ASECS, Cleveland: Susannah Centlivre’s plays, Charlotte Smith’s poetry & romantic women’s gothics

Modern photo of Beachy Head, England

Dear friends and readers,

A fifth blog report on this year’s ASECS meeting in Cleveland. Centlivre. Three panels, two very early morning; one very late afternoon. Susannah Centlivre’s plays on gambling, addiction and marital and civil liberty speaks to us today so too the sources and power of Smith’s melancholy vast poetry. The gothic strange work of several later 18th century women writers is explained & defended.

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Folger production of The Basset Table: Valeria (Emily Trask) and Ensign Lovely (Robbie Gay) bond at Valeria’s lab table, where they share a discovery about worms.

An early morning session on Susannah Centlivre on Friday, 8:00 am (87, “A Woman’s Case”) surprised me by how good it was. Only recently have I had the opportunity to see one of Centlivre’s plays staged; it was so much better than than it had read, I realized I had not been giving them an adequate reading at all; these papers found Centlivre adumbrated humane understandings of addiction in the areas of gambling and alcoholism for men, and explored in a modern way the problem of personal or civil liberty.

Emma Ingrisani’s “‘If He Has Lost his Money, this News will break his Heart:’ Sentiment and Vice in Centlivre’s The Gamester claimed this play showed real sympathy for gamblers. Centlivre shows Valere’s gambling to be compulsive, but the qualities that led him to be addicted to gambling make him appealing. In gambling Valere experiences sublimity, he’s attached to gambling and feels himself magnificent; & the point is made that the man of feeling is not moral so much as someone who enjoys his emotions and is attuned to the emotions of others. The culture of sensibility alters the play’s criticism of gambling. The play is suggestive of an inner world in the characters, and seeks to explain supposedly abnormal impulses. The play’s conservative sexual politics parallels a sophisticated economic and social world. Angelia knows his faults, wants to marry Valere anyway as his dangerous masculine sexuality appeals.

In Aparna Gollapudi’s “The ‘Itch to Play:’ Gambling as Addiction in Centlivre’s The Gamester and The Basset Table are companion pieces. The male in The Gamester is an early prototype of an addict; the fame in The Basset Table cannot be an addict as such because as a woman she is unfree, bound to the will of others and thus does not have autonomy in the first place. Ms Gollapudi suggested the Enlightenment adumbrates the idea of an addict out of its concept of an ideal man of reason. Gambling is still considered a vice or sin, where we look at it psychologically (or chemically): the individual has lost control. In most plays we see gamblers play because they want to, not because they feel compelled to. The full idea of addiction (self-enslavement) comes in the later 19th century when people observed opium addiction. Ms Gollapudi cited much earlier treatises where drinking is shown to have an element of inner compulsion; Trotter: the drunkard is driven by cravings despite his intentions, irrationality, not for profit, unthinking pleasure, fueled by a failure of the will. Benjamin Rush gambling a disease or palsy of the will. Cotton’s Compleat Gamester is someone obsessed, with a deep-seated need, uncontrollable. Valere is exhausted in the morning; he earnestly vows to stop gambling, but he is at the table again soon after. Lady Sago is wasting her husband’s money, wilful and she and others are shocked into reform by showing them parallels with sexual complaisance. In the tradition of such plays, the male threatens financial harm to his family (e.g., Holcroft’s play); Lady Towneley chooses an irrational ideal of pleasure (Vanbrugh). Centlivre’s plays present a modern individual self in her depiction of gambling.

Lady Lucy (Katie deBuys), Sir James (Michael Milligan), Mrs. Sago (Tonya Beckman Ross), and Ensign Lovely (Robbie Gay)

Jennifer Airey’s “‘I must vary shapes as often as a player: Centlivre and liberty on the English stage” took up Centlivre’s defense of the stage against Collier’s criticism it’s immoral. In A Bold Stroke for a Wife, Colonel Feignwell frees Anne Lovely through his masquerading; the females help one another by using disguises too. Feignwell also defends his militarism as supporting the Hanoverian world which provides liberty for the subject; Anne Lovely shows us the right of women to resist male domestic tyrants who claim a power over individuals they do not deserve. Anne Lovely says her right to chose her dress (not to wear quaker clothes) is an aspect of her liberty, freedom of movement. She is justified, and enters a new contract with a better master; but her freedom goes only so far. The play’s parallel argument is that children are obliged to obey only when parents use authority reasonably. The older guardians are utterly destructive, selfish, obsessive. Underlying the action of masquerade is the idea that through acting one can save oneself. Ms Airey felt the play’s presentation of good sense and romantic fidelity in the central characters disconnects actors from the charge of prostitution (selling themselves).

Misty Anderson was the respondent and said that in Centlive liberty is a core value. She summed up Ms Ingrisani’s paper thus: emotional susceptibility is not entirely negative (gambling is an emotionally drenching experience). The depiction of the gambler is part of the history of the depiction of the reformed rake: excess is turned on itself but it “re-inscribes” [makes visible?] uncontrollable passions. Ms Gollapudi’s paper: more psychological terrain, makes a powerful case for considering the history of the invention of addiction (we move from Hogarth’s disease of the will to Methodist’s brain-searing). Gender gets in the way as Lady Reveller cannot be a slave as she is not free & in the end is indistinguishable from social norms; Valeria is obsessed with science; her character is just not convincing. Ms Airey’s paper: acting itself part of the agenda for liberty; a provisional self challenges patriarchal power and belongs to Butler’s discourse of the self as performer, re-assembling the self for social life.

2005 Bold Stroke for a Wife: Illinois Wesleyan University

Ms Anderson seemed though to object to the empathy and idea that rebellion gives liberty and pleasure: what do we do with actors around us who act with less liberal tendencies? Ms Ingisani defended the breaking out; but, asked Ms Anderson, is not this a risk, a danger making someone susceptible to a conservative person’s resentment? Valere is a psychological portrait but we see he’s a victim to an economic system. To Ms Gollapudi’s paper, MS Anderson said the will is not something individual, women can realize themselves through social manipulation; we don’t believe men have self-mastery (or autonomy) either. Ms Airey wants to show Centlivre defends the theater as a place of moral reformation.

Ms Anderson then asked what is the difference between Behn’s and Centlivre’s characters. Centlivre claims liberty through enacting performance; Behn’s characters perform hedonism plainly, not an act. Centlivre’s characters exist in a deeply unjust situation where you choose one trap over another; we can see some freedom if we see that signing a contract does not enslave us ontologically.

It was a brilliant response, show-offy too. My demur (which I voiced in the discussion afterward) is that if you obey the social conventions these will prevent you from enacting radical freedoms which may over-ride and erase contracts if the whole society agrees eventually to change. To worry about the risk of vengeful conservative people about you, made me think of Marianne Dashwood’s reply to Elinor who claimed freedom of understanding even if her behavior was under subjection that this ends up in subservience. And in another dialogue that “we are all offending every moment of our lives” no matter what we do (S&S I:13 & 17). The compromise Ms Anderson suggested ends up in supporting the establishment, not changing it and keeps everyone unfree.

Would it were that every session I ever went to at a conference came near the interest of this one.

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Again at 8:00 am, now Saturday morning, a really worthwhile seesion on Charlotte Smith’s poetry (which I love (155, “Unromantic Charlotte Smith”).

Charlotte Smith by George Dance

Regulas Allen (“‘Rightly to spell of every herb hat sips the dew: Chaos and classification in the poetry of Charlotte Smith”) found the pervasive theme in Smith’s poetry is displacement, exile, a failure of boundaries, mourning over disorder, nothing can be securely in a place. She approaches plants in a scientific spirit, telling the species of plant, categorizing them using Linnaeus to try to impose an order on chaos which the notes to the poems continually undermine. In her life she knew continual disasters from the time of her marriage; abject terrorizing powerless misery as a women with a violent ruthless failure of a husband. She remembered her childhood as a time of wealth, innocence, contentment; her refusal to relinquish her class pretensions meant she had to make large enough sums of money to support gentility and a good future for 9 children too so she had to write for publication continually. She produced 10 novels and many editions of poetry. Her apparently learned study of Linneaus, geology (Erasmus Darwin), botany, her notes at the bottom of her texts, were not done to show off but as a way of finding order in nature. She’s not plagiarizing but situating her work in time and against the savagery of society (as in footnotes telling of pirates brutality).

Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening

Huge vapors brood above the difted shore,
Night on the ocean settles, dark and mute,
Save where is heard the repercussive roar
Of drowsy billows, on the rugged foot
Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone
Of seamen in the anchored bark that tell
The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone
Singing the hour, and bidding “Strike the bell.”
All is black shadow, but the lucid line
Marked by the light surf on the level sand,
Or where afar the ship-lights faintly shine
Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land
Mislead the pilgrim-such the dubious ray
That wavering reason lends, in life’s long darkling way.

Her poetry has a continuity. In the sonnets and Beachy Head we find traumatic displacement, or geographical violent shifts, corpses adrift in tides, emblematic landscapes of despair. She finds deep-time geology registered in a Middleton churchyard; couples cruelly parted; if she presents a shepherd she looks at the ground he walks on, many presences sleep unremembered there. In her Emigrants we find a French lady and her children, a female exiled from her husband, born to affluence; the channel waters, England and France dissolve into one; in Beachy Head the cliffs register the sudden violence of time, shells high up show continental shifts; it ends on a hermit in a sea cave who tries to make his place but cannot. Late in life the botany and zoology of her Rural Walks show her turning to order, contrasting what has been learned in the new science to peasant cultures she has known. It’s an escapist pursuit, a resource for someone sick at heart, provides calm to a wounded mind. She does not just think of herself and hers: her poetry is about the instability and harshnesses of experience for others too.

Greta River Bridge by John Sell Cotman (1782-1842)

Ruth Knezevich talked of “Charlotte Smith’s “Antiquarian Pursuits in Beachy Head.” Ms Knezevich wants to understand the history and philosophy we find in this poem. The narrator’s literary voice presents the past tangibly by narrating a history (including going back to a castle of Stephen of Blois) that reflects the invasions and evolutions across the island (with relics) and the globe. People are in a local place but that’s the micro-level. She records names, places, events that make a wider perspective. We are invited actively to participate in the geological landscape and history. Her use of annotations is innovative; she distinguishes botany from Shakespearean perspective. She uses them to authorize her text and embed it in the writing of her era. The poem ends in brief rhapsody. She can be distinguished from romanticism by her concrete particularism and brings out the duality (intertwining?) of history with a literary voice. She wants her text to be respected, with her roots in 18th century traditions which go back (as in Warton’s history of poetry) back to the middle ages.

Lisa Ottum also discussed “Unromantic History in Beachy Head.” In her own era she was attacked for imitation; in our time Beachy Head is seen as central and romantic. Ms Ottum saw the poem as part of a debate about history’s effects, moving from past the cliffs to Asia, from the countryside to pre-historic time, from geology to cosmopolitanism. Smith has read Fergusson and Kames, Hume and Gibbon, and followed the changes in historical writing. She looked to the past to understand the present, to private life too, seen in larger social movements. Historians wanted to learn about manners and customs of people as well as statecraft. In Beachy Head she could find a proximate perspective to bring the moral imagination to bear. The poem is preoccupied with departed happiness which is fleeting, unsustainable. She uses temporal shifts in perspective, with a surplus of emotion. All things will collapse away into nothingness; after contemplation of large disasters, she has smaller pictures of cottages. The mind then rests on local peaceful moments. The poem draws on Cowper’s Task, anticipates Mont Blanc, where mediating power of the poet copes with vast powerful teaming worlds.

A cover illustration for Radcliffe’s Udolpho: in prose she too register the cataclysms of time and history

We had a fine discussion afterward. It ranged from asking what were Smith’s sources to when the people first encountered Smith and what editions they first saw her work in. I asked if she was influenced by Scott’s Antiquary and we talked of his Old Mortality and Scott’s use of history, chronicles and antiquarianism. What geology did Smith read? I thought of the poets and text of Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. We discussed when Smith was first identified as a romantic (by Wordsworth, and again in the 1970s), the long period where most of her works fell out of print and no one discussed her. What a change since the mid-1980s and the feminist movement which was essentially responsible for bringing her back.

For “Women and the late 18th century gothic, see continuation in comments.

The novel has a famous scene of a wild hurricane flood over a vast cliff (mocked by Austen in her letters — but recalled)

Ellen

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Christopher Hodson’s Acadian Diaspora & V. S. Naipaul’s Enigma of Arrival

Funestes ont été pareilles dispersions et pareil abandon (Emile Lauvrière, Brève histoire tragique du peuple acadien, Paris 1947)

Dear friends and readers,

Every once in a while I read a book, do a review on it, which requires much reading in books I’ve never gone into before, and I come away with a new perspective that enables me to see much that I had been reading before or studying in a new light, from a point of view that I hadn’t considered before and opens up whole new ways of looking at books and art and life too.

Such a book was Christopher Hodson’s Acadian Diaspora, which has had a (mildly) transformative effect on me, not so much for itself, but for the whole outlook it belongs to, the set of books, I had to read to understand it, including the Cambridge Companion to Post-Colonial Studies, ed Neil Lazarus. So you can imagine how chuffed I am to see it in print — it’s just been published in the (18th century periodical) The Intelligencer. From my restatement of one of the many insights of Hodson’s book:

Hodson thoroughly undermines the argument that we can explain what happened to the Acadians before and since 1755 (and by implication that of other peoples so dispersed) by examining their technological know-how (referred to as level of “sophistication” or “civilization”), willingness to work hard, or cultural norms (family values, religion, particulars of an ethnicity). Once people are dispersed, displaced, divided up, we see how easily people’s cultural norms, their local social capital (to use Bourdieu’s term), sentimental ties dissolve, or are bypassed … We see how technological abilities are blocked or made counterproductive … Hodson demonstrates that for individuals and family groups with only small or no property, no connections they can call on to enable them to overcome local exclusionary customs, and no military to support them, the ability to control their circumstances and future is extremely limited (169-71). He shows that “ordinary people’s safeguards” are long-standing and recognized commercial and familial relationships and also known and understood local economic environments that cannot be misrepresented to them ..

If you read the review, you’ll see summaries and references to the central books I read — much worth reading. I particularly enjoyed Marie-Therese Humbert’s epistolary La Montagne des Signaux:

;

Margaret Saunder’s Rose of Arcadia:

(try to glimpse the lovely later 19th century painting),

and the French history of the Acadian “derangement” by Emile Lauvrière. Very important was an early “straight” history of Trinidad by V. S. Naipaul, The Loss of El Dorado which in context (for me) read like a more imaginative passionate version of Acadian Diaspora. The same motives, the same savagery (barbarity), the same delusions led to analogous disasters and cruel societies on the coast of Latin and South America. Both encompass colonialism across a wide swath of the earth during the long 18th century and then focus in on specific concrete instances (some of these overlap). Naipaul’s begins with Ralegh’s Discovery of Guiana.

I didn’t, though, mention one I will probably continue to cherish, V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and only mentioned in passing his The Loss of El Dorado. I’ve been wanting to write to tell of my new discovery and sudden real love for at least one side of V.S. Naipaul’s writing but have not known quite how to do it. The content of Enigma of Arrival, its subjective outlook made it tangential to my review-essay. That’s why I never mention it, let alone describe it, and and yet it centrally helped cause my new understanding and the use I can make of the post-colonial point of view in my writing and thinking.

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The Enigma of Arrival has no central story line that quite makes sense, and its individual anecdotes of the lives going on around our narrator are not individuated, often the people are not named, only the outlines of their fates and some sense of the meaning of these fates told. It’s partly autobiographical, partly fictionalized: a writer brought up in Trinidad, of Indian ancestry, comes to live in a cottage not far from Stonehenge on the English Salisbury plain — where to him it seems cold and to snow a lot. His stories of getting used to England reminded me of my experience: of cold, yukky, pub drinking and music, and how I went from a dreamy reader of English books to a stranger wandering about to being at home in England, finding an identity I was given that I could live with there, in Leeds especially. it was one where I was left alone to join in with others or not, given a lot of individual social liberty.

The Enigma of Arrival is a deeply meditative book which through memory and imagination takes us back to neolithic time in the UK, through to the hardships of Elizabethan and 18th century history in Latin America and India, and fast forwarding to the moment in the mid-20th century when the narrator is taking his walks and interacting with his neighbors (workmen and others in cottages) and landlords. I identified with his quest for an identity different from the one imposed on him, his attempt to read and write and re-form a history he could endure to place himself against. Of course that’s what I did too when I came to England. He is telling us of how he became sort of English, while remaining at-home nowhere like all around him, and yet rootedly local. Funny, poignant (sometimes tragic as people kill themselves) with people half-mad the way they are in life. Writing strengthens him. Me too. I’ve felt the way he does when he’s up in planes and landing here and there on the earth.

In these meditations he made post-colonialism a new vital area of understanding for me, one I now see which relates us all to one another today — as the US gov’t acts out the latest elites’ will.
When do we arrive? when we reach a landscape, how do we become part of it, its past, a part of its people? when we begin to understand what? He says he leaves South Wind unread for a long time: it’s a book of conversations on an island off Italy by ex-pats. Gradually he feels he contains in him the worlds he creates and reads, and it’s not that there is no love between people for real (as Rushdie mistakenly thinks, a sad pastoral); rather that all of the characters and our narrator are seeking love and meaning and he finds it by seeing back in time and across in space to find stories like his (and mine and yours) everywhere.

The calm achieved he talks of is one I’ve found in Trollope. I’d like to think the Mr Harding of the book, a boarding house manager, is an allusion to Trollope. Much more likely Naipaul chose the name for the reason Trollope did: it’s quintessentially English.

The Acadians were chased all over the Atlantic; they are us too.

I’m happy to put a copy of my review on my website.

Ellen

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Austen & 18th century views of Richard III: Wallace’s Digging the Dirt: what the archeaological imagination turns up

Archeaology often unearths grim stories

Dear friends and readers,

As you probably know the bones of Richard III were unearthed this past Monday in a Leicester parking lot; the skeletal remains show a small man with a twisted spine, some who had suffered scoliosis; dreadful wounds from a weapon made of a hatchet axe and spike had been delivered to his head and shoulders; his body was covered with humiliation wounds. It seems the parking lot is where there was once a friary, later closed by Henry VIII. The friars rescued the body (all but the feet) and buried it.

As I’m sure you also know Richard III has been portrayed as a villain, twisted in mind by his ugly body — said to be that of a hunchback. This portrayal goes back to Thomas More’s life, a political document supporting the Tudor claim to the throne; and it was carved in the English imagination and memory from the time of Shakespeare’s plays, with a long tradition of great actors admired in the role, from Garrick to Olivier who did it part farcically, to the most recent Ian McKellen who lent humanity to the role.

Less well-known Kevin Spacey and Annabel Scholey in lead roles at BAM

I’m not sure you know that the first objections to this portrayal occurred in the 18th century and were bought together by Horace Walpole who took the side of the Yorks and said it was Henry Tudor who murdered the two young boys, heirs to the throne, and in our time there are groups of people who join together to defend Richard III: The Richard III society has put the whole of Walpole’s Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III online. One such person, Robert Fripp ‘s Dark Sovereign will sell more widely now: he was a guest blogger on my Ellen and Jim have a blog two after I wrote a posting in praise of a local WSC Shakespeare company’s production of Richard III where the production brought out telling parallels with contemporary politicians.

Austen took the Walpole and Fripp side of the question in her wildly parodic History of England (dated November 1791) where she plays upon Goldsmith’s History of England (either 2 or 4 volume version) and history in general. Her family library and brothers’ reading suggest she could have read anyone from Robertson to Hume too; and she’s read Shakespeare’s history plays:

RICHARD THE 3D

The Character of this Prince has been in general very severely treated by Historians, but as he was a York, I am rather inclined to suppose him a very respectable Man. It has indeed been confidently asserted that he killed his two nephews and his Wife, but it has also been declared the he did not kill his two Nephews, which I am inclined to beleive [sic] true; and if this is the case, it may also be affirmed that he did not kill his Wife, for if Perkin Warbeck was really the Duke of York, why might not Lambert Simnel be the widow of Richard. Whether innocent or guilty, he did not reign long in peace, for Henry Tudor E. of Richmond as great a Villain as ever lived, made a great fuss about getting the Crown and having killed the King at the battle of Bosworth, he succeeded to it.

Austen gets a kick out of shocking the reader, startling us and mocking in this history and sometimes it feels like 1066 and all That. But she does seem to sympathize with Catholics rather than Protestants — she and two neighbors are fervent adherents of Mary Queen of Scots no matter what anyone says. Alas, she has an anti-learned lady quip on the beheading of Lady Jane Grey’s death, suggesting the same kind of odd detachment we find in her letters. So I am not sure she is seriously “on the side” of the Stuarts — or anyone in this parody. It resembles 1066 and All That, with the hits at history as much as the way it is taught and presented. She’s still dwelling on this Northanger Abbey, the conversation during the country walk between Eleanor Tilney and Catherine which ranges from history as such to the Gordon Riots to the connection (or not) of all these to gothics , viz.,

Catherine: ‘But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?’
Eleanor: ‘Yes, I am fond of history’”
Catherine: ‘I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs–the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books.’
Eleanor: ‘Historians, you think … are not happy in their flights of fancy. They display imagination without raising interest. I am fond of history–and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence
in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under one’s own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such. If a speech be well drawn up, I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made–and probably with much greater, if the production of Mr. Hume or Mr. Robertson, than if the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola, or Alfred the Great.’ (NA, I:14)

And yet (as we have seen in our journey through her letters), we find the adult Austen in 1813-14 at Godmersham reading Paisley’s book defending aggressive ruthless imperialism (a sort of politicized history), and with her niece Fanny, Bigland’s Letters on Modern History and Political Aspect of Europe (aloud).

Turning to her references in her novels to Richard as an unlucky name, which (as used) feels like a family joke, it’s not clear that the idea the name is unlucky comes from connecting the name to this king or not, but details like “he had never been handsome” incline me to think the reference in Northanger Abbey does refer to Richard III. So Catherine Morland’s

father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard — and he had never been handsome.

It’s possible too that in one of her unkind jokes in her letters she has latently Richard III in mind: she says in a 1796 to Cassandra of of Richard Harvey whose marriage was put off

till he has got a better Christian name, of which he has great Hopes.” [Letters, p. 10]

An intriguing reference to Richard III in Mansfield Park has one Henry Crawford professing how he longs to enact Richard III (MP 1:13):

I really believe,” said he, “I could be fool enough at this moment to undertake any character that ever was written, from Shylock or Richard III down to the singing …

By Persuasion there is a turn-around (as there often is in this penultimate of her novels), and we are into “poor Dick,” and find Austn harsh on her Richard. The Musgroves have been displaying the common sort of sentimental fantasies people do when someone is safely dead:

The real circumstances of this pathetic piece of family history were, that the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year; that he had been sent to sea because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross, two years before.
     He had, in fact, though his sisters were now doing all they could for him, by calling him “poor Richard,” been nothing better than a thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable Dick Musgrove, who had never done anything to entitle himself to more than the abbreviation of his name, living or dead. (Persuasion I:6)

Moving outside Austen & 18th century Richards, I seriousl recommend Jennifer Wallace’s magnificent Digging the Dirt: the Archeaological Imagination. Two passages from my earlier book review:

Wallace’s book is a work of deep poetic insight into the subjective
basis of modern archeaology. She points out that the site for geologizing and archeaologizing is no longer external merely or even primarily. Instead of running off to the desert sands, caves, or delving frozen mud, Cavalli-Sforza and his followers take blood samples. We carry our history in our DNA. It’s a fine book which were it taken seriously and read by many common readers could help reshape the popular understanding of what scientific and literary writing together can explore.

Science turns gothic here too in her meditation on sacrifice rituals and freak-show modern tourist places (the realities behind Carter’s mausoleum in her Nights at the Circus) in modern London and malls too around the world. She shows how quite a number of sculls and corpses we happen to find where put there as a result of cruel sacrifice rituals. These included depriving the then living person of certain kinds of food for months, of tying them up in certain ways, killing them slowly.

A later 18th century print of an excavation at Herculaneum

She includes a long section justifying the archeaologist and Druidical Stuckeley’s work and insights about Avebury in Somerset, and a section on later 18th century archealogical digs in Pompeii. A central map for Robert Wood, an antiquarian, member of the Society of Dilettanti and its first director of Archaelological Ventures, who came to Pinarbasi, a village near Hisarlik (now thought where the citadel of Troy was), determined to discover “concrete facts” was Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Ilidad, notes, and especially, Pope’s map of Troy. In 1720 Pope drew a map which Wallace describes as “bizarre and geographically-impossible,” “exuberantly fanciful, people with warriors and ships and tents and other characters from the Iliad, busily doing things.” This map it was which became the guidepost for the people who first poured over the site “scientifically.”

Poetry and snatches of prose from letters by Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth even are shown to be prophetic and explanatory of archaeological insights today too. To turn back to the grim photo with which I began this blog: such is what these powerful people turn into, as in Shelley’s Ozymandias.

I MET a Traveler from an antique land,
Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.”
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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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Pierre Arnaud’s Ann Radcliffe et le fantastique: essai de psychobiographie

Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806), A Young scholar (1777-78) — there is no good authoritative picture of Radcliffe, but she was a reading girl

Dear friends and readers,

As part of my translation study project, I’ve read Pierre Arnaud’s famous study of Radcliffe. I’ve started it several times, but never got past the opening biography and initial reading of Radcliffe’s life. I can now say this reading, for which the book is known, is its weakest place; it’s an insightful and (until Rictor Norton published his Mistress of Udolpho), the most informative original book. It still has a lot to enable the English reader to see that we won’t find elsewhere, partly because he writes out of the French tradition. I thought I’d write a summary-review because the book has not been translated nor is it like to be.

It’s not a reflection on his scholarship that this book has not been translated. He wrote three good articles on Radcliffe, one biographical one on her husband; he translated Austen’s Northanger Abbey with a good introduction and notes) for the recent brilliant Pleiade edited by Pierre Goubert, and recently edited a good translation of Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest, Les Mysteres de la foret, translated by Francois Soules (for folio classique) If you can read French, it’s written concisely, lucidly, and in suggestive phrases.

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Kenilworth, 1814 illustration (visited by both Radcliffe and Austen — and many others)

The first chapters take the reader through Radcliffe’s life. As what Arnaud as to say is found in Norton’s book I won’t repeat it just confine myself to saying Arnaud was the first to emphasize how Ann Radcliffe spent a couple of formative years in her maternal uncle Thomas Bentley’s home. Ann’s mother was Ann Oates, and Arnaud tells of how Bentley married Ann’s mother’s sister (1754), Hannah, how the aunt and a baby died (1759), and how another aunt, Elizabeth, came to live with the man and acted as a mother-aunt to the frequently visiting niece. Ann Radcliffe seems to have visited Bentley’s fine home (Turnam Green) and shops until 1772 when he remarried, and she rejoined her parents in Bath where her father acted as tradesman for Bentley. We learn of the father’s connections to the famous learned surgeon, Samuel and then Richard Jebb, and Bentley’s close partnership with Wedgewood. We are led to picture an adult home and work-life that’s intellectual, artistic, genteel, aspiring, a milieu of intelligent liberal people — in Bath too where she may have gone to Sophia and Harriet Lee’s school. (There is no proof of this, and Ann does not seem to have been the sort of girl who would thrive in girl groups). At age 23 she married in Bath a rising journalist-translator, William Radcliffe, a strong liberal type, who became editor of the English Chronicle and the young couple lived in London.

All good. He then argues, following some European critics (Marthe Robert, Romans des origines et origines du roman; Roger Caillois, Le coeur du fantastique, aka the heart of the fantastic) that the fantastic comes out of the depths of a personality, and that they lay a personal story bare through their dreams; for Radcliffe he thinks each of the novels constitute a step in a series of ever-expanding confessions. Her characters follow an internal logique she is acting out and provide the lines of trembling force that her novels trace.

But, as many besides Arnaud have demonstrated, the power and texture of Ann Radcliffe’s fiction suggest a deep and lasting trauma of some sort shaped the girl. There are obsessive repeating patterns of sexual violation, anxiety, paradigms of near rape, murder, and yet a deep discomfort with confronting sexuality. Radcliffe is actually unusual for an English female writer for writing more or less openly about family dysfunction, violent and abusive husbands and uncles, at the same time as she offers no direct clue how the implied author might have had any experiences like these as she uses very general archetypes in gothic settings.

Theories abound. The fictions repeatedly show a young girl harassed and near-assaulted by a father-uncle figure, not protected by a jealous mother-aunt. Norton suggests that Radcliffe may have been abused by her father, and sent to live with an uncle and aunt; there does seem to be strong antagonism as well as tender pity for the (sometimes jealous) mother-aunts in her novels. Leona Sherman thinks Radcliffe may have reacted by avoiding sex when she was older and keeping her husband at a distance from her (later in life when she ceased publishing she lived separately in Windsor). Arnaud finds six basic characters throughout the fictions: Uncle&seductor/Mother/aunt-governess/stepmother, harsh/young hero; also a continual doubling. Like others, he suggests the characteristics of the heroine closely resemble those the implied author has. He believes that Radcliffe was molested by her uncle.

I don’t think the theory is crazy. My take is she may have been a victim of sexual or psychological-emotional abuse from her father. It need not have been physical though there is this shattered presence in the books. Then her mother did not protect her — the books show a mother-aunt who is often hostile or helpless. Her uncle (and perhaps aunt) also did not take her side when she tried to tell them (again characters like this recur in the fictions), no one did. Her husband became everything to her and she escaped into her fictions and reading; her way of coping was to lose herself in her calming visions, and to become absorbed in the past, the architecture and customs and then write critically about that, pour her then controlled feelings into that.

Henri Fuseli, The Silence

One of the covers for the many editions of Udolpho over the centuries: wholly appropriate

The problem with this early section of Arnaud’s book is he spends equal time and space on the first slender effort, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne as he does on all the other 4 novels (Sicilian Romance, Romance of the Forest, Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian). Doubtless it’s easier to show on the basis of what is an outline of what’s to come on a simple short pattern, but it’s in the nuances and thorough build-up of imagery and experience in the text that the power of the text calls attention to deep troubling feeling. That’s where her genius comes in, not her plot-design stories.

He’s not alone in over-speaking about Athlin and Dunbayne. The recent Oxford paperback edition by Alisan Milbank’s contains an introduction where were what she says being applied to the Romance of the Forest or Udolpho or her travel life-writing book, A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, it would be appropriate and accurate. Here it’s ove-rspeak for the particular text, giving a false impression of more greatness than was shown originally. This does a real disservice to an author because a reader told this about this novel and then reading it, might not go on for another. (The same kind of over-speak is found in Walter Scott novel criticism.).

As I say the actual biography is worth reading in the way of Aline Grant’s early study for the particular comments he makes as he goes along on this or that aspect of Radcliffe’s life or the people among whom she grew up and where, but once the reader gets past this opening connected reading of the novels, the book becomes pure gold — with one more reservation. Arnaud has not read Radcliffe’s travel book, Talfourd’s long memoir of Radcliffe’s life which prefaces the posthumous romance, Gaston de Blondeville and excerpts from the travel book. Thus Arnaud does not know how many long learned books of architecture and history went into Radcliffe’s creation of her castles and landscapes. He does know she means her history seriously and took anecdotes from Pitaval’s Causes Celebres (not the same as are found in Charlotte Smith’s Romance of Real Life), but does not take her grounding in stories of ravaging injustice particularly to women seriously enough and misses an important dimension of her work. I realize I am sounding a limitation again; alas, this is a common one only recently being overcome (I hope to write a separate blog on some studies of Radcliffe’s Journey book which I didn’t include in my paper, The Nightmare of History in Ann Radcliffe’s Landscapes

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Furness Abbey, Cumbria (modern photo of ruin described in her 1794 Summer Journey)

So, returning to the sections of the book on The Sicilian Romance, Romance of the Forest, Udolpho and Italian, and the third section of his book, Arnaud shows us that Radcliffe is interested in terrors that have a real basis, not superstition, explores apprehension (rather than anxiety) (p332). Again and again what is terrifying really is happening or really happened in the past. Sometimes while the heroine is in the castle: Montoni’s murder of his wife, her aunt.

In The Romance of the Forest and Udolpho, she traces a process of psychological disintegration of the heroine, brought on by gradually increasing terror (p 338). She has smaller trajectories where we trace this in little for another heroine or inset story or the older woman in the novel.

He concedes that by elucidating what in the original terror was unjustified superstitution, she grates on the reader, makes the reader feel a dupe and then the reader gets back, is unwilling to read another (p 340), but he suggests she does this to put out a false trail, to deflect us from thinking about the real terrors we’ve experienced or our attention from her. He thinks that she understood the source of her anguish and consciously wrote to exorcise her miseries (p. 349) I agree & argued this in my paper on her Nightmare Historical Landscapes. I’m not sure she is conscious of this, for in the famous incident of the wax figure she includes a footnote telling us the historical source for the anecdote. Her worry seems to be not that we will pay attention to her, or to make us pay attention to fantasies but concern we are not getting that she is historical.

I agree with him (and this is Battaglia’s view too), that The Italian disappointing because it makes least use of superstition and unexplained ghosts, the Italian, and is the book going most in the direction of detective-mystery, “Le roman policier” (p 343). This book is particularly is anti-Catholic church in thrust. He acknowledges she is attracted to the beauty of the ritual, but not the obliteration of the will of the individual (seen in the prison scenes).

He grants her that she read enormously, including philosophy (only he is at a loss to cite more than the usual suspects of Burke and Gilpin), points out that at the close of her career in Gaston de Blondeville she admits by logic there is the possibility of spirits appearing to people (p 348). Her tone (he thinks) becomes less didactic in this last book too. But one can see in the other books that she does in part believe in the possibility and dreads the power of her own emotional life (p 349). I wish he had devoted a whole chapter to Gaston.

He does miss the footnotes to some of these explained incidents where she says she got the anecdote from history and that generally these show women victimized egregiously. In this she is showing us another version of victimizing that she didn’t know but was attracted to notice. Arnaud is innocent of all feminism or feminist thought and scholarship. he does not see how violence disturbs her, how aware she is of it as a basis for social order. This she shows in her travel book.

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J.M.W. Tuner, Buttermere Lake, with Cromackwater, Cumberland

The last and fourth part of Arnaud’s book is how her books are a hymn to nature. he begins with development of realism in the 18th century and its techniques. Gainsborough is instanced. In the period there was also a development of a beautiful naturalistic poetry — Thomson, Cowper. Readers of Radcliffe did think she had been in the Pyrenees (as Catherine Morland imagines). Perhaps Radcliffe meant to introduce into the novel what beloved poets had done for verse.

Arnaud says that we should answer why she made these landscapes so central. Other novelists include them (e.g., Charlotte Smith) but why go on to make them central. My answer: it’s part of the calming therapy. This exquisitely observed architecture drawn from her reading is hard absorbing work for her. She made such trips, she studied travel books with their engravings; he goes over her extracts from her travel books to show her working up her dream image from what she is seeing and imagining music to go with it (p. 355).

He suggests the enthusiasm she felt for nature and beautiful real landscapes came from evolution of art in this epoque. I’d agree. Again he begins with the problem of a demand for the didactic; genre or everyday scenes were a minor genre; gradually they took over as the most popular. Again the problem here is Arnaud thinks what she studied were simply engravings and he leaps beyond Gilpin to what is often said about Radcliffe because she does cite the names of Claude, Salvador Rosa and a few others. He has gone into what he can find were her sources for her novels; for example her notebook tells of her visiting Belvedere House. Much though is sheer guessing. If he had read her travel books, he’d find she has carefully studied architectural and travel books with their depictions of buildings, their histories, a region, the customs and laws of the place. All he can end up with is quoting the insights of great critics on say Claude; instead if one reads some of these studies, one discovers for example a sharp critique of monastery life which her recreation of the place makes visible, a serious reading in travel culture books.

There is no need to guess. Read the 1794 journey with all its citations, and today since we have the net and ECCO we can follow her. This is beginning to be done. See particularly the Italian journal, La Questione romantica, Viaggio e Paessaggio (many essays are in English — some in Italian and/or French too), Autunno 2003/Primavera 2004.

Catherine (Felicity Jones) is telling Henry and Eleanor Tilney (J. J. Feild and Catherine Walker) this is just like the Pyrenees (2007 Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies)

She read a lot, she did not socialize at all, not even a little bit it seems. If she had a circle of friends, they were people no one today knows about. And she filled time with these learned tomes. Then when she could she traveled to some comparing her memories and maps with what she saw. The problem was again her anxiety and fear (whatever happened to her when young) and probably she was right to turn back when she saw that her husband and she were searched as if they might be enemies and might have found themselves clapped in prison. So she never got to Italy; she did see a great deal of Germany, of that part of France that abuts, of Holland, Belgium and then traveled where she could locally. She did a great deal with what was available to her.

Arnaud say that Radcliffe took details from Burke and Gilpin and applied them for her own use. For Burke terror an end in itself; for Radcliffe it’s used to prompt sublime feelings. Gilpin insists on the importance of composing your scene. He thinks landscapes not perfect unless they have an abbey or castle. An old one or one in ruins have been integrated into their environment (p. 366) Architecture is so central to her descriptions — and books too (p. 366) Arnaud says she used Gilpin’s commentaries and we see that her pictures are in effect interwoven with commentary.

But he is right to say that her originality is in how she applied what she read (p. 362). He concludes she works with the eye of a painter and poet; writes romances that way. I think it’s more than that: she writes with history in mind, and a political point of view, mildly reformist maybe but real enough for that. And these shape her content.

He finds in her a real knowledge of aesthetic treatises and currents in the era and says this is uncommon among her English contemporaries (p. 369). He says that nature and the supernatural occupy a bigger place gradually as she becomes less moralizing in each book (p 369) He feels there is a rhythm that moves from terror to landscape/relief nor are there quick transitions where something is suddenly dropped p 370. She will frame an encounter between characters carefully, such as Elena and her father (p. 371). The landscape is a state of the perceiver’s soul (p 371). That Pierre de la Motte in Romance of the Forest can experience depth of emotion in nature shows he has some good qualities (p. 371)

Radcliffe’s descriptions themselves have a symbolic value. Her Nature permeated with a divinity (p 374). He discerns a pantheism (p 375) carefully put so as to stay within apparent confines of Christianity. For her this also provides a corrective to Catholicism, to punitive ideas and doctrines, to fearfulness. He remarks he says her published books are never set in the UK; he has not read the travel book, one quarter of which is in the lake district, Cumberland and Scotland too (p 377). He sees in her yearning a desire to return to her father but he does not press that (p 378) He is unaware she was interested in geology, goes to look at Druidic stones as realistic remnants of what the earth once was (as this was not estoric as Marjorie Hope Nicholson showed in her Mountain Gloom and Glory).

A contemporary print

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To conclude, Arnaud says Radcliffe’s initial appeal was she comes out of the same zeitgeist as Sade, Lewis, romantic poetry: a reaction against but coming out of Enlightenment. For readers profoundly shaken or encouraged by revolution, she offered to 19th century readers a fearful and a usable past, takes them into her urge into oblivion, peace, reverie, a movement into fantasy, which however populated, is not as frigthening as the spectre of the future. I’ve had students who came from Southasia and Asia tell me that the terrified flights of her characters reminded them of experiences they had with their parents fleeing a revolution or fascistic military tyranny. I enter into her Emily’s Udolpho far more fully than I do Austen’s Emma’s Highbury.

For myself I’d like to add that going into Italian as well as French books on both Radcliffe and Austen can give us new ideas, new perspective, a fresh methodolgy or outline distinctive from the Anglo-American and mean to share a few of these (e.g., Pierre Goubert and Beatrice Battaglia on Austen, translation studies of Charlotte Smith, more on Radcliffe) with my reader here in this blog.

From Edith Wharton’s female gothic-ghost story, “Afterward”: the walk on the parapet; Wharton is a daughter of Radcliffe

Ellen

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Winston Graham’s last five Poldark novels & 18th century historical fiction

Romola Garai as Gwendoleth Harleth in Daniel Deronda (2002 scripted Andrew Davies, directed by Tom Hooper, George Eliot’s 19th century then contempoary masterpiece) — Garai is found in historical films from all sorts of sources

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been meaning to report that I’ve written twice more about Winston Graham’s Poldark novels: a new slant and real qualifications about what I said the first time round on his second quartet, or, to put it another way, Upon rereading The Stranger from the Sea and The Miller’s Dance; and then Rereading and Outlining The Loving Cup and The Twisted Sword. I then linked both blogs to my Winston Graham mostly Poldark website.

I’m almost there with a second reading of Graham’s Bella, which I’ve discovered almost makes a central use of history: both about the discoveries and importation into the UK of great apes, the training of singers and the nature of a career on the stage at the turn of the 18th into the 19th century and how the frequent pretense of legitimacy for children born to mothers whose fathers were not their claimed legal fathers and bigamy existed in tension with the family-patronage, private property through primogeniture systems of the era.

I tried to write about the centrality of history in the later Poldark books at their society message board or facebook site said to be about these novels, the first two mini-series. But unhappily have discovered myself thwarted on both sites. There has been no serious talk about these books ever on either it seems (nothing scholarly, nothing academic) and the people are not used to it. I wrote of the hybrid nature of historical fiction (part actual history which can be trusted), of the particularly disquieting use of unconventional transgressive sex in the books. Clowance sustains a bigamous relationship; another how all 12 novels imitate 18th century novels’ plot-designs, type scenes and characters and themes while presenting tactfully realistically psychological support, then adjusting to today’s norms in popular visual media — as 18th century films imitate one another.

Garai as Barbara Spooner Wilberforce’s wife in the (since Mrs Siddon’s portrait in upper class lady’s clothes) signature Gainsborough studio hat, an extravaganza (from 2006 Amazing Grace)

Quickly a petty tenacious bully resentful of my (to her) apparently offensive (I can never figure out what’s offensive) postings on the facebook was able to delete my last posting on the message board on the grounds it was off-topic. Ah, I then realized that the playful pseudonyms which seemed so delightful to me also can allow non-accountability. “Nampara Girl” used the same paragraphs as Karen Knight on facebook so was none other than the woman in the other bit of cyberspace who managed to sneer at me and impugn my character when I said I would no longer post — “what you don’t want to be challenged?” says she in this self-righteous tone. On the facebook page I spoke back forthrightly saying she had written an insinuating (I didn’t use the word snide) remark when I had never said anything about her character and was attacking my honesty and sincerity. So she was getting back. All I could do then on the Literary Board was point out I was on topic, describe the nature of her behavior, motives and power and (so to speak) walk away.

Positions are all in cyberspace communities. Who can control, censor, withhold, delete a message. At core (as can be seen in Austen studies, in various cult groups), it’s virtually impossible to wrench a body of writing out of its popular readership’s use of it. Winston Graham found this when he tried to persuade the larger indifferent public that the 1996 film adaptation of his book was a worthy new start for filming the later books; he writes in his Memoirs of a Private Man that he could not get beyond the vilification of the new film by the cult tenaciously wedded to the 1970s mini-series. An important social lesson about how what one writes is taken from you once you put it out in the social world and encountering intransigent cult readerships.

So the dream of doing a genuinely historical handbook (a la Patrick O’Brien books) is out. If I’m to write about this I must stick to blogs and my website for now, but eventually (or again) look out for panels and groups who study historical fiction and then how how the Poldarks enact and brilliantly transcend the two also. And I can try my historical fiction of Elizabeth’s Story. A third outlet is to try to write something on the novels in the semi-popular essay kind for History Today. Here I know no one (a usual situation for me) and experience in publishing articles shows me the truly “blind article” submitted and chosen is a myth.

I set aside a unit in my library, a shelf all their own for historical fiction and women’s historical fiction. I repeatedly have trouble remembering my books since I often do not recall the author or even the exact title of the book, but simply that it’s on the subject of historical fiction from this or that angle.

Right now these are:

Beasley, Faith. Revising Memory: Womens’ Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth Century France.

Bird, Stephanie. Recasting Historical Fiction: Female Identity German Biographical Fiction.

Fleischman, Avrom. The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf.

Groot, Jermone de. The Historical Novel.

Harman, Leah. The Feminine Political Novel in Victorian England.

Hughes, Helen. The Historical Romance.

Keen, Suzanne. Romances of the Archives in Contemporary British Fiction. Also her “The Historical Turn” in James E. English’s Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fictionn.

Looser, Devoney. British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820.

Lukacs, George. The Historical Novel.

Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel.

Sanders, Andrew. The Victorian Historical Novel, 1840-80.

White, Hayden. The Content of the form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation.

Zlotnick, Susan. Women, Writing, and the Industrial Revolution.

Graham writes about his use of historical fiction in his Poldark’s Cornwall and I’ve discovered that other historical novelists write about theirs. He identifies three types and my friend Nick added a fourth. Graham does not as some woman have write history books as personal travel writing, a subject I’ve never seen treated in any essay. Of possible interest too are studies of historical films: Pam Cook, Fashioning the Nation: Costume and Identity. David Ellis, Hollywood’s History Films, Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema. History writing is ever sliding off into writing about people in costume, writing political novels (you are looking for a usable past for the present).

Garai as Sugar in Crimson Petal and White (from Michael Faber’s 20th century neo-Victorian novel) – this one I note has that strange thing done to it, bits pulled out and re-strung to highly romantic music which sentimentalizes the mood & degrades the film’s meaning

As you can see, I am especially interested in how women writing historical fiction has changed its nature, downgraded its respectability — by the injection of romance and feminist thought in which Graham participates by the way and also various mystery-suspense motifs and formula. In rewritten novels as projecting the history of a previous era. Again these later are seen far more heavily in the last 5 novels (almost not at all in the first 7). I am also interested in the serious use of film for history and how its costume aspects make it relevant to us today, speak to us today. I’ve this past months been steadily watching first all 26 hour long episodes of the 1967 Forsyte Saga and now I’ve just finished Part 8 of 13 parts of the 2002 version. For each one making summaries and saving stills.

So that’s where I am tonight. Tomorrow we are going off to the annual East Central 18th century conference, our 11th, this one in Baltimore, the Inner Harbor and I hope to come back with much to tell of what I heard and learned.

Garai, the much (unfairly) punished & poignant Briony in Ian McEwan’s 2007 Atonement (anti-Clarissa rewrite of Richardson’s Clarissa)

Ellen

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Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde: interiors and landscapes

Richard Glover, Cattle Watering

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve some happy news. I’ve agreed with the publisher of Valancourt books to produce an edition of Charlotte Smith’s second original novel, Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake (1789). There is no standard scholarly 20th century edition of this novel available for an affordable cost. The novel has been reprinted by Elibron in a 5 volume facsimile of the 2nd edition of 1790 (corrected by Smith) and as part of the horrendously expensive 20+ volume set produced by Chatto and Windus. You cannot buy the volumes separately. I have the Elibron reprint, have downloaded from ECCO a second copy of the same edition text printed in 3 volumes. I’m told I can google and put together an e-text that way. It would save me typing and I could correct against the other three copies I have, for I do have the volume in the Chatto and Windus set out from a university library.

It’s a startlingly good book, strong, despite its languors the result of over-the-top emotionalisms, especially when a character is deprived of some treasured project (that can be marriage too). Thus far all the friends I’ve told about it, they come back grateful for now knowing a new author to turn to. This is the fourth text by Smith I’ve read in the last few months. The others; translation and adaptation of Prevost’s Manan Lescaut, of Francois Gayot Pitaval’s and Francois Richer’s, published court cases, Celebres et Interessants (1735-44), and her late long Rousseau-supporting novel, The Young Philosopher)

What follows is a summary, evaluation account of the novel as I read it in the context of the politics of the era, its economics, Smith’s own life, and the aesthetics of the novel. In the comments are an explanation of one way of reading it as a picturesque novel. Landscape is central to the text morally as well as aesthetically.

I know my deep abiding interest in this book comes from its tone: one of corrosive reflections (a phrase which echoes throughout). I don’t deal directly with this aspect of the book here.

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Volume 1 & 2:

Richard Westall, Harvest Storm

It opens with impressive beautiful descriptions of Cumberland — using a technique of glimpsing visibility and intertwining eyes seeing something and movement in a landscape that has been attributed to Radcliffe:

At length they came within view of Grasmere Water, and passing between two enormous fells — one of which descended, clothed with wood, almost perpendicularly to the lake; while the other hung over it, in bold masses of staring rock — they turned round a sharp point formed by the root of the latter; and entering a lawn, the abbey, embosomed among the hills, and half-concealed by old elms which seemed coeval with the building, appeared with its gothic windows, and long pointed roof of a pale grey stone, bearing every where the marks of great antiquity. The great projecting buttresses were covered with old fruit trees, which from their knotted trunks seemed to have been planted by the first inhabitants of the mansion. In some of the windows, the heavy stone work still remained, and they were totally darkened at the top by stained glass: in others, the sashes had been substituted; and the windows had been contracted by brick work, to make them appear square within; but, even in these, the stained glass had been replaced, which generally represented the arms of Newenden with those of Brandon.

Smith’s hero, Sir Edward Newenden is unhappily married to a narrow cold shallow society type (think of a cross between Fanny Dashwood and Lady Middleton), and slowly falls in love with her cousin, Etheline Chesterville. It’s a story of adulterous love. Etheline is innocent of such feelings, but she is their cynosure. Desmond tells a similar story but in the case of Desmond the married woman with children loves a man she is not married to (Desmond, the hero).

Smith is very good at depicting uncongeniality, misery, hurt — no one does mismarriage better than she, though she does not develop the outlines quite inwardly enough in the way of a 19th century novel. Then again respectable 19th century novels don’t tell this tale.

The recluse of the lake, Mrs Montgomery, the mother of the hero who appears suddenly and saves the heroine in much the manner of Willoughby in S&S, though she is saved as was Jane Fairfax from drowning; the moment resembles the first meeting with dozens of heroines saved o the brink of disaster (see Caroline with hers in Caroline de Lichtfield). This is utter archetype.

Mrs Caroline Montgomery has had a chequered history. Her mother had been married to a wealthy nobleman killed fighting on behalf of Charles Edward in 1745; she was cast off and ignored by her husband’s family and could not get them to pay her jointure nor did she have means to force them. This is reality in the period. In London she meets a man who had been forcibly married to someone else; they fall in love and she goes to live with him — as a financial support and protector and has two further children by him.

He dies, and now her daughter and sons have no resources or connections without begging and harassing his family; a male friend of her now dead companion takes them in, a Mr Montgomery. The woman’s husband’s brother attempts to seduce the daughter, Caroline (the woman who tells the story) as the daughter of someone who fell from rectitude can demand no respect. Montgomery succours them and helps them, and Caroline falls in love with him’; he is the father of her son — and they marry. Montgomery is Catholic so he cannot hold an office and has little money. When we meet this second generation of gentlewomen, her beloved husband is dead and she too has been refused succour and endured insults by someone who offered to keep her in a relationship which would subordinate and humiliate her (“Pretty affectation in a girl who has been brought up on the wages of prostitution”).

I admire Smith’s analysis of family as well as social life. She delves more deeply than Austen in the way she takes account of sexual motivations and the clarity of the class and money clashes underlying her characters behavior. I really do feel her working with a sense of ideal hope that this book will be good and meaningful and speak to people — after her two successes. Not yet at this point is she beginning to pretend she doesn’t care about her novels and writing them but for money. In this sense of giving it her all I’m reminded of Mansfield Park. Desmond would correspond to Emma as attempts to do something new or other from the previous three.

The novel moves slowly and gravely — she worked hard on it. There is an equal weight given to interior life that I miss in her later novels and the transitions are carefully done. She is especially good at developing the sort of thing Austen only implies: how bad someone feels when someone else hits at them in teasing or quizzing: so Ethelinde (like Elinor) has to endure teasing, and it’s not good-natured over her love for the impoverished but handsome Montgomery: “uttered in a sort of malicious raillery, as they frequently uttered it, gave her the most unpleasant sensations of impatience and sometimes resentment. She is very daring to enter into Edward’s mind and his love for Ethelinde as a married man.

Montolieu’s remark that Austen’s curious pattern of having a heroine in love forbiddenly, tabooed against utterance for a variety of reasons stops love scenes comes to mind. Smith falls down when it comes to these; the way the characters talk is unreal, something that happens only occasionally and at the close of Austen’s novels when the lovers come together as when Darcy says “by you have I been properly humbled.” Montolieu was aware how hard a love scene is to do — Trollope is unusually good at it.

Smith has set up a pattern of intense marital disappointment and temptations to adultery as well as much else destructive in society; we find ourselves in a world of gambling, drinking, parties which is not at all extravagant (or a vortex of dissipation) but reads as a probable imitation of how the gentry and upper class spent their lives. The very quietness with which Smith traces agons and losses makes them more intense. Once you have read her other novels you realize there is not more variety of patterns (like Austen the patterns obsessively repeat themselves and can be linked to Smith’s life), but the patterns are more active and they bring to the fore genuinely risky behaviors that are part of everyday life and how these continually impinge on women in particular — as well as vulnerable males.

The volume closes with Edward’s misery. He has done the right thing: he has insisted that Danesforth leave the house and said if Lady Neweden follows him, she will not be allowed into his house again. He asks her if she thinks about what will happen to her children by him. She appears not to care a jot about them. This is a misogynistic portrait in part: she is made too bad, too one-sided, but her quarrels with her father who is horrified at her indifference to scandal and then her children are powerful.

Montgomery as we know has not yet gone to India; he comes back to the house and leaves with Mr Chesterville and Ethelinde whom rumours about (with Edward) have made it impossible for her to say. Her father continues playing for high stakes (he cannot resist for every once in a while he makes badly needed money even if on the whole he’s losing) and we hear her brother has is a financial burden.

This is a strong book, highly original really, exposing the realities of this world before any reforms that mattered (social programs, redistribution of income) or changes in patriarchal, militaristic hierarchical norms had taken place, even a little. It’s power is in the analysis of the psychology though in these last scenes which are not idealized emotions, Smith rises to the challenge and writes believable enough dialogue.

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Volume 3

Canaletto, Lord and Lady (detail)

I’m beginning to wonder why the novel is called “the recluse of the lake.” As far as I can tell the only character who fits that description is the hero’s mother, and although she told a moving story of her life in Volume 1, she has not been seen since; all we’ve had is the occasional letter to her son now in London.

The heroine’s brother is now in debtor’s prison and there have been some remarkable persuasive pictures of his confinement — and his hysteria. The depiction is overtly presented as an argument against imprisonment for debt.
It looks forward to 19th century fiction in this.

There is a troubling anti-feminism in the book despite it’s being a heroine’s text by a woman. Most of the men in the book are good to very good; most of the women except for the heroine and the hero’s mother are variously awful. The heroine’s cousin has committed adultery and the cousin’s husband left her cousin; he is in love with the heroine and very deeply. This adultery theme recurs in Desmond and is deeply felt. The husband is dissatisfied; the wife is
frivolous, mean, cares little about their children. It’s done with intense emotion and is persuasive, but this cousin and other females we meet are used to mock women as such. When a male in the book is a gambler or rake or mean, somehow the criticism seems directed at him individually; when an erring female is presented, we get shaping comments which direct the invective at females as such.

Smith’s Bath is a different place in this book: one which includes high gambling, drinking, sex too. Austen’s heroines never have any such overtly vivid active experiences as Ethelinde or the cousin’s husband, Sir Edward, who is the second most dominating character in the book. The ostensible “lead male,” Montgomery who loves Ethelinde and whose mother lives deep in Scotland (and is thus far the only recluse of the lake in sight) are really far more marginalized in the action and scenes and emotion. Ethelinde’s family is made of gamblers and they bring her to debtor’s prison. Sir Edward’s family which includes the adulterous wife accounts for the other half of the vivid sharply satiric scenes of social life. I find this interesting too. There is a pull in an unusual direction for Smith.

The real hero is Edward Newenden who is in love with his wife’s cousin. He endures as humiliation his wife’s taking a lover (a cavalier servente in public) so Smith explodes the idea that’s enjoyable. It’s he who can be reasoned against not duelling (again important in the era). It’s his strength and heart and ethics that are at the core compass of the book — and yet how he longs to leave the wife that withers his soul, ignores his children and go take up life with Ethy.

An extraordinary energy emerges when Smith flowers in smaller stories, plots within plots, lyrically and simply told. Chesterville, the brother has a wife, and Victorine’s story again includes a mother who had sex outside marriage. I see this as a pattern in Smith. She does not have the courage to have her heroine have sex outside marriage, or a present living women, but one just dead, a mother, and she’s free. (This is also the pattern of Montalbert.) The full story of Victorine’s mother taking place on Jamaica is moving.

We also get a multiple adulterous pattern too – with unhappiness in marriage and the inability to separate underlying what is protested against here. Now in French novels this inference is made explicit — Madame de Stael comes to mind (Delphine especially which Napoleon singled out for particular hate): during the 1790s a more liberal divorce law was put in place by the Parlement than has been in France until the last 20 years and a huge percentage of women (it was mostly women) filed.

Ethelinde is absurdly virtuous to us when she refuses to marry Montgomery because he has no money even after her father recognizes marriage to Montgomery is her only safety. but we might remember how many of us will give up our lives to 5 day a week jobs we might detest or not respect at all at any time in order to make money.

I did not go over the life of Victorine’s mother: yet another woman who defies the sexual prohibition before marriage. Mrs Royston, but rather like Lady Newenden, she is presented as amoral, aggressive, and just awful in her adulterous behavior. She seeks Montgomery as a lover and when he refuses her, she is angry.

Most novels that are artful will have a core of repeating patterns or some set of interrelated themes: this one is about the sexual angle of dysfunctional social and familial life as experienced under the inhumane and unjust conditions of the time and our own time insofar as it mirrors then. Again and again we are shown sexual transgression in all its forms, sometimes moral and understandable, sometimes amoral and cruel.

Money is so central too: when Mr Chesterville dies, his brother at long last shows remorse, but when he attempts or thinks to go to the corpse to give it decent burial and perhaps take his niece and nephew in — he had refused this in life when Montgomery approached him — very like Chapter 2 of S&S his wife argues him out of it (pp. 236-43). I think the scene is actually stronger than Austen’s because the terms of what she is saying are made more explicit, the underlying vicious impulses and overt social norms brought out. But Austen’s lives because her dialogue is more dynamic and ironical, less obvious and it opens a book of concise art, while this is lost in the back of Volume 3 after a series of impossibly neurotic (over-the-top) sentimental scenes few but 18th century specialists will endure.

Smith carries on this delving into the inner lives of people driven by these sexual mores that destroy their very fibre: we get a sense of why characters are so often presented as sickening in novels. Here we see the process. The ending includes: Sir Edward finding that the Chesterville brother-lord type is willing to misrepresent all that has happened — the adulterous wife, the woman who abandoned her children (and the tenderness there is Smith remembering how she couldn’t live her children) and accuses the impossibly virtuous Ethelinde — this is so appalling to him hat he can hardly contain himself from murderous anger. Edward wants to murder the man who is now exploiting the sexuality of his vicious wife.

Before I get too over-the-top irritated at Ethelinde for refusing to marry Montgomery out of stupendously virtuous concern for what will happen to his finances — I have to remember how I allow the norms of other people to drive me wild and make me feel bad about myself. These are not about sex for me but money and position, but the insecurity and self-obsessive thoughts are the same. Luckily I live with someone who tells me to ignore them and myself know I should. Ethy does not.

I also like how Smith exposes the whole patronage system. We are expected to remember the young Chesterville cannot save himself and Victorine by going to India because he hasn’t begun to have it in him to exert the self-control necessary to rob all the people he comes across through the means the company provides.

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Volume 4: the powerlessness of women.

Caspar Friedrich, Woman at a Window (1822)

Ethelinde’s father dies and since he gambled leaves her nothing a reflection of Smith’s father). Her brother, another inveterate gambler ends up in debtor’s prison and is freed because the hero, Sir Edward, pays his debt; Sir Edward also helps the brother find a post in India. The story is presented as Sir Edward’s love for Ethelinde when his vicious wife commits adultery, but the way the action of the plot works out is the reader is worried about Ethelinde succumbing to Sir Edward’s love because she has nowhere else to turn to because of her gambling father and brother.

Smith’s secondary hero, Montgomery, the young man who is justifiably in love with Ethelinde and to whom she is in effect engaged, must travel to India to make his fortune. The hardship of this kind of thing comes out. This is colonialism
from the point of view of those who do the work. Austen’s brothers had to go to sea; reading about Rosalie de Constant, a French woman artist of the very early 19th century, you will find a story of her brother who went to India several times and suffered much from loneliness and boredom and the social conditions in India. He came back more than once; he never made anything more than enough to support himself. In Ethelinde our young man doesn’t want to go any more than Rosalie de Constant’s brother did.

So Montgomery, is being driven by everyone he knows to leave England, sail for India and attempt to make his fortune there. Every instinct in him finds this course of action repellent, from his knowledge of what making money from India means. to his fear for what will happen to Ethelinde when he leaves her without any source of income or shelter but what Sir Edward can offer.

At the climax of Volume 4, Montgomery turns to Ethelinde and makes an impassioned argument on behalf of dropping out of their caste, of taking a job which requires manual labour which will leave him dependent on a wage (but free of a patron), which will require them to return to Scotland to live very modestly. She is just about yielding, when she is pulled away by his mother who through her experience, her own tiny income (which is inadequate for her own needs and would be pulled upon by these two young people) and her knowledge of what can happen (visions of too many children hover over the text), counsels Ethelinde to urge her Montgomery to go to India. But before she is pulled away, Montgomery erupts into French and quotes a long passage from a text by Rousseau (which I don’t recognize) but which argues for breaking from their caste:

Soyons heureux et pauvres; ah! quel tresor nous aurons acquis! J’ai des bras, je suis robuste; le pain gagné par mon travail te paroitra plus delicieux que les mets des festins. Un repas appreté par l’amour, peut — il jamais, être insipide?

This scene between the hero and heroine is followed by one between Montgomery and Sir Edward in which Montgomery tries to enlist Sir Edward to argue Ethelinde into at least marrying him before he goes to India. This climax is to me slightly astonishing because as the emotion between the two men becomes overwrough, Sir Edward confesses to Montgomery his intense love for Ethelinde. This is the equivalent of the Princess de Cleves’s confession of her longing for Nemours to her husband. The Princess’s confession has often been called improbable, but my experience tells me this is not true. It is probable for a certain kind of sensitive sincere person who wants to live a life of candour.

I have come across more modern variants of the Princess’s confession to her husband, e.g., Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?where Lady Glencora Palliser confesses her love for Burgo to her husband. Trollope solves the crisis by having Plantagenet, her husband behave as ideally as Lady Glen: he forgives and blames himself; as narrator, Trollope also suggests to the reader who may doubt this scene an out: the husband is not taking his wife seriously; she does not really want to commit adultery; this enables readers who would get upset at their favorite heroine wanting to commit adultery to dismiss the scene as trivial or non-serious.

I have never before come across it between two men. Mrs Smith, as narrator, is well aware the reader will expect an explosion from Montgomery much worse than the Prince de Cleves inflicted on the Princess. Montgomery almost does this, but he controls himself when he is told by Sir Edward that he will leave Ethelinde with his sister, return to his wife and travel with his wife to Europe. He feels deeply sorry for this man and appreciates his candour. The scene of course enables Smith to pour out what a person who longed to marry another and couldn’t might feel when stuck with someone who is betraying and treating them awfully — and is simply uncongenial.

In Ethelinde, after the scene where Edward Newenden confesses his love for Ethelinde, Montgomery does not know what to do. Certainly it’s an ambiguous gesture; again in La Princesse de Cleves the heroine confesses her adulterous longings to her husband and by so doing destroys his peace; he cannot forgive and understand. She is innocent and means well and perhaps Edward does this to control himself; it also keeps Montgomery’s suspicions at bay.

Mrs Montgomery is at risk of losing all her money and thus Montgomery must go to India. Smith means to expose the intense hardship and loss the global colonial system inflicts on ordinary people — it only comes out indirectly in Austen say. I keep likening Ethelinde to MP and then Persuasion, only Austen is apparently comfortable with such demands on men. She protests against the forced marriage (sale) of women in India (Catherine or the Bower), but that’s all.

Edward is an ambiguous figure. As I say, we can’t really feel for his wife since she is presented so negatively but were that not the case and she allowed to speak for herself (we never see into her mind), we might see her as having been sold by her parents for this man with a title. Smith’s Sir Edward anticipates the males which begin to inhabit the books as of Desmond: the selfless older man who does everything for the heroine, loves her and asks nothing. One I remember well in Montalbert was very moving. But they are kept at a distance; this first time she is allowing us to see inside the figure to understand why she is so sympathetic to him.

When we get to Volume 5 we realize that Montgomery was not wrong, for what has happened is Ethelinde has gone to live with Sir Edward’s sister who is indifferent to her. In her house are living her ruthless amoral husband and a man who attempts to seduce and then brutally to force Ethelinde to
have sex with him and become his mistress. The scenes here read as what could easily happen

Then we have the astonishing shake-down savage talk between Sir Edward Neweden and Lady Newenden’s parents, the Maltravers’: the frank needling accusatory conversation over who brought what money to the marriage and who owes who what, the open lying of the mother and father are utterly modern. The thought that comes to mind is we don’t experience this so directly in marriage since we have — through our norm of marrying for love — to some extent freed the marital relationship of such viciousness.

I found myself also moved by the over-sentimentalization in a way of Montgomery and Ethelinde and Mrs Montgomery’s goodbye where they think they may never met again. In a way it’s better than Austen’s almost automatic mockery of emotional goodbyes. Why should people not mourn and deeply at such forced emigrations, trips, ejections. It’s Austen who should justify her refusal to acknowledge these destructive wrenches.

Less interesting is the attack on Ethelinde by Davenent and his salacious friend at Ellen Newenden’s. Ellen is Edward’s sister. Ellen’s portrait, as horsewoman of a lesbian tendency is one that carries on through the 19th century into our own time. In the last quarter of the Poldark novels, the villain-protagonist, George Warleggan marries such a woman, Harriet, and we see how Harriet’s cold carelessness can destroy a semi-vicious man, Stephen Carrington because he is someone who buys into the class and hierarchical values.

Until reading this novel I had the impression it was filled with beautiful landscape and high sensibility. It’s famous for its descriptions of Scotland. In fact while these are good, they are very few and far between. Most of the book takes place in London or in houses in countryside comparable to the ones Austen uses.

It is every bit as realistic as Burney’s Cecilia. For example, as part of the threads in Volume 4 and 5 Montgomery’s mother goes to Lyons when she hears that her income in an investment is threatened by a bankruptcy. A letter comes in which she reports this is what happened. A hard cash mentality is what lies behind most novel-stories and at one point Mrs Montgomery puts to Montgomery what is the problem: can he and Ethelinde live on £70 a year with her and what income he could get given that he has no education to do anything under his caste? It is this sort of hard detail that characterizes numbers of the scenes in Ethelinde and helps make it the strong serious book it is.

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Volume 5:

Bifrons Park, Kent (1695-1700), artist unknown

It ends in a mood or atmosphere that is reminiscent of Austen: a few close good people make a small circle of friends, the center of which is a wedded couple. The central male of the book, Sir Edward, goes to Europe with his wife, but she finally leaves him for the rake-villain of the novel.

Ethelinde endures a realistic near rape. She flees Ellen Newenden’s house with the help of servants and we see her take lodgings where she pays small amounts of money. We get the sense of what a gentlewoman walking alone in the 18th century might fear. She is driven to take residence in an unpleasant aunt’s (Lady Ludford, see below) where she is despised (this is in the vein of Austen’s books). The whole adventure of escape, including the servants’ fear of the master who wants to help his friend get at Ethelinde is persuasive.

I find this a painful book to read. I end up dreading what’s to come, at the same time as it’s moving, I find grasting the endless passages of mixed distress, and that the characters do what’s expected of them by the society (however vicious it may be). This makes for this pain. So Edward goes abroad ostensibly with his wife (she never appears again on the stage of the novel) but it’s all misery the ugly scenes with her parents he endures. Mrs Montgomery loses all her money so Montgomery must go abroad.

Then what I expected to happen happens. The near rape. Why does no one in the book think of it? who is to protect Ethelinde? she seems incapable of a job. The book turns to a Clarissa mode where Ellen Newdenden having made the mistake of marrying Woolaston allows Davenant to prey on Ethelinde. Ethelinde of course is as cagey as Clary and she has no problem in rejecting a man she has never felt any attraction to.

This is a bit of improbability surely: given how realistic Smith has tried to be it doesn’t make sense that no one foresees this determined pursuit. I realize Smith wanted it to occur to keep interest up and involve flight with landscape.

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Henry Fuseli, Romeo and Juliet

I found some of this novel so painful in the last parts of Volume 4 to read, I really hesitated in going on with Volume 5. Once Ethelinde was safe outside the compound which contained Davenant, I was relieved and somehow don’t find the scorn that she receives from Lady Ludford and aroused jealousy from the daughter, another cousin, Clarinthia Ludford, hard to take. I am driven to wonder why. I know there is an analogy with the Clarissa story in that the men at Brackwood (Ellen Newenden, now Mrs Woolaston’s house — or should I say her husband’s) were planning to abduct and one had tried to rape Ethelinde — at least that’s what is implied. But I don’t think that’s it so much (though I was apprehensive lest she should change her mind and not flee). I can read other very painful kinds of stories (recently Doris Lessing’s Grassing is Singing) I don’t feel this.

It’s the peculiar form of feeling in Ethelinde that the humiliation wrests that is probably so hard to take. Her pride so seared by these sexual-social attacks. Her erstwhile protector, Ellen Newendon now become Mrs Woolaston, comes in and asks how dare she be so choosy? What does it matter who she fucks with? or marries for that matter? individually? Partly also that she is so obedient; I can’t stand how she buys into some of the norms used to control and destroy her.

The book has a transcendent beauty in the fifth volume too — that kept me going. When Ethelinde goes walking along the beaches by herself, into the wilds, Smith writes prose akin to her poetry (see the 2nd edition, 1790, Vol 5, Ch 3, one sequence on pp. 75-76).

Unfortunately when she meets up with an interesting ethical looking man who likes solitude like herself, he turns out to be not another Edward Neweden type (the kind of male heroines meet in the other novels seen from outside) but we are back to the more sentimental improbable tripe: the older man is a long-forgotten uncle, Mr Harcourt seeking out his long lost daughter, Victorine, now in the East Indies with Ethelinde’s brother.

Smith does not seem aware that in the West Indies money is made based on slavery as she is that in India it’s made by wresting it corruptly from the natives (not paying taxes for example). Victorine and Ethelinde’s brother have gone to the West Indies to recoup their fortunes.

********************************

An illustration of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon, 18th century: a prison

The deus ex machina of the novel is money — which has lain at the center of the action all along. Not only does Sir Edward return with his, but so does this long-lost uncle, Mr Harcourt, who turns out to be brother to the widowed mother, Mrs Montgomery of the young secondary hero, Montgomery. Mr Harcourt has grown very rich in the West Indies. This is not a novel where the source of this wealth — slavery — has reached the novelist’s consciousness. So two males with money solve most of the problems of the family.

Some individual bravery and moral decisions come into play. Montgomery himself returns on his own from India after he discovers that the kind of work and behavior he will have to enact in order to become rich is beyond his reach. It’s not put morally but rather in terms of his character. His return occasions some of the suspense of the action. His ship becomes lost and he is thought dead for a while. Ethelinde almost marries Sir Edward. There are several paragraphs which make it clear that the moral of this is the young man and young woman should have married without money. They had something worth taking a risk for and what they thought was out there was not except at terrible moral cost. Further, their concern was over “false” ideas of status. This then takes the theme of Persuasion up (one finds it also in Crabbe, the young couple advised to be prudent who destroy their happiness in life for nothing) very strongly and does not qualify it in the manner of Austen’s novel. The only character to come near this in Austen is Edward Bertram when in Mansfield Park he tells Mary that it will cost him a price he doesn’t want to pay to become rich. And the conversation is buried and all we are really asked to pay attention to is Mary’s deflating and mockery of him to see how her moral character is wanting.

The introduction of Mr Harcourt with his huge wealth produces a series of turns and twists in the plot-design which allow Smith to show us how each of her characters reacts to the presence of great money. Her real strength is in just this sort of exposure of the greed and manipulation and hypocrisies of social life.

The Ludfords: Mr becomes obsequious, Mrs intensely envious and raw with resentment, Clarinthia only glad that the money will remove Ethelinde from Southampton where she attracts suitors. Clarinthia rejected a nice man, Southcote, because he was decent, yet when she sees him turning to Ethelinde, she is livid.

They return to London and meet Mrs Montgomery who is presented as unable to lift herself above anxiety; whatever happens in the letters from her son, it’s a new reason to dread the future. Had Smith represented this attitude of mind as what’s engendered by her history and circumstance it would have been effective, but it’s just represented as innate (as kind of typical universal characteristic). Montgomery writes he is well but not making money as he can’t do what’s asked; she worries he is unhappy; he writes to Ethelinde he is and she worries he will sicken, and then he will drown on the way back.

Ethelinde’s brother, Chesterville, resumes his selfish profligate ways and his wife is a vain creature. Another dialogue emerges about sharing the money with their uncle’s half-sister’s son — so Ehtelinde’s brother and his wife become just like John and Fanny Dashwood, only much bitterer and more is explained. Ethelinde’s brother does not want to share any of the uncle’s wealth with anyone and he talks in language strongly reminiscent of Chapter 2 of Austen’s S&S. What could his sister and her widowed friend possibly need more than a tiny income? This suggests Austen need not have heard what her brother wrote in a letter after their father died. This dismissive callous way of talking was commonplace. The brother does gamble and his wife is frivolous: the gambling is a behavior we don’t find in Austen, but an attempt on the part of other relatives to ensnare Mr Harcourt into marriage recalls the marriage manipulations of Austen’s novels. (The analogue in life is again Smith’s father.)

While some of Volume 4 takes place in a countryside and among houses very like what we find in Austen’s P&P, a good deal now takes place in Scotland. This includes a sequence out in the landscape which has some brooding lovely poetry, and two near visions one of which takes place in a church burial ground. These visions are not ghosts but are projections of Ethelinde’s loneliness and distress. She almost sees her dead father and has a sense of Montgomery’s presence. These two sequences are very well done.

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Wm Turner, Abingdon

The qualified happy ending at last. Montgomery miraculously survives and returns to marry Ethelinde; they get enough money from Mr Harcourt, Mrs Montgomery’s fantastically rich half-brother, and Sir Edward Newenden whose wife has died. We are not told of the hinted terrible circumstances: miscarriage, abortion (?) childbirth, Danescourt beating the hell out of her, or tossing her into the streets to survive as a prostitute. Even Ethelinde’s brother begins to behave when he sees that Mr Harcourt might marry a cold-hearted gold-digger, conveniently part of the Ludford group. Woolaston has spent all Ellen Newenden’s money and fled so again Sir Edward comes forward to do the right thing for his sister.

It’s in some of the realistic working out of the stories that the novel manages to hold this reader. I had remembered Ethelinde’s visit to her father’s tomb. That is a gothic-picturesque scene – and is found in other women’s novels of the era, to my memory close is a scene in Sophie Cottin’s Amelia Mansfield. Again Austen skirts this (her NA).

I was most moved by Sir Edward who when he thinks that Montgomery is dead offers his hand in marriage to Ethelinde. Of course she refuses: her reason is not unsound: Montgomery has become ‘interwoven” in her existence,” Vol 5, Ch 13, p 294. She is so aware of his moral nature and goodness and pressure is about to consent to stay by him as friend and semi-sister. They also have the one believable love dialogue: for a moment she almost yields and says “Sir Edward, my dear Sir Edward — ” and he “Dear! …” (p. 296) One of the few believable erotic love gestures is that of Ethelinde and Edward as they say goodbye after Montgomery has returned. She does respond at last: “almost involuntarily she lifted his hand to her lips …” (and then a paragraph follows of their quiet gestures and his departure) (Vol 5, ch 13, p 305).

So much better than all the verbiage the novel subjects us to. Real feeling for a moment. He is the presence in the novel that most moves me — a variant on Smith herself who seems ever to have dreamed of finding some mate in marriage when it was closed off forever by her terrible marriage. It’s been suggested that Smith did have a chance to have a partner after she left her husband, but refused this because it would hurt her children’s future.

I was involved enough to hope that Montgomery was dead and Ethelinde and Edward would marry. But I knew it was hopeless. Smith would not permit it — as she knew that this would be unacceptable. I don’t know that people would see it was her, but she just couldn’t let herself go.

And so it ends with the same sort of language of quiet resignation and happiness with a qualifying note that one finds at the close of several of Smith’s and Austen’s mature books.

Ellen

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Foremother poet: Annette Von Droste-Hulshoff (1797-1848): The Jew’s Beech

Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840), Sylphide

Dear friends and readers,

About a week ago we finished a lightning-quick absorbed (for those who participated) reading and discussion of Annette von Droste-Hulshoff’s one work still in print: The Jew’s Beech (first published in 1842), during which we also albeit briefly discussed her life and poetry. She was an important (rare) early 19th century German lyric poet (so foremother poet), and in the way of advertising familiarizations one reads her work and life represent a kind of intersection between the passion and content of Emily Bronte, with her retired life resembling that of Emily Dickinson.

I’ll do one better and suggest her autobiographical novel, Ledwina (which I was able to read a portion of, Englished by Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantop in Bitter Healing: German Women Writers, 1700-1830) depicted her restricted choices and liberty and all-encompassing apparently kind but repressive family makes me think of Austen:

she so loathed this sad and anxious sheltering, this pitiful cautious life where the body governs the spirit until it, too, becomes as infirm and impoverished as the body itself, loathed it so much that she would gladly have let all her life’s energy, which was glimmering out a spark at a time, flare up and expire in a single blaze

We see her daily life, and as in Austen’s letters, her close relationships with servants. There are strikingly modern passages: for example the heroine grows irritated with herself when she falls asleep (partly tiredness, partly boredom) during the day because as it is she can

scarcely sleep at night; then I get up from time to time and walk about my room; it’s not good for me, but what is one to do with the long night.

What indeed?

Her continual rewriting and perfectionist stance towards each detail of her text recalls Austen too.

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To begin with her life:

Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, 1838 portrait by J. Sprick

Annette von Drost-Hulshoff may be said to be a rare women represented in the German romantic canon, but like so many women before the 19th century, it’s hard to get at the truth of her life. What I have read amounts to two different lives.

Take your choice:

Her birthplace, Burg Hülshoff in Havixbeck, Germany

at wikipedia and from the articles cited you will learn of a woman who was ambitious, wanted a career (planned her publications to make an image) and was thwarted by her family, the prescriptive life laid down for an upper class Catholic German unmarried woman, and bad luck. Her father was learned and gave his daughter an excellent high culture education (tutors in ancient languages, French, natural history, mathematics and music (she inherited considerable musical talent from her father).

We are told she was a member of her brother’s intellectual circles, knew Grimm, Goethe, Schiller and many other illustrious German names. She almost married a Protestant, but was cruelly tricked out of it when family members persuaded a Catholic lawyer to pay court to her. The end result was her reputation was hurt, she presumably shocked by this treachery.

Her father’s death, religious doubts, and her family’s wealth enabled her to live a life of quiet retreat with her mother and family and study and write poetry in the countryside. She wrote long-narrative poems but her work was not marketed skilfully (a backwater publishers) and the commercial failure humiliated her.

But again she tries for a social life, this time a salon in Munster where she meets Levin Schücking, a young poet, whose friendship, sympathy, congeniality inspire her to write again: poetry, The Jew’s Beech. Schucking has to take a position as a tutor in an aristocratic family. New contacts led to a literary success, an invitation by Clara Schuman to write a libretto, but she was betrayed by Schucking who, now married, writes two novels, one exposing the flaws of the aristocracy she belonged to, the other with a portrait of herself that distressed (she is said to have treated the poet like a son), so again she retires, this time to small house by herself and dies of TB. Nonetheless, Schucking was himself responsible for publicizing her work.

Or the life as told by Blackwell and Zantopp (Bitter Healing) and suported by Ledwina (written 1819-26):

The Säntis, a mountain in the Alps near Schloss Eppishausen, which inspired Droste’s poem “Der Säntis”

Blackwell and Zantop present Drost-Hulfshoff or Annette as not wanting to have her works published, as reclusive, quiet, and the story of the thwarted love affair becomes not so much a manipulation of her as her being over-sensitive and alienated or different from most of those she met, unconventional in her perceptions, and drawn inwardly by her religious feelings and love for travel and long sojourns in a wild romantic Westphalia landscape. Her relationships were all with family members or close friends; important to her were a Professor Anton Matthias Sprickman of Munster, a woman writer of popular tales, Katharina Brusch, and Adele Schopenhauer (the famous Schopenhauer’s mother who wrote her of travel in the UK). When young, Annette chose to turn away from her brother’s friends (now they are boorish students); she rejected one man who denounced her as arrogant and manipulative. They describe her poetry effectively (inward, intense, her marshes and moors inhabited by demonic nature spirits), some prose works (Pictures from Westphalia, 1842), two unfinished novels (one Englished as Our Country Place, begun 1841).

Both accounts depict her as an isolated and independent woman in character who was often ill: her heroine Ledwina suffers from severe chest pains; she has a widowed mother who has to give up her estate to an unworthy son, sisters desperate to marry but wanting to remain close to one another, a woman who goes mad with shame when she is left a bankrupt widow, another who renounces speech for 14 years to be able to live with her husband. It is an account of un-freedom, a lack of social worth accorded women. The Jew’s Beech presents women in the same light.

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Friedrich, Abbey in the Oakwood

The Jew’s Beech, another Scheherazade tale:

I can find no plot-summary, but there is an account of the story’s sources in Drost-Hulshoff’s relatives’ experience of peasant culture and court cases recorded by them (see August von Haxthausen) The prosaic feel of everyday life, the anger and greed and competitiveness within families, occasional violence, the pragmaticism which nonetheless accepts superstitions reminded me much of the world of Martin Guerre as described by Charlotte Smith and Natalie Zemon Davis.

Basically it tells us of the lives of a few people who live amid and participate in a fierce smuggling and destruction of timber going on in the local rich woods and lands owned by the wealthy by bands of men desperate to make a living. We are told of foresters who are hired as murderous police on behalf of the state and grandees (who want to protect the game and “their” woods). In effect an unackknowledged all-out war between the haves and have-nots goes on ceaselessly in the background and every once in a while individual people erupt to murder and avenge themselves for humilation or because someone owes them money (or something else) and didn’t pay up.

The translation by Lionel and Doris Thomas (reprinted in an Oxford paperback classic) held me because it was rendered in modern lucid idiomatic fluid English. It reads as a startlingly modern fable (rather like a unusually plain Isak Dinesen story) so I expect the translator is part of the new school of translators (pressured to do this by publishers) which modernizes older texts by getting rid of certain kinds of idiosyncracies of the original author or the period. The packaging reminded me of Wolf’s historical fiction set in the same era about the poets Kleist and Gunderrode, Englished as No Place on Earth: the prose style here is the same. It may be that one or both of these texts is distorted.

So, we have a fearful world of peasants seen by a narrator kept at a distance. Violence is the way they control one another and the novel suggests things like drunken beatings, the intense concern with money and surviving as the main motive for people’s actions without admitting it. Margret the mother, loves her son, Frederich, but unhesitatingly lets the uncle take him away to work for him though it seems to me that the uncle is as fierce as Peter Grimes and I would not trust my son with him.

Oddly (again referring to Wolf’s historical fiction) I felt it was sort of an 18th century tale told much later – the way women are said to write in a belated way. It opens in 1738 with the birth of the young hero, Frederick,moves backward to the mother and her bad decision to marry a violent man (but then she was single and it’s said ugly) and then forward to Frederick as a young man — who can be dandy like, sensitive dreamy but also a determined bourgeois. It jumps forward once to July 1756, again four years and ends 28 years later (1788).

Charlotte Smith’s Romance of Real Life shows us how the legal and economic arrangements of the ancien regime create hatred and resentment and can lead to murder. What’s on Drost-Hulshoff’s mind is precisely this. The first three pages gives us the framework:

As a result of primitive and often inadequate lesiglature, the ideas of the inhabitants as to right and wrong had become somewhat confused, or rather beside the official legal system there had grown up a second law based on public opinion, usage and superannuaion arising from neglect … legal form mattered less the spirit was adhered to more strictly, infringements occurred ore often … nothing destroys the soul more surely than an appeal to external legal forms in contradiction to one’s inner sense of justice.

Drost-Hulshoff differs from Smith in emphasizing custom and also the vulnerability of women who do suffer terribly in this tale. As a kind of throw-away detail we are told of how at a wedding where everyone is celebrating, a young woman is being married to a very old man who sneers at her and seems to look forward to domineering and being cruel to her. The first time we meet Friedrich’s mother she has decided to marry a man (Friedrich’s father) who we have seen be somehow hideously cruel to his first wife so that she flees from him in the night all bloody and thereafter lives with her parents and not soon after that dies. Friedrich’s mother receives the same treatment from this man who we are told makes an exception for his son, which makes his son tender to the father.

It ends enigmatically. There are two murders and after the first murder was committed I was convinced that Friedrich had not done it. He was an accomplice with the lumber thieves, but not the prime actor. After the second the murder of the lender Jew Aaron (who is presented anti-semitically), as he had humiliated Friedrich, I thought he had done at least that one (though it’s never stated), and then when his corpse is found by the Jew’s beech tree, although it was implied that after years of exile and flight, he had returned and killed himself near where the Jew he killed died, I was not sure.

I am particularly struck by her originality and unconventionality. How different this is from the sentimental pirate and other tales of the French at the time. I thought of Marmontel’s Shepherdess of the Alps, but also the tales of sensibility of Germane de Stael. It is wholly alien in the way of Emily Bronte’s stances.

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Johan Christian Claussen Dah (1788-1856), Dresden by Moonlight (1850)

We had some very good talk and I’d like to include some of the postings of two friends on WWTTA. Fran, a reader of German, very knowledgeable in its literature, wrote as quietly brilliantly as she usually does:

Glad you’re enjoying this hauntingly puzzling tale, Ellen. I’ve already re-read the German text and the notes in my new edition, so I’ll try and make time to see how the English translation compares with the original as well. I’ll probably be using the older online translation, though.

You’ll probably have seen from other sources that Droste-Hülshoff based her story on true events, ones that her ancestors had been involved in. The historical murder took place on 10.2.1783 when Soestmann-Behrens, a so-called ‘Schutzjude’(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzjude), was killed by Hermann Georg Winkelhagen, a farm worker from Bellersen (the B. in the text) after an argument about an unpaid bill.Though Droste-Hülshoff purposedly clouds the issue of who actually murdered the Jewish merchant in her text, there seems to have been no such doubt as to Winkelhagen’s own guilt.

At the time, D-H’s maternal grandfather (some sources say great-grandfather) Caspar Moritz von Haxthausen zu Abbenburg, an aristocratic landowner, was also serving as judge at the patrimonial court in charge of the case, so the details were passed down in family lore.

Like the assumed murderer in D-H’s story, Winkelhagen fled capture, but in the course of his adventures was picked up by pirates and sold into Algerian slavery. This lasted until 1805, when he and 231 fellow prisoners were freed by Jérôme, Napoleon’s brother. Winkelhagen then made his way back to Bellersen, arriving in April 1806, only to hang himself later in the woods on 18.9.1806.

From these dates, you can see that D-H did choose to set her own story further back in time as you thought.

It’s interesting that you should mention the sentimental pirate tales popular at the time since D-H.’s uncle August had already published a version of Winkelhagen’s story under the title of ‘The Story of an Algerian Slave’ in 1818, which played up the pirate and slavery scenario much more.

I’ve read that version, too, as it was in the notes. It’s a much more
straightforward, unambiguous account, though the Algerian side of the events as described there are actually held to be almost entirely fictitious, written perhaps to cash in on the wave of interest you indicate, whilst the details of the murder itself seem to have been more solidly based on the surviving details of the original case.

Since the subject of anti-semitism has already come up, it was interesting to read there that Winkelhagen had first been taken to court by Soestmann-Behrens for defaulting on payment of some cloth and that W. had expected to be let off since his accuser was ‘just’ a Jew. He wasn’t: the court found in favour of his accuser and W. retaliated by violence. When he returned from slavery, the matter of whether to prosecute the murder came up again, but it was deemed that his 24 years of exile, imprisonment and forced labour had already been punishment enough.

Interestingly enough, Droste-Hülshoff didn’t read her uncle’s version until after she had written all or most of her own story and, whilst she notes wanting to introduce some of the details he mentioned that she had initially forgotten, she also mentions not wanting to re-write the whole thing, underlining in particular how very different her fictional portrayal of the supposed murderer was from her uncle’s portrayal of the historical W.

She actually did revise this short tale again again over a long period of time, perhaps because it was one of her first adventures into prose. There seem to be eight, extant, much revised drafts or manuscript versions, which makes establishing an accurate text history pretty difficult.

This process of constant revision might also be the reason why this is her only completed prose text, whilst the rest remain as mere fragments.

Continued in the comments where I end with two lyrics and a bibliography.

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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Conference papers: Wild remote places, knots of grief out of Prevost; infamy & respect

Caspar D. Friedrich (1774-184), Chalk Cliffs on Rugen (1818-22)

Dear friends and readers,

Paradoxically I’ve not had any books to blog about since I’ve been reading so diligently towards one perhaps two conferences. Tonight I looked and saw that the proposal I was aiming at — for a Chawton conference in summer 1213 — is not due until January 1213. I had thought it was November 1212. From a brief conversation I had with Gillian Dow at the JASNA in Portland, more than two years ago now, I had the impression she’d welcome papers on the French background of 18tn century women writers and as I love reading French novels and am interested in the issues that crop up when one reads translations as well as the interaction of French and English texts, the one I thought I’d try for is for Dow’s panel whose topic is to be women writers and translation.

This blog is about the novels I’m going to deal with (and maybe a memoir) — which cannot be said to anticipate the Brontes so much as be like them fundamentally; the ultimate precursor is Prevost. Another problem with Lucasta Miller’s The Bronte Myth is she apparently does not know of these novels, still very much part of the reading of Victorian women of the first half of the 19th century. I call specific attention to Sophia Lee’s The Recess (which Austen probably had in mind in her NA parody), and Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher. Great and powerful novels — if with the usual flaws of wild romantic novels of the era.

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Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), ‘Woman Wearing a Mantle over her Head and Shoulders’ (detail), c.1718-19.

Starting late last week, I’ve now read Prevost’s Manon Lescaut (1734, revised 1753), a novel that deeply engages me), Charlotte Smith’s translation, Manon Lescaut, or The Fatal Attraction (1786), and am now into her Romance of Real Life (1787), a set of stories she has made out of published long legal cases originally in French, and at the same time reading her very great and last long partly-gothic, Scots novel, The Young Philosopher (1798). Ive not got a specific thesis yet; I seem not to come up with anything precise until I actually sit down and write.

A second novel I’m persuaded is strongly influenced by Prevost is Sophia Lee’s The Recess; Or, A Tale of Other Times (1783), which like Smith’s book is also influenced by Prevost’s Le Philosophe anglais, ou Histoire de Monsieur Cleveland, fils naturel de Cromwell, écrite par lui-même, et traduite de l’anglais (1731-39). I once read half way through it in French and now have it from ECCO in both the French and contemporary English translation. The Recess was almost immediately translated into French as was The Young Philosopher. For The Recess I have very good notes which I’ll share here one night later this week.

In all these

the world is filled with people who are having a long and
painful journey, who are exhausted by affliction, who have lost all the ties that meant anything to them, and who have not deserved this! I have thought the central motive for the gothic is a knot of grief: it is a genre compounded of mourning and rage, one in which people are allowed to express what cries out for expression but which they silence — for many reasons. The book is a memoir written in the first-person, sometimes in the present tense and sometimes in the historical present (the past). It is intended to vindicate the writer, to record the unknown truth and is written to pass and to solace the time.

I have two critical books I want to read through or dip into J. R. Foster’s older The Pre-romantic Novel in England which is really a study of Prevost’s influence on the English novel, and April Alliston’s Virtue’s Faults: Correspondences in 18th century French and British Women Writers. I own a copy of Smith’s Etherlinde, or the Recluse of the Lake (1786) in both the Elibron reprint of the English text (5 vols!) and my home-made xerox of the contemporary French translation.

Later this week I will write a blog on The Recess (which I have ample notes about from the time I read it on ECW with a friend) by way of re-familiarizing myself and on the weekend The Young Philosopher, in order to come to some conclusions about it.

For now what the English women took from Prevost seems to be his use of wild remote places in which the protagonist is driven to a nadir of loss, grief, despair, madness, suicide; intense sympathy with a younger generation’s rebellion and reactive defiance against the mercenary ambitious on their own and previous generation. Prevost expressed an enduring psychic condition of neurotic passion, he expresses a cri de coeur about the nature of life and both Lee and Smith took these over. With this mood they can take whatever conventions they are using to an extreme and alter our perspective on life.

SONNET.

Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore,
Night o’er the ocean settles, dark and mute,
Save where is heard the repercussive roar
Of drowsy billows, on the rugged foot
Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone
Of seamen, in the anchored bark, that tell
The watch reliev’d; or one deep voice alone
Singing the hour, and bidding “strike the bell.”
All is black shadow, but the lucid line
Mark’d by the light surf on the level sand,
Or where afar, the ship-lights faintly shine
Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land
Mislead the pilgrim; such the dubious ray
The wavering reason lends, in life’s long darkling way.
— Charlotte Smith as Elisabeth Lisburne

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Nicholas Lancret (1690-1743), Blindman’s Bluff (1728)

The other conference paper I’m not much more precise on. I began by proposing a panel on actresses which I did not plan to contribute to, but when it seemed only one person was interested in actresses (at least for a panel of mine), I changed its focus to R-e-s-p-e-c-t: For actresses, women playwrights, working women, fictional heroines and even aristocrats respect and favorable reputation matter. In other words, I included all sorts of women and the dangers of their various occupations to their reputations.

Then because I didn’t know what to do (meaning if I should or could just withdraw the sugggestion), and did want to contribute something, I decided I would present a paper at it too, to be titled: Ellen Moody, George Mason University, “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me!” paranoia and shame in the writings of George Anne Bellamy, Charlotte Smith, Sophie Cottin and Mary Brunton. The conference program is now up and my panel is Saturday early afternoon.

Looking at it, I begin to worry less about trying to do two things since I’ve read the works of two I mean to cover, am now reading Smith (and have read her before) and have certainly worked on Bellamy. I also see where the topics criss-cross. Brunton and Cottin also use wild remote places, have a knot of grief at the core of their work; the difference is the accent: in the first I want to see how the French work enables this, in the other the effect of it on the writer’s reputation and way we regard the work.

A key link between the two sets of books and emphases or themes could be the fictional poet, Elisabeth Lisburne whom George Delmont hears of in The Young Philosopher. In Delmont’s wanderings in Wales (supposedly after his brother to give up yet more money to him) he comes across wild landscape, remote, rocky, where he is told of a young gentlewoman who drowned herself; she had been intently waiting for letters that never came and we are given a moving poem of lyric despair. My guess is there will be more poetry from her. She is a surrogate for Smith. I’m drawn to the first set of lyrical stanzas that Smith puts in the book as by Elisabeth Lisburne because it reminds me of a translation I did of Veronica Gambara’s similar poem where a refrain deepens into a bleak lack of hope.

When the two heroines, twin-daughters of Mary Queen of Scots by Bothwell wake in the morning in their subterranean cavern their source of light the sun is seen through the glazed thick windows: “The rising of the sun, whose first beams gilt our windows, rouzed us entirely. Methinks, while I expatiate on these trifles, times seems suspended, and the scene still living before me …” Once when they left, they found themselves in a park “with a playful group of fawns and deer, with whom [they] long to frolic.” But another time it was a ruined cloister:

For a long way beyond, the prospect was wild and awful to excess; sometimes vast heaps of stone were fallen from the building, aong which, trees and bushes had sprung up, and half involved the dropping pillars. Tall fragments of it sometimes remained, which seemed to sway about with every blast, and from whose mouldering top hung clusters and spires of of ivy. In other parts, ruined cloisters yet lent a refuge from the weather, and sullenly shut out the day while long echoes wandered through the whole at the touch of the lightest foot; the intricacies of the wood beyond, added to the magnificence of art the variety of nature. We quitted, with regret, our new empire, when the sun left his last rays on the tops of trees.

I think of Manon and know how lack of money drives our hero and heroine into crime, self-degradation, and realize that money too is key to these romances, to Brunton and Smith’s heroines, Bellamy, even Sophie Cottin. Each novelists traces female sexuality as experienced by many women (sometimes disturbingly silenced as someone who has had a child out of wedlock). Each “traces [her] heroine['s] incessantly renewed struggle to keep from being swamped in the tempest of men’s emotional needs. (Manon may be said to have been swamped in the tempest of Des Grieux’s emotional needs.) Most of her sympathetic heroines, central or not, have a “tenuous hold” on “their social position” and we repeatedly see them “displaced” (“common theme” across the novels) “so that women already existing legally as possessions within male-controlled economy, find themselves alienated from its provisions …” They resemble figures from French, “exiles” (Prevost called himself “d’Exiles”) defined by what they cannot have. Nancy Miller makes Prevost’s heroine one of her key heroines’ texts — of the tragic terrain instead of euphoric.

I figure I’ll find enough to make an elegant argument for a proposal and a paper before November with sufficient content to back it up. But to anyone reading this, have you have articles or books on Prevost (beyond Sgard whose work I know well) or Sophia Lee. I know all Labbe’s books on Smith.

Ellen

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