Helen McMurran’s Spread of Novels, applies Bellos’s Fish in your Ear theory

To translate seemed to me a beautiful thing to do — Victorine de Chastenay on her beginning Radcliffe’s Udolpho

La Coeur et la raison: title of Goubert’s translation of S&S, so the allusion is to Pascal’s La cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas [The heart has its reasons, that the reason doesn't know]

Dear friends and readers,

I send along a brief review of Helen McMurran’s significant book. Her argument implies that creative and attentively alive linguistic translations as well as translations that paid close attention to changing the text to something acceptable to the targt culture were at the core of the spread of the novel across Europe.

Next up will be a two part evaluative review of Pierre Goubert’s study of Jane Austen: he finds out the traits of her mind and character as shown in the books and letters, and has himself written one of the powerful accurate translations of her book into French: La Coeur et la Raison, a translation that enables me to approach Austen’s text afresh the way Ang Lee’s great film adaptation (1995), together with Davies’ 2008 imitation also function. Goubert is much closer in spirit to Austen.

Then I’ll return to Austen’s letters, probably beginning with just Letter 95 (Jane from Henrietta Street, to Cassandra, at Godmersham, 3 Nov 1813).

What troubles me about the reviews of this book is most reviewers seem not to have bothered to read carefully enough to present its arguments about translation or simply (as usual) don’t care about translation studies to see its significance. Her views are consonant with David Bellos which a recent review of Virginia Woolf’s collaborative translations from the Greek with S. S. Koteliansky show hardly anyone takes into serious consideration. The writer found her alterations of Koteliansky deeply effective but had to dismiss it as not accurate, so wrote a muddled even puzzled account of the Hogarth project.

McMurran’s book is presented as having dual purpose: it also explains how novels spread and that was probably what attracted reviewers and a publisher as it’s what was mostly discussed by the reviews I read. The images in this blog are of translations of Austen into French from her own era. See Francophone Jane for listing.

This is Isobel de Montolieu’s translation: it contains her preface, a short life, and the whole of her text.

McMurran traces the history of translation in the 18th century. She argues that translation in the 18th century either refused to obey the norms of earlier translations which meant to obey the norms of classical culture as if it were universal; translations were also original (or idiosyncratic, depending on your perspective) in how they obeyed the target language’s literary norms (3). An influential study by Venuti divides translation types into domesticating or foreignizing. She says this division fails to take into account another way of thinking about translation. Before the 18th century the point of translating a text was to transmit it, and often the original and translated texts were used as learning tools.

Foreign language at the time was taught by method like Latin: silent, translating; in school texts we see words placed against one another as equivalents (9). (For my part I think this kind of study still essential in learning a new language.) You were transmitting the Latin and Greek (through Latin); your purpose to render and transmit; you produced what was understood and re-valued in original; you are engaging with, imitating, bringing up to date revered originals. There were classicists who did argue that a given text was not translatable, by which they meant it was necessarily at as good as the original. Such an argument would never be made when it came to Malory’s translations of 5 French romances into his romance epic of Arthurian Tales because the French texts were not respected (often not known). But it was applied in the case of Homer and Virgil especially. Now putting them into vernacular meant you were supposed to convey the essence of the author as you filtered it in your idiom. So Johnson complains that Pope loses the wild savage essence of Homer.

This Archipoche edition gives the complete and unaltered early 19th century translation of Austen’s MP as Les Trois Cousins by Henri Villemain.

In the later 17th century the historical sense was beginning to emerge, just glancingly but it was coming. People became aware that older texts were from another time and culture and the distance between themselves and this earlier time. They begin to update texts. The most infamous examples are the Shakespeare alterations in drama. 18th century scholars continue to see the much revered texts as partly timeless — not wholly as the verse imitations by Pope of Horace and Johnson of Juvenal show. But they never see the texts written in their own time as timeless. When they translate texts in their own time, they are not reviving or renewing. Translaters begin to see themselves as enriching their own readerships of their particular nation and language by translation. Literary translation becomes a transnational exchange; texts are seen as representative of a nation

Think of the difference between Curtius’s European Literature and Latin Middle Ages and Auerbach’s Mimesis

A very important sub-argument of this book is that translation in the era was not seen as hackwork. She has a long section showing simply that most translations we have were done of out love of a text, interest in it. Yes there were hacks, but they are in the minority because so badly paid. She suggests this sort of motive persists to our time.

It’s certainly true of Feneon’s Catherine Morland for Northanger Abbey which by chance, talent, perhaps spiritual affinity made this anarchist’s French text a genuine match for Austen’s:

The historical sense changed the way texts themselves were viewed in histories of the novel. Early histories of novel, starting from later 17th century just assumed earlier novels were written out of a universal impulse to tell a love or adventure story. They would connect texts across centuries and make no effort to discover if there was any author of the particularities of a time or place. De Sade’s history is the first person to look at circumstances and say the one romance comes from one culture and time and another from another. Scott developed this into an important insight: he was the first to begin to look at texts as forming national identity. Watt sidesteps all this to begin with new definition of novel that takes us back to universal aesthetic impulses (divided into neat binaries). But he too (McMurran does not say this) begins with this assumption there was something new in the 18th century which made a break with the past.

McMurran’s book may be a companion to Moretti’s Atlas of the Novel, showing us how much novels at the time represent an interaction between the French and English. But more importantly it’s an application of Bellos’s perspective on translation.

An anonymous 1816 translation of Emma, included in Valerie Cossy’s JA in Switzerland

McMurran tells us how trawling through catalogues tells us so little about the books — how nebulous and hard it is to make any sense of these catalogues, first pages, what little information is available and paratexts — and erects it into an understanding of the era as polymormous, as being indifferent to who the author was as they could not know. It was not until much later that it was admitted texts were changed to suit a political point of view, to sell to the taste of a public. Cossy’s book is an attempt to delve the people who produced the French translations of Austen, their political and personal views, and that of their immediate audience. It takes a long book to analyze just a couple of Austen’s translations (Montolieu, excepts from Pride and Prejudice) this way.

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This is Eloise Perks’s 1822 text unchanged

She then moves into the translations themselves. It’s interesting to see (from what evidence we do have) that in the early parts of the 18th century 30-35% of fiction read in the UK were translations from French, but as century wore on less and less translations, there were more indigenous English texts in the UK. In France the proportions move the other way: little translation from the English until mid-way and then a flood of English texts translated into French begins, but these English texts were (it’s important to recall) naturalized, made to reflect French aesthetic and moral ideals.

This is Isobel de Montolieu’s text unchanged; unfortunately Helen Seyres has altered Montolieu’s text (as well as title, to Raisons et Sentiments) for Archipoche, making the reprint worthless

McMurran then turns to “rendering practices” in prose fiction. She explains that she ascertained what 18th century translators did when they departed from their text. Well it depends and was individual, but two common resorts are amplification to make more vivid, or condensing to make more forceful. I’ve found that later is typical for the two good male French translators of Radcliffe, Soules and Morellet (and sometime also for the poorer ones, Moylin and Fourier, but they might do that for anyone). Amplification allows for change of perspective such as we see in Smith’s Prevost and condensing such as we see in Chastenay’s Udolpho.

Behn then studies Eliza Haywood’s translations. I did not know that Haywood translated a lot (as did Behn) and I cannot resist thinking both did it for money. Haywood looks to heighten the impression of the text. My respect for her went up when I learned that that she translated Boiguibert’s Marie Stuart, Reyne d’Escosse, Nouvelle Historique, Mary Stuart was an attraction to Madame de Lafayette too (in her Princess de Cleves as the wife of Francoise). Haywood wrote about her methods justifying them Apparently many have thought her Mary Stuart an original book; she also wrote a fictionalized biography, The Life of Madam De Villesache, but this one she presented as a translation.

This real interest in French reminds me of Aphra Behn’s really fine work in French which only recently has gotten some attention (mostly libertine love poetry).

Quite career for Eliza Haywood as a translator. What’s interesting is how she deviates from her texts. Most of the time I dislike her fiction intensely (even her more domestic later fiction) which I find sarky and heartless or crudely didactic — it matters to me what her strength is exercised for; but here she emerges with a certain humanity. I did not know she translated a good deal of Prevost’s Memoirs of a Man of Quality; this is astonishing really.

McMurran then has a matching section on La Place as a French translator of English texts; his translation of Oroonoko influential; he sympathizes intensely with the African characters as native Caribs in a history of Imoinda; he manages to go outside a Eurocentric view of these characters according to McMurran.

About mid-point in her book the cross-channel emergence of the novel becomes her topic. Again she sees translations as central; part of this was the emergence of the nation state, for the first time the idea a language is not easily translated into another because of cultural differences is voiced regularly. McMurran loos at de-nationalizing strands too and turns to look at Richardson’s novels in translation.

It’s here I left off, but will return eventually, but again I interested to see a new perspective (so many have studied Clarissaand Richardson in translation you see). The new perspective informs Robert Frail’s more recent enquiry into transation, A Singular Duality which again is defeated by reviewers who remain wedded to the idea a translation is first and foremost a crib of a specific text. See Gillian Dow. “A Singular Duality: Literary Relations Between France and England in the Eighteenth Century (review).” Translation and Literature 17.1 (2008): 127-131. Project MUSE. Web. 26 Feb. 2013. .

The modern Pleiade texts

McMurran begins with the idea that a national cosmospolitanism characterized the outlook of readers and translators alike in the 18th century; people read the second language of either English or France while they were in Europe. As there was intense hostility between France (and hence French and French book) and the UK (books in English) so there was also intense admiration. This too describes some of the motives for translating central to the function and nature of translated texts in the era.

A still from Victor Nunez’s Ruby in Paradise, an appropriation of Austen’s Northanger Abbey: the image resembles a common motif in women’s painting (e.g., Jane Freilicher).
Ellen

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Ghost stories and gothics: inside or outside? gender, real and/or projection, terror & horror, Kafkaesque

Claire Bloom and Julie Harris conveying frightened terror as they simply listen to incessant sounds coming from a house (The Haunting, 1963 from Shirley Jackson’s equally famous tale)

Dear friends and readers,

Although I’m no longer teaching gothics and ghost stories regularly, I have by no means given up reading and studying and writing about them. We read two on Trollope19thCStudies and three by Edith Wharton on WWTTA this winter solstice, and I was delighted to review Tyler Tichelaar’s Gothic Wanderer in the context of Teaching The Gothic (an MLA anthology of essays) this past fall.

A stimulating query was put on Victoria (a list-serv run by Patrick Leary) by Judith Flanders. Is it true as she just read that ghost occurrences in 19th century ghost stories tend to occur on bridges and marketplaces and in the 18th century in private houses? It seemed to me the most befuddled sociological-metaphysical “theorizing” must have given rise to such a notion, plus the person could not have read many ghost stories. So I answered the query in order to bring the subject back to accurate mapping.

Ghost stories are inward stories of terror, most often written by women and when not by women using heroes who are vulnerable, male victims in the position of the typical gothic heroine. The aesthetic techniques of many are those found in what’s called l’ecriture-femme, or women’s writing. One of the most famous where the ghost occurs in the streets (so marketplaces and perhaps bridges) is the mid-19th century Gogol’s “Overcoat.” Scrooge’s ghosts take him all over the streets, bridges, and marketplaces, as do all of Oliphant’s: “The Open Door” has them in the wood, so does Gaskell’s “Nurses Story” (out in the snow). Snow is deadly, stands for death in ghost stories.

There are few 18th century artful ghost stories until the later 18th century; those most famous are paradoxically at the same time strongly sceptical and the person who has the experience is lower-class, a servant. In Tom Jones Fielding has Partridge experience a ghost in a theater while he watches Hamlet. Later 17th and before and very early 18th century tend to see ghosts as manifestations of sin, an eruption from hell: the brilliance of one of the first artful narratives, Defoe’s “Appariton of Mrs Veal” is the question, has she gone mad? It does not matter where she is, the action occurs in her mind.

By artful I mean crafted by someone who is writing the story down or inventing a poem and at a distance from his or her material; not someone gripped by religious panic, fanaticism and ready to burn people (usually women) as evil. Ghost stories are not a joke; they come out of atavistic dangerous areas of the human mind.

I taught ghost stories for years. The artiful ones teach very well; they really tend to fall into a group of repeating patterns (evil, guilt, injustice/justice), lend themselves to precise definitions (a ghost is the soul/presence of someone who was once alive), and provide just the right amount of reading matter to give students for a presentation.

I like them for more reasons than I might care to say publicly here, but one I can is that they have a metaphysical dimension that’s central to them. The best single book on them since they became artful is Jack Sullivan’s Elegant Nightmares where he shows they are a sort of popular form of Kafkaesque. I can’t overpraise it or his Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural which has definitions of ghost stories and examples. I find introductions to good anthologies often have the best information and insight into them: Michael Cox for the Oxford sets, J. A Cuddon for an out-of-print excellent set, The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, What Did Miss Darrington (where the introduction used to be online somewhere). They do tend to be written by women (another anthology beyond the Victorian ones by Dalby is Restless Spirits), and a good book on the gothic which really tends to discuss the ghost story is Eugene Delamotte’s Perils of the Night.

The useful fault-line that is arguable, even demonstrable is between the ghost as really there, not just a psychological project, the ghost as both, and the ghost as sheer psychological projection. The three options make for different meanings. Some ghost stories continue to be all three but in modern ones (starting with 20th century, post WW1) there’s a strong tendency to opt for the last.

Sherlock Holmes violent labyrinth: The Adventure of the Cardboard Box (Sarah Findlay and Ciarhan Hinds as sister and brother-in-law)

Another is less easy to use, much more blurry but there as recognized by Radcliffe is horror versus terror. The ghost story hits the inward being and thus terrifies our inward being; the vampire breaks bodily taboos and is more a horror story, physical brutality and breaking of taboos a mark (stories of body snatching say belong here, especially from graves). The ghost story unnerves us, the horror tale disgusts. The Cardboard Box really moves into horror (ears are cut off the victim) as do many of Conan Doyle’s: his are more masculine gothic (see The Gothic Wanderer). It is true that the wild action takes place in the marketplaces of the world, but the ears are delivered to the women in their home Christmas time.

I offered a bibliography with The Gothic Wanderer; to that I’d like to add just for ghost stories:

Owen Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Palgrave)

Shane McCorristine, Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750-1920

Owen Davies’ five volume set: Ghosts: A Social History (Pickering & Chatto)–primary texts plus commentary, Reformation through the twentieth century.

Sasha Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007.

Gaslight on line is a wonderful place to explore; the original list-serv which was opened when the site was first built and then active and lively was a place for reading ghost stories from the 1880s to 1910s.

I don’t deny that in older anonymous folk and faery tales different kinds of criteria might be needed to understand and enjoy (if you do) them, and very recently feminist and post-modern re-vamping of police procedural and detective stories are evolving new psychological and sociological insights into what ghosts and gothics have to tell us.

One change is in the attitudes of the detached watchful figure (Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison)

Ellen

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East Central ASECS in the Baltimore Hyatt: women’s books & lives, infamous, respectable

Frontispiece for Phillis Wheatley’s poems

Dear friends and readers,

In this second of a two-part report on the EC/ASECS conference I attended a couple of weeks ago now, the themes of the papers and talks seem as much about what gains respect as what incurs infamy.

Papers and talks were on ways writers were pressured into presenting themselves in order to be heard at all, surprising underlying punitive and/or emotional patterns which are still with us; the difficulty (impossibility it seems) of breaking out of stereotypical expectations, frustrating publishers. Since two of the panels I went to were chaired by Eleanor Shevlin and were about book history, I also summarized a paper she read aloud to the Washington Area Print group last week on the publisher William Harrison.

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From a 2007 film adaptation of Justine

The session I chaired on Saturday (9:00-10:15 am) was originally intended (by me) to be about actresses, but as my call for papers turned up but one possible paper and I found I was not able to write a paper myself after all, I contented myself with the publication of my review of Felicity Nussbaum’s Rival Queens, and widened the scope of “R-e-s-p-e-c-t (yes I had Aretha Franklin’s famous song in mind) to include women in all working occupations and all ranks: “For actresses, women playwrights, working women, fictional heroines, and even aristocrats respect and favorable reputation matter.”
I’m delighted to say truthfully all three papers were excellent (I took more notes than usual) and the talk afterwards stimulating.

Kate Novotny spoke on “The Ethical Quicksand of Sade’s Justine: or, How to Win Readers and Offend People.” Mr Novotny went over the text, conventions and rhetoric of Sade’s Justine to show how Sade mediated his book’s shocking content in order to persuade his reader to listen to his philosophical point of view which (among other things) justified violence. His rhetoric relies on the similarity of his story to Richardson’s Pamela and other tales of virtuous lowly girl makes good. Justine is a satire on Richardon’s piety. Kate went over the text of Justine slowly, showing its use of familiar motifs. Lulled as it were, once we are reach the orgy, the fundamental nature of the text is an egoistic misogynist ethos. The strongest person is the best person and can or will not be controlled; one implication is that it’s a mistake to give women a voice at all.

In contrast, Sarah Hastings’s paper, “Vows, Whores, & Signs: Women and Words in Behn’s The Feigned Courtesans and The Rover shows Behn’s comedies hinge on a critique of mores that prevent women from exercising their power. Behn intermingles women who enact normative roles of virtue and who are prostitutes, gypsies are aligned and actresses identified with prostitutes. Failed servants survive through prostitution — indeed only through sexual flexibility can women survive at all, marriage being an exploitative commercial contract whose crux is a sexual-familial bargain. We see the mask of the courtesan allows her to enact agency and be pro-active on her own behalf; she is better off than the relatively helpless women who obeys norms of virtue. Women want to flee the world of men, be free from male control. Her stories foreground anxieties about marriage. Behn’s women want marriage to be partly based on compatibility (love). Tellingly Angelica Bianca is the only real courtesan in The Feigned Courtesans and wants to de-commodify herself; Helena wants a constant husband (while Willoughby wants an open marriage for himself). Behn’s plays reflect the world outside them too. Ms Hastings gave a brief history of the laws concerning prostitutes (made illegal under Henry VIII) and suggested an infinite series of steps exist between respectability and being called a whore; the class the woman belongs to affects how she is seen too. Women were treated as interchangeable objects. Market savvy women exploit these gradations and contradictions. During the civil war too there seemed to be a surfeit of women in civilian society, yet changes in customs which favored women.

From a 1986 production of Behn’s The Rover

Katherine Kittredge’s paper, “No Shame in Patchwork: Didactive Depictions of Laboring Class Girls” came out of her work on child poets and children’s literature in the long 18th century. Mr Kittredge asked how are laboring girls depicted in the 18th century? The improbability of Pamela not only gave rise to parody, it was felt not to be the strongly corrective narrative needed to train working class girls to accept their place and condition. The most famous of the didactic stories for girls was Goody Two-Shoes, the story of an itinerant orphan teacher who becomes respected and later marries up. Much harsher is the History of Susan Grey where an orphan becomes a washerwoman; when a captain goes after her, she is unjustly fired, flees, and dies a horrible death. We see the vulnerability of such a girl; ambition is dangerous; education and gentle behavior cannot change your status. In another story, the mother so busy with so many children that she can teach them only the catechism and her older daughter cannot be spared to attend school. Interestingly, in such stories we do not find upper class women teaching; the roles modeled insist on plain clothing, mending one’s clothes, and if the girl has fewer that suggests she will be safer: one good calico say and two other outfits. (She is not trying to get above herself.) Sewing or making clothes becomes a skill that creates community among women. These are proto-adult narratives that teach the girl that a laboring girl will never pass, they have an underlying paranoia that everyone is watching and punishments meted out. Later on in the century other standards than home-made few clothes replace these; now the girl has to be careful lest she make herself ridiculous because she has access to consumer culture.

Samantha Morton as Jane Eyre (1997 film)

The discussion afterwards was very interesting. One French scholar debated whether Sade had a discernible or consistent philosophy in Justine. Late on I thought of the Comus-like debate in Sade’s Marquis de Ganges but do not know if there are such passages in Justine. After all the papers all stayed within the 20 minute limit. I remembered Germaine Greer’s two part chapter in her Slipshod Muses where she argued that we have very few documents on Behn and suggested that much that has been said about her in biographies has no foundation. Greer thinks what evidence we have suggests Behn lived partly as a kept mistress and her playwriting was a way to help her make ends meet, not something she could really survive on. Thus her plays mirror her life’s experience. Ms Kittredge’s children’s stories anticipate Bronte’s Jane Eyre who has (we recall) only 3 dresses, two grey plain ones and one grey silk; she resists Rochester’s attempt to make her play a role above her status; she becomes a teacher, and she is rewarded for her selflessness. Even 20th century novels for women reflect these didactic “good girl” patterns: in Winifred Holtby’s socialistic radical South Riding, one of the heroines is very intelligent and her parents cannot afford to send her to school because her mother having too many children needs her at home. She is rewarded for her self-sacrifice when someone comes across with a scholarship for her; her great wish is to become a teacher like the primary heroine of the book.

Sarah Burton (Anna Maxwell Martin), the working class girl as teacher with her pupils behind her (2011 South Riding, an Andrew Davies’ product)

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Edward Young (1681-1765)

Eleanor Shevlin chaired two book history sessions. The mid-morning (10:30-11:45) had three papers whose particular topics — a woman poet, a bluestocking and saloniere who wrote letters and Richardson — were areas I’d worked on.

Jim May spoke first about the frustrations he’d experienced working on a half-volume for the Cambridge edition of Richardson’s complete correspondence. Prof May has been working for many years on Edward Young and his part was to edit the 28 Young-Richardson letters (6 from Richardson). He gave a brief history of the publication of this correspondence. Richard Phillips had bought Richardson’s letter ms’s, and commissioned Anna Barbauld to edit the papers inside 3 months (!) Peter Sabor has counted around 600 letters from Richardson and Barbauld included about 1/4 of these; she conflated, abridged, eliminated substantives. The texts are hard to read. Foundational work was done in the 20th century by Henry Petit and Harry Forester; it would be very hard to improve upon them. PRof May handed out a xerox of letter by Mary Hallow, Young’s housekeeper who had a close relationship with Young. The problem is Cambridge’s policies which do not include information on punctuation, variants and have other restrictions so hat Prof May will intends to publish an essay which includes the notes not permitted in order to get the material he has added.

Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800)

Eliza Child’s paper on Elizabeth Montagu’s “Letters from the North: Marriage, Power and Coal” was fascinating to me. I had known Montagu was involved in her husband’s mines (a central source of their great wealth), but not how active, how interested in industry, genuinely knowledgeable and (for her time) benevolent or at least just to the workers. It was another outlet for her imagination, altruism, sensibility. She chaffed at the limitations her husband imposed on her. Ms Child told us about Montagu’s entrepreneurial activity at Denton, a mining community; she had the confidence to persuade her husband to risk capital expenditure. Sections from Montagu’s candid letters were read aloud (she does not want to “lose” money “merely to avoid a little trouble”); her husband was more cautious (we heard her urging him “to act”, that he got “angry” but when “money came into his pocket” is gratified). She had hoped to be seen with Voltaire and Johnson in her “Essay on Shakespeare”; here she could be socially useful. She enacted fair hiring practices (contracts were short-term), opposed fixing prices (cabals), broke ranks with their peers over these issues. Her sister, Sarah Scott’s Sir George Ellison, is a model of benevolent capitalism. She also had effective charities: set up schools, gave material assistance to children to learn to read, for girls to knit and spin. These letters can provide a conterpoint to how women are often depicted in the 18th century novel where we often find them victimized by wealth.

Felicia Hemans, recent edition of her poems and letters

Alex Grammatikos spoke on “The Nothingness of Fame, At least to Women: Felicia Hemans and the Price of Celebrity.” Mr Grammatikos’s paper showed how Hemans was gradually pressured into presenting herself in the most conventional poetess sort of ways because she saw that not to do so left her vulnerable to criticism for her private life: she separated from her husband after having 5 children by him in 5 years; she turned to her mother who took care of the children while she spent her days writing and reading. She was also ignored or seen as inferior to the male poets. When she presented her work as that of a women of sensibility (and wrote poems to suit) she was successful. In her letters we see her say that she has no friends to help her promote her work as an author. She tells one correspondent how her previous poems were not successful because their subject was “not to be seen from a female pen.” She read reviews which focused on her femaleness and she redirected her career. There was a considerable gap before she could get a book of poems published again and when she did, she writes in the sentimental vein (“Records of Women”) for which she became famous. Mr Grammatikos felt Hemans resented this identification and Byron’s mockery of her as a “he-mans” was grating. But there was no breaking out of these stereotypes. So the phrase “nothingness of fame” was hers and refers to her sense of her true selfhood as lonely and suppressed.

Once again the talk afterwards was very interesting. I regret I was not able to get most of it down because so much was give-and-take. I can remember best what I contributed which was that I reviewed a Cambridge edition of Austen’s later manuscripts (which is supposed to be published this spring) and found the edition to be a missed opportunity; the choice of documents showed the series had not been thought through (so one had “everything else” including early manuscripts and not all the late ones); it was said to be for students and yet the price was outrageous and notes veered between minute erudition and high school-type explanations; it was basically a reprint of Chapman without Chapman’s apparatus.

There were two more lively talks (Phillis Wheatley, Kathy Temple on William Blackstone’s Commentaries); another session from which I briefly summarize 2 papers, and on November 9th (a few days later) Eleanor Shevlin’s paper on “The Making of the English Novel,” the role of periodical subscription magazines and newspapers; for summaries of all this see the comments.

Ellen

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

Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840), Sylphide

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

What indeed?

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

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To begin with her life:

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

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

Take your choice:

Her birthplace, Burg Hülshoff in Havixbeck, Germany

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friedrich, Abbey in the Oakwood

The Jew’s Beech, another Scheherazade tale:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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Lucasta Miller’s Bronte Myth(s)

I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure, born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld; or offered only at a price I cannot afford to pay —Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

I am Heathcliffe — Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

Poeple little know the injury they do to children by laughing at their faults, and making a pleasant jest of what their true friends have endeavoured to teach them to hold in abhorrence … [my employers had] a surprising effect in repressing all familiar, open-hearted kindness, and extinguishing every gleam of cordiality that might arise between us … I was used now to wearing a placid smiling countenance when my heart was bitter within me. Only those who have felt the like can imagine my feelings, as I sat with an assumption of smiling indifference — Anne Bronte, Agnes Grey

The Bronte house in Haworth

Dear Friends and readers,

I’ve been away for about 5 days during which time I read a couple of books I’d long wanted to read — mostly because of the way I heard academic colleagues talk about them: one was Lucasta Miller’s The Bronte Myth, which seemed ever to be accompanied by phrases meaning Miller had at long last (relieved tones here) freed the Bronte sisters from a context just filled with falsehoods. Now I know that the Brontes are yet another literary group of women around which a fan cult of sentimental emotionalisms and present day (not just Victorian) identity politics swirl. The question was, what was so inaccurate or were the people advocating the book referring rather to skewed presentations. It did not sound as if it was the latter. So I was even eager to know what I had been mistakenly believing.

It turns out to be highly debatable whether the Bronte stories are filled with inaccuraries. Rather the obstacle for understanding the books partly by understanding the lives and other writing or art of the writers was a matter of prejudiced and unexamined interpretation and emphases, some of which simply is that the popular audience prefers to learn not so much all they can about writers’ lives rather than study their books, but what will reinforce their own belief system. Lucasta Miller’s book is valuable because she really treats so many biographies (novelizing and non-fiction) of Charlotte and Emily, and offers a detailed picture of what scholarly and primary documents there are to study. She often also seems to be correcting various inaccurate details about major people in the Brontes’ lives.

But alas, not always. She also produces her own biases, most often when it comes to presenting Charlotte and Emily as suffering from having been made victims. What she wants to do is substitute another ideal or norm, one as feminist (in her book a very ambiguous word) as any she attacks: she is concerned to make us see Charlotte (and Emily at times as well) as bright (in tone), ambitious, resilient, robust career (need I use the word net-workers) women, thwarted perhaps, but more from death than any particular local injustice. The portrait reminded me of the one nowadays replacing the older view of many a Renaissance woman writer as withdrawn, austere, with a new assumed stereotype, a woman whose main goal is her career, someone who resembles a modern woman academic.

Charlotte Bronte (1850) by George Richmond

Emily Bronte (n.d.) by Branwell Bronte

Anne Bronte is mostly omitted as someone not needing such whole-scale re-drawing; she has only recently been paid adequate attention to and is from the get-go being presented as fighting robustly for women’s rights. The bitter caustic quality of Agnes Grey, its strong depiction of the social world as dysfunctional is ignored by Miller in favor of briefly describing and praising Anne’s nowadays conventional targeting of alcoholism and feminist critique of permanent marriage bonds.

I find Miller’s book to be in fact a continual sustained and unfair attack on Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography as well as “the interfering” Gaskell who is (somewhat ironically) presented as a normalizer (see my other blog for Gaskell analyses). Miller is concerned to defend Patrick as good father who encouraged all his children to read. Nowhere though do we learn his income (which would account for much misery) nor why he left his daughters at Cowan Bridge. Charlotte’s husband, Arthur Nicholls may be perfectly understandable his distaste for publicity, but that Charlotte married him rather than George Smith or someone else does seem to be the result of her less than acceptable status as a clergyman’s daughter (the Austens had trouble marrying out of their immediate clan too). We are told they are misrepresented but are not given evidence beyond thumbnail sketches which turn them into common modern-like decent men. She even (though not wholly unexpectedly since her sympathies do not encompass Branwell), justifies Mrs Robinson or Lady Scott (Branwell’s employer who may have committed adultery with him) as within her rights to defend her reputation. Lady Eastlake’s withering scorn and resentment of the low governess-writers is not clearly brought out.

To Miller, the isolation of these women, their deprivation, the instilled class insecurity and stigmas, were all exaggerated, much of it the product of Gaskell’s determination to excuse them for having written their radically shocking novels (which Gaskell is presented as mostly disliking), perceived by Gaskell as a danger to the careers of women like herself. By the time she finished describing Haworth village it sounded like the apparently cheerful and business-like corner mall near my house. It may be that Gilbert and Gubar’s interpretation of Bertha Mason as a double for Charlotte herself is not one Charlotte would have recognized and it may be the way the Brontes regarded their neighbors shows their own desperate narrowness and alienation (which would include an attack on sexualized women such as Bertha is supposed to represent), but it is a legitimate way of our understanding Charlotte’s novel.

I wondered if Miller had read Mary Barton, arguably just radical and threatening (to the capitalist establishment). If so, she does no justice to Gaskell’s own complicated politics (though she quotes Jenny Uglow now and again).

Miller’s defensiveness about Emily is especially fierce and tendentious. No Emily was not angry that Charlotte tried to publish her poems; of course she would have wanted them published. She probably didn’t like the patronizing. Emily was a fully conscious and even learned (two translations from the Latin in Emily’s younger hand exist) writer. She was not a pantheistic mystic. She was probably often “happy and relaxed” when alone. Miller’s way of retelling the story that Charlotte told Gaskell of how Emily kept and once cruelly beat a bulldog into quivering submission, wounding the animal is typical. Miller scrutinizes Gaskell’s imagery as melodramatic and therefore not worthy of belief. Then she quotes a servant “who could remember nothing of it.” Hareton’s cruel hanging of animals in Wuthering Heights is offered up as influencing Gaskell’s anecdote when the text could just as well represent a lingering memory of Emily’s own behavior. Within 10 pages, the incident has become the “dog-beating caricature” (see pp 224-33). We are to dismiss it as exaggerated if not wholly untrue.

Emily (it is implied and also said) is just not explainable. She is too private. Is she? Miller asks us to read many of the poems as about characters in the fantastical sagas of Emily’s younger imagination. Do they then have nothing to do with her?

I don’t mean to say Miller is obtuse or hides evidence: she retells the story of Heathcliff to show how disturbingly sadistic and vengeful he becomes.

The 1991 film of Wuthering Heights which presents both generations and Ralph Fiennes as an searingly angry half-crazed man is a perceptive enactment

She tells of a new find of translations from the Latin by Emily which are accompanied with sketches by her of a man holding a boy up by his hair; he is about to beat the boy in front of another man. Another man is flogged next to a heap of corpses. Miller wants us to believe these are extrapolations from Horace’s text where there is an allusion to Medea. But this is not the Medea story (pp. 286-87).

For some texts Miller is particularly good, e.g., Charlotte’s rich analyses of Lucy’s breakdown in Villette (though not as willing to bring in Heger as an explanation). Her analyses of Emily’s poetry, especially when she separates out the original lines from those Charlotte rewrote or added to, together with her probable list of books read by all four Brontes gives us a literary context to understand Emily’s work in.

But she is obfuscating. She distrusts biographies as legitimate art and the biographical as a legitimate approach; one can predict how she will judge a critic by how he or she regards biography. Henry James is used as an insightful authority because he inveighed against the uses of biography. Mary Robinson’s biography with its original emphasis on Branwell becomes “an exercise in moral rehabilitation,” “biographical apologia” (pp. 238-43). Repeatedly the implication of Miller’s responses to the Charlotte’s letters and Emily’s leftover fragments to whomever is they are performances, a kind of personating an identity, and letters are the very lifeblood of biography. What then do we do with Emily’s student essay, “The Butterfly:”

Nature is an inexplicable puzzle, life exists on a principle of destruction; every creature must be the relentless instrument of death to the others, or himself cease to live (quoted not by Miller, but by Bluestone in his chapter on the 1939 film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, in Novels into Film, p 109).

Miller does make an exception for Rebecca Fraser’s The Brontes: Charlotte Bronte and Her Family, one of the few biographical texts Miller praises. This one too is often praised and I wanted to read it for the same reasons I wanted to read Miller: to help me see what is accurate and inaccurate. Now (from Miller’s descriptions admittedly) I realize Fraser’s contribution is also to target Gaskell’s biography as what has to be done away with, to use biographical methods comes up with a strong defense of Patrick Bronte and to normalize Charlotte in terms of modern academic career women’s lives and goals.

Patrick Bronte in old age

In the the later parts of the book Miller has an easy time making fun of modern novelizations by pop authors, filmic and textual versions of the Brontes’ lives, but again makes her academic norms and life biases clear when it came to dealing with recent writers. Recalling how recently free adaptations of texts have found more favor with critics than faithful ones, she praises post-modern playful fictions with play with the biographical facts.

Oddly (except he is such a respected figure), she is careful to take Hughes’s appropriation of Emily Bronte seriously: “it reflects his impulse to clear up the mess left by Plath’s suicide by imposing a fatalistic order.” What should have been said is his impulse to erase how much he was to blame for his adultery and desertion of Plath. We see how she is careful to distinguish her heroines from Plath’s misery, whom she half-blames while (very much in her vein of wanting to deny death-wishes in her women writers) mentioning how “other commentators on Plath’s suicide reject the idea that it was an inevitability” and suggest maybe “she did not really want to die and expected to be saved” (pp. 279-80). I suppose that’s why she sealed the room she gassed herself in.

The book is an eye-opener certainly — but one where Miller is trying to substitute a new modern academic career woman stereotype for a more complicated and in some ways historically accurate portrait which emerges from a careful reading of traditional and recent scholarship. She exposes herself and the world she is praised by, as much as she does her variously respected, resented and mocked targets. What we get is a suggestive new Bronte myth. Pace all Miller says, Gaskell’s book is a masterpiece of imaginative and biographical art and offers rich insights into all three Bronte sisters’ work. It’s carefully substantiated, thick ethnography too. If Gaskell is silent, reticent, evasive when it comes to a presentation of Charlotte’s sexuality so too is Miller, especially when she gives no alternative for Freudian-psychoanalytical & hidden-injury-of-class approaches.

Elizabeth Gaskell (in 1854) by Samuel Lawrence

The Brontes lived a hard inward life in Yorkshire, a deprived life as young women in an awful school, they had few opportunities for advancement of any kind, and three young died, within one year (Emily is a kind of rage) and Charlotte not long afterward, of a pregnancy she should not have risked. The reader can also use Miller’s book as a sort of encyclopedia for Charlotte and Emily as it cites & describes so many sources and criticisms, including Patsy Stoneman’s.

Ellen

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