Persuasions, the JASNA journal 43 (summer 2022): Charles Austen & Slavery & Martha Lloyd; Blackface in High Life Below Stairs; Miss Bates’ soft power carries her through

Cassandra’s drawing of Jane Austen (I’m sure this is accurate)

When once we are buried you think we are gone
But behold me immortal! …
— from Written at Winchester on Tuesday, the 15th July 1817

Friends and readers,

Mid-summer and the anniversary of Jane Austen’s death. The least I can do is return to Austen blogging: for this somber occasion, Vic Sanborn has written a new blog, and I can refer the reader back to one where I link Austen’s very last poem, offering a different take on Austen’s experience of life as shown us over her books, a tone different from Vic’s, but just as earnest in my sorrow that Austen died so young. I’ve just watched the new Netflix Persuasion, featuring, as I’m sure you are tired of hearing, Dakota Johnson as a re-made Anne Elliot (more on that and the current state of Jane Austen movies in the next blog).

Dakota Johnson (Anne Elliot) and Cosmo Jarvis (Wentworth, apparently a rock star) are the latest couple

And I’ve been perusing Persuasions, the JASNA journal No 43 (Summer 2022), and while most of the papers show the usual careful conventionality of approach to Austen (ever balanced, conservative in outlook, almost apolitical), and an underlying hagiography which undermines or shapes what is on offer, there is also the usual feast of information and insight if you care to study the whole issue. So for this blog I’ve singled out four essays I thought of immediate interest to us today: countering the dishonesty and complacency of the Austen world has been guilty of (me too).

The first part is a gathering of essays on the subject of Jane Austen and the arts, only the perspective isn’t that of the anthology I reviewed on this topic a while back:

Charles Austen, thought to have been painted around 1810, in the uniform of a captain

Credit where credit is due: the perspective is much more non-traditional: the authors go to places you might not expect and treat as serious art or politics what you might not think of as art or a document to be read politically (philosophically) in the first place. For example, draftsmanship training the Austen brothers had in the Naval Academy: what is left is treated as serious art. This perspective turns up stuff that is overlooked.

So first up I call attention to Devoney Looser’s essay, whose content is repeated more briefly in a recent Times Literary Supplement for July 8, 2022, “Heroics at Sea,” p 5.. Charles Austen has been presented as acting to “crush” slavery during his career as a captain aboard a British ship bound to capture any ship with enslaved people on it, free them, and punish the perpetrators. The “honest” truth (Looser is calling for honesty) is not quite what has been implied.

In 1826 the Aurora captured and boarded the Nuevo Campeador, and a brief paragraph was printed (and reprinted, went viral insofar as one could in 1826) to suggest that Charles Austen as captain was actively “crushing” the slave trade. The devil (as they say) is in the details. A group of lines indicate 250 people in chains, closely kept in filth and starvation. Someone threw a yam and it’s remarked how the enslaved people behaved over this like angry maddened dogs. Well who would throw a yam? It reminds me of how Trump throw a roll of toilet paper at an audience of Puerto Rican people after that first horrific hurricane during his regime. Then what happened to these people? papers of emancipation were handed out but what else. Looser’s research (based on that of others) finds that most of the time such enslaved people ended re-enslaved or in conditions nearly as bad as the one they were headed for — the mortality rate very high. Nothing whatever done for them. Tellingly the most interesting detail is how the captain was allowed to escape. He had some excuse of his dangerously ill wife — of course he must be allowed off the ship. Surprise, surprise. He never returned. Nor was there any attempt to capture and punish him legally for his crime. Captain Austen probably got his prize money when the ship was finally brought to port; Looser doesn’t mention this so I wouldn’t be so sure. The key to so many written documents about slavery or state-sponsored piracy at sea is how evasive the content usually is.

It is significant that Looser was able to be much clearer and more emphatic in the TLS than Persuasions.

The first essay in the volume, Julienne Gehrer’s “Martha Lloyd and the Culinary Arts at Chawton cottage, a long piece on Martha Lloyd’s cookery book teaches us a lot about the intense closeness of Martha Lloyd to Jane (and Cassandra Austen). Written with more “honesty” (I’ll call it) we read here much evidence of Jane and Martha’s close (lesbian dare I say) attachment, which I have written about elsewhere on this blog.

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A contemporary illustration of a stage production of High Life Below Stairs: a coachman, cook, and household servant all drunk refuse to open the doors of their quarters to their employers

Moving right along to the Miscellany: there are two items of note. One developing further Looser’s call for honesty on a farcical drama often misrepresented in effect; and the other breaking with a conventional conclusion about Miss Bates, but as in the manner of most of the Persuasion articles, doing it without disquieting us, and in a sense re-asserting a conventional value: how useful is social networking.

Lesley Peterson’s “Race and Redirection: Facing Up to Blackface” is absurdly prefaced by a black letter warning: This essay contains language and images that may be disturbing or harmful to some readers. It’s such thinking that leads to banning books and essays like this from schools. The usual over-interpretation frames the honest content. Peterson believes that Austen’s thin, short play, The Visit, owes a great deal to a popular farce by James Townley, High Life Below Stairs. There is a single simple allusion to the Townley play and the Austen family (this is what is interesting) acted High Life Below Stairs as amateurs at Steventon. Peterson’s whole outlook comes out of studies like Penny Gay’s and Paula Byrne’s which have Austen as knowing just about every play ever acted on the 18th century theater, with a phenomenal memory, and inspired to write her novels by details in many of them. The person wanting to write a book called Jane Austen and the Theater is certainly in good luck.

What is new here and so dreadfully distressing is Peterson actually read Townley’s play, and, unlike those who have written about it before (e.g., Byrne), brings out how two of the servants below stairs are black. Probably enslaved people because the white servants resent them for not having salaries. What’s more insult them. I hope I need not repeat the ugly stigmatizing of these black servants’ looks and clothes, and a humiliating ritual (presented as comic) they go through on stage. The story of the farce is about how two “masters” (employers) decide to infiltrate (like moles) below stairs in order to see if their servants are as lazy and over-fed as they surmise. Surprise, surprise, they are. As lazy and overfed. The sneers here are just shameless — the play’s content reminds me of people in my neighborhood who are home-owners talking of tenants as if tenants were an ontologically untrustworthy inferior species.

Full disclosure: I read the text in Garrick’s abridged version in a 5 volume 1805 collection of plays I once (every so luckily) picked up in a Chichester book shop (The British Drama, comprehending the best plays in the English language published by William Miller, Bond Street, printed by James Ballantyne, Edinburgh, 1804 — 2 volumes of comedies, 2 of tragedies, 1 of operettas and farces, with 3 prefaces telling the history of the genres). I confess I never read High Life Below Stairs until last night. I was content to read other people’s descriptions of it. So I am grateful to Peterson.

Peterson of course absolves Austen of all snobbery: she claims The Visit shows Austen would have been very alienated by the masters’ plot: alas, The Visit has a very different story (a very slender one). Basically we can’t say what Austen thought of the story matter of High Life, nor do we know if the Austens played the servants’ parts in blackface. For myself I venture to suppose they did not as it would have been great trouble to blacken two people’s faces and then clean the material off. An illustration from the era printed by Peterson suggests an actual black person (negroid) playing KIngsston, the male black servant. The female, Chloe, is given hardly any lines. OTOH, I remember Jane Austen in her letters referring to musical performers as hirelings. In fact because of the apparently necessary hagiography towards Austen, her essay only somewhat faces up to its content.

Of the at least six actresses playing Miss Bates, for me Sophie Thompkins was the most moving even if in he candied 1996 Miramax Emma: here she is at the moment of realizing Emma’s humiliating mockery of her (1996 Emma, scripted McGrath)

The last essay I have room to report on here (I am trying to keep these blogs shorter), is Diane Reynolds’s “‘I am not helpless:’ Miss Bates as the Hidden Queen of Highbury.” It makes it into the printed edition (there is a hierarchy here, and those essays online are paradoxically often by “lesser” people. Reynolds treats Miss Bates being treated with full respect, hardly any qualifications. That’s unusual. Amanda Vickery is one of the voices who does. Reynolds argues that Miss Bates’s “logorrhea” (Tony Tanner’s word and I cannot resist it for its force and felt accuracy) are in part a conscious put-up job, and cover-up.

I’ve written postings and blogs to argue Miss Bates knows about Frank and Jane’s engagement (how could she not?) and if you read this logorrhea in place (at the ball, at the alphabet game, when the piano comes, and especially towards the end when Jane has been physically sick from Frank’s punishing treatment and Mrs Elton’s unbearable needling and pressure), Miss Bate’s words & stance protect Jane – one stance comes to mind of so many – when Jane is seen to not be able to find her wrap. Frank comes over and so it’s a moment very like the one where Miss Bates declares she is not helpless. Arguably, says Diane, Jane Fairfax is “the novel’s true heroine.”

I loved her characterization of Emma “uphold[ing] a hierarchy,” “pour[ing] out her uncensored venom.” Yes she has a “horror” of “being in danger of falling in with the second rate and third rate of Highbury who were calling on them forever” (we are to see that we see only a sliver of those who come and leave their cards or whatever).

By contrast to Emma, who is isolated except for those she choses to come under her domination (Harriet in the novel), Miss Bates is “continually in company” and we are told today and many believe that networking is power – to know a lot about neighbors and others is a kind of power.” Emma emerges as pathetic by your account. But I would qualify here that from what we see of Emma’s thoughts, just about everyone Emma meets she despises, she is bored by or can’t stand. It’s interesting whom Emma befriends, since she so little understands them. That suggests they are objects to her and she cares little about them (Harriet she drops with no problem, Frank too). Reynolds uses Rilke to justify her use of sub-textual matter (invisible) kept hidden, in the background and her reading against the grain.

The unconventionality here is the non-complacent depiction of Emma. The way some at JASNA talk of Emma has sickened me. Yet we must acknowledge Emma is super-rewarded at the lengthy end of the book – by contrast and similarity Jane Fairfax shows an inability to take too much company; she too loathes it but it of course susceptible to outrageous intrusive comments the way Emma is not. Myself I find a good deal of Jane Austen in both heroines. I also like the looking askance at the supposed deep understanding friendship of Austen and her niece Fanny Knight. In one of her letters to Fanny I feel Austen gives away she looks at Fanny as an amusing object for scrutinizing ironic study.

There is or could be a problem in claiming so much power for Miss Bates, except that Reynolds calls Emma a “magical” world and in that paragraph remind me of Trilling’s now old once well-known introduction to Emma where he declares it an idyllic or pastoral world where reality is sufficiently put aside so that we can laugh at or love these “imbecile” characters because in such an environment they don’t come to harm. What I mean to say is Miss Bates’s is what is nowadays called “soft power,” and soft power doesn’t go very far when you are ejected from your dwelling and have nowhere to live. Emma may mock, but Miss Bates, pace Mr Knightley’s justified worried sympathy (or maybe he is right), does not end up homeless because the marriage comes off. Highbury is not an Indian village and its financial customs and laws work very differently.

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Honesty is the new aegis in some of this collection. But honesty about Jane Austen, given the constituents of her fan-clubs, and the need for academics to sustain a position at their US universities (not exactly over-funded or bastions of anything near economic liberalism in the mid-20th century sense), and sceptical, well-informed (on Martha Lloyd’s movements), candid and against the grain looks at the plays and novels involved can go only so far.

Ellen

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000): Foremother poet, African American Sharp Radical

From a recent essay on Brooks by Doreen St Felix (New Yorker, 2018)

To Prisoners

I call for you cultivation of strength in the dark.
Dark gardening
in the vertigo cold.
in the hot paralysis.
Under the wolves and coyotes of particular silences.
Where it is dry.
Where it is dry.
I call for you
cultivation of victory Over
long blows that you want to give and blows you are going to get.
Over
what wants to crumble you down, to sicken
you. I call for you
cultivation of strength to heal and enhance
in the non-cheering dark,
in the many many mornings-after;
in the chalk and choke.

Dear Friends and readers,

We cannot let Black History Month pass by on this blog without remembering, praising, attempting to characterize the wonderful poetic oeuvre of Gwendolyn Brooks.

What I want to say about her is I was all wrong, and the reason I want to start this way is to suggest to for many readers, and probably white especially, it’s possible the poems you have come across are from her earlier poetry more seemingly (and in truth) conventional in values and stereotypes than her middle and later periods. When it’s a case of one or two poems in an anthology or on a page of selections, inevitably you read her “the mother:” today it prompts anti-abortion religiously-rooted utterances, insisting on the centrality of motherhood to women, without any memory or awareness of how powerless women as mothers are in reality, and especially Black women whose sons and daughters can still be casually killed on the street with impunity. One comes across poems which, when read in isolation, seem to portray a picture of young colored girls sheltered from reality, seeking the most obvious treats, stereotypes which belong in a 1930s movie.

To me some of these early poems seem to accept the impoverished life inflicted on Black people. They are often written from a child’s point of view.

A song in the front yard (from her earlier period)

I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now
And maybe down the alley,
To where the charity children play.
I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.
They have some wonderful fun.
My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine
How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine.
My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae
Will grow up to be a bad woman.
That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late
(On account of last winter he sold our back gate).

But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do.
And I’d like to be a bad woman, too,
And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace
And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

In later years she was sarcastic over her Anniad (still said to be modeled on Virgil’s Aeneid, when in form and imagery it’s surely Chaucerian and reminiscent of medieval European romances): in one interview I’ve come across she says she won the Pulitzer for it and Annie Allen because its learning was snobbery. She calls its allusive techniques (which surely she worked hard on) pompous; she says to her the Pulitzer is a pleasant salute.

Brooks evolved; when you’ve read her middle and last poems, in retrospect these earlier ones read quite differently — she is first of all writing “seriously the inner lives of young Black women: their hopes, dreams and aspirations;” depicting how they become part of a community (painfully); the “day-to-day struggle” within European forms, genres. In her interviews and some quotations from her scattered prose, I find that like many another brilliant person, she hated going to parties, and struggled to find her own voice, and people she was compatible with, to discover what would be a good time for her. She also fits into Annie Finch’s perspective and defense of the poetess tradition of white American women from the 19th through mid-20th century — rhymes, strong formal elements, strong sentiment.

So I’ll call the sonnet-like sequence called Womanhood middle period and invite the reader to read and listen to this vimeo

These poems on womanhood for Black women are not paid enough attention to. What is preferred are the shorter poems or those about Black man.
They are superb and present a continuum of Black manhood as experienced in the US. Read her Negro Hero: to suggest Dorie Miller: the man who lived and died, a reading of the poem. She can take on a male voice, and speaks for central Black young men in the 20th century.

Paul Robeson

That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.

Malcolm X
———
for Dudley Randall

Original.
Hence ragged-round,
Hence rich-robust.

He had the hawk-man’s eyes.
We gasped. We saw the maleness.
The maleness raking out and making guttural the air
And pushing us to walls.

And in a soft and fundamental hour
A sorcery devout and vertical
Beguiled the world.

He opened us –
Who was a key.

Who was a man.

And also in rage:

The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

In her last phases (last quarter of 20th century), she became a plain-spoken quietly angry, sarcastic poet, pithy, vivid, chronicler of African-American life using both its own development within literature, in the contemporary social roles chosen and inflicted, with an awareness of Black music (jazz) and visual art. I now find her a deeply moving urban poet, terse, epigrammatic, using free forms, speaking symbolically, allusively.

Read her Primer for Blacks.

To those of my Sisters who kept their Naturals
Never to look a hot comb in the teeth.

Then this late poem:

To an old Black woman, Homeless and Indistinct

1.
Your every day is a pilgrimage.
A blue hubbubb.
Your days are collected bacchanals of fear and self-troubling.

And your nights! your nights.
When you put you down in alley or cardboard or viaduct,
your lovers are rats, finding your secret places.

2.
When you rise in another morning,
you hit the street, your incessant enemy.

See? Here you are, in the so-busy world.
You walk. You walk.
You pass The People.
No. The People pass you.

Here’s a Rich Girl marching briskly to her charms.
She is suede and scarf and belting and perfume.
She sees you not, she sees you very well.
At Five in the afternoon, Miss Rich Girl will go home
to brooms and vacuum cleaner and carpeting,
two cats, two marble top tables, two telephones,
shiny green peppers, flowers in impudent vases,
visitors.
Before all that there’s the luncheon to be known.
Lasagna, lobster, salad, sandwiches
All day there’s coffee to be loved.
There are luxuries
of minor dissatisfaction, luxuries of Plan.

3.
That’s her story
You’re going to vanish, not necessarily nicely, fairly soon
Although essentially dignity itself a death
is not necessarily tidy, modest, or discreet.
When they find you
your legs may not be tidy nor aligned.
Your mouth may be all crooked or destroyed.

Black old woman, homeless, indistinct —
Your last and least adventure is Review.
Folks used to celebrate your birthday!
Folks used to say ‘She draws such handsome horses, cows
and houses.’
Folks used to say ‘That child is going far.’

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Wikipedia includes an account of her life and awards: all I can do in brief space is highlight a few events. She was born in Kansas, and brought up in Chicago, which remained her home, and to its cultural worlds she belonged all her life (like August Wilson remained a Philadelphian). She began to read and write well at an early age; her earliest poetry (as a young girl was published in the Chicago Defender (Black newspaper founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott). She did not fit easily into high schools; one too white, one where she was ostracized as too Black for the place; finally she settled in an integrated school, Englewood. Sending her work out brought her to the attention to James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. She found a place with other Black writers in 1935 in WPA groups, e.g., Illinois Writers Project. In 1935 she went to Kennedy Key (?) College, joined the South Side Community Art Center; was married to Henry Blakeley Jr in 1939. From her you can slowly trace her ever-expanding circle of friend-writers and publications. A landmark was the 1945 A Street in Bronzville. Richard Wright wrote a commentary on her work. From this one we have

Kitchenette Building

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”

But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms

Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?

We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

She was often the first African-American to receive this or that award. Her last years she is going to conferences, teaching at universities. She finally made public her own struggle for racial self-acceptance. She urged writers to create young Black protagonists who go counter to commercial  or best-selling tropes. In 1968 she was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois.

She nurtured and mentored others; her very last volume was about children, poetry seemingly for them (they are bold, revealing for example, the problem of incest where males are encouraged to be aggressive and at the same time marginalized and poverty-stricken), Children Coming Home.

The standard biography seems to be by George Kent, A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. The Library of Congress has brought out a slim volume of her poems edited and introduced by Elizabeth Alexander: The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks.

The Field of Angels memorial at the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, honoring the 2,200 enslaved children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish between 1823 and 1863

Ellen

For V-day, Women’s films: Capernaum, Two of Us (Deux) and Celine Sciamma (mostly)

Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw) Ethiopian girl living in Beirut (Capernaum)

Madeline (Martine Chevalier) and Anne, her daughter (Lea Ducker) — (Deux of Two of US is not just about the love of two aging lesbians, but the daughter of one of them)

Heloise (Adèle Haenel), Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (it’s a three-way relationship at its height: wealthy young girl to be sold to a husband, painter, and pregnant maid)

Animals welcome
People tolerated …

Friends and readers,

I’ve just spent four weeks teaching a course where we read two marvelous books by women, Iris Origo’s War in the Val D’Orcia, an Italian war diary, 1943-44, and Christa Wolf’s Cassandra and Four Essays, and want to observe, commemorate, act out Wolf’s argument (proved) in her book that there is a real body of literature by women, separate from men, superior, filled with alternative values, following different genre paradigms, only permitted to thrive in Europe and her cultures since the 18th century and that in marginalized ways, but there and wonderful — deeply anti-war, anti-violence, filled with values of women, a caring, cooperative, preserving, loving ethic. What better day than V- or Valentine’s, better yet against Violence Day, especially when aimed at women. A day yesterday when much of the US in the evening sat down to watched a violent-intense game, interrupted by celebrity posturing, false pretenses at humane attitudes, and glittery commercials (the Superbowl).

Last night I watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire (which I’ve written about already here), and the 6th episode (Home Truths) of the second season of All Creatures Great and Small (ditto), and the fifth episode of the fourth season (Savages) of Outlander, Her-stories (adapted from Diana Gabaldon’s Drums of Autumn)

Anne Madeley as Mrs Hall (housekeeper, and vet)

Helen (Rachel Shelton) and James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph)

Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Adawehi

I delighted in my evening:

Home truths: shamelessly sentimental and ratcheting up lots of angst, yet nothing but good happens. Why? I’ve decided it’s a show with women in charge — for real. Mrs Herriot gives up James to Helen, Mrs Hall and the woman with the perpetually nearly mortal cows. Mrs Pumphrey is the local central goddess, and Tricky woo, her animal. A new woman came in, an aging gypsy who lives with stray dogs. Parallel to Mrs Pumphrey. I love it.

The men are the Savages: the crazed German settler who thinks the Native Americans are stealing “his water” so when his daughter-in-law and grandchild die of measles, he murders the beautiful healer of the tribe — they retaliate by murdering him and his wife and burning down his house. Claire had been there to help bring the baby into the world. The coming problem that most counts is measles. Jamie and Ian discover they can’t get settlers while the Governor and his tax collectors are taking all the profits from settlers and using it to live in luxury, and Murtagh is re-discovered. Very moving reunion with Jamie and Claire — keeping the estates, feeding animals. She functions as Mrs Hall.

The three women eat, walk, sleep, talk together; the two upper class ones go with their maid to help her abort an unwanted pregnancy among a group of local women meeting regularly to dance, talk, be together where they sit around a fire — here they are preparing food, drink, sewing ….

A brief preface or prologue to two fine women’s films: Capernaum and Two of Us, with some mention of Salaam Bombay and Caramel, ending on Isabelle Huppert as interviewer and Elif Batuman as essayist on women’s film art:

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Zain (Zain Al Rafeea) and Rahil’s baby, Yonas (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole)

One of the courses I’m taking this winter at the same OLLI at Mason where I teach is one recent fine movies, and the first we saw Capernaum directed by Nadine Labarki. She has another remarkably memorable film I saw years ago, Caramel, the stories of five women whose lives intersect in a beauty parlor). She and two other women wrote the screenplay. It’s an indie, in Arabic, set in the slums of Beirut: the title refers to a place on the northern shore of the sea of Galilee and forms part of the Jesus Christ stories. The word also means chaos. It makes Mira Nair’s Saleem Bombay looks into the semi-lark it is: both center on a boy living on the streets of desperately poor area who is cut off from any kind of help from parents. Nair’s film ends in stasis: with the boy on the streets still, having stabbed to death a cruel pimp who preyed on a prostitute who is one of the boy’s friends, and took her small daughter from her.

People write of Capernaum as heart-breaking but most of their comments center on the boy (Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian). It’s done through flashbacks. The gimmick complained about is the boy is suing his parents for bringing him into the world. Basically the boy, Zain, exposes the cruel treatment his parents have meted out to him — real emotional, social and physical abuse too. In fact, Hilary Clinton proposed many protections for children, a couple of which aroused the ire of conservatives because she proposed to give children rights which in effect included complaining about parental abuse. I remember how she was attacked fiercely for her proposals on behalf of children. As eventually passed it was about adoption procedures and administration, whether she succeeded in making the child’s welfare count for real I don’t know

What is seriously relevant is the continual filming of dire poverty and the imprisoning of helpless (stateless) immigrants, refugees with no papers and how the need for papers is used by criminals and some lower base businessman to punish and demand huge sums from these people willing to buy forged documents. Astro, the film’s villain, is trying to take Rahil’s baby from her so he can sell the baby, and we discover at the film’s end he had no good parents and home for the baby, only a transitory prison. Labarki takes the viewer through the jails such people end up in and the conditions there — although this is Beirut, you could easily transfer this to the borders of the US. I find the supposed secondary character, a young single mother end up separated from her child as important as the boy, Zain — the fantasy of the movie is this boy takes real responsibility for the child. We also see how Zain’s sister, Sarah was sold to a man when she was 11 and dies of a pregnancy, how his mother is endlessly pregnant with no way to make any money to feed her family or send anyone to school. We se how desperate circumstances have led the boys’ parents to behave brutally to him and to one another, to in effect sell Zain’s sister, their daughter, Sarah, age 11, who dies in childbirth (too young for pregnancy).

It’s an important movie for our time — Biden is continuing many of Trump’s heartless and cruel policies at the borders — not the separation of families. There is no excuse for this. This movie does have a sudden upbeat happy ending (sort of). See it.

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Then very much a Valentine’s Day film: Two of us, also on this film course’s list.

Nina (Barbara Sukowa) — much in love with Madeline, she has no family around her

Isabelle Huppert more recently (see her in the interviews just below)

Very touching. It’s about two lesbians who have grown old and one is nervous (Madeline), frightened of her two grown children (Anne and Frederick), never ever admitted how she loathed her bullying husband (who made a lot of money if her apartment is any measure). Nina lives across the hall and yes people outside them think they are just friends. But they are deep lovers and as the movie opens, Nina is pressuring Madeline to sell her apartment so they can move to Rome permanently, Rome where they have been so happy.

What happens: Mado has a stroke, and is parallel to a movie so long ago, The Single Man, for which Colin Firth was nominated for an Oscar where two homosexual men have deep true life and one dies (Matthew Goode) and the other (Firth) is closed out by the family. Goode leaves everything to Firth, an English teacher. Goode’s family know about the gay life style and enjoy spitefully excluding Firth and beating back the will. Firth comes near suicide, pulls back, just in time.

Here the women hid, and Nina has to break through a caregiver who loathes her as competition. There is much inexplicable imagery. As the film opens, Nina has a dream of herself as a child saving Madeline as a child. Black birds or crows come and go. Nina becomes violent and axes the daughter’s care to get the caregiver in trouble and fired. Gradually the daughter realizes there is something special here. When she first sees a photo of the two women together in Rome, she is revulsed, and puts her mother in a home where the mother is drugged into compliance. The caregiver and her son come and threaten Nina, and when she is out, destroy her things in her apartment insofar as they can and steal what money she has. My mother had a caregiver just like this desperate hard angry woman. Anne witnesses her mother try to come out of her stasis to reach Nina, and Nina try to run away with her. Anne thinks again, and chases her mother and her mother’s lover back to her mother’s apartment, where they are quietly dancing together. The movie ends with Anne banging frantically on the door, saying she didn’t understand.

There is hope. Anne has brought a kitten for her mother while the mother was with the caregiver. We see it in the hall and may hope Madeline’s money will be enough and they will be left alone again. Such movies do show up the ratcheted up cheer of All Creatures and Small – how much truer to life this. Real anxiety Real trouble. It’s about aging and loneliness. There are as fine reviews of this as The Lost Daughter.

And two thoughtful interviews conducted by Isabelle Huppert (a fine French actress. One with the director, this his first film. The other between Huppert and Sukowa: listen to two actresses talk shop It’s very unusual to talk candidly about the problem of enacting, emulating having sex in front of a camera.

Don’t throw your evening out to become an object sold by one company to another to sell awful products at enormous prices.

I conclude with an excellent essay-review by Elif Batuman of the film-oeuvre of Celine Sciamma. Batuman shows how Sciamma is seeking out and inventing a new grammar of cinema to express a feminist and feminine quest for an authentic existence as a woman experiencing a full life: Now You See Me. I quote from it on The Portrait of a Lady on Fire:

The “female gaze,” a term often invoked by and about Sciamma, is an analogue of the “male gaze,” popularized in the nineteen-seventies to describe the implied perspective of Hollywood movies—the way they encouraged a viewer to see women as desirable objects, often fragmented into legs, bosoms, and other nonautonomous morsels. For Sciamma, the female gaze operates on a cinematographic level, for example in the central sex scene in “Portrait.” Héloïse and Marianne are both in the frame, they seem unconcerned by their own nudity, the camera is stationary—not roving around their bodies—and there isn’t any editing. The goal is to share their intimacy—not to lurk around ogling it, or to collect varied perspectives on it.

Mira Nair (filming A Suitable Boy) and Celinne Sciamma

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Ellen

Highly compromised 18th century abolitionist literature: Inkle & Yarico among many other analogous texts

The cover of one of the many renditions of the Inkle and Yarico stories

Friends,

As a brief follow-up to my blog about the poetry, letters and life of Frances Thynne Seymour, Countess of Hertford, I have placed on academia.edu, my review of a book published in ECCB: An Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography (Bucknell Press imprint), and link it in here:  Dominique Lyndon’s Imoinda’s Shade:  Marriage and the African Woman in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, 1759-1808.

The book (I admit here) seriously angered me, and if I hadn’t promised a friend I would do this, I’d probably never have finished the book. I did a lot of reading around the book too. Then I patiently summarized the contexts of a history of very compromising supposedly abolitionist (the nice word is ameliorist) texts).

If anyone is interested, mine is a very readable review about a book justifying or explaining favorably a history of texts that are dismaying — but teach a lesson about white supremacy, a white outlook — very like Lady Hertford’s Ovidian Heriode in the person of Yarico to Inkle — Inkle has sold Yarico and his unborn child into enslavement and she writes of her continuing love for him. The irony is the man writing this book is African-American, and teaches at Princeton: the charitable interpretation, and partly probable reason for his having written this book is he’s trying his best to find something redemptive or inspiring (!) for modern day African-American scholars.  I don’t see how it seriously could be.

https://www.academia.edu/43655684/Dominique_Lyndon_Imoindas_Shade_A_Review

You have to think about what you are reading, but the analogies with many 20th and 21st century popular texts about African-America and European conflicts are there, including I now realize the very popular Broadway musical Hamilton (about which a blog will be forthcoming).

On Frank Felsenstein’s English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race and Slavery in the New World, see the comments to the previous blog.

This discreet drawing accompanied the first publication of the Yarico and Inkle story in middle class literature: there are far more salacious ones I don’t care to reprint

Ellen

James Baldwin’s and Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk ….

Fonny (James Stephen) and Tish (Kiki Layne) as we first see them walking together

Gradually appearing intertitle introducing the film

Friends and readers,

If Beale Street could talk, book and film, tell the same terrible tale we learn about in When They See Us. A system of incarceration whose structure and rules give African-Americans no hearing, only injustice and the felt hostility of blind chance & dependence on other vulnerable frightened people.

I began with the film, which I’ve wanted to watch for quite some time:  we are thrust into the story of two lovers walking down a paved alley in a park, and they vow love to one another, and determine they will tell their families, who, it seems, may not approve. Cut to Tish’s voice saying “I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love…through glass:” we now see her sitting in a prison visiting room on one side of a glass waiting for Fonny to be brought out to sit on the other side. They cannot touch one another, they cannot hear unless they pick up the phones attached to each side of the booth they share. We are puzzled for a long time: why is he in prison. He seems utterly upstanding, he makes little money as a sculptor, but he is the son of church-going people, not an alcoholic, not drinking, trying to get together money to bribe someone willing to rent to them. Much of the film is interwoven flashbacks and we see in one: someone finally offers them a concrete garage space that is described as a loft (so the man can charge more). Most of the time no one will rent to them.

Gradually the story unfolds bit-by-bit: flashbacks interwoven and a narrator’s voice to connect is the mode: so throughout with increasing poignancy we see their ecstatic first days and nights of love.  But then after he is jailed, she finds she is pregnant, then (something she dreads) she has to tell her family and then his without him, because he is in prison (still unexplained): her family accepts the baby and coming marriage:

His mother does not, nor his sisters who speak in ugly spiteful ways using church dogma as a cover.

More time goes by in the ongoing forward time narrative as Tish gets a job selling perfume (one she is told she should be grateful for as she is black), and then one night in a flashback while they are walking in the street we see how from out of nowhere Fonny was accused of raping a Puerto Rican woman, Victoria Rogers (Emily Rios), he never met and was nowhere near. They are told she singled Fonny out in a police-formed row of men; and are gradually led to a white lawyer (Finn Whittrock), well-meaning, who tells them the woman has fled to Puerto Rico. Fonny is beginning to become angry, frantic, violent, resentful, half-crazy in the bare cell room.

Then finally, either as flashback, just before or after, we see a brief encounter between Fonny and a sly angry-looking, resentful white police officer whose name we learn is Bell (Ed Skrein) grows livid when after he accuses Fonny of stealing, the store owner vindicates Fonny. Fonny himself is proud, often hot-tempered and has to be controlled by Tish. Bell warns Fonny he will get back. Early on Tish remarks what happened was the result of Fonny’s strong pride. Yes and it took just one resentful white man.

The police officer, seen only once, his sneer hardly has time to register

And all came clear to me. This white officer incensed at Fonny has lied, pressured the woman into accusing him, probably helped her to flee. There is no way Fonny can clear himself of this crime unless the Puerto Rican woman comes back to refute her testimony.

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The movie seemed to me and now I know is a deeply felt adaptation of a novel by Baldwin, both of which (book and movie) dramatize as the on-going story the need African-American people have of one another. Again we see the two family groups early on, and Fonny’s mother and sisters are incensed, cruel and corrosive in what they say. After Fonny is imprisoned, the two fathers getting together to steal little-by-little to get up the money for Sharon Rivers, Trish’s mother (Regina King) to go to Puerto Rico to speak to the woman.

Mrs Rivers is so brave, ever changing her clothes, her wig, wanting to look presentable, right somehow, so intense, worried, tight, hopeful still, goes and at first is rebuffed by the woman’s older male relative, but eventually he yields (perhaps a bribe) but then Victoria becomes hysterical and refuses to go back to withdraw her testimony. She asks Mrs Rogers if she has ever been raped. This is the desolate climax of the film.

Mrs Rivers appealing to Victoria

Victoria herself angry, impoverished, resentful

When it’s clear they can’t count on any evidence in their favor except there is no evidence but the identification by a woman who won’t come to the court, at first the lawyer holds out, but we see the case is going nowhere, there is no trial set.  Tish gives birth to her baby; fast forward and Tish tells us that he plea bargained and it’s clear they are waiting for the years of prison to go by as they meet regularly in a freer prison room for visitors. His son is a small child and they try to act as a family during the time they have together. Eat, play a board game, tell each other how the week has been. This is how the  film ends; the family in a visiting room in a prison, with the wife’s salary and will power holding them together.

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I waited until I got hold of and read the book, David Leeming’s commentary and quotation of Baldwin in his James Baldwin: A Biography, and Joyce Carol Oates’s review for the New York Times of the book and film before writing this blog. Why? No one in the feature that came with the film never anywhere said that Fonny was framed; that he will spend years of his life behind bars helplessly. Not one person said it was the spite of a single police officer. I wanted to read the book to make sure (since in the film this is never made explicit) this a parable about how vulnerable black people are at any moment to be plunged into non-life, death in prison. Why keep silent? This is supposed to be Beale Street talking at last, telling.

It’s an instance of what we experience in When They See Us: it is the same story writ little. In the US if you are black and someone somewhere with some authority who is white can destroy you. I’m told Get Out is a crucial recent film about black life in America. It’s next on my Netflix queue.

Baldwin emphasizes the story is a parable about “the black man’s bondage … everywhere; and “the emotional imprisonment of whites.” I again admit I didn’t see that much, only that the lawyer was as helpless as his client finally. In David Leeming’s biography, Baldwin says he also meant to show how isolated black are at the same time that they recognize they must be involved with one another, recognize their need of one another, share and bond experience in a way of imprisoned (if often invisible) life. The context is a “battle for integrity” in a world where the struggle to survive makes them have painfully to give integrity up — or compromise reality.

Joyce Carol Oates, like the people in the feature to the DVD, seems to want to make this an affirmative story about the endurance of African-American people helping one another Oates says it is a “traditional celebration of love:” and it is all she says, including a portrait of the white lawyer as sympathetic and doing his weak best.

Regina King as Sharon and Colman Domingo as Joseph as Tish’s parents

The white lawyer

Her review doubts the wisdom of using Tish as a narrator (voice-over) retrospectively — there seems to me her doubt of this young girl having gravitas enough doubt about a woman’s gravity and seriousness, and a black woman. I admit Oates goes over and makes plain the horror at the center of this disaster, but did she have to say “so patiently,” of course the police officer is a villain (who has killed a 12 year old black boy some time ago), and to de-emphasize this seems racist to me.

Now I see that the film, through an integrated back-and-forth series of flashbacks tells the story of both Fonny and Tish since they were children bathing together, the stages of their earliest life in black-and-white photos. I thought of Daphnis and Chloe, Paul and Virginia. We see his friendship with a man who gives evidence him (coerced); moments of Fonny doing sculpture, Tish selling things, coping with customers, the two of them begging a meal when they have no money, fixing their apartment, but I suggest a thread through the love affair is Tish’s mother’s support of them, of her; Tish’s sister gets the lawyer but Tish’s mother helps her to give birth and bathe the baby first. And especially Tish coping from pregnancy to still waiting.

Suggestive of giving birth: actually Tish’s mother is helping her bath the new born baby

The film rightly was nominated for many awards; it should have won more.  At least Regina King won for Best Supporting Actress.

It’s a beautiful book and wish I had known about it before; I’ve placed it in this Reveries under the Sign of Austen because the narrated voice and point of view is that if the young woman and her mother. It has many scenes of intimate domestic life: the kinds of furniture black people can afford; Fonny and Tish doing all sorts of things in their lives: he with friends, she in the subway. But much more (on the whole) she. The book is a heroine’s text. A poignant romance where courage is holding out (like Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop). It is a woman’s film using the characteristics of women’s art to powerful effect.

Ellen