Women’s Holocaust Memoirs

Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, translated from the French by Rose Lamont (a trilogy)

You cannot just add women in or replace men with women and stir — and assume you have the same situation — Elizabeth Minnick, Transforming Knowledge

Dear friends and readers,

Over the past month I attended via zoom, a four session class called Women’s Holocaust Memoirs, led by two professors (of women’s studies among other things), Evi Beck and Angelika Bammer. We read the above stunning, astonishing literary masterpiece, Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After (published 1965-71), two hardly less extraordinary brilliant fragmentary-seeming texts, Sarah Kofman’s Rue Ordener Rue Labat, translated (also) from the French by Ann Smock (published 1993); Carolina Klop’s (pseudonym Carl Friedman), Nightfather, translated from the Dutch by Arnold and Erica Pomerans (published 1991), and the much better known retrospective meditative (insightful, highly intelligent but still angry) Ruth Kluger’s inclusive Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (published in German 1992; revised and published in English 2001).

Kluger reading aloud the first paragraph of her memoir ….

I was deeply moved by Delbo’s trilogy especially (it is comparable to Primo Levi’s If This Be Man, and The Truce), educated into the frighteningly horrible (hardly believable) worlds of the WW2 Slave Labor and Death Camps by the first and part of the second volume; by Kluger’s Still Alive made to think about in an unsentimental frame of mind barbaric abuse, torture and killing of people against a backdrop of our common amoral society. Let us not forget how fascism targets many groups besides the “racially stigmatized” (here Jews): Delbo was a political prisoner; disabled and LGBTQ people, socialists were all enslaved and/or murdered.

It was something of a privilege to have the company of the two professors; Evi Beck was born in Austria in 1933 and lived under the Nazi regime; she has been teaching and writing in the area of women’s studies from the 1970s; Angelika Bammer, born of German parents, has made holocaust as well as women’s studies and comparative literature her life’s work. The perspective of the class was that of a female (or feminine, feminist) lens (very like what I had been teaching over at OLLI at AU, in The Heroine’s Journey): most discussion of the holocaust is partly based on men’s memoirs; when the Holocaust Museum in DC was opened, there was a resistance against even including women’s memoirs.

We discussed women’s histories, e.g., Marian Kaplan’s Between Dignity and Despair, a history of Jewish life from the time the edicts of restriction began until the time the arrests started, and people began to flee, go into hiding: why did these people behave the way they did? And we saw all month, women’s memoirs differ considerably from men’s in experience, in artful patterns, in themes, attitudes, tropes, most of which I was outlining in my course using very different books (an anthology is by Myra Goldenberg, Same Horrors, Different Hells). Joan Ringelheim can be found on YouTube discussing how women did in the long term; conditions were different, treatment (rape, forced prostitution, pregnancies, children with them)

The mother-daughter pattern is overtly central to two of these books: Rue Ordoner Rue Labat and Still Alive.  (It also becomes central in Christa Wolf’s German-centered account of her childhood in Nazi Germany and during the war, Patterns of Childhood; Wolf’s book includes a flight from the Russians during their invasion of Germany). The mother-daughter pattern serves as a paradigm of oppression in these Kofman and Kluger.  Kofman’s book tells of her mother’s fierce struggle to keep her daughter, Sarah, with her. Ruth’s mother also refused to allow her daughter to try to escape with the help of strangers. Mrs Kofman, though, has violently to wrest her daughter back from a French woman who rescued and hid them both, and then begins in effect to re-make Sarah into a French child and daughter of hers. The French woman was much kinder in behavior, less domineering; Sarah’s mother (often in an hysteria) repeatedly beats her. Kofman’s father was a rabbi, and we see among Sarah’s mother’s frustrations was her husband leaned her on, demanding things she could not produce, while himself avoiding decision-making.

Kluger herself discusses her book on YouTube: https://www.c-span.org/video/?168914-1/still-alive-holocaust-girlhood-remembered

What is most distinctive about Still Alive is the honesty with which Kluger characterizes the people she meets; it is a memoir written many years later (as the other three were not), no false pieties; she tells what life under fascism felt like, and the hardships and indifference refugees from the camps had to confront and cope with upon returning to what had been a home or (more common for Jewish people), emigrating elsewhere. Kluger remains bitter against her mother’s values (very conventional), those of the society that permitted (I’d say even encouraged) the Nazi rise, and hardly changed its values and norms at all once the immediate aftermath of desperate need and collapse of nation-states was over. Both Kluger and Delbo astonished me with their insights into the relationship of trauma, depression, and self-destruction; why people want to destroy themselves after such an experience. Both have the wide perspective of before, during and life long afterwards (much like the powerful, truthful and great French serial on the Vichy regime in France, A French Village)

Nightfather centers on the father of a family who has returned from the camps and remains obsessed by his memories; the camp experience is continually present in his mind; everything everyone around him says or does he responds to with comparative comments that are comical (a good deal of sardonic humor in the book), angry, sad, traumatizing; he is a shattered man who has to be taken to an asylum for ten years. Klop is very equivocal about her gender and feels a stranger vis-a-vis her older brothers. Nightfather is a book whose focus are three siblings, with the mother there as a stabilizing force (a real heroine who we hear studies the Odyssey). You can apply to it Adrienne Rich’s

“With whom do you believe your lot is cast?
From where does your strength come?
I think somehow, somewhere
every poem of mine must repeat those questions
which are not the same. There is a whom, a where
that is not chosen that is given and sometimes falsely given
in the beginning we grasp whatever we can
to survive”

The two fragmentary-seeming (they are very artful) and short books, Nightfather and Rue Ordoner Rue Labat expose the falseness of what is said to be heroic behavior; the cost of it when it conforms to violence, coolness, of who is considered worthy. Both were written long after the experience; Kofman killed herself the year after she published hers, though like Klop (Friedman) and Kluger, she rose to a respected position as a writer and in universities. The impulse to run away is powerful in these fragments. At the same time, again and again there is a terror at separation from those your identity is bound up with; one reaction is dissociation, boundaries around you dissolving; another is to try to vanish.

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I feel awe in the presence of Christine Delbo’s books (you see the second just above): Auschwitz and After, the one we read, is so beautifully written, artfully shaped continually, the experiences so beyond real comprehension for those who have not known what she has but made almost visceral and felt and re-lived by the way she weaves present, past, her own story in prose pieces of one to four pages with the stories of the 238 women who was brought with her to Auschwitz (49 survived); all interspersed with poetry.

There are three parts: None of us will return has the hardest material to read, graphic and unflinching descriptions include a SS person sic-cing a raging dog on a prisoner. The brutality in Auschwitz is accompanied by mockery; bestial criminals whipped, starved, continually screamed at, and did all they could to shatter their victims. It is written in a relentless present, breathless, and as the scope expands, you feel you are getting a distillation . The first half of Useless Knowledge is about day-to-day life in the next two camps Delbo found herself taken to, both considerably less harsh than Auschwitz (or she would never have survived); the second half has the Swedish Red Cross coming to the camp as the Germans are defeated and flee in early 1945. Delbo’s first response when she finds herself free and in a building she is supposed to integrate herself with other in is utter bewilderment, an inability to function without someone helping her. She cannot take in ordinary life any more. She cries and cries. The third part The Measure of Our Days tells of her life afterwards mixed with her re-enacting the lives of those 238 women in the camps who died, and those who survived (though made into different people). How time passes as people live and morph on. As with Delbo’s other book, Convoy to Auschwitz, Delbo commemorates every woman she can in the third part of her book. The coda is a series of poignant poems which urge the reader and all to live on, to find some joy, to dance, to sing.

The themes include the ambiguities of the ways in which memories work in the human mind; the creativity of the imagination given the slightest opportunity (in Part Two the women put on a play by Moliere); the idea that Delbo has died and it is a copy of herself, a mask you are meeting and she is getting through the world in; storytelling itself in the book is self-conscious or self-aware. She uses the “we” for her central voice; she addresses the reader as “you.” Terrifying quiet experiences include the finding of a teddy bear as a present during Christmas and realizing it is leftover from a child see hugging it intensely before she was taken with her other to be gassed to death. We see repeatedly how holding themselves together as a group, by looking out for one another, remaining tightly together insofar as this is possible, they are enabled to survive. Primo Levi similarly survived though his relationships, but he presents himself as an individual. Delbo thinks of herself as embedded with others, but she also shows herself ready to die at moments, and then comes along someone with protection of some sort for her space, a shield, a hand held out.

On Convoy To Auschwitz

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The two professors felt what tied all four books together was the focus in them on relationships, on what the people did for one another, what they did with one another, the way relationships sustain and destroy: the violence people can inflict (emotional is included here) and comradeship. The books do not tell us of the worlds of the Nazi guards; the emphasis is wholly on those experiencing not implementing. Intimacy is a way of asserting personal life. For women especially the SS demands that they stand naked so they can be assessed as to which to kill and which to allow to live on; such scenes in these books are unforgettable.

The course ended on them reading aloud recipes from an anthology called In Memory’s Kitchen: this consists of recipes women written down by undernourished, and starving women in a Czech camp: robust, rich, and once beloved dishes.

And then we listened to one of the marching songs of the Partisans (resistance groups), an anthem for the survivors. It was a song sung in German (if I’m not mistaken); but what I found on the Internet is the more commonly known French one:

Ellen

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Women Talking: what passes for feminism in films in 2022? a bunch of difficult women …

Ben Wishaw as the lead male, a central sympathetic character in Women Talking (this is the only still I could find in a large size)

Claire Foy as one of the women talking (she is seen as a central dominating presence and she is certainly angry, and “difficult”)

Jessie Buckley, endlessly mentioned as part of the stellar nature of the case (and so complained about as exaggerated, and too sarcastic)

It’s being presented with the same timid mild praise and objection that the film itself practices ,.. I don’t say there is nothing worthy seeing: I see that that the film is a disappointment as feminism and its compromises indicative of our era and mainstream media.

Dear friends and readers,

I make it a policy usually to not review movies I find awful; you get little thanks for it, though it may attract attention. It needs to be bad in some important way: like a book on anorexics which purports to be sympathetic but is actually a vitriolic attack. (Another hatchet job by Kate Chisholm.) This film cannot be described as awful; it is rather wholly inadequate, insulting and as to what is presented for consolation, ludicrously inappropriate for most contemporary people; it moves into badness because it is not being reviewed truthfully: the subject matter on the face of it should be matter for feminism, and its being advertised as feminist; instead the film strips most of the context of what led to the women being in this room, allows us to see hardly anything horrific that has happened (in fact barely describes it) and centers on a useless vote, punctuated by in inset-sweet romance between Wisham as a young man who has himself been ejected from th colony and Maria Rooney as this continuously sweet woman who regards herself as blessed by her enforced pregnancy. It’s worse then tepid, and non-dramatic, the only philosophy presented is that of the Bible (some passages literally taken), and the only fates these women can imagine is to be mothers, grandmothers, to hold hands.

Mick LaSalle of Datebook Movies and TV is the only reviewer who takes the above point of view; I use some of his language. I presume (hope) the book tells the full story of women nightly drugged and raped in a Memnonite community, finally breaking out and going to court. In the movie house I was in the movie opens with these women as girls being indoctrinated into strict obedience. It was like one might imagine a Taliban session. Then we see them in the fields, and sudden switch to them gathered a barn (with Wishaw who as he takes the notes does become a sort of leader). Only at the end of the film do intertitles give the watcher some sense of what the serious case concerned.

In the ads what is focused upon are the rare moments of justified anger and rank misery (after having gone back to her man for one night, Jessie Buckley comes back with a broken arm and badly bruised face). We listen to two teenagers who seem to think themselves very rebellious for smoking. In some of the many reviews of (usually mild) praise, there are complaints about Buckley as giving an exaggerated and caricature performance. Her sarcasm was not appealing it seems. Praise for the older women’s religiosity was profuse. I was by turns bored and irritated. For lukewarm praise see Sheila O’Malleyyon Ebert.com. As the still above A.O Scott’s piece for the NYTimes shows, all too typical moments are let’s console one another

Judith Ivey as one of the group “elders”

This meeting of the women as real people afterwards remembering what the experience had been like sounds more effective (it is an ad).

This has a feel of reality:

Benjamin Lee in The Guardian wisely concentrates on what you do not see in the film (the gaslighting of the real women, told they were having hallucinations): “stiff theatricality” is too kind.

Why do I bother write of it? because this is being served up as feminist. And it’s timid.

It also seems to me indicative of our era and time when it comes to mainstream social media. I finally unsubscribed from The Women’s Review of Books after its last sad years of the unexciting language, compromise and ennui; it’s no wonder that at the end their pages were dominated by trans issues (with to me its alienating nomenclature), Black lesbian writers, chummy columns of what was my favorite serial and novel this season? The problem with the passion of Foy and Buckley is they end up on a bandwagon of women headed out for they know not where, surrounded by children as their natural burden.

What have we seen? why difficult noisy women. I took two courses with Elaine Showalter at Politics and Prose (which runs online courses as part of the bookstore community) towards the end of the pandemic; it seems the new fashionable phrase for radical political women writers is difficult women. So that’s what we saw here with Ben Wishaw kowtowing to their every sensitivity.

Ellen

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EC/ASECS virtually: Material Culture: Book history, Theater things, Natural History, & “My Journal of the Plague Year” (3)

Faye Castelow as Hellena, Joseph Millson as Willmore and Alexandra Gilbreath as Angellica Bianca in Aphra Behn’s The Rover RSC, 2016

Friends and readers,

My third and last blog on the EC/ASECs conference held last month, virtually. The first centered on the Thursday evening and first panel, Friday morning, where I gave my talk on “A Woman and Her Boxes: Space and Personal Identity.” the second blog included a long talk by the present Senior Curator of Education, Deborah Harper, on a history of collectors’ pianofortes, at the Winterthur Museum. For the the third I cover what papers I heard from Saturday morning until later afternoon. (Unfortunately I had to miss some; the titles of these are found on the website and not included here.) The conference ended with a spell-binding coda speech by Joanne Myers, of Gettysbury College near by, likening each phase of her time enduring the social isolation and closed schools of the pandemic to the phases of Daniel Defoe’s experience of a deadly epidemic in London in his famous partly fictionalized book.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We began with a book history panel. I heard two of the three papers or talks. Joseph Rudman explained and described the Editing Aphra Behn Website. He had a good deal of praise for E-ABIDA that website, E-APBIDA. He described what was in the site and how it was a useful tool as well as handy modern and extensively informed device. The general aim of this website is to explain the fine new Cambridge edition. Cambridge is publishing an 8 volume edition of Behn’s works at the same time. He offered strong praise for what the website is providing (there are 15 different editors), will apparently carry on doing for a while (as support for the edition) and suggested that it might stir others to do likewise.

One of the Burney diaries covering these court years

Elizabeth Powers’ presented her paper, “Books Do More Than Furnish a Room: Goethe and Burney in Their Father’s Library.” She chose these two authors because she felt they overlapped in time and despite showed how their different parentage and culture and their writing at the end of literary traditions produced a kind of public discourse which all who participate in this discourse can share in. Burney was secretive about her reading while Goethe was open. Burney was educated mostly at home; Goethe sent away to schools. But both kept journals and dramatized themselves differently in these. Burney shows herself embedded in her society; while Goethe is apart, he is interested in developing a style he will use later to legitimize what he writes down autobiographically. (My view is Burney is partly fictionalizing herself and doing it very effectively through the use of novelistic techniques.)

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Jonathan Groff as George III in Hamilton: nowhere as hilarious on video as when he is in person in front of an audience

Whole outfit

For “Theatre things” I again heard two of the three, these both thought-provoking papers. Jason Shaffer in his ““The Coat and The Cockade: Costuming Elements in Early Republican Drama” centered his talk on costume, and its importance, how an audience is led to suspend its disbelief while looking at outrageously amusing or dramatic clothes; they are delighted to believe in what they see. Then on stage familiar objects interact with a fantasy world built around these. He chose to discuss scenes where characters discuss their clothes. A costume endows an actor with the power of the character and theatrical realized dream vision. We also identify the actor as him or herself for real; that’s part of the thrill, and the familiarity. Mrs Siddons playing Lady Macbeth is both herself and Lady Macbeth. He mentioned how brilliant were the costumes in Hamilton; how they functioned as emblems of complex ideas made visceral. Watching theater on a computer at home loses the sense of audacity in the actor; bodies matter. Clothes too. Watching movies without others in the audience diminishes the thrill. He gave various examples of characters from the plays of the era on the English and American stages. Then how advertising pictures serve to reproduce our memories of, or create longing to join in, the live shared experience.

A contemporary cartoon of the Brunswick theater collapsing

Matt Kinservik in his “The Suppression of the Royalty Theatre Reconsidered” taught a somber moral. Basically the original patentees (ownership and control of these goes back to the early Restoration years, and their heirs (or those who had bought the patents and were present owners) allowed the group to build their theater and then insisted it be shut down. Matt named which people were involved, the hard and difficult work (negotiations) required, who went at first to support friends and/or associates and the various phases of hard work (including getting the materials) and then the advertising. And then the dismay when it was clear the law would be enforced, and how much money was lost when the audience so wanted more legitimate theater. The moral was the worst choice was opted for by those with the power to shut the others down: They let them build the house and then cracked down.

A famous travel book, described as a delightful classic, filled with description of flora and fauna

Unfortunately I missed two of the three papers on panel on natural history, in travel and other writing. I came in upon people discussing local birds.

The third talk, by Rodney Mader, was quite different, riveting even. His topic was Bartam’s Travels and Its baggage, a book written by a man who was a quaker scientist influenced by the romantics poets and Wordsworth’s Prelude. Mr Mader talked about a post-humanist perspective he found himself developing during the experience of trying to write about such a book and writer during this pandemic. He felt all the injustice (violence, lies) he was seeing going on around him — politically, economically, socially — estranged him from dealing with the material as it was presented by the people at the time. These were books compiled by people who dispossessed others, their methods were dependent on their power over others so the natural science was imposed. The man studying plants without regard to all that was going on around him was the son of an international merchant, a farmer who worked enslaved people. Wm Bartram himself found he could not drive or control the 6 enslaved people he was given; there is no evidence of what became of them (there were six including one pregnant woman).

Apparently, if you look at history on the Internet that includes Bartram, you can find the people involved in organizations he would have belonged to practiced, were for eugenics, and today present sign identifying themselves as for environmental conservation. An Alabama Heritage site from 2011 celebrates Bartram and other explorers and writers in botany; there is a photo of a Black ornithologist on their website.

The pièce de résistance of the whole conference turned out to be Joanne Myers’s concluding Presidential Address: “My Year of the Plague. She began by telling us she had long admired Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year and had taught it several times. She reread it this past year, and it helped calm her to read the incidents as her and her two daughter’s lives unfolded around them. She worked and taught from home, and taught her daughters too. She delivered a talk whose emotional trajectory followed that of Henry Foe (the chief character of Defoe’s Journal). Her tone was quiet, controlled, intense; she said she seemed to devour space and time in matter of fact prose. She saw the mistrust, the isolation, and sometimes people trying to help one another. At one point she said she was trying to provide service against the terrors’ dislocations. She teaches at Gettysburg herself so was surrounded by pro-Trump types and (I imagine) made the atmosphere everywhere outside her home more fraught. Defoe himself (in my view too) is a de-mystifier; it was noteworthy to her that Defoe remained a private man amid all he recorded.

Next year EC/ASECS hopes to meet for real or physically at the Winterthur museum in Delaware.

Ellen

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Virtual Conferences, Lectures & Videos: Anne Bronte, her novels & poetry (2): as whistleblower

Anne Bronte by herself, drawn as a girl seeking, looking out

Dear friends and readers,

A couple of week ago now I wrote out some notes I took on two separate occasions, a talk on zoom from the Gaskell house and Haworth cottage on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte, and two talks from an Anne Bronte conference (which also included material on Patrick, Charlotte, Emily and Branwell) on September 4th Well tonight I want make a second installment of notes on talks on Anne Bronte herself, her poetry, and mostly about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

I thought I’d begin backwards, with Anne Bronte herself as discussed by the award-winning journalist, Samir Ahmed, and here I’ll point out to how she won a suit against BBC for paying her derisory sums.

Samira began by telling everyone how early as a teenager, she was “blown away” by The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (this made me remember how much Austen’s Sense and Sensibility has meant to me since my teens). Ahmed felt that Anne had an awareness when very young of injustice. As a graduate student, Ahmed’s dissertation was on “Property and Possession in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” She agued the book was written as a popular call that could be intertwined with a romantic novel story. In her preface she says she cannot understand why a woman cannot write what a men might want to and a man a woman. Her aim is to tell the truth.

In both Agnes Grey and Tenant there are experiences our heroines have, which are burned into their brains. Agnes Grey humiliated and berated for not controlling children allowed to become frantic and savage. She is giving testimony ever bit as surely as Christine Casey Ford. Anne was an intelligent woman with a need to speak. A mind seeking justice. At the time of the novel Frazer Magazine one could find awareness of the equivocal nature of the place of the governess. Agnes is paid barely enough to live on. Anne like the “fly” on the wall in a documentary for both her books. She claimed that you find in her books abhorrence towards hunting and going out to kill animals as a sport (I must carry on re-reading Tenant, which I’m doing just now; then turn back to Agnes). Both books too play upon the exploitative power children can give an adult — to oppress the adult, or to terrify her if she is the child’s mother.

She quoted Andrea Dworkin to align lines of hers with those of Anne Bronte. The last lines of Agnes Grey speak to an anti-materialist socialist idea:

Our modest income is amply sufficient for our requirements; and by practising the economy we learnt an harder times, and never attempting to imitate our richer neighbours, we manage not only to enjoy comfort and contentment ourselves, but to have every year something to lay by for our children, and something to give to those who need it. And now I think I have said sufficient.

I have omitted much that Samira Ahmed said about contemporary feminism, modern movie-making (the good Wuthering Heights films and the 1996 Tenant film), some actresses who have involved themselves in good causes, trafficking in women, alcoholism (with respect to Branwell). I wanted to concentrate on the central theme of her talk. What I loved best was she concentrated as much on Agnes Grey as The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Anne Bronte as drawn by herself by a family dog
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This edition is by Stevie Davies:

Davies was known to me previously as a superb historian of women and original inventive fiction: her Unbridled Spirits is a part imagined history of 17th century British women – -during the civil war they gained freedom, agency and lived some of them remarkable lives; her Impassioned Clay brilliant historical fiction where the insight that what we are doing is ghostly, bringing back dead people becomes central (insofar as Gabaldon is aware of this, and so too the better writers of the TV serial there is invested in the series a ghost-like apprehension of the past).

Davies has gotten herself an academic position and edits Tenant of Wildfall Hall expertly. Alas, there is no manuscript. This happens with Austen’s novels. It’s not until way after mid-century (except for Scott) that writers save their manuscripts: they apparently gave them to the printers to devour. What we have here is the first edition of Tenant before Charlotte could abridge or tamper with it. Davies simply adds on the preface Anne wrote for the second edition.
Davies’ introduction is superb Among other things she brings out the subjective nature of the text, the ambivalence in the way Gilbert Markham is treated; she shows that many aspects of this book are a kind of inverse for Wuthering Heights. There are a lot of characters with H names in both. She finds a lot of the Gondal stories in both; she has Jane Eyre as another alternative in the same kind of vision about women artists, Rochester contrasted to Arthur Huntington.

There were five talks on Anne’s fiction, mostly on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, for which I have some brief or merely representative or summary notes.

Marianne Thormählen,”Literary Art and Moral Instruction” in Anne Bronte’s novels. She wanted to show us is how modern critical dislike or moral judgements and dislike of didactism has marginalized her novels. Juliet McMaster is one of those alive to lapping multilay humor, wit, a kind of low laughter, amid real pain and bruises. Josephine McDonagh brings out the actuality of the body in Tenant; how the body and soul are both threatened. The structure of the book has put off others: Markham for the first time, then Helen as an inset diary. I like her bringing up Antigone. You must learn to distrust what flatters you, look at what makes us uncomfortable — for my part I see little.

Amy Bowen presented Tenant as a horror of “gothic realism: about real imprisonment, a woman trying to escape an abusive husband (where she has no rights or power). The focus is the interiority. Enclosed imagery reflects the hard world outside. Helen resists engendered discussions about education: that boys are taught to be inconstant, indifferent to the pain of others; women taught to be constant with no knowledge of an abrasive world.

19th century painting by an unknown woman of herself as a painter

Emily Vause’s themes were female authority, authorship and one’s identity. Charlotte was conventionally female, and she insisted her sister hated Tenant (because she, Charlotte, did). Anne draws adults with discerning eye to her apparently widowed adult female. Vause’s paper delineated the excruciating interactions Helen has with Arthur’s guests; she has to withdraw herself from what she hates: the male gaze fixed on her. She denies him access to her bedroom and he is dumbfounded (May Sinclair said the resounding of that door echoed across women’s minds). In effect he had been raping her. He means to corrupt the boy to spite her, and she flees with him. Her autonomy as a woman she never gives up, nor her authority as his mother. Her authority by her art allows her to escape to self-sufficiency. At one point he casts her painting supplies into the fire. Vause saw a parallel between Markham and Huntingdon, and was disappointed to find at the end of her story Helen becomes subject to a new husband.

Jordan Frederick discussed gender, custody and child-care, a genuine issue from what I’ve seen and heard from ordinary readers reading the novels today. I find today that many readers are put off by Helen’s wanting to keep her son close to her, her refusal to let him be educated into alcohol (she makes it associated with bad tasting medicine. To protect your child as a woman was legally impossible (he cited the series of reforms, 1839, division of wardship; 1873, giving a woman custody of her baby and young child; 1886 guardianship of children). Not until his deathbed does Arthur exhibit any remorse; she must turn to Gilbert in part. The temperance movement, methodist magazines (ideas of bearing witness) and Anne Bronte’s experience of her brother also lies behind this book. Anne is questioning toxic masculinity; Helen actively criticizing and fighting against this formation of the male psyche. He talked of how the gothicism here is realistic and the setting itself; society itself is the threat. Her feelings isolate her. Here he agreed with Any Bowen. He felt much irony in the book but thought at the end Gilbert will behave in a way that allows Helen not to be entrapped again.

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A recent cover for Agnes Grey

Maureen Kilditz’s “Walking and Health.” Perhaps the most interesting paper for the group (from the way the talking went – this was just after the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan) was about walking as an act of liberty. Kolditz began with a quotation that indicated women were not seen walking in the street unless accompanied by a chaperon. Agnes Grey must find someone to walk with; not permitted to examine the employers’ garden. How can a woman obtain a position for work if she is not allowed to walk about casually (she would be mistaken for a prostitute and then arrested for vagrancy). Walking is a function of our mobility in the natural world. How to get to your destination if you don’t have a horse? Strolling was discouraged: when Mr Western sees Agnes walking he suspects something — a kind of latent sexual nuance lingers over this act. So walking is perilous — it represented “unfettered female agency.” At the quiet contented ending of Agnes Grey, Mr Western comes with his cat to invite Agnes to come out with them. Here it is pleasurable; not a sign of poverty or struggle.

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Wildfell Hall in the engraving by Edmund Morison Wimperis (1873)

I conclude with three of the four talks, which were on Anne Bronte’s poetry: Quinnell: ‘Tis strange to think there was a time’: Romantic Echoes in Anne and Emily Brontë’s Poetry; Ciara Glasscott, “Is childhood then so all-divine: representations of childhood, innocence and romantic imagery in the poems of Anne Bronte: and Dr Edwin Moorhouse Marr: “Even the wicked shall at last Be fitted for the skies:” Anne Bronte’s Poetry and the Hope of Universal Salvation.” I don’t want to repeat what they said lest I transcribe it correctly because much was subtle and attached to specific lines in poems. I omitted Sara Pearson on their afterlife because I couldn’t take precise enough notes. I’ll call attention to those poems the talks pointed and make some general remarks from what they said:

“Tis strange to think there was a time\
When mirth was not an empty name,
When laughter really cheered the heart,
And frequent smiles unbidden came,
And tears of grief would only flow
In sympathy for others’ woe;

When speech expressed the inward thought,
And heart to kindred heart was bare,
And Summer days were far too short
For all the pleasures crowded there,
And silence, solitude, and rest,
Now welcome to the weary breast … (see the rest of the poem where you clicked)

This and others were said to emphasize a loss of early innocent childhood; then silence, solitude and rest is what was wanted; now night the holy time is no longer a place of peace. A grieving and regretting here that goes beyond Wordsworth. There is real fear in her “Last Lines” “A dreadful darkness closes in/On my bewildered mind”). In “Dreams” she imagines herself to a mother with a young baby, fears finding herself unloved afterward. There is a Blakean idea of unqualified innocence, an idealized nostalgia (it is highly unlikely Anne ever saw Blake’s poetry). There is great affliction in her poetry partly because she wants to believe in salvation for all. It was very upsetting for her to think of Cowper lost in hell. If he is not saved, what hope has she? She sought individual comfort; there is a deep seriousness about them all, and then quiet contemplation. I’m not unusual for finding Bluebell, one of her finest

A fine and subtle spirit dwells
In every little flower,
Each one its own sweet feeling breathes
With more or less of power.

There is a silent eloquence
In every wild bluebell
That fills my softened heart with bliss
That words could never tell.

It seems to me we have been misreading these poems by framing them in evangelical and sheerly religious contexts. We need to take seriously, the strong dark emotions as well as her turning to the beauty of the natural world and real and imagined memories of childhood.

Branwell Bronte

Ellen

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Martha Rosler (born 1943): photographer, profoundly humane, politically enlightened, educator, essayist

Martha Rosler, in front of her most recent exhibit, Irrespective at the Jewish Museum & Yale University

Dear friends,

This is an interim blog, or a blog in progress. I am not ready to write at all adequately, even in a blog form, on the life and work of the American artist, Martha Rosler. I need to read her writing more, see more of her photography as printed in books. I’ve two good books on the way(Culture Class, and a Retrospective catalogue). But having felt so demoralized by recent events in the US public worlds, and today feeling lifted up with some hope for women with Joe Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris for his vice-presidential candidate, and listened to the various podcasts on Rosler’s exhibit online, I want no longer to wait to include in my series of woman artists at long last, someone still alive as well as right now creating art to enable women to uncover, challenge, and subvert the views of them that turn them into powerless sex objects, woman as existing only in relation to men (mother, wife, sister, daughter),and to expose war, homelessness, gender roles, commercialism, inequality, hard labor, desperately abysmal living conditions around the world. She is has been at this for fifty years. She was born and still lives in Brooklyn, taught at Brooklyn college, has been socially engaged with the communities all around.  Her official website.

Her photograph and montages speak for themselves — as pictures should.  From her Semiotics of the Kitchen:

Letter “K” (Knife). Still from Semiotics of the Kitchen, black-and-white video, 1975 — If you had to live here …

From House Beautiful, Bringing the War Home (1962-72); Images of women at home as of Vietnam and the US colonialist wars against the Southeast Asian people (Vietnam, Cambodia)

The Gray Drape

Men at War

The Gladiators

This is one she made of Pat Nixon, as the quintessential American householder:

First Lady, Pat Nixon — it’s hard to distinguish so much phoniness, so flat and abject , so pathetic a consciousness

How beautiful? what make for beauty? Rosler is much influenced by Luce Irigaray’s strategies of apparent aquiescence combine with harsh punishmentas the way of the world towards ordinary people. In her essays on art and the art world, she lays bare the class structures, the privileging, how museums and colleges can work to stifle individuals. Her anti-war work is sometimes wrongly interpreted as being against just one kind of war: the colonialist, far away. But she is ever doing is examining the material bases and left-overs from our daily lives. History and art must be inclusive: take in what’s found at Wall-Mart, low and vulgar as well as high and elegant art.

Here is a good explanation of what her collages and montages are made of:

And here she discusses the conditions of the art world in Lisbon at an exhibit in a museum the 1970s, her own attitudes and how they’ve changed over the years, and what are the conditions an artist who wants to show her work (and occasionally maybe sell it) have to deal with: audience taste, audience tolerance, the financing of art

Ellen

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Jane Austen and Cornwall

Cassandra’s depiction of Jane Austen, said to be at the seaside, 1804

Kynance Cove, modern photo

Janeite friends.

As I hope to get onto a plane and fly to Cornwall tomorrow evening in order to spend a week there with a Road Scholar group headed by Peter Maxted (naturalist, environmentalist, author of among other good books, The Natural Beauty of Cornwall), I’ve been looking to see if there is any mention or connection by Austen of herself with Cornwall. I found one specific concrete mention, to which a friend has added another in the comments:

In a letter to Cassandra, from Castle Square, Southampton, dated Saturday Oct 1st 1808, Austen writes:

You have used me ill, you have been writing to Martha without telling me of it, & a letter which I sent her on wednesday [sic] to give her information of you, must have been good for nothing, I do not know how to think that something will not still happen to prevent her returning by the 10th — And if it does, I shall not much regard it on my own account, for I am now got into such a way of being alone that I do not wish even for her. — The Marquis [of Lansdowne] has put off being cured for another year; — after waiting some weeks for the return of the Vessel he had agreed for himself by a famous Man in that Country [Cornwall], in which he means to go abroad twelvemonth hence (LeFaye, 4th edition, pp 147-148).

A contemporary print of the high street in Southampton: the Austens rented a house in Castle Square

I feel for Jane: she has been used ill: anyone who does not tell of information or acts they have been getting or about, but leaves their friend to act as if they were not in possession of information vital to both, betrays that friend, makes a fool out of her. Cassandra has done wrong, not a big betrayal, but she has gone behind Jane’s back to do something she hoped Jane would not find out about. I am moved by Austen’s statement that she has “got into such a way of being alone” that she no longer wishes even for Martha Lloyd, whom Jane loved. I have just had such an experience of a “friend” not telling me of information she has had and so in effect misrepresented a situation. But I will no longer be misled.

Of course I also feel for her as a woman “got into such a way of being alone” that she no longer wishes for a beloved presence.

LeFaye’s typically insinuating note tells of John-Henry Petty (1765-1809) who was “widely travelled but rather solitary” who came to Southampton “to indulge his passion for yachting. He bought the ruined castle within the city walls, and enlarged it “into a gothic fantasy,” selling off the father’s library and art collection at Bowood house to pay for this rebuilding. He became Marquis in 1805, married his mistress, Mary Arabella, daughter of Revd Hinton Maddox and widow of Sir Duke Gifford. LeFaye then recounts nasty gossip about how Lady Gifford was “fat,” and as “strange” as the house Lord Lansdowne created, because she, in supposedly eccentric dress, went walking one day with her three daughters in wind, rain, on stony and mud-filled cobbled streets. LeFaye follows this with the more charitable account by James Edward Austen-Leigh, who turns a carriage this woman went round in into a “fairy equipage” (pp 542-43).

But we have had to take several turns to get there.

For the second I am indebted to Diana Birchall and her use of google, a reference in Mansfield Park, the mention is direct, including the word Cornwall.

“To be so near happiness, so near fame, so near the long paragraph in praise of the private theatricals at Ecclesford, the seat of the Right Hon. Lord Ravenshaw, in Cornwall, which would of course have immortalised the whole party for at least a twelvemonth!”

The upper classes in Cornwall behaved the way they did in Northampton: put on private theatricals and then wrote in absurd praise of themselves.

The Mansfield Park players hard “at work” (from the 2007 Mansfield Park, scripted by Maggie Wadey)

Another more speculative literary connection could be Richard Carew’s Survey of Cornwall; an Elizabethan antiquarian, he wrote the first intelligent thorough vivid description of Cornwall and its people; it was valued and reprinted in 1769 and 1811; Davies Gilbert provided an index. It has been reprinted in our era by Halliday.

Austen never mentions it, but it is the kind of book we find her reading: histories, travel books, culture, memoirs, and in good 20th and 21st century accounts of Cornwall’s history and culture and geography Carew is still quoted as an authoritative source. The mid-18th century sees the beginning of archeaological digs and accounts of them in books. I would like to assume she read it, for if she did, she could have known as much about Cornwall and more as most general readers would today.

For a fourth and speculative type, Austen could have read some of the sources Winston Graham used, like reformist exposés of prison conditions. See The History of Bodmin Jail, 1779, compiled by Bill Johnson (2006). We know she visited another prison with her brother and was too appalled to describe what she saw.

She would have known of the Wesleys and clearly knew of the spread of methodism (in its evangelical reactionary phases in Hannah More and elsewhere); but again we are up against mostly silence or no specific evidence.

On religious radical religious movements, emigration and myths and legends associated with or rooted in Cornwall gaining new ground in her period (Arthurian, Druidic), like some sceptical or careful Enlightenment types of her era, she might have shown little interest; like others newly interested in the history of poetry, e.g., Thomas Warton in his History of English Poetry, she would come across Arthur in Chaucer and Spenser. We know she read the poets of the later 18th century.

We can find some specific authors and books from the peripheries (so to speak) where we know for sure she read well-grounded observations, in this case mostly about Scotland: Johnson and Boswell’s twin tours and Anne MacVicar Grant)’s memoirs. Here is one of my favorite of Grant’s poems, from her Poems on Various Subjects, a “familiar epistle” to Anne’s good friend of many years, Beatrice, remembering when they were young and aspired to be poets:

When to part us, loud storms and deep gullies conspir’d,
And sublime meditation to garrats [sic] retir’d;
To the workings of fancy to give a relief,
We sat ourselves down to imagine some grief,
Till we conjur’d up phantoms so solemn and sad,
As, if they had lasted, would make us half mad;
Then in strains so affecting we pour’d the soft ditty,
As mov’d both the rocks and their echoes to pity [but]
The cottage so humble, or sanctified dome,
For the revels of fancy afforded no room;
And the lyre and the garland, were forc’d to give place
To duties domestic … (reprinted in Breen, Women Romantic Poets, 1785-1832, pp 88-93)

In Austen’s active life, she traveled all around the coast of southern and once to western England — once as far as Wales, about which (again) we have some sketch-y knowledge: see Diana Birchall’s Jane Austen at the Seaside.

So we can sort of connect our 18th century Austen with Cornwall: “philosophical” studies, and history; poetry and memoirs of travel-writers and others telling of life in the peripheries at the time, the newly burgeoning genres of survey and archeaological analysis, and her own summer travels.

And we can place her against a backdrop of 17th through 18th century history in Cornwall from our own modern perspective: here we have a cornucopia, and from a virtual library of books I recommend F. E. Halliday, The History of Cornwall, Philip Payton’s Cornwall, Philip Marsden’s Rising Ground; Winston Graham’s Poldark novels and The Groves of Eagles, and DuMaurier’s several novels set in Cornwall, especially Jamaica Inn and The King’s General, grounded in the real doings of the civil war, its aftermath and the Grenville and Rashleigh families, and 17th into 18th century history of Menabilly in Cornwall. I’ll bet Stevenson’s reading of DuMaurier’s novel is absorbing and enjoyable.

And we can go there ourselves.

Ellen

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A Jane Austen Study Day, JASNA, DC — Life in Regency England (1)

A statue representing Jane Austen outside Chawton House

I give an account of the whole meeting briefly and then summarize and comment on the first two papers: on religion socially, politically considered, and on the lives of servants, what a huge population, and the way they were represented as opposed to the reality. For now a brief anticipation of the second blog

Dear friends and readers,

This past Saturday, April 27th, the JASNA-DC (which includes people from Northern Virginia, and Maryland just outside of DC), together with members from the southeast and mid-Virginia local groups met at the American University Library to spend a day together. We heard and discussed four papers, had lunch, were told about events at the upcoming JASNA in Williamsburg, Virginia. Organized by Mary Mintz, an English professor at AU, and now regional coordinator for the JASNA-DC, with much help by Amy Stallings (one of those in charge of the upcoming AGM in Williamsburgh), it featured papers of high calibre, entertainingly presented, and covering basic aspects of Austen’s life and writing in brief, religion, servants, portraits, and dancing. This is on the morning’s papers, the first of two blog-reports.

Crofton, St Edmunds, Portsmouth — see RHC Ubsdell, a painter of Austen’s era

Anthony Batterton spoke on “Millenarians, Methodists and Muggletonians Religion in Jane Austen’s England.” He offered a general history and the situation of the differing religious groups of Austen’s England.

Austen’s era was a time of great diversity of opinion, undergoing a transition into fewer sects. At the same time the Anglican church had a very strong powerhold, to attend university, be an MP, to not be barred now and again from holding property, the sect to espouse was the Anglican. Beginning in the reign of Henry VIII, we see a re-branding of Anglican’s Catholicism (no inner change), but then what happened is what meant to be an Anglican swerved wildly. The 1662 Act of Conformity set up the exclusionary rules, against which many stubborn people held out — or were converted to something other than Anglican. There was a new Book of Common Prayer, it softened over the years and in 1689, an act of toleration had made the situation of Catholics and Unitarians clearer. One concrete result of all this is the re-building and decorating of churches in the later 18th century where iconography has been seriously gotten rid of. By mid-Victorian period, Anglican art was re-Catholicized. No one professed to atheism or agnosticism. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer was current into the 1920s.

A way of characterizing the values is enlightenment was to be preferred to enthusiasm (which in the 18th century tended to mean highly excessive and out of control) . In American the situation was quite different: the evangelical and Pentecostal sects met in the open air, encouraged mystic experiences. There had been a “great awakening” in the US, which began the Sunday school movement, and that spread to the UK. The evangelical revival in England in the 1730s, were intensely emulating their masters and mistresses. Austen shows much ambivalence to this new evangelical strictness, proselytizing and overt posturing. But Sunday school movement in both countries from around 1780 offered education for the very poor, reading, writing, math lessons, the start of a conscious effort to provide free primary school education. The abolition movement grows here (there were pro-slavery people too, e.g., Jame Oglethorpe); 1807 slave trade abolished; 1833 finally reached full abolition.

He went over the classes of ministers: rectors, vicars, and curates; that there were two kinds of tithes; gradually vicars became sort of rectors with curates replacing the vicar as a poorly paid worker in the parish. Later in the 19th century the anxiety over taking high Church of England positions and practices had gone: you might say the church was being slowly gentrified, with ministers having an upgraded gentleman’s status. The avowed purpose of Oxford and Cambridge was to train clergymen; churches functioned as the registry offices of the time starting in 1537. Marriage Act of 1753 was meant to control marriages. Ministers were supposed to preach or read sermons each Sunday.

Outside the church of England were all the dissenters, and after the enthusiasms of the civil war and 17th century these began to go into decline. It was so much to someone’s advantage to become Anglican. Still dissenting academies arose to provide an excellent education, and they were quietly supported and protected, and as the century wore on new and politically radical forms of dissension rose or spread: quakers who gradually shrunk, ossified, became inward looking, pietistic, and stopped proselytizing. Millenarism is a belief the end of the world is at hand, God about to overthrow the world’s order. Methodism can be dated back to 1730, John Wesley the crucial man (came back from the US after a failed romance and time in a church). Methodism split into factions with Wesley’s believing in free will and Whitfield’s disciples Calvinist (only successful in Wales). A Swedenborg sect was visionary, from Sweden. Muggletonians were millenarians, except aggressive so they would denounce people (they cursed Walter Scott, their last church destroyed during the Blitz). Unitarians held there was no trinity; nowadays they are not seen as Christian. Presbyterians and congregationalists organized their church so as to give the ordinary person power

Catholics and Jews were excluded from the act of 1689; those who had no property elsewhere and could, moved north. The decriminalizing of Catholicism in 1788 led to the Gordon riots. 1829 came a fuller emancipation. Jews had been expelled under Edward I, brought back publicly under Cromwell, emancipated partly 1753, and more full rights in 1858. No or few permanent Muslim residents can be found in English records; in 1813 a recording of a resoundingly successful Indian restaurant. Did they serve curry?

Now Austen had two brothers and a father who were all clergymen, so the whole profession (Navy too) a deep part of her life, but Mary Crawford exhibits a modern sensibility. You were legally supposed to show up in church once a month; you could be fined if you never showed, but it was social pressure within communities that led to church-going in the 19th century.

There was not much feeling for the inward experience of religion in the era; rather he thoroughly mapped religion outwardly, how it functioned socially and politically in the time, and how represented by the Anglican establishment.

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This is a portrait by Hogarth of the servants in his household – Janet showed this sympathetic image

Janet Mullany’s topic was “Freedom and Identity: Servant life in Jane Austen’s Time.” We were told she writes for WETA and speaks frequently; that she has a thorough knowledge of the lives of servants, having been studying this topic for years. She was English herself, grew up there. As Carolyn Steedman (whom Mullany quoted) demonstrated, thousands of people worked as servants in all sorts of houses and situations with records coming from the later 17th through early 20th century. Janet had many slides and was very witty. She zeroed in on specific aspects of the servant’s experience.

In the 1960s the BBC interviewed hundreds of servants, seeking reminiscences, and it became apparent many of these people were ashamed of such a background, or bitter. Also that there is a insistent conformity of attitudes projected by everyone (from whatever angle) towards servants. A huge amount of material emerged because so many were in “service.” People just did not live alone much until our own era; it was rare not to have a servant if you were above the subsistence level. One in eight people were servants in 1775; one in four in 1796. 1.4 million women, 60,000 men since the 1890s. They resiliently took on work that was hard; they have been replaced by technology.

So we heard how houses were built differently but from the later 18th century on you find special quarters set up for servants; that they expected “perks” and “Veils” from visitors. They were taxed as if they were objects, different roles different tax. Men servants more expensive and did much less. Mullany showed caricature cartoons. Mullany then moved to registry office entries — inns and taverns were places to exchange information, find position advertised. There were hiring fairs, they bought their specific tools with them. Cook was a major respected role. So too housekeeper. She told us about the rise of a respected chef in Paris. Cookery, cooked vegetables are found in engravings; shoes (precious for servants) found also.

19th century early photograph of a servant — it appears to be Hannah Cullwick

Austen mentions servants now and again with telling comments. Martha Lloyd was the Austen housekeeper (that’s how Mullany explains her presence for long stretches of time at Chawton cottage.) James was a servants during her father’s life. Littlewoods, foster parents. The city of Bristol was a code word for owners of enslaved people — Mrs Elton’s brother-in-law made his money from enslaved workers abroad. She mentioned what other people wrote about servants or the enslaved. Success stories helped gain respect: Ignatius Sancho, born in Africa, painted by Reynolds; some of the stories show the previously enslaved person or people at first making a success (he ended up owning property in Westminster), but the society throws wrenches. White Europeans did better often because they were not so easily cheated; the society would not help the previously enslaved as they didn’t have real respect. I thought of Johnson’s adopted son, Francis Johnson.

Mullany brought in slavery too by imagining from the smallest wisps. She told of the famous decisions: 1772, 1783, seeming to suggest that a person on English ground cannot be enslaved. For servants though newsprint is invaluable. By 1711 it was understood how important were the plantations “abroad” in bringing in needed income. Servants served people thoroughly. Supported musician-servants were 80% male.

Mullany concluded her lecture with “close reading” or deciphering sets of engravings revealing “the life” of the servant — as a patriarchal, hierarchical establishment would condescendingly show these. The popular play, High life below Stairs is not all that far gone from truth. She brought in the famous portrait of Belle from Kenwood House, and told us Belle’s life story in sofar as it is known.  More common as a set of representations:  One set of a “Harlot’s progress:” contrasted with her virtuous sister who gets her ring, holy moment of matrimony.  One amusing James Northcote set of engravings shows a wanton servant ending up a prostitute on the streets, and a virtuous Pamela type becoming the “lady of the house.” (I’ll add these last especially are more about controlling women’s sexuality and identity in men’s and the society’s political eyes than the reality of their existences.)

I suppose the title could make you ask yourself as you listened, How could you know any liberty working from the time you got up to when you went to sleep (and not in your own private space), made such a small salary, had so little time off? And also how could a servant emerge with authentic existence — finding out, and then fulfilling any individual talents and desires she might have had in such a chequered imprisoned silent space.

A delightful Brock illustration — don’t miss the cat ….

There was some brief discussion after each paper, but I didn’t take what was said down. The papers took most of the time allotted to each up and people came up afterwards to talk and ask questions.

E.M.

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EC/ASECS at Staunton, Va; ASECS, Denver: Theater, Film, Landscape, Women artists

A 2017 production of Etheredge’s Man of Mode

A painting of an unknown young woman in the Berger Collection, Denver Art Museum

Friends and readers,

I held off writing about the rest of the autumn EC/ASECS conference separate sessions this past fall at the East Central, American 18th century society, a regional group (for a brief account and link to my paper on “Intertextuality: Charlotte Smith, Prior and Crabbe in Persuasion”), I held, I say, off for so long that I have lost my stenographer’s pad of what my now slow weak fingers and clumsier hands can capture. So I have determined not to wait so long for transcribing what was I able to take down, from the ASECS (American 18th century Society) conference I went to three weeks ago, March.

For the rest of the EC/ASECS I’ve described what the trip ordeal was like and what I saw of Denver in my Sylvia II blog Afterpiece (scroll down, not too far) and the two panels, Factual Fictions and Fictional Facts, one of which I chaired, and in one of which I gave my paper on the historical fiction of Winston Graham. Now I can offer a summary of the keynote lecture.

Matthew Kinservik on Etherege’s “Man of Mode and Its influence on 18th century comedy” has just been published in the March issue of the Intelligencer this year too. He asked why such an “oddly unfunny play” should have been such a hit and deemed representative of the finest intellect, controlled emotionalism, and satiric nature of comedy in the Restoration era. He explicated Steele’s adverse response and Dennis’s defense of the play. From close reading this debate Matt demonstrated that The Man of Mode survived as a period piece, highly artificial, a throw-back to an earlier era, historically acceptable, in which a central (no longer socially admired) aristocratic type, Dorimant, does whatever he wants and is made acceptable by the hypocritical codes of England “of the past.” It was therefore seen as safe, non threatening, and as a flattering view of the Restoration — all the while presenting sex-antagonism, on a bedrock of spite, as a serious exposure of earlier (still ambiguously attractive) norms. Etherege’s text emerges as even then (the early 18th century) the darker play it feels like and must be played for today. Perhaps I should have mentioned that of two of the plays performed in the Blackfriars theater next door to our conference while we were there, one was The Man of Mode — so after Matt’s paper we had quite a frank discussion and dispute over all sorts of aspects of the production, which used costumes that combined 21st century motifs with later 17th century ones.

Walking in the Wood (Davies’s 2007 NA)

Onto ASECS, Denver:  I link Matt’s lecture/paper to a Thursday afternoon session on “The Eighteenth Century on Film” (a NE/ASECS panel) where the topic was TV movies mostly, popular social art of our own time, using texts either from or based on 18th century history. Sarah Schaefer gave a paper (and did a power-point presentation of on the openings, framings (paratexts) of Black Sails, Outlander, Poldark and Westeros, Westworld and Games of Thrones were all brought together.

Poldark paratext (2015 — the oceans of the world gazed at)

Outlander paratext (2015 — linking 18th to 20th century world)

She argued the point of the images was to build a global world in which we see geopolitical tropes at play. Poldark is the most heritage-like of the costume drama films she covered; in Outlander the fantastical leads to a historical setting. In these liminal vast pictorial spaces we enter foregroundings of humanistic feelings and themes. Emily Sferra spoke on Andrew Davies’s 2007 adaptation of Austen’s Northanger Abbey: she criticized the film for making Henry as teacher of needed moral lessons to Catherine instead of allowing Catherine’s movement from a naive response to gothic to a mature understanding of how true terror, oppression, cruelty enters our lives. She felt Davies had lost Austen’s peculiar satirical tone. The movie also pleases the male gaze and desire (say) to look at other males as JJ Fields is sexy in an elegant artificial way. I add that in that this interest in the male body and beauty Andrew Davies’s NA then resembles the movies Sarah Schaefer was discussing. Zoe Eckmann made a case for regarding the depiction of female sexuality in The Favourite as liberating for the 21st century female gazer; she saw it as satire presenting women as aggressors. It overturns the way we expect women to behave submissively; audiences don’t care about historical accuracy.

Emma Stone as Abigail Masham

Rachel Weisz and Olivia Coleman and Lady Churchill and Queen Anne

The audience for these papers turned out to be people who had watched precisely these film adaptations with real care and investment of themselves. I presented an argument against Zoe’s view (made in my blog-review a couple of months ago: “Repulsive, obscene, gut-level anti-feminism”) and then the conversation became as lively as the one over Matt’s paper and the production of Man of Mode that audience saw. I wish I could remember all that was said, we went way over time ….

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On Friday early morning, I again found myself able to take down what was said about Gilpin and his relationship to other landscape gardeners and illustrators on “The Landscape Garden in the Eighteenth Century” panel. Elizabeth Mjelde talk on Gilpin’s work at Stowe began unexpectedly in Sri Lanka where she located evidence of the global impact of Gilpin’s work in an English officer’s private commonplace book about seeking new sciences for transforming the landscape, exploring it, testing it. In a place where harsh colonialist practices were the norm, here are dialogues and pictures about one’s duty to keep the desire for retirement, and another way of life “in its place.” Dana Gliseman’s paper was about the intersection of literary and artful imaginative terrains (descending from Gilpin) with concrete literal places. The ha-ha comes from a desire to make a trompe-d’oeil. I think she meant to suggest that the central concern with sexual reproduction (marriage, sexual transgression) found in characters in novels otherwise highly pictorial and picturesque show a linkage between landscape, the natural world and moral meaning.

Villa Medici, Fiesole

I assume others like me when we moved from these papers citing the usual English novels (Tristram Shandy, Sidney Biddulph, Mansfield Park), to Felix Martin’s remarkable talk on the development of landscape art (JW Turner), then schools of picturesque and classical architecture, parks which are genuinely global, rooted in documentable history, and finally considered philosophical aesthetics — were bowled over. Mr Martin was himself an architect who has studied in Italy, Dublin and the Warburg Institute and he brought a wealth of slides to enable us to journey through time and space and end on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesen (his own country seat in Wisconsin), landscaped houses, and those of followers of his work. He went over different architectural schools as seen say in Blenheim and the Medici gardens in Fiesole, Castle Howard (familiar to some of us as Brideshead in the movie). He moved from the writing of Shaftesbury to Blake, to modern landscape design in Arizona. As Olmstead had come up in the panel I chaired where there was a paper on the later Gilpin-rooted influences on environmentalism, so Olmstead came up again as against false pomposity and for a cosmopolitanism that builds with local geography and flora in mind. The Denver park is an Olmstead creation.

Wright’s creations in Taliesen restore the landscape

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Prometheus Painting by Prince Hoare

I’ve two more papers to report, one from a Friday mid-morning panel called “Picturing the Stage,” the other the key note address of the conference by Melissa Hyde on women artist of the era, especially two almost unknown Frenchwomen, much of whose work seems to have disappeared. Mark Ledbury’s “Painter, Playwright, Entrepreneur: Prince Hoare in 1790s London told the remarkable story of a man whose father had been a painter, and who somehow went to good schools, learned several lagnauges, got himself to Rome where he was supported and befriended by radical talent and rich people (Fuseli, and the Cortellini family) who was continually re-inventing himself, and turned to acting, to writing plays (one farce out of a tragedy), left a book of fascinating essays about his own era from an artistic and theater man’s point of view called The Artist. He asked why is this man forgotten and the answer he came up with is “art history” is still plagued with and organized around (money given) the respectable known canon

Marianne Loir, Portrait of a Gentleman reading

The title of Melissa Hyde’s “Ambitions, Modest and Otherwise: Women and the Visual Arts in France,” emphasizes the perspective of her talk: the struggle of women artists to find time and space and materials to paint with, to find clients to paint for, to have them recognized, their name known and talked about. Women artists had the problem unreal depictions of the female body were used as a matter of course to embody “the glory and fame” denied most women whose bodies did not at all look so well-fed and fecund. She discussed French 18th century women artists and learned women whose names have come down to us, whose rare but nowadays sometimes re-printed books are known, findable, in print even. She contrasted the famous successful Vigee LeBrun (with brilliant memoirs to make her presence understood). The first woman is Marianne Loir, who died age 28. She painted Jean-Francois de Troy; produced a portrait of Madame de Chatelet. she never married and appears to have lived independently, alone for a while and also with a sister. Francois Hubert was her teacher; Prof Hyde showed us images Loir made of women as young girls, society ladies, ordinary unidealized people. Prof Hyde was forced to start her lecture late (an unnecessarily prolonged giving out of prizes ate the time up), and I had to rush away to my panel, so only heard of the beginning of Mme Lusuler’s career (I am not even sure I have her name correctly): she painted men, a “boy with a violin,” psychologically revealing portraits. She was well-connected, studied with academy teachers, received an “eloge” in two columns

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I had to leave on Saturday sometime mid-morning at the latest so missed a panel I would have loved to hear, “Marriage Rites and Marriage Wrongs: Feminist Thinking, especially a paper Condorcet: “One injustice can never become a legitimate reason to commit another (on women’s suffrage and marriage reform) by Guillaume Ansart; “Domestic Tyranny and Civil Slavery: Marriage in Catherine Macauley’s History of England” by Wendy Gunther-Canada;” Louise d’Epinay as a site to study the need to reform marriage and the state through education.” There was in the early morning a panel on health and disease in the 18th century chaired by Chris Mounsey (he chairs excellent panels on disability). But I did the wise thing in leaving at 9 am or so: given plane delays, airport troubles the trip took me 9 hours, and I needed to be home on Sunday to work towards my teaching, to drive Izzy to ice-skating, to say nothing of resting myself.

Unknown little girls in the Berger collection — each girl has a symbolic toy

I also did not attend a panel I could have: at 9:45 on Thursday morning, chaired by Benedicte Miyamoto, four papers on artists: three enjoyable sounding papers were Sarah Bakkali, “The Portfolio as Portable Museum: Disrupting French Collecting Practices,” Cristina S. Martinez’s “The Removal of Poussin’s Sacramento from Italy: smuggling, displacing cultural property and developing copyright,” and Louisiane Ferlier’s “Royal Society: Classifying the Collections then and now,” which Benedicte followed up with a visit for her panelist at the Denver Art Museum were they viewed the Denver Berger Collection. I know about this (noticed it) only because this Friday night I went to Eleanor Shevlin and Sabrina Baron’s Washington Area Print group’s talk by Benedicte (on her study of marginalia and reading practices in artistic manuals) and afterwards their dinner (or supper) at a local Thai restaurant. She and I got to talking of the conference we found we had both attended, and she told me of this panel (which I had missed) and showed me the above picture on her cell phone. Another graces the top of this blog.

I did not mention in my blog on my panels what a good time some people in the hotel appeared to be having on Friday evening. There was a concert on harpsichord and flute by two 18th century women musicians, Elisabetta de Gambarini and Anna Bon, both of whom seem to have had a hard life (one included beating by a husband): I attended this concert, quiet and unassuming and lovely. A film was shown in another part of the hotel. There was another concert in another venue further off (you needed to get a cab). People were drinking and began to play Dungeons and Dragons it was said — in 18th century costumes?

I did see some old friends (had coffee with them), and made some new acquaintances; got myself used to eating breakfast out of Starbucks (they have good coffee and yummy croissants) and hoarding snacks in my room. I took home a new edition of poetry by Charlotte Smith and bought on a discount when I got home two more biographies (of Catherine Clive and of Charlotte Lennox). I went to an enjoyable Burney dinner Friday evening, which dinner lasted until well after 10, and afterwards up to bed. I have still not tried to master putting on or changing the channels of any of the buttonless TVs in these fancy modern large hotels. It is still just that too much to ask. I worry the programs will be awful and I will not be able to turn the thing off.

And so ended another conference for me, not just this past Friday night but also in the act of writing out, and remembering what happened and some of what was said that I was able to join in on.

Ellen

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10 books that have influenced me most in my life? Julie de Lespinasse & Marie Anne du Deffand

Watteau, The Serenade

Day 8/10 of books that influenced me, had a discernible impact. (For Day 7/10, Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale). When I was around 17 or 18 years old, I was in a used bookstore in Manhattan called the Argosy. It was on 59th Street, near the corner of Lexington Avenue. How I got there I don’t know but someone must’ve told me about it — it seemed to be about 5 floors high with very old elevators (the kind that had gates that seemed near to falling on you), and each floor was filled with bookcases of dusty books, many very old and decidedly uninviting, some falling apart.

It was there I first came across Fanny Burney, in a one volume and in a three volume edition of her letters (brown, falling apart) and I have told that story in the Burney newsletter: “On First Encountering Fanny Burney D’Arblay.”  But it was what was nearby that riveted me truly: a single volume edition in French of the letters of Julie de Lespinasse, nearby a 3 volume edition in French of the letters of Madame Du Deffand. I opened them up and started to read and found them irresistible. I no longer have those books but I do have the Elibron facsimile of a 2 volume edition of Lespinasse and a 2 volume edition of the letters of DuDeffand edited by Chantal Thomas.

In the volume by Lespinasse I read she was frantically and abjectly in love with a M. Guilbert and wrote him desperate letters where she poured out her thoughts and feelings in the most eloquent language I had ever come across. In the course of telling the tortures of her soul, she talked freely about all sorts of things, writing dramatic scenes, commenting on books, on plays she’s gone, people she knows, but always she comes back to the main point, she loves him, she cannot do without him, why does he not write her, why does he not visit her, not even respond to her. It was a form of madness.

An engraving said to represent Madame du Deffand

Madame du Deffand was very different: acid melancholy, caustic wit, the most bitter and truthful comments about life, funny, she wrote mostly to a man I had never heard of before: Horace Walpole whom she was very fond of, but also Voltaire (I had heard of him) and people with strange (to me) titles, particularly one man, Heinault to whom she confided the secrets of her life. I’m sure I understood less than half of what I read but what I did read struck deep chords. At early point I understood she was blind. Well many years later I have read much about Lespinasse, niece to Deffand, and Benedetta Craveri’s Madame du Deffand and her world, and Chantal Thomas. I read these before I read the unabridged Clarissa.

Engraving representation of Julie

I took all these volumes home (including the Burney) in a big brown shopping bag, and since then have read even many later 18th century women’s letters and memoirs and novels, English and French. I typed and put two novels by two other women of this era (Sophie Cottin, Isabelle de Montolieu) on my website, and edited Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde for Valancourt Press. Jane Austen read some of these women (Stael, Genlis, for a start).

On the vast first floor

The Argosy still exists but is no longer many floors with ancient elevators; it’s one big floor with a basement and you buy many of its books through catalogues. Below is the Argosy from the outside ….

This coming fall I propose to read with a class at OLLI a paperback edition in English of Madame Roland’s autobiography and letters. I am very fond of a biography of her by Francoise Kermina, which is more insightful than the ones in English and also a Elibron facsimilar of a 19th century study of her by Charles Dauban which includes selection of letters by her to her friend and separate sketches of her relationships with different equally interesting people..

Alfonso Simonetti, Ancor Non Torna, illustration for 19th century Italian translation of Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest

I put Ann Radcliffe here too, anong these women: my love for her novels, and the one travel book comes out of how the tone of her mind is coterminous with the tone of these other women’s minds of the later 18th century. I know I love the gothic which increases what her books mean to me, but basically her Mysteries of Udolpho is such another as Stael’s Corinne, ou l’Italie, and Madame de Chastenay translated Radcliffe’s great book into French and left a 3 volume memoir of her own.

Watteau, Iris (detail inside much wider vaster mural)

Ellen

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10 Books that influenced me most in my life: Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, Bronte’s Jane Eyre & DuMaurier, Austen’s Mansfield Park

Hattie McDaniel, Olivia de Havilland and Vivien Leigh 1939 in Gone with the Wind

Diary

Friends,

Day 5/10 of books that influenced me (growing up lasts a long time), that had a discernible impact.

Again for me this is problematic. Between the ages of 13 and 15 I read and reread four books to the point I knew many scenes by heart and can today still conjure them up vividly in my mind. Undeniably (surely we are to to be truthful, or What are we doing in such an exercise?), the first up in time (I was 12) was Gone with The Wind. It came into our house as a book-of-the-month club special for my mother, and I sat down and began to read. I was so entranced (with a four column page) read it so much and so often that the copy fell into pieces. The cover illustration was a collage of scenes from the GWTW books (hence not like the one I find) but my copy was a reprint of the first edition, the ample book behind this older cover:

Note the confederate flag on the side of the paper cover

The problem is that even then I knew it was a racist book and I am today deeply ashamed of myself that I ignored this. (Note the confederate flag on the side of the paper cover.) It was wrong and racist behavior on my part as the book has functioned perniciously in US culture. Still I am not embarrassed in front of GWTW. I have seen this reaction when I used to assign to students to read a book from childhood and the young adult was embarrassed to realize what the book he or she so loved was. I regretted when that happened. My father tried to read The Secret Garden to me when I was 10 and had to give it up so mortified was he to see the agenda of Burnett’s book. These books answered to what we were then

I was Scarlett in my earliest readings. GWTW led to my reading a helluva of lot of Walter Scott in my earlier teens.  In later years I have decided the heroine of GWTW is Melanie. I shall never forget her standing at the top of the ruined stairs of Tara with a rifle, having killed the marauding soldier, and now determined to lug the corpse to the field to bury it. When Ashley comes home, Scarlett’s wild desire to run to him, and Will saying, “he’s her husband.” I’ve expanded the heroes to include Rhett Butler, Ashley Wilkes and Will Benteen.  I remember so many scenes from GWTW; they formed a backdrop of women’s key emotional moments in my mind. Scarlett in her mother’s green velvet curtains trying to charm money out of the imprisoned Rhett.

It’s women’s historical romance first and foremost.

I’ve never given up this type of book and some are leftist and liberal. My most recent wallowing has been in the distressingly pro-violence Outlander (the first three books) and the brilliant voyeuristic film adaptation: I find irresistible the central love relationship of Jamie and Claire, and I bond with Claire in book and film. I find irresistible still her fierce adherence to Jamie, I bond with her in book and film.

Claire and Jamie starting out together …

People disappear all the time.
Young girls run away from home.
Children stray from their parents and are never seen again.
Housewives take the grocery money, and a taxi to the train station.
Most are found eventually.
Disappearances, after all, have explanations.
Usually.
Strange, the things you remember.
Single images and feelings that stay with you down through the years

I know the Poldark novels by Winston Graham belong to this genre so my study of the Poldark novels began here when I started to read Ross Poldark after watching a few of the episodes of the 1970s serial drama. It’s deeply humane in its politics.

My first copy of Ross Poldark, the 1970s reprint of the 1951 cut version, published in anticipation of the 1975 serial drama starring Robin Ellis

There were three other authors I read & reread around the same time, getting to know by heart key scenes: the second chronologically was Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I recently reread it once again and am convinced it is a poetic masterpiece of l’ecriture-femme, one of the great novels for women and one of the world’s great novels in all languages. Who can forget countless passages like this: “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.” Contra mundi.

This is the copy of Jane Eyre I now own

At the time I was not alive to the crucial differences in language between Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca — Rebecca was another “extra” from my mother’s subscription to the US Book-of-the-Month Club. Like Bronte, like GWTW, DuMaurier’s books satisfied a need in me that recent Booker Prize women’s romance (Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac, A. S. Byatt, Possession) also satisfy. Bronte and DuMaurier explicitly make visible a woman’s vision using techniques found in l’ecriture-femme, but there were only 5 Bronte novels that I could read (JE, Villette, Agnes Grey, Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wuthering Heights) so DuMaurier functioned as yet more of the same: My Cousin Rachel, Jamaica Inn, Branwell Bronte and above all King’s General. Last summer I reveled with a group of people in a class I taught at OLLI at Mason in reading together King’s General (17th century civil war, crippled heroine) and Susan Sontag’s Volcano Lover. However vastly more perceptive about the nature of reality, Volcano Lover is still of this genre. All versions of the same kind of underlying deep gratification of soul.

I had found my copy of Jane Eyre in a local drugstore for 40¢; I went back a few weeks later, and found imprinted in the same cheap way Austen’s Mansfield Park. Another 40¢ and home I went to read and reread MP. My fourth and nowadays favorite book of all these. When I got to the end and heard the moral of struggle and endure, I turned back to the first page and read the novel over again. I’ve never stopped reading it. It has never been far out of my mind, always at the edge of consciousness to be called up. I’ve never forgotten the cover of this MP: white, with 18th century type stage characters, and the blurb telling me this is a “rollicking comedy.” In my naivete I couldn’t understand why this blurb so false was there. But no matter I was Fanny, and this was a somber strong book.

The colors dark and distorted this is nonetheless the second copy of MP I owned

Since then I’ve seen all the film adaptations of Jane Eyre and Mansfield Park available.

Fanny and Edmund growing up at MP (1983 Ken Taylor BBC)

With GWTW, Jane Eyre, and Mansfield Park I began my love affair with women’s great books, historical romance, and historical fiction. I’ve never stopped reading these and nowadays want only to write about them. And for me they include the great classics (in 19th & early 20th century beyond DuMaurier, English Anne Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Virginia Woolf, Rosamund Lehmann, Margaret Drabble).

Ruth Wilson as Jane Eyre (Sandy Welch’s JA, 2006)

Ellen

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