18th century actresses & historical fiction; Poldark dreams

Verity (Norma Streader) and Captain Blamey (Jonathan Newt) falling in love (1975-76 Poldark I)

Dear Friends,

I’m sometimes torn over where to put a blog. I’ve been putting my conference reports on Ellen and Jim have a blog, two for several years now and so thought it best to report on the recent EC/ASECS I went to over there; but the full truth is much in these sessions belongs here with Austen Reveries. The first report is about actresses’ memoirs, attitudes towards marriage in the era (from Dryden’s Marriage a La Mode), and historical fiction. So I’m writing this short blog to apprise my friends and readers here of this first report. I like to put my personal events and dreams on Sylvia so what I’m hoping for over my Liberty in the Poldark novels I’ve put there.

Ellen

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Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin: the driven half-mad heroine

All the various covers of Slammerkin feature a satin red ribbon

Dear friends and readers,

In this novel I re-visited matter that first riveted me at age 12 to 13. The ultimate rebel heroine. I read the book about 3 years ago and recognized this but had the same response (almost, really) as age 12-13. Not this time. At long last not. It has taken 51 years to see the full pathos of Mary, what it means for real, not just for the character, by my own identification and bonding. I cannot speak it in this blog as it must be spoken personally, so I will talk of this another day on Sylvia. Below I do the conventional performance, but before that let me say, poor poor Mary. So impossibly without hope of adequate choice, understanding of what to do and how to do it, such an obscene liberty as she is confronted by.

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Sack dress, side and back, mid 18th century

I finished Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin for the second time yesterday and was even more impressed by it than I had been the first. Donoghue takes the bare outlines of the life of a young servant girl hanged and then burnt for killing her mistress and creates a vividly moving tale which brings home to the reader how vulnerable to destruction poor young women were before the mid-20th century just about everywhere and in many places on the earth still are if they succumb to male sexual aggression — and become (as is probable they will) pregnant.

I did not chose this novel as the one by a woman, a heroine’s text set in the 18th century by a later 20th century novel to fit into my interest in the theme of liberty, but it turned out a central ironic chapter is entitled “liberty” and one of its central themes is indeed how women are answerable with their bodies to survive. Many allusions to other 18th century novels (Richardson’s Grandison, Lennox’s Henrietta), to plays (Marivaux’s The Game of Love and Chance), contemporary historically real women (the Metyards, Queen Charlotte, Kitty Fisher). The scenes are emphatically not imitations of scenes in 18th century novels; they differ radically – that’s part of the point I suppose, but there are numerous novels alluded to. Mary read “the story Pamela Andrews” (for example) and does not see why she should not achieve the same. We are taught why she could not.

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The initiating story: The book opens (Prologue) with the execution of Mary’s father, Cob Saunders, whom we are told rebelled against the loss of 11 days when the calendar shifted in the 18th century. In Chapter One, called Ribbon Red, Mary is then inescapably despised as the daughter of an utterly failed man; her mother, Susan, remarries, has children by the second husband, a Mr Digot, a boy much more valued than she. She is beaten, half-starved, given wretched rags to wear and told the best she can expect is what “respectability” she will seem to receive if she is utterly obedient to all repressive norms; she is taught (barely) to write and read and sew. At age 13 returning from her school to the hovel she lives with these parents in (a coal cellar in London), she is dazed and unsure what a man is after when he holds out the reward of a red ribbon to her; she is in effect raped before she realizes what has happened, and when her hard harsh mother discovers Mary is pregnant, Susan Digot throws her out with a tiny bundle of clothe ostensibly because Mary will not tell a tale of remorse and shame.

This incident is deeply poignant. Mary cries out in her heart, aloud, and later unconsciously “mother why did you desert me?”. This betrayal of daughter by mother is as key an event as the rape for a ribbon.

An early cover

There follows a brief stretch of narrative (about a third of the first half of the book) where Mary soars with wild delight as she plays the role of a fantastically desperate Magdalen (Chapter Two) with a kindly young woman in her 20s, Doll Higgins, who takes Mary under her “wings” and gives her a happy time — despite the freezing cold, living in a filthy vile room (furniture-less, vermin-filled). She is like a girl with her first best friend who she loves and who seems to love her. Doll is the first person to be kind to Mary, and the only person in the novel (except for Daffy, the young man who offers to marry her and is potentially we can see a benevolent man) who treats her as an equal as well as supporting her emotionally and socially. They support themselves in the only way women could in 18th century England: by selling their bodies, only outside acceptable custom, as prostitutes for so many pence or shilling a time. They are exhilarated with youth and their deep congeniality, seemingly perversely thrilled to be outside any respect, safety net as they drop in (so to speak) to masquerades, plays, dances, large social crowd events.

Alas, Mary becomes ill from the cold, poor food, bad living conditions, and, not discouraged by her friend who appears not to want to get sick herself, inveigles her way into the Magdalen Foundling Hospital where she has to live like a prisoner (though supposed voluntarily), in a strongly regimented day and night in return for which she gets regularly good food, warm clothes, a clean warm bed and room, and the hope of a “good” future as a placed servant as long as she carries on obedient.

As in many novels, we have already learned that our heroine has many gifts (intelligence, capability with her hands as a seamstress, beauty enough) and is quietly appreciated by the head mistress, but (anticipating what is to come at the end of the book) after a while as her health improves, she begins to long to enjoy herself, to be herself, for freedom, and insists on being allowed to leave — and as with her mother, will not pretend to the morality which upholds the order that condemns her to servitude to men and more powerful women on their terms. She tells a lie that she has a place waiting for her with a friend of her mother’s in Monmouth: her mother had told her of this friend. The matron calls this an egregious lie and (in effect) harshly ejects with Mary after Mary refuses to listen to her advice, with Mary’s bundle once again (this time it has the flimsy sexy things she had gathered as a prostitute) to (the ironically titled) third chapter, Liberty.

We know she longs to be with Doll again and seeks Doll out, only to discover Doll somehow froze to death in an alley behind the hovel they shared. We have been told enough of the gay Doll to know Doll was herself depressed, self-despising, bitter, and proud. Mary realizes she should not have deserted Doll, that she did desert Doll and Doll had grown to need her as much as she needed Doll. She has lost her ability she thinks to live so squalidly — actually she had it only because she had Doll. She can only survive by selling herself.

Making a strong contrast to Cleland’s Fanny Hill, Mary Saunders never appears to enjoy sex with the men she sells herself to, only to feel a sort of triumph over them. Donoghue is a superb enough novelist to project sexual pleasure or thrills in the narrative, but they are only registered through the indirect third person discourse, never what Mary feels. Mary does register that Doll was in love with one man and did enjoy sex with him (but only him), but Mary never feels even this. It’s a straight cold transaction — this makes a lot more sense than the erotica Cleland dreams up. Without Doll’s social manipulative abilities and cool, Mary quickly gets herself in trouble with a brothel madam and is in danger of a knife attack (punishment) from a wild black man the brothel madam uses to keep the girls in place. Rather than carry on this horrible life under terror, she boards a wagon to Monmouth.

Mary travels in a wagon something like this 1767 Harvest Wagon by Gainsborough

We are now into Part Two, much the longer part of the narrative, really 2/3s of it. Unfortunately, Mary has to sell herself once more to earn the 14 shillings she needs to pay the wagoner to get to Monmouth whose smallness, bareness, nothingness astonishes her. We are to believe she finds her mother’s friend and the friend (due to the letter Mary has written) takes Mary in as the orphaned daughter of her once best friend. We now read a long story of Mary’s gradual adjustment to the household and those in it to her: the master, Mr Thomas Jones (surely an ironic allusion to Fielding’s hero) a one-legged man; the child, Hetta (named after a “Mrs Lennox’s Henrietta), the black servant ex-slave Mary sleeps with, Abi (given the name Abigail); the ex-wet-nurse now semi-governess, deserted by her husband after the child she had by him was crushed by him in his sleep, Mrs Nance Ash, an embittered frustrated older woman, the apprentice, Daffy, and most importantly the mistress, her mother’s ex-friend, Mrs Jane Jones, who runs the shop as chief seamstress and businesswoman. The life is at first hard and monotonous (Chapter Four, The Whole Duty of Woman) and it is always strongly disciplined but as time goes on (Chapter Five, Thaw), her mistress becomes her friend, she is accepted and even receives a secret proposal of marriage from Daffy which she at first accepts.

I say unfortunately for the customer is Joseph Cadwaladyr who turns out to be the local curate and tavern-owner who at first failed to threaten Mary to work for him as a whore, but who she then (not altogether understandably at all) turns to when she suddenly sickens of her life and decides (wholly unrealistically) her ambition is to be rich, return to London, become admired and the center of admiration, so she must gather money to travel back. The only way to do this is sell her body. And she has Cadwaladry to turn to (Chapter Six, Bloom Fall). This sickening with her lot is brought on in an immediate way after she allows Daffy to have sex with her and hates it — or both him for being a virgin and herself for having been a whore.

The center of this sudden utter alienation from her life with these people is that Mary can only escape the complete loss of status (like a slave has) if she agrees to live a life of total self-repression and hide from those she works for afterwards what she “was.” If she fits in as wife to Daffy, possible mother to his children, lives a life like that of Jane Jones. This she can not get herself to do either; she seems to take into her self-image the scorn for herself others demonstrate and self-destructs by returning to this trade in an attempt to accumulate money. Of course gradually what she is doing becomes known (Chapter Seven, Punishment). She pretends to be getting cider or ale for her mistress nightly when she is selling herself fifteen minutes at a time by a wall. The first great risk comes when her master catches her and himself succumbs to sex with her — and hates himself afterwards.

She becomes a quietly half-mad presence in the house disturbing everyone, for she does not want to flee. She does like the comfort, the respect, the peace. Daffy grows to hate her as she rejects him harshly and without explanation. She insinuates rebellion into Abi’s mind: Abi tires of her endless work schedule with no friend and no pleasure beyond existing safely and in peace. Mary is a rival to Mrs Ash. Most of all she is somehow enabling Mrs Jones to rebel too: Mrs Jones begins to become Mary’s best friend (Jane and Mary), a confidante she chooses over her husband, a fellow maker of stays and gorgeous clothes (include beautifully embroidered and furred slammerkins for the wealthier women of the town). Mrs Jones says she is a new mother, and ironically turns out to be one just like Susan Digot. At first Mrs Jones herself psychologically refuses to read all the signs that accumulate and will not guess at the probable source of Mary’s money when it’s found. She does intuitively know it was meant for an escape and, telling Mary she would otherwise have to turn Mary in as a criminal (to be hung or transported as a thief), herself gives it away to Cadwaladyr’s charity box.

The crazed self inside Mary leaps forth in the scene that ensues. Mary steals Mrs Jones’s secret smaller hoard, packs the clothes she and Mrs Jones had created, and puts one on (a totally inappropriate act).

A sack dress or slammerkin from 1729 (the novel is set 1763-65)

When Mrs Jones demands an explanation, tells of her whoredom; Mrs Jones explains she has given Mary’s money away and this act so incenses Mary (it was hers, painfully earned as the values of her society taught her, over many months of wretched sex acts) that she murders the woman with an axe.

The book is not over quickly. The last chapter, As the Crow Flies, gives us a full account of her wild attempt to flee, her imprisonment, the court trial (a mockery). We see Mr Jones’s adjustment and proposal to a rival seamstress in Monmouth, and Mrs Ashe’s humiliation (she hoped he’d chose her). Abi’s flight to London: the white people gave Mary the chance to blame Abi, and even if they didn’t, she knows instinctively with Mrs Jones gone she is again at risk for slavery (the cruelties of concubinage). And Daffy we see him once again take up with a girl, Gwynn, whose parents had seemed to reject him after they were engaged. Daffy is the one living person who seems to feel for Mary, (by contrast Gwynn scorns her) seems to suspect that she had potential to live within the norms of the community with him, and projects forgiveness in his mind. We have Mary’s weeks waiting to die, and then the terrifically powerful death scene. She has seen people hung, and remembers back to the Metyards (a historically real mother and daughter) and imitates the daughter by leaping to her death when the rope is placed about her neck just before she is to be turned off.

The saving grace is the greatest horror of all. She is sentenced to be burnt afterwards as a treacherous rebel to someone above her. But we are told without this her body would have been snatched by the doctors (Donoghue has read Albion’s Fatal Tree), so better to turn into ashes than be answerable with her body in this final degraded way.

The ending with its final moment of defiance and death by leaping reminded me of Lewis’s The Monk; the murder story of a half-mad seamstress servant accused of killing her mistress of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

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So what is this about as it’s most fundamental? That a woman is answerable with her body and has no liberty, can find none because of this. She could not escape it in the 18th century and the mirror held up here insinuates she will not escape it now, only this demand comes in softened qualified forms if she obeys the new norms and rules. It exemplifies what I have been thinking about when it comes to women and liberty: Mary to live must sell her body either indirectly or directly; to be free of bodily punishment at brothels (low class are the only kind that will take her in), not a chattel she must do it on the streets. The poignancy of the moment when her mother turns her out is extraordinary as well as the underlying exposure of how a mother can do this to a daughter, cut her off utterly and be supported in this by the community. IN this novel women succour and they betray women. How can they not? Like men, when so powerless, so exposed to punishment at the slightest rebellion, they prey on those closest to them. Her behavior threatens her mother’s marriage with the second husband and status. I admit I was put off by Mary’s ambition (see comment for this perspective).

Doll’s many sayings voice Mary’s rebellion under the conditions of the time and now: Never give up your liberty (don’t go into an old people’s home when old; don’t give someone else power of attorney). Clothes make the woman. Clothes are the greatest lie ever told (see pp. 62-63).

Mid-18th century sack dresses

It’s superior to the two novels by Donoghue I’ve read thus far: The Room uses a child narrator whose perspective distances us from the horrific events of the book; Life Mask, also set in the 18th century, is too thoroughly constructed with research from well-known documented lives to come alive. It’s another on the same subject or perspective as her superb non-fiction literary critical Passions Between Women, and several other of her fictions, either set in an earlier era, The Sealed Letter (set in the 19th century), Kissing the Witch (a retelling of fairy tales which brings out their typical misogyny by recasting them from the woman’s point of view with sympathy).

When we read this novel on Eighteenth Century Worlds, I remember Judy asking if I knew of any 18th century novel where a girl began as virtuous and slid into prostitution. I now can answer that one: yes, Cleland’s Fanny Hill. Fanny ends in triumph, as the real and this fictional Mary Saunders does not, but last summer’s reading in Therese Philosophe and other erotica novels revealed other heroines who begin as “poor but honest” and survive as prostitutes for a time, but only a time.

Ellen

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Jane Austen’s letters: Letters 40-42, To Francis Austen; 21, 22, 29 Jan 1805, Mon, Tues & following Tues, Green Park Bldgs

George Austen (1731-1805)

Dear friends and readers,

There needs no subtle interpretation as to why 4 months later (see letter 39, Sept 1804) this and the next two letters were saved and printed: Austen’s father died, and Austen was deputed the writer. If we were not before, we are now in a position to feel how centrally this common act (dying of old age and/or disease) presented disaster to the Austen women. Not just financially, but socially (since they had not married, both girls were continually at risk of losing whatever status they had as genteel spinsters — allow me this word) and by extension emotionally.

Jane Austen had kept some of her negative liberty: she had escaped being answerable with her body (had been brave enough to go back on her promise to marry Harris Bigg-Wither), had turned to writing and books first, bonded with women friends, but as her heroine, Emma pointed out single women have a “dreadful propensity to be poor,” and Emma’s sidekick, Harriet, felt despised too. But in this letter the immediacy and exigency of coping with the death trumps a little what is to come so we find simply a straight emotional account, tinged with a sense of vulnerability and foreboding. The women had to hope (as did Austen’s Dashwoods) the brothers, the uncle and his wife, would be generous.
out

So, the first two letters are descriptions of how he died, the first apparently was thought not to reach Frank, but that she wrote twice gives us twice as much matter to understand her reaction, and probably was a release. It’s in the second contains we find one of those resonant lines which recur with more frequency in the later letters: “It has been very sudden” puts me in mind of one in 1816 about the wind or rain beating on the window: she’s fatally ill, knows she is, and the bankruptcy has occurred, she’s back in Chawton and aware that Emma was found boring and MP not the over popular hit she longed for another time.

The third letter disposes of a few practically useful things George Austen left: the paucity, personal quality and care with which this effect is taken care of reminds me of women’s wills of this era and that of the 19th century. They too had little to leave; all the more do they solemnly give these few symbols of their identities away.

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The dying Mr Austen (Tom Wilkinson) attempts to extract firm reassurance from his son, John, that he will provide for his step-mother and step-sisters as they have only a tiny income and nothing for dowries (1995 Miramax S&S)

The letters may be usefully read together. All are to Frank. These escaped the vigilance of the grand-daughter who burned the three packets from Austen to Frank which he is said to have kept with him all his life; maybe they were in Cassandra’s position. All to Frank — I adhere to the idea Jane was very close to Frank partly on the basis of the three packets of letters she wrote him and partly from the novels (the importance of that letter “F”, the use of a sailor brother or lover and Frank as Jane’s lover in Emma). There are a number of places in Letter 41 where we see Austen reformulating or repeating as far as she can remember what she said in Letter 40, only the utterance comes out slightly differently. In neither is there any irony, nor the kind of elaborately re-directed guarded half-fantasy witticisms that are a cover-up for an emotion or feeling she apparently did not dare to Cassandra or get herself to express openly.

She is operating under a sudden shock and and the writing of the letter is helping her to contain herself. It’s really important to see how quickly she sat down to write the first. It is in fact nearly the first thing she must have done upon the man dying — and if we do not have letters to Henry and Charles and James that does not mean they were not written, perhaps by her too.

The sequence is this: the father is taken very ill as he has been before: “with a return of the feverish complaint, which he had been subject to for the three last years” (letter 41). Since they left Steventon 4 years ago, that means these bradycardia or mild heart-attacks (if that is what is involved and my guess is yes) started a year after they came to Bath. But he had survived these.

That was Saturday. The seizure was very violent and they resorted to violent counteractions: cupping (awful, painful; if it helped it was because it was so bad this procedure it wiped out the body natural pain from your mind). It seemed he was better, and the the next morning, Sunday, he was amended so that the family fooled themselves (as did the physician) when Mr Austen was walking with his stick (at Lyme her recording her father walking back was a sign that this was a kind of difficulty for him) Bowen (an apothecary) “felt sure of his [Mr Austen's] doing perfectly well.” But as day advanced, he got worse to the point that by 10 it was alarming to look at him.

Then Monday at 9 in the morning Bowen comes and requests a physician, Dr Gibbs, by which time “it was then absolulely a lost case”. Dr Gibs said “nothing but a Miracle could save him” and at 10:20 he died. The first letter is written almost immediately after the death, in ordinary language, a little while after that. No delay and then letters to Godmersham (Edward) and Brompton (Henry & Eliza). James is sent “an express” to come, and does — he may be closer in distance, closer in feeling, is the eldest son.

When the next day a letter from Frank to Cassandra arrives, she seems immediately to have sat down again with the same system: she regrets to not to be able to prepare him for the shock, tells of the father’s death frankly, simply.

The differences between the letters are there, but they are minor. The first seems more distanced in tone; there is less detail. Yet in the first she gives a blow-by-blow account of Mr Austen’s last 3 days upon being taken ill In the second she precedes this with an account of the past three years’ complaints, but then she is more graphic and up close with the death and her feelings about it than the first: like Henry Tilney on his mother: “everything I trust & beleive [sic] was done for him that was possible! — It has been very sudden — within twenty four hours of his death he was walking with only the help of a stick, was even reading!” In both letters Jane moves to comfort her audience, trying to find something to say which offsets the devastating feelings they are now enduring.

Janet McTeer as the desolate Mrs Dashwood (2008 BBC S&S).

The Austens are also comforting themselves by thinking of the father’s worth; the father was “spared of all the pain of separation” because “quite insensible of his own state … he went off almost in his Sleep. The second says the family did have some hours of preparation and then prayed he would die quickly so as to prevent dreadful agons. The insistence he was “spared from knowing he was about to quit” such cherished objects as wife and children. In all this is the intense consciousness in Jane and by implication her father how they desperately need him for money, if not just now, eventually. In the first the mother is bearing the shock, was quite prepared for it, feels blessing of his avoiding long illness. In the second the mother is “tolerably well,” bearing up with “great fortitude, but her health must suffer from this great shock. We have to remember here that she is writing for effect, to comfort and is not necessarily expressing her own deepest feelings which seem to be on the side of life for her father most of all. Both letters express Mr Austen’s “tenderness as a father” (letter 41), “who can do justice to?” “The loss of such a parent must be felt, or we should be brutes (Letter 40).

The grieving trio, Elinor (Joanna David), Marianne (Ciaran Madden) and Mrs Dashwood (Isabel Dean) (1971 BBC S&S)

By the time of the second letter funeral arrangements are made for Saturday. The parents married in Walcot church; now the father will be buried there.

Walcot Church, Bath, contemporary print

I agree with Diane R about the relative lack of religion in these letters: the concern is here and now with the living left, the house something has to be cone ith, with the corpse. Indeed it might be considered astonishing. On the other hand, I find the assertion of the “serenity” of the corpse creepy but know Austen’s era is a half-way or transitional moment from real belief in afterlife (and thus ghosts not far off, the body is dwelt upon) to secular concern with how someone died, his being spared knowledge that they didn’t get before. They don’t care about religion enough even to need an explanation. The trouble there is in this era the people are nowhere near knowing the causes and therefore the salient symptoms of an illness.

Money is still to the fore. It is intertwined as a possible shattering experience and on Austen’s mind as that of the mother and aunt and Uncle (“shewn every imaginable kindness”) is the now unfunded state of these people. We see it most obviously in these immediate arrangements: where will they stay? Steventon? Is that an invitation from James. Since Austen does not mention Mary I assume she was not there even if the pronoun is a “they.” It could be James and aunt and uncle. But Austen women “must have this house for three months longer.” The verb is “must.” They have expended the money for a lease that long and will lose the money if they leave earlier. So they will “probably stay till the end of that time.” But what then? The “uniting in love” comes from those there being there and reassuring the Austen women that way.

The third letter brings us back to a world of subsidence where objects are hard come by and treasured. You did not throw out things. So the sending Frank Mr Austen’s personal property (the kind of thing one finds in women’s wills as the whole of what they leave) is not so or just sentimental but practical too: for the sailor “a small astronomical Instrument: (compass and sun-dial) in black chagreen case. Expensive. Which “direction” shall they send it? This question shows Frank now knows, wrote back. Also “a pair of Scissors”. They will be useful and “valuable” to him. It was Frank who walked about with Mr Austen’s Polonius-like letter in Frank’s pocket for years and years.

I Have Found It: the Indian analogous adaptation of S&S: the women cut out of the grandfather’s will, take their things and go to Madras

All three letters are from Green Park buildings; these are quite a step down from Sydney place if not as “low” as Trim Street. Frank was in the HMS Leopard at Portsmouth.

See Letters 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 and 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39.

Ellen

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Andrew Davies’s 1984 Diana: a complex heroine who ends up another war victim

Dear friends and readers,

The third and last blog on this remarkable, unfortunately unreprinted mini-series, the 1984 Diana adapted by Andrew Davies, directors Richard Tucker and David Stroud, produced by Ken Riddington. Parts 1 through 5 and some of 6 dramatized R. E. Delderfield’s There Was a Fair Maid Dwelling (the first two thirds of the present single volume Diana), in a strongly elegiac romance mode, mixed with much social drama, much of the story of Jan wholly invented or filled with much more plausibilty and coherence than found in the novel.  Some of Parts 6 through 9 dramatize The Unjust Skies (the present last third of the single volume Diana), this one again combines romance (mixed modes), social drama with a spy-anti-war thriller melodrama. This last blog is Part 10 which has a central sequence set up to remind us of The Bridge on the River Kwai ending on a brief reprise of the Paul et Virginie.

What has emerged from this careful journey through a 10 part mini-series is that we have been given at one step’s remove a complex portrait of a heroine type usually dismissed as frivolous, a destructive femme fatale and here found to be a courageous spirit living a richly rewarded inward and outward life. John Leigh, or Jan (the character is aligned allusively with Jan Ridd of Lorna Doone) has grown up, but not changed in essentials; it’s not a movie about the education of Jan Leigh, but rather how his continuing enthralment with Diana Gaylorde-Sutton shaped and will continue to shape (even after she has died) his experience. The two paratexts which dominate the film pictorially, the Folly where the couple have met and had central trysts and talk and the two buzzards endlessly twirling about one another are an emblem of Davies’ film’s struggle against conforming to their world’s unjust irrational restrictions.  This is a central theme in all Davies’s romances.

This last segment from Delderfield’s book is dominated by darkness,

Opens on fierce quarrel scene before Jan is forced into duty as a saboteur, him accusing and mistrusting her

and war scenes, with the only relief the French countryside during the day and dream of Sennacharib that ends the story.

From tracking shot of Jan walking down the hill from her grave

As with the two first blogs, this takes the form of summary, notes and dialogues from scenes.

First segment: the pair in the cottage before he leaves.  Fall into primal quarreling; he does not mind her abortion and inability to have a child but her sexual promiscuity and her deserting him; how will he know she will be there when he returns (vastly improved version of pp. 562-77). The defense is the love; she goes upstairs, he follows, they make up, and she promises not to have operation because of her weak heart until he returns.

The head shot of her on pillow has become a repeating motif of Davies’s films: it’s as if it’s a shorthand in say the 2008 S&S

Second long central piece: war in France.  This is based on myths of French resistance, improbable idea that one man would be sent this way, and just this woman to find the right contacts to save him, that Jan could fool anyone as a "killer" type.  The first use of trains to be anonymous, frightening, the modern world (becomes ubiquitous in TWWLN, HKHWR), a French sky; the central segment of him as saboteur with dangerous men who (we see) use the war to murder those they just don’t like.  another of these tight dialogues with Raoul, Jan left with French communist, Simon (Philip McGough).  Davies enjoyed writing their debates (not in book):

Grim Simon:  He was seaman, before the war, Cardiff Liverpool.  Both in Spain ( all added by Davies) Jan calls himself a journalist and Simon calls that a tourist. "Fair enough" says Jan.  Simon quotes English poets — Auden, Spender, love one another or die … they talk about necessary murder  then they go home"  Jan: "I’ve done the necessary murder" Simon: "yah… yeah… me too plenty …"  They are becoming friends. simon;  "Funny first I work for French aristocrats, then I work for English gentlemen… " Jan: "I’m not a gentleman"  Simon: "All English officers are gentlemen"

Simon clearly hostile. Jan has his gun under his pillow loaded. Next morning, tthe first shot we see a hand with a gun, we see Jan awaken and look under his pillow, no gun, across the way Simon says:   "English officer sleep very well" and throws the gun across.

Point made how people kill one another under cover of war.  Man (or Simon) heard whistling tune from movie Bridge on River Kwai

Outside they climb and survey in lovely pastoral green countryside, they are setting up bombs to hit track and station house with Nazis in it. Simon now respects Jan as leader, they return and more nighttime table talk: Simon wants to go to America, wear big hat, drink in a whiskey bar just like Auden. "I thought that you were a communist …" "I am communist" and "America’s a capitalist country" "when this bloody war is over every country will be socialist country …" "the land [then] belong to everyone my friend."  Jan: "Right"  Simon: "Right. You think I’m a fool, I’m not a fool I know these things will never happen …"

Child on bike riding to town; in town Simon and Jan, Jan to furniture shop, goes around back, and lo and behold he finds Diana with dark hair wig, looking like French bourgeois escapee from WW2 French film; she justifies herself that she knows people, she is useful (right), she will get him out (romancing).

Cut to high climactic blowing up of bridge; Simon too eager and stands with machine gun to kill and is killed: 

Climbing down by rope

Bomb all ready, waiting for train to appear

Simon eager, but nervous

Unfortunate human being fleeing tunnel, Jan shoots to kill

Jan escapes, seen on bike, then into town where Diana’s hugging a wall with a machine gun under her skirt

Diana in purple with machine gun at the ready

They grab a jeep and careen through bullied town, past checkpoint where she takes off her dark wig, then they are running through countryside. Now night falls and we are back in Paul and Virginie territory. We are returned to Nun’s Island kind of scene.  She says "This reminds me of nun’s island …all we need now is the gramophone and records … " A flute starts up again. She invites him to enjoy themselevs. We are to imagine them makng love. …  Later Diana:  "God I’m starving again … never mind Lance is supposed to be a wonderful cook… even he smiles …"  She is enjoying this.  A car of Nazis seen; they flee, she stands shooting and he jumps in the water; she is taken, he goes unconscious, rescued by doctor.

Then he decides to stay; revenge motif of him killing Germans.  A montage of death and killing; real footage intermixed; over-voice of time passing, Raoul comes to find him, make him sane, a scheme to save Diana as a prisoner of war in a convoy. 

We see Jan in hard light silent heading men through a wood … waiting along a road for cars and trucks to come through. Again bombing and shooting scene. These must cost … turning and crashing cars .. different kinds of footage intermixed:

someone’s face destroyed — war seen as hideous Nazi officer shooting everyone in tented truck. Jan attacks him hand to hand. He fears he sees her dead

He finally reaches her at back of truck, set up is parallel to his reaching Alison.  He is crying, lights on film now bleached. Raoul: "hold her gently you fool. She’s alive"

Her face made up to look like Alison’s in death.

Dissolve black, back to green world, soft returning music, we are before stables cottage with Jan shaking someone’s hand and car outside. Has black bag so doctor.  Cut to her laid against pillow in lovely soft acqua blue gown, hair lovely of course. She’s dying, spinal chord has been destroyed, her heart can’t last.

A last loving conversation; they’ve had what they’ve had, she’s glad she’s not the one left; one last request to take one more ride to Sennacharib (see above).  Last words: She:  "Look Jan the buzzards.’  He:  "Come, I’ll take you home."

Then the scene of him before the grave and walking away.

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Just one last comment:  Alison Light’s Forever England:  Femininity, literature and conservatism between the wars treats of a group of women writers ignored by high culture literature (Compton Burnett, Murdoch, Christy, DuMaurier) as creating a myth of a green idyllic England whose values were to be cherished and could sustain good life between individuals (pictured often in retreat, as refuge). I’ve become persuaded that Alison Light’s book on women authors ought equally to have included so-called middle brow men, some of whom wrote great books (Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes).  These Davies turns to like a homing pigeon, not that he thinks the UK perfect. In 1984 it’s not been ruined by Thatcherism which (after 1990s) he attacks but he does have this vision of somewhere wholesome, a visionary England (we see it in the 2008 S&S), or maybe it’s just the natural world that Diana in this mini-series turned mythic (we find in the 2007 Room with A View).  Critics don’t want to contextualize these men with women, but certainly Angus Wilson knew his predecessor was Ivy Compton-Burnett.  Trollope belongs here for Davies too, and George Eliot’s English countryside.  Dickens shows the 19th century world cruel and anonymous already

Ellen

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Andrew Davies’s 1984 Diana: melancholy romance, spy anti-war thriller (out of Delderfield) (2 of 3)

Dear friends and readers,

Yesterday I wrote a blog describing the first six parts of Andrew Davies’s 1984 10 part mini-series, Diana.  I write on the Parts 7 through 9 today. As I said yesterday I decided to study this film because it’s one of Davies’s neglected early romances and has had no scholarly talk about it anywhere, and not only sheds light on Davies’s attitudes and adaptation processes, but is a wonderfully well done richly varied film in content and art types (including film noir sequences, wild war and in Part 10, a Bridge on the River Kwai one of blowing up a train, complete with an allusion in the form of someone whistling the movie tune).

Closing sequence of Diana:  2 buzzards seen as part of credits/paratext here photographed as Jan and Diana take one last look: she is dying, partly paralysed:

Jan (Kevin McNally) and Diana (Jenny Seagrove)

Parts 7 & 8

Adaptation from The Unjust Skies, part 2 of book now printed as last third of Diana:

Much of Part 7 wholly invented, especially all the matter not having to do with Diana (the marriage time with Alison, the training school, Alison’s death), Raoul de Roydon (Ives Beneyton) built up to be an individualized character and connecting linchpin to spy-killer thriller war parts. Part with least of Diana, she appears first at Alison’s funeral (she is pregnant), they walk through cemetery; again at the close when he enters the French house where he has agreed to kill someone as saboteur, she is there theatrically to greet him.  He is persuaded to join in by 3 meetings, Ackerley  (Jeffry Wickam) and Raoul after death of Alison; Diana in pub after funeral; and then with Raoul where he is already half-disguised.

Diana as revenant; a little later they wander together amid the graves (Pt 7)

Notes on Part 7:  Opens with marriage ceremony: Alison’s in-laws stayed away, feeling their dead son betrayed; again these goodbyes by windows — very common with Davies. Jan now treasures boredom and futility of his posting, warm, dry, no one trying to kill him, staying alive had become important again — over-voice.  Friendship with Lt Starkey (Adam Norton).  Jan & Starkey forced out from idyll to train under Ackerley (Jeffry Wickham), Ackerley one of Alison’s gremlins.   The bullying, taunting, teaching to kill.

Starkey needled, humiliated

She comes to London on his first leave, and is killed by bomb.

Finding Alison

Sequence includes real footage of bombing of St Paul’s.  Grief, guilt of Jan. Call by Ackerley to meet Raoul de Roydon who wants to recruit him (as advised by Diana) to kill someone for him and Madame de Roydon (reconciled with her husband says Raoul sardonically). John recognizes as a Diana idea; refuses. The funeral:

"it was a quiet funeral I wanted to keep everyone away to hug my bitterness and sorrow; no thrupenny wreaths, he didn’t want to share her death with anyone. I wanted to avenge it in some way and didn’t want to share that either I wanted to be in every sense alone. (all original with Davies) Diana’s voice calls him back: Jan!. 

Two walking side-by-side; they pass a graveyard or walk though one in high grass. In bar: I just knew Raoul would get it all wrong with you."  Tactless:  "When you’ve got over your wife’s death? He: "In a day or two do you mean?" "Was she anything like me at all."  He: "Do you think that I feel like discussing her now with you? .. "She wasn’t like you no not in any way"  Diana: "And you loved her … He: "Yes I loved her …" She is glad.  He: "you’re pregnant aren’t you."  She: I hoped you wouldn’t notice … "  He: "Why don’t you forget all this nonsense you’re mixed up in you’ve got out of France, you’re here stay here … stay with Yvonne.  She: "I wish I could … He "It might be important for you to play your games, it always was wasn’t it …" He tells her she’s playing heroine with bullets this time …  and she does admit to enjoying it.  She also hates Rance (we are slowly to gather but it never feels all that strong):   Rance to run whole [Nazi] operation  Swiss French … yes I think he is wicked  … I’ve had to see rather a lot of him socially … he’s a swine …" "Yes I see." She: "No you don’t I don’t think uyou could even imagine .." Rance is her lover  -acted out in next part.

The dark kitchen scene with Miss Rogers; this is a repeated motive where they assess where Jan is at now.

His adieu to his child (Rachel Farley); he is taking it on, and we see him confabulating in disguise with Raoul; told the real man he is masquerading as had "unusual tastes" (was gay, again brought in), see him arrive in France, walk by bridge, into house and there is Diana in morning lingerie waiting for him.

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

Jan murders Pierre Rance point-blank (Pt 8): in this part McNally takes on features of strong spy ruthless hero figure

Part 8 is heavily dependent on Unjust Skies; complicated action-adventure sequence punctuated by love-making and talk between Diana and Jan,

advice and counseling sessions with ironic wry Raoul, e.g.,

He does say that it’s one of her games to get him there for her own amusement This is a harsh assessment and if true, she’s radically unserious, frivolous. She is utterly unlike Alison we are told. In line with his outbursts of calling her a bitch. 

Then a whole day spent just getting to know each other again; she tells that she was pregnant last time … no inquest … don’t be angry with me please ..(abject for the first time, a cloying note) they walk over, kiss, next scene upstairs naked in bed

She: "You still love me don’t you?"
He:  "I never stopped you know that:

The love-making open them up to one another: "she can start to tell something things: the child she was carrying was Pierre Rance’s; he runs Ives .. He:  "and you were his mistress"  She:  "I still am … Got as close to Pierre as she could and find out as much as she could about what they were making there .. not in love but fascinated by him but I hated him now … she did what she had to do to not bear his child … [Rance] was angry, had thought it amusing fathering a child on his employer’s wife … I’ll be free of him in every way when you kill him.  "I’ll be free of him in every way when you kill him …  In this one Davies heads into different territories of sexuality not at all broached in To Serve Them All My Days. It’s made alluring by keeping it at a distance; in more recent films it is graphically displayed and feels awful (as anal intercourse in 2006 The Chatterley Affair).

Rance is coming tonight. Jane has been made up to look like he is Rance for later encounter with Ives de Roydon.

Now they have another meeting with Raou,l downstairs:  "After you kill him you impersonate him; then he infiltrates the factory,  The gun is suitable for what we have in mind. One clean shot from up there with this. I the head, naturally, no bother, no mess… "   This is followed by Diana bringing the gun.  After Raoul leaves, Jan up to the attic and long sequence of Jan watching sadistic-masochistic sex sequence between Pierre Rance (Jean Boissery) and Diana with Jan as voyeur.

Brilliant because framed, because we can see only part, hear only some of the words, more suggestive than more modern frank sequences of anal intercourse.

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A little bit of film noir right here. Movie includes film noir sequences beginning as early as bits in Parts 4, 5 and 6, much more in 8 and 9 (nightmare presentation of events that we do not see directly that occur between 8 and 9). 

So, what is film noir?  the male version of psychological melodrama: In film noir a male protagonist caught between desire for femme fatale and "good woman" (so Davies has added Mary, Alison, fleshed out role of Miss Rogers, is more sympathetic early on to Madeleine).  The films are pessimistic, devoted to abjection; psychological melodrama, the psychic life of the female at the center provide plot-design (often using flashbacks). Flashback part of promise of restoration. Neither confirms positive values for real as both focus on psyche as agent of evil, causing destruction of self and others.  This is Davies’s really brililant way of blending a WW2 caper with WW2 footage and psychological sexual dramatizations of material often kept away from us. Now some of this vital to Davies’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes too)
From Jeanine Basinger’s American Cinema and Turim’s Flashbacks in Films.

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Just 2 shots of what Jan sees and some dialogue Jan hears:

"Va changez … " Rance puts these photos of naked and semi-naked women in the table. He:  "Tu les aime?"  She: "Actually I think that sort of thing is childish" Rance:  "What a prim little person You speak like an English nanny …" Honky tonk horn heard — like Louisiana soul He says: "Marche .. marche pour moi."  He has a stick, and she walks about in lingerie (hidden in walking of Elizabeth and Miss Bingley in P&P)  The POV is Jan up in the attic looking through peep hole – voyeuristic — we could imagine Rance has that stick up her behind. "It’s very strange; you speak like an English nanny and you move like a Marseilles whore.  Jan begins to mutter.  Rance:   "Come here Didi, lay down … "I think I might stay here for a day or two they do not expect me till Friday" He laughs when she says something in his ear

Jan shoots down:

and then fight erupts between them. Man trying to grab her, Jan jumps down, he fights with his whip. shoots him through chest; then steady through head. 

She walks over slowly, says his name, is nauseous Jan stands there unsteady, walks over to cover body with the purple silky material Diana had used for a cape

Afterwards redressed, he in shirt and suspenders drink over a table

He looks hard at her but says :"Better"
She: "I’m sorry Jan"
"No it’s my fault I made a mess of it"
"No I mean not clearing up afterwards … it was his … I didn’t know it was going to be like that … I’m not very much use … "

"Not very nice. I managed to clean up .. the blood .. about the … stuff … damage i can’t do very much about that .. they’ll have to get a builder in  …I bundled [Raoul] behind the sofa I leave the rest to Raoul and his men"

"I’m sorry too I should have shot him the moment he walked in
No you had to see you had to see what he was like
I saw a helluva lot more than I wanted to
Poor old Jan
So that’s … that’s what it was like between you and Rance
More or less. I wanted you to see … in a way
You enjoyed it?
Sometimes he wasn’t always like that
Ah Diana I don’t understand it I don’t want to understand it
He’s dead now Jan he’s gone
So we just forget all about him (rising hysteria in his voice)
Yes that’s what we try to do we do what we’re told (she gets up) and what we do now is we lock all the doors and go to bed there’s no going back Jan come on
He drinks down the drink, she holds his hand firmly; he puts united hands to his eyes.

Light flute as they make way down corridor, further and further silhouettes going up stairs to room. Long sequence of them retiring slowly slowly down corridor, silhouette, darkness and smaller and smaller; then sequence of him troubled in the night.

Raoul the next day; they made a bad job of it.  Men with cigarettes in mouth remove the body.  The drive through France. She:  " I want to go on and on traveling and never getting there I know."   Many car shots, a kind of tracking of car as it weaves in and out crossing from road to road:

One stopover:

She: "Yes all right I’ll come with you"
For good?
Yes for good
He:  you don’t really think we’re going to make it
She:  I didn’t say that
You don’t, do you
She:  I don’t know

Ends on car sequences where and Jan take up an abode (meeting with Raoul) after she goes off to be Ives’s wife. Raoul has little respect for Diana as a woman, though very affectionate about her.

Jan enters the ornate garden, house, compound (so back to lower class male in a way), Diana joins him, and they threaten the husband, Ives, who insults her mightlly. This is where the story most caper like.  They stuff him into car, barge into factory for information; get him down stairs, he betrays them and she runs over Ives de Roydon, her husband (Ives Aubert) in car.  She has car near place he has to get into; you go on he says; he is wounded, come back for me in the morning. She says they must make connection by 11:30. So she drives on and goes to talk to soldier as a decoy while he must force himself to run to where he needs to be.

Poignant music as his bloody exhausted strained face watches her chat up the soldier.  She is working to help him get past Nazi guard so he can escape back to UK so saving his life.  Grey black light; he passes her as she has drawn soldier in, hanging on gate; film slowly goes black as he goes unconscious.

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Part 9: 

The action-adventure spy-kinky-erotic material and disquiet too (film noir in feel) made very tight in experience as opening of Part 9 in the UK with Jan in hospital, is series of epitomizing flashbacks that retell left-out details and rest of their adventure getting home, making an action-adventure sequence into subjective experience of trauma.  The point is to turn action adventure spy stuff into psychological inward experience and analysis of the chief character’s hangups and intense disturbance, like Jan’s killing of Rance at close range; hard loud banging of guns.

Starkey’s conventional happy romance with the nurse (Victoria Burton) a sort of subplot here. This is entirely added by Davies. The juxtaposition is salutary.

Anti war conversation also all Davies:  Starky’s visit to Jan:  "Is it something to do with this mysterious French resistance lady she’s been telling me about … you amaze me you always amaze me … what a dark horse you are …" "One flask of whiskey, poems of Catullus, men only, get well soon …" 

The positiveness of life is re-asserted.  Wholly invented scene and built up character of Starkey as he says (Adam Norton) "Jan:   … and it’s [what I'm saying is] serious." Starkey:  "Well I needn’t ask. Everything is serious with you, isn’t it? "I envy you … I’m actually alive that’s not to be sneezed at, is it?  Harvey’s dead you know …" And Appleby … it was terrifying. .."

Not in Delderfield at all.  All Davies:  Starkey:  "You now they try to tell you what it’s going to be like and then it’s all quite different … Like how exhausting it is to be afraid all the time … still that unarmed combat stuff … I never really believed it in the gym and then suddenly I had to do it … (moving monologue as he remembers) .. broke his back, John heard it go .. the human body really is extraordinarily fragile isn’t it? [Starkey's mind goes back to Harvey] … Harvey … it bloody well works I’ve just killed myself with my bare hands … but Harvey was dead … it made me terribly angry that for some reason it must’ve been Harvey’s fluent French  .. He had such a wonderful bloody accent and he worked so bloody hard on his [something] vocabulary … then he never got a chance to speak a bloody word of it … I’m supposed to be cheering you up sorry …"  Jan: "you really are in a funny sort of way"  Starkey:  "You see I thought I was the only one who thought like that …"  Starkey:  "We’re going over again, that was just a rehearsal. .. you’ll get a desk job now … boredome for you …" Terror for Harvey… "Just remember your rat like instinct for self-preservation"

Jan wandering about hospital grounds, over-voice.  Then Jan and Diana first return to Sennacharib half-way through and talk of future in pub near water:

The return to village after hospital, near sea, talk of future, promises in pub

and then ensues their re-entry into group, how she is rightly distrusted, how she orders Drip about without thinking, her giving child horse-back riding lessons (too hard on child), the visit to Diana’s mother (very wry apt social jokes), the sequence of watching Diana naked in worship:

Jan watching

and now (as contrast to Alison talk) Diana’s talk of nature worship when they come back to house:

 "it’s only there I can do it you see. It’s only there it feels real. I felt like that since I was 14 …the kind of religion they tried to teach me in church was beastly, so prim and snobbish and it made me feel so wretched … and then all the money we had … I mean they talked about the poor inheriting the kingdom of God but no one seemed to believe it except me … and I thought if that’s it then I am doomed … but I did want to worship God somehow … then one day I went down to the beach all on my own just as you saw me today and it happened I realized that that’s it that’s what it is that’s where God is if he’s anywhere and it’s all part of nature and everything that’s part of nature is right …"

Then wedding, early euphoria cut off by call to return to France by Ackerley.

Part 10 and last thoughts in a third blog.

Ellen

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Andrew Davies’s 1984 Diana: elegiac romance, social-war drama (out of Delderfield) (1 of 3)

Dear friends and readers,

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I’m making the first of (I hope) a few (not too many) blogs on Andrew Davies’s movies to help me think about his vast and varied oeuvre.  Perhaps some of these may be of interest to people who watch, enjoy, study, write about costume drama and film adaptation of historical novels and especially Davies’s Austen films(I now count at least 7by Davids  if you include his Bridget Jones films and his Room with a View) and his romances and heroine’s texts  (e.g., Wives and Daughters, Falling, Sleep with Me)

The paratexts of buzzards and a "folly" central to series.

The dialogue about it from Part 1:   "… Diana as a young:  "Gilroy built it to be sad in, don’t you think that … he fell in love with some girl he couldn’t marry so his heart broke … that’s what Drip said … He was really crackers, don’t you think. ‘ Jan as a boy:  "I don’t know."  Diana:  "Well of course he was , He should have gone off and married somebody else … He bursts out: "I’m not common and I’m going to be a writer … "

The 1984 10 part mini-series Diana is so good it seems scarcely believable it hasn’t been marketed with the same intensity as the 1980 13 part To Serve Them All My Days. Not only has it not been marketed, the only way you can watch it today is to download the whole thing from Pirate ebay, a considerably time-consuming and sophisticated task.  Jim did this for me, and among the revelations is that this is a book centered in erotic enthrallment, and (unexpectedly) thus imitates Brideshead Revisited repeatedly with its melancholy retrospectives spoken in over-voice by Kevin McNally as John Leigh (a Jan Ridd character — the allusion is to Richard Blackmore’s Lorna Doone) in the tone and manner of Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder.  It also compares closely to Julian Bond’s (the writer) film adaptation of H. E. Bates’s Love for Lydia: the same enthrallment, a sensitive hesitant male finds himself called upon by arisocratic family to squire arrogant solitary girl.

I suspect it "fell out of the canon" because the male at the center is not by nature macho male, but driven in that direction by his entrancement with Diana (as played in the first two episodes by Patsy Kensit and the next 8 by Jenny Seagrove). a femme fatale who turns out to be unconventionally ethical.   McNally plays a gentle sensitive male with a depth of feeling for a particular woman he cannot get over in the Poldark films too (Drake Carne for Morwenna Chynoweth).  Diana is also often a deeply melancholy film, much much less upbeat than To Serve Them All My Days too.  Jan ends alone on his hill looking at his beloved’s gravestone in the countryside which nourished and sustained their love, Sennacharib. Yes the allusion is to Byron’s poem and meant to encompass the presentation of WW2 as bloody, brutal and (whatever the rational) amoral in its working out.  Davies is ever anti-war (e.g., his Dr Zhivago)..  

I have read Delderfield’s book and watched the film twice, the first time swiftly and with intense absorption before reading the book, and the second time after reading, slowly, taking some notes and capturing stills.  It’s a very curious film: it takes a strongly masculinist book (Delderfield centrally believes that women want to be mastered and beaten by males) and turns it into a sort of woman’s film, for an inwardly developed Diana is the center of the film.   At each turn, Davies discards the worst things in Delderfield (the class obsessions, the fawning, the unembarrassed male wet dream aspects) and subsitutes genuine humanity, decent activity and circles round the human vulnerability and isolation of his beautiful central presences.  It is a commentary type adaptation; even some of the hinge points are changed along the way; in this it’s very like the 1974 Pallisers by Simon Raven out of Trollope.

Places:  the Gaylorde-Sutton mansion, Heronslea, is the same house used for Cleveland in the 1971 Sense and Sensibility. Pythouse Estate, the Folly is Rushford Tower, north Chagford, Devon, near Rushwood  Wood.

Allusions Davies adds:  in Part 4 where Davies imitates film noir and 1930s and/or WW2 footage, he has Jan admit to his friend Twining (Jonathan Lynn) that he has been writing novels.  First he had at first written a (silly) wish-fulfillment novel:  "adolescent fantasy rich girl poor boy happy ending puerile," but now he is older and gone on to write a novel where "at center [there's a] rich beautiful amoral girl destructive and yet self-destructive, doomed though she never recognizes it." Twining replies with cliches which we are still to take seriously:  "sprinkling of the jolly old Evelyn Waughs ….think I preferred the first version meself …"  Evelyn Waugh leads us to Brideshead (Decline and Fall)

In order not to go on too long about this mini-series (or exceed the normal length allowed by LiveJournal) this will just take the form of summaries of notes and stills for every couple of parts.  This blog will cover the part of the mini-series that adapts the first book of Diana (parts 1-5 and some of 6); tomorrow’s blog will cover Parts 7-9 which adapt the second book, and a third blog will be a description of Part 10 and final comment.

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From There Was A Fair Maid Dwelling (part 1 of Diana as now printed)

Parts 1 & 2:

Jan (Stephen J. Dean for 2 episodes) and Diana (Patsy Kensit) watching the 2 buzzards circling above Sennacharib the first afternoon they meet; their first deeply felt congenial talk. Pt 1

Notes;  the woman who owns and runs bookshop is original addition by Davies, Miss Westbrook (Mary Morris): about the classic Lorna Doone, she says "Hi class twaddle in my opinion."  The hunt  Jan comes to watch (and be left out of) is in the novel, and also how Jan identifies with the fox. This exhilarating sequence of powerful girl riding will haunt the ending of the mini-series when Diana, nearly paralyzed, goes for her last ride before dying. In the scenes here Patsy Kensit wears a brilliant yellow sweater (all the sun comes to her) which stands out.

When Jan meets Diana for lunch, Ives de Roydon (her cousin she suggests, her parents would like her to become a wife of a man like him in rank) is clearly indicated to be gay, the point is reinforced. This is only mentioned as a possibility late in the book probably in order to blacken Ives.  Davies brings in homosexuality as much to humanize as differentiate this foppish rich privileged young man.

Saying goodbye: this is an obsessive Davies’s motif, the character at the window of the coach, train, bus, car Pt 1

Miss Reynolds (Gillian Raine), Diana’s ex-governess’s warns Jan. Diana calls her Drip: the character only marginal to the book and dropped mostly is developed fully and kept central by Davievs.  She tells Jan: 

"I just wanted to warn you I think I know how you feel about Diana and I think you’re very likely to be very badly hurt ..  [I'm a] foolish sentimental old woman but I do have some experience of how people like the Gaylord-Suttons deal with people like us Jan.  They keep us on just so long as we’re useful or amusing to them and then they crumple us up like old paper bags and throw us away .. have you ever wondered what it feels like to be called Old Drip …

It’s just a nickname it doesn’t mean anything, he says and she:  No of course not of course not and I answer to it just as a dog answers to its name because that’s where my food and shelter comes from and I give my affection too because there’s nothing else for me to do with it. I’m speaking to you like this because I believe you still have a choice …"

Diana when she takes off her outer garments when she comes to his house late at night after a quarrel she started and is drenched by the rain:  "It’s all right, the body is just the clothing of the soul you know"  "I read that in a poem in school. Don’t you think that’s beautiful.’  Jan: "Yes I do". This is not in Delderfield.

Stephen J. Dean is good at embodying sultry, resentful, sullen, passionate too.

The narrative voice-overs of Jan by the end are Kevin McNally and the sentiments and music echo Brideshead:  "She was offering herself but the offer was conditional I was going to have to become a gentleman. He has his Uncle Mark teach him to ride.

The trysts where they flee to Nun’s Island for 4 days is done as a Paul et Virginie sequence. Intense nostalgic over-talk by McNally:  "It lasted for four days, four of the most extraordinary days of my life …I had never felt so close to another human being [this is the idyll of Sebastian and Charles] We talked incessantly about out family … books … our absurd pipe dreams.  .. lived like savages … silence … I didn’t need to say we had used up all our supplies and our idyll was nearly done …"  Some of these words are in Delderfield as is the visionary feel.

Near end of Part 4: talking, swimming, fishing, Nuns Island pt 2

As well as use of candlelight at night (for atmosphere) the film makes modern use of flashbacks, voice-over retrospective throughout. I’d say Parts 1 and 2 are closest to the book of all the film but they take up less time in the film than they do the book. They are at least one half of the first volume while in the film adaptation they are one-fifth of the narrative. To be equivalent they’d have to be one-third.

Part 3 & 4

Much of these parts is wholly original:  Davies fleshes out Jan’s story to give him a successful career as a reporter in London

Jan (Kevin McNally) taught by Mr Blackler (Fulton Mackay) not to be a "piss poor reporter:"  people want "fighting and kissing."  This is a motif throughout the series: Jan on one side of a desk, someone in with power in an institution on the other Pt 3

and then during the early 1930s in Europe a correspondent. He invents characters: Mr Blackler (Fulton Mackay), the boss, who like Uncle Reuben (Iain Anders) teach him different versions of reporter who keeps some integrity and sells newspapers widely; what reporting is; he gives a bigger part to Twining who at first appears to invite men to Jan’s London flat when Jan not there (it’s not made clear).   Jan’s scrapbook; his returning to London house of Gaylorde-Suttons’:  "most of these evenings ended on a fruitless vigil on the pavement opposite .. I never saw anybody come or good but my obsession made me linger …"

Learning his trade during day pt 3

Added characters (Bellman [Lockwood West], the sports reporter whose pieces sell the paper).  Jan goes back and learns one can’t go home again.  Not in Delderfield at all. So in London John had found his "feet’ in life which means his career at the Illustrated Echo and life as a successful reporter — jazz music for this aspect of the experience – he feels a helluva felow that morning in 1934.  This is where he takes up with Madeleine (from the novel).

What is kept is the Diana material: this includes his use and betrayal of Madeleine (Claire Toeman) in London (changed so that we see Jan lose his virginity and to make Claire a decent sort — the dislike of her as promiscuous in the book is dropped).  His treatment of this sweet young woman made awful:

Meeting under the clock (this still doesn’t show it but it’s there — where she is stood up on her birthday and exits the film for good). Pt 3

Part four brings Diana’s flight from him after she encountered him by chance in London bookstore, and their reunion at the Folly:

Diana grown up (Jenny Seagrove, first close up of her) Pt 4

her having him in her room during her birthday party and what should be for him humilating use of him as a stud in her bed; the long flashbacks of memory as they make love (in his mind).  Again is addition of homosexuality:  Ives comes into her room by mistake; he does not want her but has his own secrets with male lover

Then her refusing to be serious with him, her letter turned into speech at the Folly and his intense anger dramatized. .  

Then long stint of him as tough reporter: blends a sort of Bogart kind of archetype (complete with cigarette), news footage and Jeremy Irons retrospective narratives. In cafe given a darker sexier turn to make it fit a kind of small film noir during run up to WW2 part.He reads of how for her the war is antics for the rich. He meets her in cafe and rejects her. 

Diana:  I’m "in the pink. I’m always in the pink when I’m in Paris, aren’t you. Jan:  "How the hell did you find out where I was ..  She says he has changed; he replies: "We all change." She:  "Where did he get that suntan. He: "Spain." She: "Oh but Spain’s absolutely impossible now with that dreary war …"  He:  "I did notice the war yes I was reporting it." She:  "Frightfully interesting people"  He: "Most of them are dead." She "Everyone loves Berlin.  Maybe we didn’t meet the same people"  He: "No I don’t suppose we did."  She: "It’s not a crime to have a good time and enjoy yourself you know … oh what a bore you never used to be such a dreary earnest chap. I can’t tempt you then." He: "No not any more. She: "Oh well never mind, and trots off, "I expect you’ll see my picture in the papers. He (deep voice):  "I sensed her unhappiness without malice but without compassion" (!) I told myself that I was free"

But she had rekindled my curiosity and he begins to follow her in the papers … "the pack she traveled with …" "In tracing that rootless life I began to feel my own rootlessness on impulse I cabled Uncle Reuben and told him I was coming back, coming back for good …

When he returns to Devonshire, finds she has been in an accident, at first thoght dead, but discovers she was drunk while driving and caused the death of three people, and of course he rescues her, teaches her, is her priest (though he denies it) and they seem returned to their love. Miss Reynolds says I hope you are not trying to bring back the past, he says no, and she "of course you’re not) but he was.  Voice over of intense resonance. Sometimes the whole way McNally holds his body reminds me of Jeremy Irons in Brideshead

Exhilaration remembered later Pt 4

So the two parts become the education of Jan as he swirls endlessly around this woman he is a satellite of. He makes himself an ambitious man for her as well as himself.  In the book he hardly leaves Devonshire, and Davies feels a need to account for his leaving this wonderful career Davies gave him so Reuben is now dying and wants to leave firm to him; then we get Reuben’s speech on egalitarianism (from the book) to which is added how he didn’t marry a girl above him he should have (alas she ended a spinster you see).  Film has strong class-based conflicts in the scenes, including at funerals (people must pay to have lines in — Uncle Reuben’s).

So, death of Reuben, funeral, they are together in the Folly and part 4 ends.

Part 5:

Like much of Part 3 and some of Part 4, Parts 5 and 6 are made up of enormous amounts of invention, especially the long Alison sequence and setting up of children’s establishment at Heronslea, the interview process, the idea of what education is about (teaching the spirit, vivifying it) enunciated by implication during that interview and the pessimistic intimations or perception of existence we find in Alison Hill (Lynne Miller). 

A wholly new character is Mary Easton (Christina Barryk) who works for Uncle Mark (Jack Watson) and then for Jan as horsewoman and manager; someone he neglected to love as a woman but helped enormously as a friend.  Davies takes over the best of Delderfield’s scenes (such as his meeting with Mrs Gaylord-Sutton [Elizabeth Bennet) living in utter impoverishment at the close of Part 5, and he imitates whole genres (WW2 sequence) as well as the close of Brideshead where Charles is talking to Hooper becomes (Part 6) Jan talking to subordinate, Bowles [Michael Mella]).

The story:  we see Heronslea now under wraps, white sheets (so common in these film adaptations); John visits Diana’s father to demand her hand, and is astonished to find her father only too glad; she seems to know, is off to London and he discovers her scheme to set him up with her money, he is incensed (this in the book). He will not be her plaything; so off to Uncle Mark to buy the riding place and turn it into a working money-making stables and genuinely habitable place.  Mary’s strong help.

Part 5: Mary (Christina Barryk) defying Uncle Mark whose property Jan has come to buy in order to forestall Diana’s plan to make him into an upper class gentleman-squire at Foxhayes

As they work, the nostalgic regretful voice:  all new and invented:  "[She was one] of Twining’s nutbrown lasses I took her utterly for granted and I never considered for a moment what she might feel about me"  But all but Mary is in the book.

Station greeting between Diana and Jan: he all masterly forceful, they are not going to FoxHayes There is something angry in him. He shows her the stables.   She: "You are joking — it’s a thatched cottage after all." He: "It’s mine it’s ours."Mary passes by and Diana to him: "You’ve sold out and spent your money on this dump …" accompanied by insulting way of treating Mary: "Who is this person?  … " Jan: "This is Mary she works here … Diana:  "Well hasn’t she got any work to do then?"  Jan then pushes her Diana into house:  "What the hell do you think you’re doing, talking to Mary like that"  Diana:  "I’ll talk any way I damn well like."  Jan:  "Not here you won’t, not in my place …"  Diana: "You fool you could have had FoxHayes …"

He is defying her putting him into squirearchy and this is significant to Davies too: "I know I can make a business of this … well this is what we talked about, isn’t it … living together in Sennacharibb … I mean well this is it this is what I wanted .."  Diana: "Oh Jan you bloody fool didn’t you realize that was just a game .. this is real life. Did you really think I’d want to live in a rural slum with a bunch of  broken winded hacks and a fool for a husband"  Suddenly and it’s not prepared enough and not in the book quite so directly:  "You bitch … you stupid cruel mindless bitch."  She:  "how dare you say that to me"  He:  "Because it’s what you are you bitch …"

She takes something to hit hm with and whips his face. He stops her hitting again, and whacks her down with his bare hand. They make up intensely suddenly, and she "Make love to me, John – we are to feel this violence brought this on … He:  "You did want to see the upstairs …"  All from book.

He "Why don’t you want to stay with me …" He won’t let her go alone: "All right where are we going then …you’ll see I’ve got it all worked out." They are camping out in great house with record player they had in the Folly.. The emphasis on the Folly and mention of Nuns’ Island and use of phonograph is further intuitive development from Davies. They are again two trespassers, just two nameless wanderers who happen on a strange old empty house for shelter from the storm.  A recreating Nun’s Island fantasy.  After sitting and listening and drinking, she says she was fool about FoxHayes business, "Sorry Jan."  Jan:  "I don’t want anything from your family except you and I want to marry you now"  She agrees "All right then" She says she will ilve in that rural slum and will be no practical use, cannot be bothered," admits her jealousy of Mary, but "I’ll make you laugh sometimes and well have lovely times in bed   We know the worst about each other — "

But we have seen hardly any bad in Jan:   Twining: he’s a "noble" person.  He is an ultimate hero in this novel; his only flaw is in fact his enthrallment. 

They are about to retire "upstairs," and telegram about her father’s bankruptcy (and we discover later suicide). "You’d like to see the upstairs would you" In high servant voice. "Yes I would very much …"  She would have let phone ring … her father probably dead.   He: "Yes of course "Let me drive you up …" "No thanks you’ve got much too much on your plate anyway I don’t want to get there before my mother does … We do rather seem to be doomed …"

The buzzards and folly — doomed lovers.

She didn’t stay very long; we were here only yesterday morning she does say "Whatever you read or hear about me remember I love you that’s all the counts … all right .. must fly." His face darkens.

Morning, Mary there and she makes him some breakfast. "The young lady”s gone to London. He apologizes for yesterday . "I hope you’ll come to like her very much Mary.  Diana and I are engaged to be married. She: "Oh." 

Now in news office again; Twining on phone to give news of bankruptcy and Sutton’s jumped out the window. John finds he cannot reach Diana by phone.  London: Twining tells him to drink ujp as soon there will be none of this, war coming, he’s not expert but people tell him Spain a dress rehearsal — interest in Spain comes from Spanish civil war. He can find nothing about two women; mother and daughter have disappeared

Remembers the solicitor (Moray Watson) and scene of man behind a desk become kindness once again as the solicitor gives him Mrs Sutton’s address.  People down and out have sordid landladies and live up high in old wooden surroundings.   Much of this powerful scene taken from Delderfield (pp. 348-54):

He tells her he asked Diana to marry him, she said yes and Mr Sutton approved.  She is cold and distant and congratulates him upon 1000 pounds. Her room impoverished. He came there to give her the 1000 pounds.  "I’m quite penniless."  (So what happened to Miss Rogers? — we are to forget how she survived)
Mrs G-S:  "I shall survive, Mr Leigh.  I was a dressmaker before I met my husband, I shall be a dressmaker once again. Now you see I have such excellent contacts."
Leigh: "And what about Diana?"
Mrs G-S: "You know I feel quite sorry for you, Mr Leigh [added line]"
Leigh:  "Do you know where she is?"
Mrs G-S: "Oh yes"
Leigh: "Aren’t you going to tell me?  Don’t you think I have a right to know?"
Mrs G-S: "I’m not sure that you do Mr Leigh.  You seem surprised that I can face the prospect of life without money. What on earth makes you think my daughter could?"
Leigh:  "Because she loves me and because she’s going to marry me, that’s why"
Mrs G-S: :"She may or may not love you, Mr Leigh, but I can tell you for certain she is not going to marry you [stretches out the scene]"
Leigh: "Let her tell me that. Where is she?"
Mrs G-S: "She’s in France where she was married yesterday to count Ives de Roydon. Could I make you some tea Mr Leigh?"
His face becomes intensely distressed — like when as Drake he would hear of Morwenna after her coerced marriage

Cut to Folly and buzzards.

Part 6:

Second half of Part 6 moves into The Unjust Skies (part 2 of Diana as now printed). And again a huge amount added in to provide structure and a trajectory that makes sense for Jan as a developing person

October 1939: he and Mary bidding adieu to their sadler’s establishment; he has paid for her to take a nursing training course; he has enlisted. She tells him he belongs here.

Eight months later, he is Lieutenant Leigh J supervising exodus — so this does follow book"   "my own sector of that shambles they called the evacuation of France."

This gives Davies a chance to make WW2-looking film. Too many people, not enough boats; 4th day major killed in air raid, leaving him in charge.  Delderfield does not account for this rise of Jan realistically; Davies does.  Semi-comic dialogue with a soldier, Sgt Bowles (Michael Mella) whose thrust is exactly that of Sgt Hooper and Charles Ryder at the close of Brideshead

People trying to flee France

A human chain of people filmed slowly: we hear bombs or thuds and lots of expected kinds of noise  We hear woman’s voice and see Diana: "Excusez moi. "Look sir there’s no need to be beastly …I’ve come to see Lieutenant Leigh …he’s a personal friend …" It’s all right, let her through and, with her, come five more children (pp. 357-78).

Diane suddenly appears, with five children in tow, demanding special treatment from her friend, Captain Leigh

Absurd patriotic ending of Part 1 or There Was a Fair Maid Dwelling just lopped off; instead we get a fuller development of where she tells him Yvonne his and we get this black silhouette escape of children, then Jan, with Diana kissing him and bidding adieu.

Now new stuff brought in again: an education segment; life in the UK during this war. Then the building of Heronslea seen from the side in the way of 1971 S&S; car driving up, French/Spanish children voices  "la casa .. la casa …" Out comes Miss Rogers (Drip); brought out of mothballs to run this establishment — all invented:  when Unjust skies opens Alison is dead and we have only snatches of what went on before.

 In the film Miss Roger doesn’t know how she’s going to manage; all invented creation of school … There’s cook … girl from village very young no training at all … Advertise in The Lady, do you think?  he’ll organize a staff… little Yvonne (Kathryn Grant) is very like her mother, don’t you think?  A long scene between Miss Rogers and Jan summing up meaning of his experiences thus far: an enthrallment, something worth while. What bothers Jan is not her desertion:  "No it’s the way she’s used me the way she always uses me …"

Time out for interview process. This occurs in a number of his films, from To Serve Them All My Days (1980) to South Riding (2010). Mrs Eggers (Rosalind Knight) the type Davies thinks usually gets the job exposed as a bully who is nonetheless desperate. Then Mrs Alison Hill (Lynne Miller) who is bad at interviews.  Key:  Jan identifies.

Jan interviews Alison

Mrs Hill:  "I’m terrified of horses … " Jan:  "Part teacher part nurse maid part maid of all work and a fair bit of mothering thrown in do you think you could cope with all that?"  She "I don’t know." Jan:  "Not exactly brimming over with self- confidence.  She:  "I’m not very good at interviews:" He " No you’re not are you, still neither am I … headmistress speaks highly of you.  Does that surprise you?"  Mrs Hill:  "She spent a lot of time [telling me] to be more strict .. thing is I didn’t mind that .. my class was noisy but they learned as much as the other ones .. they were happy  …"

Jan:  "I’d like you to tell me a bit more about yourself, Mrs Hill, you’re a widow aren’t you?" She: "Yes that’s right .. he was run over by a lorry. Jan:  "Oh I’m sorry. She: "It doesn’t really matter how it happens does it? … every night they get out the photo album  you see if I don’t get out now and start living my life I’m never going to." (Strong anti-heroism realism.)

So again identification in the interview is the key to being hired "I’ve upset them a lot Bryan’s parents but I’ve got to do it ..  Jan: "Well you might find it a bit quiet here, there’s not many young people about (same pretend objection as in To Serve Them and South Riding) She:  "I couldn’t be lonely here with the children I think I’d like it here." Jan:  "Good."

He works in headquarters. Jeremy Irons’ voice over:  "In that unreal time I found myself increasingly living for my visits to Heronslea, the place itself, the sense of hope the children gave me, Yvonne and more and more the thought of seeing Alison Hill again …"

Alison’s long soliloquy now of evil gremlins, e.g., "I tried to believe in it but I couldn’t if there is any God He is making a terrible mess of things isn’t He? He   "It’s just chance .. not so bad once you get used to it." She: "How do you explain good things ? chance doesn’t have to be bad … you don’t have to be the way you are …"  Davies no longer does this kind of thing; he has an equally long soliloquy given to Diana just before she marries Jan about religion.

Miss Rogers helps the affair to flourish along by telling Jan of the headmaster Mr Ramsay’s interest in Alison, so jealousy can make Jan more alert.   Jan teaches Alison to ride; again dialogue with Alison, now about children and teaching, and now about her anger at husband for dying.  Out to dinner for the pair of them; theirs a conventional love but nonetheless as consistently meaningful, maybe more for Jan in his central selfhood than Diana:

Dinner date, WW 2 style (they are the only couple in the restaurant)

They come back to dark hall, minor key version of theme music: "You don’t have to go back to your : little cold room if you don’t want to .. "you’re sure …" "oh yes"  In bed and naked under sheets after sex: it’s so nice I’d almost forgotten how nice it is."

Morning and he’s up and dressed.  He’s up and dressed He: "Looking at you thinking" She "Not bad thoughts I hope.:
He: "No Quite serious thoughts. She: "Look you can go if you like it must be dreadful waiting around. You’re very gentle, you must go now if you want to, I wish you’d say something."

Then it comes:  " Would you marry me, Please? (just perfect words for him there then) She looks serious and theme song comes in. We remember his overlooking Mary, his bad behavior to Madeleine, how Diana deserted him, and we wish all the best for them.  All invented, all beautiful.  But swirling still around Diana, for he wants Alison as a barrier.

Ellen

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Jane Austen’s Letters: Letter 21, Tues, 11 June, 1799, Queens Square still

Dear friends and readers,

This is another letter where one misses intensely all the context that once existed.  Like Diane (for whom I thank for starting us off this week), I like the lovely simplicity of Austen’s opening:  "Your letter yesterday made me very happy," but I wish we had that letter. Not only that but those inbetween June 2nd and this of the 11th. I wonder what made Cassandra choose to save this third one out of the many. Cassandra is enjoying remembering whatever was going on at that time that Austen knows, insinuates and doesn’t mention explicitly (had she maybe we’d not have the letter). Ah that’s it.

Heads of topics:  still at Queens Square! tone of forced gaiety, thrift-shop type shopping, again Edward’s nervous ailments, Piozzi’s style, Egerton Brydges’s novel (& poems), Martha getting First Impressions by heart, Benjamin Portal, Weston walk, hoping for home next week; if not, lives in this writing space apart with Cass …

Pump Room, Bath

A theme that unites this letter and the two before is how little people care for one another if they can’t get something from them — either in terms of getting a place, feeling they are prestigious for spending time with you. The Austens are fringe people with the barest of connections they have to work very hard at for themselves.  Austen sees this so clearly. Not that she is eager to be with such people.  The problem is there is no other choice about — and so the occasional walk cheers, getting away from others at a concert, and oh yes, writing to Cassandra — an imagined alter ego in a private space apart.

Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen writing to Cassandra (Becoming Jane)

I agree the tone of gaiety is forced. You can this this at several points:   "I am very glad You liked my Lace, & so are you & so is Martha — & we are all glad together …" She makes it explicit how such utterances are exaggerations, unral versions far away from real feeling:  "I have got your cloak home, which is quite delightful! — as delightful at least as half the circumstances which are so called"   Part of her genius in her books when she is at her best is her refusal to put down a feeling or thought that is not precisely the actual one she or her characters or the situation is imagined as justly having.

There is an intense longing to go home and weariness with enforced gaiety. . She is again stuck.  Why?  the mystery we find here not explained (by any note):  that Cassandra has "escaped any share in the impurities at Deane": this might be nasty doings, gossips, maneuvers of the icky kind which are so dispiriting, but the language also recalls Elizabeth’s sarcastic imagining of how the Bingley sisters regard Cheapside where the Bennet’s Aunt and Uncle Gardener and their children live. Why did Cassandra want to keep the Austens from Steventon — Jane asks this at the end:  "What have you going on in Hampshire beside the Itch from which you want to keep us …"  Her idea of a good summer seems to be Martha coming to stay with them be made the equivalent — substitute — for all the (tedious) visits they would have to make.  She is surrounded by people who have nothing else to do but sit with one another and do nothing worth while; this is called socializing by many, and we have a candid assessment of what this means in Emma thinking about a coming party.  The shopping sequences are actually dismal bargaining over petty ephemeral accessories — that’s part of this feeling of being forced. I thought of going to local Thrift shops in my area.  A way to kill time to no use.

Which gets me to a theme which produced the quivering mood I see surfacing — writing. I find these letters frustrating on many counts.  One they are a sliver of what was and so enigmatic.  Second the editing is just so skewed. What one wants to know is not told while one gets long histories of families (to coin an Austen phrase) no one cares about (but those into meaningless rankings).  There is no cross-reference to Letter 62 where Austen does imitate Mrs Piozzi — not so much in her travel book, Observations and Reflections Made During the Course of a Journey through France, Italy and Germany, where she never mentions her first husband, but as Austen imagined her as a married woman with Dr Johnson at Streatham:

"But all this, as my dear Mrs Piozzi says, is flight and nonsense — for my Master has his great Casks in mind, & I have my little Children — & I that have the great cask –, for we are brewing Spruce Beer again  &c&c (p. 156).  Mrs Piozzi by Jane’s account here is such another as Miss Bates. In fact Jane Austen seems to love Piozzi’s travel book (parody is a high compliment), as did a number of the fine women writers of the day. Mrs Piozzi was a kind of role model.

About Egerton Brydges’s Fitz-Albini we are told nothing: it’s such a dumb book it doesn’t rate in the most diligent of the handbooks; it’s mentioned as an Anti-Jacobean novel (in a book of that name by M. O Grenby).

We hear of Matha getting First Impressions by heart. She cannot write away quietly.  Her heart is agitated, she feels some intensity; of course Cassandra would want her to write away quietly. But she can’t. If I use the word "nervous" here I don’t men in the modern sense of debilitated, but that of Pope: strong passions moving among her nerves.  And no where to let it out …

Olivia Williams as the older Jane writing Persuasion at Chawton (close-up from Miss Austen Regrets)

Another young man: Benjamin Portal.  We were told he had handsome eyes around the time of her disappointment over Tom Lefroy (Letter 1, p 2).  Lefaye’s note does tell us he was born 1768 so he’s 8 years older than Jane, and thus the right age, and also that he is thought to have perhaps contributed to the Loiterer: a brother’s friend and with a little pretension to intelligence.  Another clergyman — meaning he has a living.  So, A possible suitor?  The marriage market is at Bath too.

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

Milsom Street, Bath

Onto this letter: the first section has the remark that Cassandra’s letter made Jane happy and about it the remark that Cassandra "escaped … the Impurities of Dean" and she is not sorry "our stay has been lengthened." So Cassandra’s letter which made Jane happy had information about the Lefroys at Dean and why the Austens & Knights were now to stay at Bath longer.

Jane still hopes "tolerably secure" of their leaving next week, though it’s possible it will drag out for another week. I remember how Fanny Price longed for her home so intensely. 

The association here then leads to the hope that the projected visits she and Cassandra are expected to do may be turned into Martha their friend visiting them.  Jane would much rather have this. (We may surmise here she would get writing time too — and liberty and space for herself for real.)

Then it devolves into talk about Edward’s complaint. His complaint was a prime excuse for going. It begins with the usual ironies but I note that she does end more complacently and sympathetically than usual:  I see no irony in this statement;  "He is more comfortable here than I thought he would be, & so is Eliz:" 

Portrait of Edward Austen Knight as a gentleman on the grand tour

We might take out a minute and contemplate this young man. He is no intellectual prodigy — no writer of Loiterers either.  He was plucked out of his family as a young boy and he must’ve known it was important for him to please.  Given attitudes towards adoption, his position was precarious even if Mrs Knight seems to have been so kindly.  People can change their minds and swiftly (Trollope’s Ayala’s Angel is about this).  Maybe it did make him nervous. Certainly plucking someone out of their environment is not made altogether wonderful even in Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax’s case.  Then the family he knew would be dependent on him to have connections — yet if we look who is it who’s making the deals. Not Edward but rather James through the first wife (much older than he, said to have been plain, but a linch pin for several of these patronage plums they grabbed).  He marries up – and I can imagine Elizabeth let him know it.  She was answerable endlessly with her body (and died of it) and would expect him to appreciate her. And he did — no Chawton cottage on offer until she died.

What I’m saying is his nervousness and desires to get away probably had real psychological origins Austen does not acknowledge in her letters at all though when she writes fiction her less than conscious not-moralizing mind picks up on his experience.

Pip Torrens as Edward Austen Knight worried sick over the lawsuit trying to take back his property (Miss Austen Regrets)

But after sympathizing Jane is back to ironies about Elizabeth particularly:  " thou’ they will both I believe be very glad to get away, the latter especially.  — Which one can’t wonder at somehow.  Somehow italicized. Some insinauation. I guess it’s that Elizabeth grew tired of Mrs Austen — as in Persuasion the older woman wanting to take precedence when the younger one has the wealth and therefore could insist on her precedence.

Could not have been fun as we see in Persuasion.

She thinks of the above as written in Mrs Piozzi’s style — as it’s insinuating about family members and life.  An essay could be written trying to compare Piozzi’s life writing with Austen. People often cite this comment and say Austen liked reading Piozzi and kept her in mind but no one works at seeing the parallels.

Then the many sentences on the thrift shop shopping. An Orleans plum is a variety of plum:  As Diane has remarked the word "cheap" and "very cheap" are emphatic, and the gist of the passage is how many sprigs Jane can get "for the same money as would procure only one Orleans plumb."   In short she’d get more for 3 or 4 shillings than she has "the means of bringing home."

Photo of actual sewing piece by Austen

So we also have a comment on the limitations of space given her for her traveling things again. That trunk that went separately never altogether out of her mind finally.

John’s Bargain store stuff.  The final comment about how flowers grow out of the head more natural than fruit is an offset but when she goes on about how she’ll wait for Cassandra’s opinion I do think to myself this woman was just not given enough to do in life or allowed to think about on paper.

The something one might have expected to be given more importance than it is:  in Brabourne’s corrected form:

I would not let Martha read "First Impressions" again upon any account, and am very glad that I did not leave it in your power. She is very cunning, but I saw through her design; she means to publish it from memory, and one more perusal must enable her to do it.

She will let Martha have Egerton Brydges Fitzalbini when she gets home (see comments for two poems by Brydges. So Jane has been reading this inferior book — she did she said love novels and maybe it was expected she read a relation’s.  Then we get a comment on its characters.  Austen wants Martha to own Mr Elliot handsomer than Mr Lance (the name is repeated in Persuasion) and that "fair men are preferable to Black."  She does in her MP make Henry Crawford "black" (darker in looks).

Then the Benjamin Portal reference: again one might have thought it would be made more of.  The family was very aware of him as a possibility I think, watching from afar.  We are told Mrs Austen saw him "the other day but without making herself known to him."  This kind of intentness speaks of their not being sure of their status too.   

We have now had four young men, one serious, one quietly wanted, one turns out to have been a painful jackass [perhaps giving rise to Collins] and now this possibility gazed at from afar: LeFroy, Bridges, Blackall and Portal.

That it’s not emphasized properly in terms of what it could lead to (as opposed to saving a few shillings — not that this apparently was a small thing to Jane) shows how rapidly these letters were written — in a hurry and haste too.

Then the making fun of how glad they are together, as Diane said, the strained gaiety and the refusal to attribute more delight or any feeling to something where you don’t feel it.

I’ve commented on the nervous passion quivering through this line: I do not know what is the matter with me to-day, but I cannot write quietly; I am always wandering away into some exclamation or other. Fortunately I have nothing very particular to say.

Now I’ll add it’s pathetic how she is glad she had nothing "very particular to say."  I feel here she is glad because if she had she would offend Cassandra perhaps.  (She was easily cowed as younger sister it seems).

Then as the letter switches to outward matters of their doings in Bath and people they meet.

In the second half of the letter we have Austen reporting outward doings — with places and people outside the family group.

Sydney Gardens

She frets over her phrasing of the walk to Weston that she apparently enjoyed.  Then we get a return to ironies.  They had not gone to a public place lately but were apparently planning (and congratulating themselves about this) to dine out, but then it turned out to be no such thing.  The next paragraph again aligns them with John and Fanny Dashwood: it seems that Elizabeth was at first not keen to that Edward accepted Mr Evelyn’s invitation (I see from the notes this family included high officers of a county, sheriffs and the like), but when Evelyn called, she liked his manners.

IS this not Fanny Dashwood approving of Lady Middleton?

So "The Biggs would call her a nice woman" is code for dull and boring and snobbish?

But alas, "Mr Evelyn .. indisposed yesterday, is worse today & we are put off."

Again we are in the world of Walter and Elizabeth Elliot. The Austens are the eager ones chasing after others.

Now Austen turns her attention to going home:   she suggests while it’s impertinent for her to make suggestions to the housekeeper, nonetheless said housekeeper better have her coffee mill ready.

Edward wants this for breakfast. (The big man.)

Now all these people sending love to others — remember Mr Knightley on the phoniness of this, the love no one carries to anyone else. The tone is trotting along. The best thing about this list of names with the verb "love" is the line about the uncle: "he hopes all your Turkies & Ducks & Chicken & Guinea Fowls are very well." Something sweet about this apparently very stupid man (his alliance to the mean kleptomaniac parsimonious wife, and then leaving all to her is what I refer to) comes across.  Austen could not know he would leave everything to the aunt.  It seems fitting that the child was allowed to put his initials in here. It’s so much mugga wugga wugga.

Back to Jane’s puzzle over why Cassandra wants them to stay in Bath. What could be going on in Hampshire beyond the "Itch" from which Cassandra wants to keep them.

And again her mind reverts to gossip about people around them and another thrift-shop type trip. In the corrected version of Brabourne:

Now I will give you the history of Mary’s veil, in the purchase of which I have so considerably involved you that it is my duty to economise for you in the flowers. I had no difficulty in getting a muslin veil for half a guinea, and not much more in discovering afterwards that the muslin was thick, dirty, and ragged, and therefore would by no means do for a united gift. I changed it consequently as soon as I could, and, considering what a state my imprudence had reduced me to, I thought myself lucky in getting a black lace one for sixteen shillings. I hope the half of that sum will not greatly exceed what you had intended to offer upon the altar of sister-in-law affection."

What a way to waste one’s hours. It reminds me of people in supermarkets who bring these pathetic coupons they so carefully spent time clipping out so they can get this can of peas for 3 cents less and that ketchup for a quarter less.  (Nowadays this is more endurable since the computer in the cash register can scan them in — it used to take further hours on line while one waited).  (I have to admit many might say I waste my hours over this stuff but I am as desperate as Austen in my way — from different reasons. I do get to write later on in the day for what I have given up and she got to write too, when (analogously) it was in no one’s interest to stop her

So Jane had overspent.  She is trying to help Cassandra present a gift "upont alter of sister-in-law affection."  This connects to Mary Musgrove: it’s Mary Musgrove who is so resentful of not going where others go so one has continually to make it up to her. Mary Austen didn’t get to go to bath so to placate her both Jane and Cassandra struggle to produce a present on insufficient funds.

And it seems the Biggs are Manydown are snubbing Cassandra. There does not come much to trouble Cassandra from them.  Jane agrees they are capricious for they sometimes do like to enjoy their elder sister’s company — perhaps they referred to Cassandra as an elder sister.  I note this statement is not ironical in the sense that Austen really commiserates with, sympathizes with her sister.

Manydown Park, home of Bigg-Wither – what it must’ve taken for Austen to say no to this young man the next day after he proposed

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Anne Hathaway as Jane comforting Anne Maxwell Martin as Cassandra after death of Tom Fowles (Becoming Jane)

Someone remarked that she found something odd in this precise clipping and saving of Austen’s letters: just this snippet out, just that letter saved. In a sense one has to ask why save them this way if you so rampantly damage them. She thought the usual cited motivation (protection of family wrongs, hurts, issues) doesn’t explain this behavior.  She asked how do we (me say) save letters; what do we do when saving them.  This is a good remark and provides another perspective.  I save letters myself, tons of them in my computer files, all of the texts, not just some and don’t fuss about what’s there or not. I’ve been told by my husband (computer guru) that once something is put on the Net no matter how private expert people can retrieve it unless it’s coded against that.

So, one response I’ve thought of this morning is how much intense investment Cassandra had in Jane, when you invest so much in one person your behavior can become overwrought and over-done (so to speak). Both were defying mores when they not only did not marry but made a point of dressing as single women intending not to marry while young. The movie Miss Austen Regrets interprets Cassandra’s behaviors as deliberately acting to keep Jane to herself — which would be a very human kind of maneuver.

Olivia Williams as Jane dying and comforting Greta Scacchi as Cassandra late in life after Cassandra tells Jane that she didn’t want Jane to marry in order to keep Jane to herself (Miss Austen Regrets)

See 1&2, 3&4, 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9 , 10, 11,  12, 13, 14 , 15, 16 & 17 , 18, 19 and 20.

Ellen

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The function of fiction, life-writing reading: postscript to NA, Chs 5 & 14 (novels, a country walk)

Dear friends and readers,

Vanessa Bell (1789-1961), The Artist’s Daughter

On WMST-l I’ve been feeling dismayed by some of the people posting onto threads about fiction.  A couple disdained popular fiction — happily put down by Marge Piercy and Katha Pollitt (with me chiming in); one woman said how she has little time for fiction (with the usual implication Austen thought she was making headway against in NA) and when she cited what she was reading (or would read had she the "extra" time), it was Ian Fleming (!) or an action-adventure book with a female surrogate for male values and conventional heroic deeds.

So I write and put this here (edited for us) as food for thought:

By happenstance I today am reading good books on popular historical fiction, preparatory to trying to concoct a panel proposal on 20th/21st century historical fiction set in the long 18th century, and then a paper proposal on a enormously popular (and the first 7 books excellent) Poldark series by Winston Graham (who also wrote Marnie, travestied in Hitchcock’s famous film).  Popular fiction does indeed deal centrally with issues of concern in each era; there is escapism but there is also (let us be candid here) escapism in the most recent Booker Prize or other prestigious prize-garnering books (often using embedded history, e.g., Nuala O’Faolain’s My Deam of You, an inset story in the time of the 1847-48 famine):  Helen Hughes’s The Historical Romance and Jerome Groot’s Historical Novel.

More to the point about feminist books, what really fine about Diane Philips’s Women’s Fiction, 1945-2005 is she shows the continuities, strong similarities between serious women’s fiction and popular women’s fiction, so that in the same chapter Marge Piercy’s Small Changes and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room are treated with Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle.

You can find exactly the same motif in Andrea Levy’s Small Island (post-colonial, anti-war, social protest) of giving up a baby treated in closely parallel manner to say the costume drama, The Duchess (Keira Knightley, the film out of Amanda Foreman’s widely-selling biography).

Books that are given positive words are "post-colonial" and magic realism; switch terms to historical fiction and gothic and we are in "inferior territory" supposedly.

Last example:  Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin (sold with an embarrassing — – to me — bodice-ripping cover) has the same critique of women’s treatement as her The Room (Booker Prize nominee) and at least in the reviews Slammerkin it was brought up it was about prostitution, free sexuality for women, and hanging while to read about The Room you’d never know it was about continual coercive rape.  The most important things about The Room were omitted.

To the function of fiction for girls/women:  I’ll frame it by saying that it bothers me that the choices I come across for books for high school and other reading groups where say 50% of the participants are girls are relentlessly — so it seems to me — books with a male protagonist at the center or action-adventure hero.  Tamara cited the few fiction books she says she has time for an they seemed to be either action-adventure males (Ian Fleming) or a female surrogate for that (Nevada Barr).  Summers I’ve a couple of times mentored young women (they are those who ask) who are in the BIS program where I teach (independently-put together Bachelor’s degree) and they have been education teachers. What do they choose for reading but what I’d call boys’ books where girls are marginalized or (to paraphrase Bobbie Ann Mason in her The Girl Sleuth) are presented as having four actions (menses, marriage, motherhood, menopause) or self-sacrificing mothers are not there.  When I bring  this up, they are even surprised as if they do not realize they are not there (meaning the young female college student). My daughter is now in a reading group and I see the same thing:  for disability one gets a book called My Left Foot, Of course, a boy.

Vanessa Bell, this time her grandaughters, their books and their dolls

I know or have read that boys won’t read books with girls at the center, but I’m not sure of that.  If they are assigned, the boys read them. Boys will read Jane Austen if you assign it and frame it generally, even Northanger Abbey (big even when the heroine is a wallflower at a dance) where I’ve been told that Henry Tilney is just a stand-up guy (as hero).

For myself I read fiction all the time. I wake in the night and sit up for a couple of hours reading and when I don’t have a novel which I call a comfort book — not always by a woman (Winston Graham does for me) — I feel bereft.  Bereft.  Right now my comfort book is Winifred Holtby’s South Riding.  Next on my pile is Rosamund Lehmann’s Dusty Answer. Sometimes I go through a row of books by one woman:  last summer it was Drabble’s Pattern in the Carpet, I began with the memoir which was about puzzles, and when I read it, I felt a great emptiness when I saw there were no more pages so I started and reread it again. Favorites are women’s memoirs and books of letters, life-writing as well as fiction.

Fiction & life-writing by women performs serious functions for girls — and can for men too (and fiction there by men).  Suzanne Juhasz’s Reading from the Heart tells of this in her first chapter on the reading girl.  (Although well-meaning I feel Janet Radway’s famous book is actually condescending.)  Carolyn Heilburn’s Writing a Woman’s life demonstrates about how such books enabled a conversation with the author and if talked about with other women begins a form of liberation from inculcuted norms and blindnesses. In her argument reading women’s books can lead to writing good ones.

So when these sorts of books are not introduced and girls don’t even know about them, it’s a real loss for them.  And when they are not frankly discussed, and the girl stays invisible to herself in them not as centrally truly useful as they can be.

And to turn to Austen’s famous defense of novel reading and her argument that as non-fiction is mostly imaginative, it’s significant that non-fiction presented as prestigious, what counts, what must be studied and can be influential so dull in comparison with fiction: I offer the idea that what’s written to be socially acceptable to the large academic group at the time (and now too in part) is dull because the writer dare not speak the private (which directly influence the public) truths that count.

Germaine Greer by Paula Rego:  she writes books which tell real truths of how people (women) get ahead, get positions, what gets in their way because these private experiences are central to women’s public lives

Ellen

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Ice-skating: III

Dear friends and readers,

It was but my third year going to The Stars on Ice (supported by Smuckers Jam) (see Year 2), which tours the US, but I this year felt again what I did the first:  exhilaration at the emotions roused, intense vicarious pleasure, and the allure of a music, light and casually dramatic show.   Izzy has written a blog which far surpasses what follows:  she conveys the experiences precisely while evaluating them.  I’m just adding a few scattered disconnected thoughts to commemorate the experience and spread the word to people who’ve not yet gone.

Again I loved John Zimmerman and his partner:

Zimmerman alone — in another year, thinner than this year.

Zimmerman is the strongest of the males: a kind of American Gerard Depardieu — he threw his partner about and there was awe at it. Probably I ought not to have enjoyed this the way I did.  Again Todd Eldridge.  I’m now aware of the power (he’s a strong athlete) and facility of Michael Weiss:

Also his genuine desire to entertain and have new and different numbers: this time in a farmer’s overalls.

The woman try for grace and lyricism, even Sasha Cohen:

The group dancing is a kind of controlled wildness in joyous patterns.

Group scene from another year.

The second part of the program (or second hour) was much more exhilarating and well-chosen, with fascinating contrasts.  They seem to have held off their rivetingly intriguing dances until then and the dances were beautifully segued into one another.  A gothic scene of the woman dancer in white frills and the man in black, making gestures reminiscent of Catholic praying, the man as dominant animus (Tanith and Bed) moved into a man and women in gay reds skate-dancing to 1920s style music.  We had a sequence of two men as touching bums; Sasha Cohen in German 1920s cabaret style dress dancing to Peggy Lee’s Fever. Group sequences were 1920s honky-tonk around a piano

I went this morning to see if during the long 18th century there had been any new or good developments in ice-skating in Europe.  It seems it was during our long era that people began to have contests and as it were play on ice skates. A once famous understudied comic view of a minister on ice:

Henry Raeburn? Minister on Ice

Many mother-daughter pairs of all ages in the seats. Izzy and I fit right in.

I’ll bet there is beautiful poetry of skating in the Georgian poems of the year, perhaps in Thomson’s Seasons. It’s so sad that in the later 18th and most of the 19th century middle class women in the UK who skated were frowned upon (as potentially promiscuous !).  But women began to do it: the BBC adaptation of H. E. Bates’s Love for Lydia has a stunningly beautiful sequence in moonlight.)

It was hard for women to become competitors and it was in 1904 the first women dared, then there was an attempt to exclude by calling the professional teams all-male but that did fail. I wonder if women were the major audience in the first part of the 20th century too. At one time it was thought men skaters would not draw crowds and men were discouraged; the sport is tainted for them by prejudice against men doing anything connected to the feminine and ice-skating is also a form of ballet.  So nowadays if a male skater is homosexual, he may well try to keep his sexual orientation a secret or hidden.

Ellen

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Ian McEwan’s Atonement: poetic gothic & historical fiction; Wright/Hampton’s Atonement: visionary

Dear friends and readers,

This is another blog in progress: about McEwan’s poetic novel, Atonement and the visionary film adaptation made from it, Atonement by Joe Wright, Christophe Hampton, Ian McEwan and Tim Evan (among several named producers).  I mean to come back and add to it after I meet with my students. For now here are the comments I will bring myself to the discussion.

The Dunkirk retreat includes not just a ferris wheel, merry-go-round, but a small dollhouse (recalling the opening doll house which was a replica of the family house) — not to omit thousands of people doing all sorts of frantic and ordinary things, among which is the systemic killing of horses

Rereading this book for a fourth time, it seemed to me a deeply painful and poetically great book.  The story shows us how dangerous it is for someone of a lower class and status to allow himself to become the pet of a rich man and his family, for they will turn on him at a moment’s notice and everyone around the estate back them up.

Robbie typing the fatal note: but it was a catastrophe waiting to happen anyway

It reveals the self-punishing nature of atonement, and how only those who feel for the hurt couple will now help them.

Post modern books are self-conscious; the writers do not think they can reflect reality directly; they are aware they are often imitating a tradition and other books rather than writing simply as a mirror of nature; they distrust authority, conventions, traditional moralities, and question these are the products of self-interested groups.  They look into psychoanalytical interpretations as the reflections of social preoccupations.

Another plainer way of seeing the book is as a gothic-inflected historical fiction.  The depiction of war in it is about the truth of Dunkirk but it is also a critique of modern colonialist wars and how we destroy human lives and civilization wherever we take these wars.  We do have those gothic elements we outlined in the beginning:  storm, tempest, death, the past, time, vulnerable heroine, monstrous crimes, the uncanny, the house, the riven landscape, even ghosts — Cecila and Robbie are ghosts of Briony’s mind.  And it’s about class today and sexuality (pathologies inside families) today too.  Robbie is an outsider, and becomes an exile and wanderer.  Briony is a prisoner of her intense self-inflicted flagellation; she never escapes her obsession (it was after all Emily who prosecuted Robbie, and Jack who let him do it). It’s possible that Robbie is Jack’s natural son; if so, then we have a semi-incestuous couple at the center.

One way to read it is of an male author in drag writing apparently androgynously, I am struck that the real way to read this 400 page flagellation by Briony against herself is that it’s a parable not to do this to yourself. If you do a bad deed, you have two choices:  live with it ruthlessly and ignore what you did, or escape somehow. Briony couldn’t pull off either; she was the prisoner of her own mind. The idea of atonement itself is critiqued.  The book is gothic because it dwells in this madness.  Robbie is our male gothic figure: outsider who becomes exile and wanderer; Briony is the female undergoing live burial or imprisonment because she cannot rid herself of her obsession.  She thinks she prevented Robbie and Cecilia from getting together because that was indeed a semi-conscious motivation: she loved Robbie as a rival.

Having done a paper studying the representations of rape, I’m bothered by McEwan’s "engagement" if that is what it is with Richardson’s Clarissa.  Atonement falls into the very large category of novels about an accusation of rape whose result is harsh punishment for the woman who accuses; he deflects this by making the accuser a girl-child, but she is equally characterized (perhaps Clarissa the character meant here) as finding male sexuality when a child abhorrent. to his credit, Wood touches on this in passing.  My paper showed that in fact accusations of rape are relatively rare in courts because women lose a great deal if they accuse whether it happened or not, and a huge percentage of rape goes unrecorded and unlitigated.

I put my paper on line and much of the above is in the bibliography — including articles on the litigation of rape in the 18th century by A. Simpson.

http://www.jimandellen.org/RapeInClarissa.html

It’s a disturbing book: like so many by men, the rapist is not really brought forward until the end. He is blamed as a rich industrialist and war profiteer, and the women of the movie are seen as wanting punishment, ferocity.  The girl who lies, Briony, is (I’ve experienced this) hated often as much by women as men readers, even though in the book McEwan goes out of his way to exonerate and how how much Briony suffered. The hostility to her reminds me of the hostility to the governess in The Turn of the Screw: two women who are accusing male sexuality, trying to control it, themselves refusing it.

It’s not really an exaggeration or too far an exaggeration to say that McEwan’s Atonement especially in the form Joe Wright gives it in his movie which salivates over Knightley’s super-thin (frigheningly gothic stance like body) takes a Lawrentian view of women (see my blog on Wright’s 2005 P&P): they are dying for men’s penises when they are healthy and give them that and they are happy.

On the post-modern nature of the book:  this is a book which imitates and alludes to a number of earlier books, authors and styles.  The heroine’s name (like that of Patrick O’Brian’s Sophie from Maturin novels) is probably chosen as a typical 18th century heroine’s name; it’s also the name of Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (in a novel cited by Austen in Northanger Abbey).  It’s connected to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, and the movie is loaded with letters and we continually hear the clacking of the typewriter either Briony writing her novel (what we are watching) or the characters writing letters; McEwan has said he had Virginia Woolf in mind, Elizabeth Bowen’s Last September (about Ireland in the 1920s), and Heat of the Day (a WW2 spy novel whose hero is a Nazi), E. L. Hartley’s The Gobetween (about a go-between over sex), 18th century poetry and it opens with a long quotatoin from Austen’s one partial gothic novel, Northanger Abbey. Incidents can be connected to novels by Woolf, the atmosphere is Rosamond Lehman’s Dusty Answer (melancholy depression novel which takes place among upper class). Robbie quotes Twelfth Night, Yeats, Auden. The attitude towards sex is that of D. H. Lawrence and Robbie can be seen as a recreation in sympathetic terms (upper class, ambitoins) of the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

As Cecilia, Briony stand there, we do not notice inthe background Paul Marshall, face down (he’s the rapist)

They are watching Robbie rescuing the children no one cares for

On Jocelyn Harris’s theory that Atonement is centrally a rewriting of Clarissa, a deep engagement with the earlier epistolary book, while it’s intriguing, and sheds light on the book, I am not altogether persuaded.  There are certainly parallels: Atonement is filled with letters and writing and this is central; the hero is a Robbie (as in Robert Lovelace) but he is accused (falsely) of rape (and thus the book is more like Fielding’s where false accusation of rape is a concern), and Robbie is a wonderful person, didn’t do it, is blamed because he is working class, and the accent or emphasis on the book is on Briony (the writer, the child — McEwan is often concerned with children) I’m not sure how central Richardson’s book is.  McEwan prosecutes Briony: the reality is false accusation of rape is rare because the girl who is raped is herself a suspect, interrogated; the book takes a proto-feminist book like Clarissa and turns it into one which indicts a female who fears male sexuality and won’t accept its worst aspects (violence, ruthlessness, rape).  McEwan must’ve hated Clarissa and sympathized deeply with the villain, Lovelace.

I suggest that Virginia Woolf as a model (her style, outlook) could arguable be made the central figure the book engages with.  And there are allusions to 18th century poetry, to Rosamund Lehmann. It’s a highly literary allusive book.  Prof Harris talked about the ferris wheel in the movie and the ferris wheel in Lovelace’s dream, but in the feature Joe Wright talks about that ferris wheel as there for quite different reasons.  I think the essay cited doesn’t go into this that much.  There’s an essay by Hermione Lee where she argues the book is androgynous in outlook: it’s a book which imitates ecriture-femme yet has a male in drag (personating Briony) at the center.

The quarrel by the fountain as seen by Briony

Hermione Lee said it well when she writes (I linked her review into our course materials) that the novel feels androgynous. This is a novel written by a man acting the part of a woman writing a ‘male’ subject, and the mood and feel is of a woman’s novel while the attitudes justify male sexuality that aggressive mostly as a reaction against how society has constructed him — what society has done to men, never mind women, particularly lower class who are thrown away.

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The author: Ian McEwan:

He’s a respected well-known writer of our time. Born 1948 he’s been writing for a long time and won some prestigious prizes: Mann Booker more than once. The early part of his career was consumed in writing amoral horror fiction of a ugly and upsetting type. 

Briony punishing herself for the rest of her life

If we look at the themes and what happens in the early books, we do discern a few things that anticipate this novel:  such as people doing things to others without crediting the others for having as much consciousness, needs, minds and lives apart from them.  They also swirl around rape and sexual crimes; often it is a man who is hurting a woman badly; ultimately it’s like Lolita where we have this crazed vicious narrator who many readers identify with and whose view of Lolita and  the world the film has presented as true. Lola who is raped may allude to Lolita.  It’s often a male or masculinistic point of view. The characters exist in solitude and they have been alienated from their society often by no fault of their own.  A man was kept in a cupboard by his mother and not allowed to grow up and learn how to integrate into society. High violence is typical of what is seen and also the ugliness, banality of modern urban life. People don’t know each other..  The early fiction is fantasy and cut off from the world’s social concerns and breaks realistic conventions.

Mid-career shows a change; short novels which are partly realistic and he writes for TV and film scripts.  In one mid-career novel, Child of Time, he has a couple whose child is stolen from them in a supermarket; in another, The Comfort of Strangers, a couple who seem to lack feeling get involved with a murderer in holiday to Venice. He’s interested in children; what they can see, and what they can’t, their simple and brutal view of the world, their anxieties and fearfulness and desire to play games, especially the games.

The later fiction shows a deep concern with how world of politics and their incorrigible effects on intimate alliances; the relationships within these novels reflect the changes—social, psychological, political—of the latter twentieth century.  The class barrier in Atonement is pernicious in its effects. Cecilia and Robbie leap to the conclusion that Danny did it.  Never Paul Marshall the man who grows rich putting candy in soldiers’ backpacks; there seems no risk he will have to go and fight

 McEwan participates in the really fine TV films made for the BBC in the 1980s; British film-makers had to turn to TV to make a living as the American film-makers took over their cinema market.  McEwan made The Ploughman’s Lunch and other films which show a detestation of the Thatcherite materialistic and anti-social era; she was a figure like Reagon, reactionary, turning the clock back deliberately to make a world of haves and have-hots, destroying unions, changing the tax code to punish the lower middle class, getting rid of social services.  The values that underly this were exposed and dramatized in movies of the 80s in the UK.

Recent turn to more compassionate, more traditional books have garnered him prestigious prizes: Booker Prize for Amsterdam. Other books are On Chesnil Beach, a young couple who know nothing of sex go on their honeyman.  He’s kept up his interest in film and he was one of the producers of the film Atonement and while he didn’t write the script he was there in all the changes, and editing and influenced it.

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Themes:

What happened cannot be undone

The irretrievability of acts; uselessness but need to atone by the person who committed the error or crime; ruthlessness and amorality of people (what is one to do with a slave-trader or say today a trafficker in women), the beauty and longing of history. There’s no doubting how the book and movie present us with this beautiful past.  The vase is broken irrecovably; fragile

On our social and political carnage of one another:   McEwan asks, What is responsible for the carnage?  Why do societies go out and murder in big numbers? People or men don’t refuse except a very few. Is it the life of establishment England (with its diplomats planning mass bombings, its rapacious businessmen, its repression of women, its maintaining of feudal class systems) being held responsible for the carnage visited on the poor bloody infantry at Dunkirk. How are we fooled as well as coerced:  Fantasy, day-dream, evasions, self-dramatization, all the powerful and dangerous work of the imagination, do battle with the facts, things as they are.

All this is realistic or part of traditional fiction; it is shot through with interiority of the characters minds: One of Robbie’s first statements is "’I was away in my thoughts."  Emily (sexually betrayed and subject to migraines, holds onto class status as all she’s got) ‘Her daughter was always off and away in her mind.’

Last moment they ever saw one another: she looks at him from bus: this recalls (among other films), The Remains of the Day and Lean’s Dr Zhivago

He watches her longingly

The movie is post-modern too: it’s imitating an old classic called Brief Encounter, a remarkably romantic woman’s film equivalent in status to Casablanca and made in the same year; In Which we Serve, a pro-war proganda film (very good by Noel Coward), Rebecca.  Also Robbie passes by a scene from  Le Quai des Brumes (1938, Jean Gabin, Michele Morgan) where hero and heroine (who resembles Keira Knightley in face uncannily) are kissing and talking. This film is said to be an example of "French poetic realism;" it’s described as "hauntingly sad, quietly emotional," & the story line is parallel to that of Atonement:  A young man, an army deserter, flees, falls in love in a small town, tries to create a new life with her; they are killed. Another one on longing for impossible happiness and the reality of loneliness. Wright is also thinking of movies of WW1 and 2 — like Coward’s In Which We Serve (also claimed as precursor movie)

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The house is photographed from within at odd angles: emphasizing its gothic like (church) architecture, its labyrinths

The artful design:

I. The structure generally, using my edition.

A. Large forms: three acts and a coda.  Act I, is chapters 1-14 and these are numbered, in my edition, pp. 3-239.  It opens with Briony and more or less goes back and forth between, one part for Robbie with Briony dominating

    Act II, pp. 243-341. This is unnumbered:  Robbie’s point of view or consciousness with Cecilia’s letter, ends on dream state

    Act III, pp. 345-451. Again unnumbered.   Briony’s point of view, again interspersed with letters by Emily, ends with initials BT, 1999 September the way a novelist might sign the last page of her novel

    Coda, pp. 455-480. The interview of Briony at 77 and devastating close.

B.  Some details: the movie does follow the hinge points of the novel in the order they come and makes the crucial moments of the book its crucial moments.

II. Details within that structure:

Opening miniature of what’s to come

Briony typing

Act or Part I

1. Chapter 1, p. 3, Briony opens and she’s writing her play

2. Chapter 2, p. 22. Cecilia’s point of view enters and the story of the exacerbated love of Cecilia and Robbie begins. In this chapter the vase is broken. The scene by the fountain — old romance. They discuss or mention Clarissa.

3. Chapter 3, p. 40: Back to Briony who is watching the scene by the fountain and does not understand it.

4. Chapter 4, p. 54: Cecilia’s point of view. She used to whisper Come back to Briony to bring her out of nightmares (reminding me of Helen bringing Decclan out of nightmares); and we hear her use this phrase to Robbie in his rages and despair. P. 59 she reminds me of the character Clarissa in her early obedience to family and family values.

5. Chapter 5, p. 70: Briony trying to rehearse play. We see Lola and get to learn about their broken home a bit.  Little sympathy for her mother, Hermioine, p. 84.

6. Chapter 6, p . 81. This the mother’s chapter, Emily, whose husband doesn’t come home, who spends as much of her life as she can in the bedroom in dim light. I suggest (we can’t tell for sure) that she is hearing Lola and Paul having sex through the wall on p. 89

7. Chapter 7, p. 92:  this opens with a scene that recalls Northanger Abbey and picturesque in movies of 18th century.  Briony looking at melancholy ruined temple, dreaming revenge. The style, mood and feel is Virginia Woolf like. She does not know it’s fake.  Narrator is there dropping ominous hints, p. 98, last sentence.

The beauty of the landscape is continually emphasized by shots

8. Chapter 8, p. 99.  Robbie’s one chapter and the tone is often bitter.  The cleaning lady’s son who has his politics to protect him. Cannot get rid of bad memories. Like Lovelace in Clarissa writing guarded memories, pp. 108-9. He is writing letter, about thinking and feeling behind letter rather than words. Words often used to cover up rather than reveal ourselves.  But resentment and genital needs come out and Freudian slip (?) he sends the wrong letter in which herites down the socially unacceptable and in our society ugly used word: cunt. Does include a small passage from Grace his mother’s point of view. pp. 110-113: she is happy to clean and cook for him; given no other outlet to show her love or services.

9.  Chapter 9. p. 122:  Cecilia: we get an inner history of this girl through her costume changes, p. 124. She can’t make up her mind what to wear and as she considers each garment her inner self comes out. In Clueless a teenage movie adapted from Austen’s Emma, this changing is a joke, not here. P. 139 McEwan’s hatred of Clarissa, the novel where a girl says no and has the right to say it, and the man is condemned rightly condemned.  Lovelace is upper class and not at all like Robbie in deep emotionality

10. Chapter 10, p. 145: Briony who has read the letter, her over-reading and disgust and fear p. 147 :he is incarnation of evil.  In this chapter Lola claims her bruises are given her by Jackson and Pierot but we have no proof of that and it seems unlikely. And then she sees them in the library. Repeat of misunderstanding of fountain scene only much worse.

11. Chapter 11, p. 159. Opens on Emily, super hot dinner. Narrator dropping hint: Lola subdued by physical assault, and in the next sentence’s it’s Paul who breaks the silence.  (Maybe like Akaki in The Overcoat Robbie should not have come; remember Ashoke told us that all life was there in The Overcoat, all we needed to know). Paul is scratched running parallel to his nose, Robbie sees it. Everyone having sex but Emily and children. Robbie comes in at p. 166.  Paul backs up Lola’s story, p 180

12. Chapter 12, p. 185:  we are back in Emily’s point of view, she is remembering the family history, real history, the books she read at university (as opposed to Rob’s listed earlier), and she was given nothing to do afterward. Her resentment of Rob is for herself. What has she been allowed to study?  to do in life. Leon’s moment, white with trouble, he’s not that bright if good-natured, p. 197

13. Chapter 13, p. 199.  Back to Briony and Robbie blamed. Evidence is heaped up but we are supposed to know it’s not so because we are supposed to trust to Robbie’s character.  She is out in the landscape.  Lola found. Someone seen escaping.  Briony says it was Robbie and Lola never denies this.

14  Chapter 14, p. 221.  The interrogation. Remembering back.

Act or Part II

Begins p. 243: Robbie’s consciousness, the prison, the march, Dunkirk.  Cecilia does reach him by one letter, pp. 272-74  Act of good faith. His mind ranges far and wide to childhood, and to a dream of a holiday, pp. 316-17. He writes it down to have it forever. Writing matters.  Words matter. Extraordinary landscape, p. 319  He goes back again and again to the final moments before the arrest and his life was ruined, over. Is this romantic? Is a life really ruined by one act? no retrievability. Depends.

Act or Part III

Briony writing a first draft of the novel we are reading

Begins p. 345.  Briony herself did not go to college, instead put herself under the tyranny of a nurse, self-punishing, p 353  We are told of Emily’s letters, p. 357-8 .Emily seems to know little of reality any more. Intensely moving scene of man with half his head blown off, and how she participates in a lie, pp. 393. So lies not always wrong.

pp. 401-405. Publisher’s kind letter: it won’t do, like Mrs Woolf, suggestions are there for us to see how to read Briony’s or McEwan’s book. It has a forward movement all right.

p. 428: the meeting and apology that never happened.

Coda, London 1999.

Begins p. 455, Briony, going back to the house, a vision of seeing Marshall’s wedding in film is dream-like not probable in the book it was in the past; back to house for party, it’s not Tilney’s hotel (a joke Henry Tilney hero of NA). Not an interview as in film, but that’s a good translatoin.

I find the close ambiguous. She wants to give them what they didn’t have, but they didn’t have it. She advertises that in a way. She says she no longer has the courage of her pessimism, could this be McEwan talking of the change in his own fiction. It is a final act of kindness too: is the demand to look at realty hard in the eye and insist on it with the idea you can change it, just useless and finally ill-nature. Better to pretend since life is going to get better anyway.

I suggest you can get "hold" of the book more easily by reading the screenplay which can act as a sort of outline or crib and the differences are interesting and revealing.

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Poignant close where the dying Briony tells us the reunion never happened; she made it up as she now lacks the courage of her younger pessimism

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The film

The house where most of the filming was done

Joe Wright and Christopher Hampton’s Atonement

We’ve already said they changed the emphasis, so that Act I in terms of time spent no longer than Act II (road to Dunkirk and Dunkirk) and Act III (Briony as nurse and the invented meeeting between her, Robbie, and Cecilia. It may feel longer because it has many rapid jump, cuts, and literally separate scenes, but the other two phases get as much time. It increases Robbie’s role and our sympathy for him.  Coda is not done by a return to the house, but an interview, what’s great is Vanessa Redgrave’s acting. She is so compassionate and yearning, her dream brings you to tears.

It’s important to contextualize a film-maker’s work with the other films.  We will concentrate on Wright though looking at the other movies Hampton has made would be fruitful too: he has made many costume dramas, a number set back in 18th century. We saw another play by him as a movie this term: Mary Reilly, only his script is a rewriting of an first script by Roman Polanski.

Wright made a movie of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in 2005, Universal Picture. The same crew just about are for both, the actress playing Robbie’s mother played Mrs Bennet, Keira Knightley the heroine, James McAvoy was in another Austen movie where he played Tom Lefroy supposed romance with Austen when young.  INteresting to compare because both are visionary and high romance:  we are led to believe in the ectascy of love and drawn to immerse ourselves in landscapes and feel highly repressed in houses.  Joy for the lovers must occur outside social conventions and norms.  Mostly silent — little dialogue in comparison with most movies, epitomizing lines rather.

In both movies the characters’ subjective inner worlds are made into landscape projections of their moods, with rapid & often wordless cutting & juxtaposition. Ian McEwan’s book Atonement imitates Virginia Woolf in its interiority and techniques, alludes to Northanger Abbey, uses picturesque landscape and poetry, and we have interjected flashbacks and repeated scenes (at the fountain, in the library) from the point of view of the character. He breaks realism.  Wright would repeat for example, the scene of quarrel in front of Briony at the window twice: first the way and what she saw, and the second, close up what Robbie and Cecilia were feeling and how she began to recognize her hostility as a cover-up.

Atonement is a masculinist rewrite of Clarissa, the film which is itself loaded with letters (like the 1991 film Clarissa), and uses the sound of a clacking typewriter throughout also to suggest to us what we are seeing is the product of Briony’s writing a novel; it’s symbolic, visionary, moving from rich interior to nightmarish exterior.

There were many driving walking sequences, marching to typewriter

Joe Wright said he was thinking of Brief Encounter and Rebecca (1939 version) when he made this film. These are piece of intense romance, about the love that never happened, never came off — which is again, a theme one finds in the Austen films, e.g., 1981 film of Sense and Sensibility for Willoughby and Marianne. Since the photography is spectacularly lush and the production design high costume romance, while Brief Encounter is associated with all that is drab and sober in look, I thought this colloquy revealing.

And then you’d find yourself in deep dreamy sadness — the insanity of what’s happening softened

Within the movie, in a dream-sequence Robbie passes before a large screen on which Le Quai des Brumes (1938, Jean Gabin, Michele Morgan) are kissing and talking. This is said to be an example of "French poetic realism;" it’s described as "hauntingly sad, quietly emotional," & the story line is parallel to that of Atonement. A young man, an army deserter, flees, falls in love in a small town, tries to create a new life with her; they are killed. Another one on longing for impossible happiness and the reality of loneliness. Wright is also thinking of movies of WW1 and 2 — like In Which We Serve.

Yet for me one of the film’s greatest and most powerful and memorable moments occurred when Brenda Blethyn as Grace Turner met the police car taking her son away with a huge stick, umbrella of some sort, risked her life confronting the vehicle and screamed and screamed, "Liars!  liars!  liars!" I’ll never forget it.  And there’s no accounting for it but the genius of the scriptwriter, director, producer and actress.

A memserizing photo of Keira Knightley:  all in greens

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Secondary sources:

To have a fuller context one really needs to look at these essays (Lee’s is online in public):  I’ve gone over the matter of some of them, but not all. For example, Finney connects Atonement to NA, both of which can be seen to condemn women’s imagination and novels:

* Brian Finney’s "Briony’s stand against Oblivion" in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Journal of Modern Literature, 27:3 (2004 Winter), pp. 68-82.
    * Hermione Lee’s review of Atonement, "If your memories serve you well …", The Spectator, 23 September 2001
    * Peter Matthews’s "The Impression of a Deeper Darkness", ESC: English Studies in Canada, 32.1 (2006): 147-160
      On 18C texts in Atonement you will also want to look at James Wood, "The Trick of Truth" in The New Republic, March 25 (2002), 28-29, and Greg Clingham, "Johnson, ends, and the possibility of happiness," in Samuel Johnson after 300 Years (Cambridge UP, 2009), 33-54.

An equally insightful and much less adulatory (critical) essay on McEwan’s book is by James Wood; it appears in the London Review of Books, Vol. 31 No. 9 · 14 May 2009 (it’s online, just google for it). It’s salutary, far less adulatory than much of what is written about McEwan today.  Wood shows that McEwan’s novels work through manipulation of suspense and the exploitation of "secrets.   

Ellen

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