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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History Today & Yesterday — at the Crossroads, Conflicted, and Cunning

Ford Madox Brown’s famous The Last of England (1864-65)

Friends and readers,

I’ve been working away on my paper for the coming ASECS conference in Denver, Colorado, on Winston Graham’s historical fiction; its now 19 minutes long and all ready, the title: “‘After the Jump:’ Winston Graham’s uses of documented fact and silences,” and I’ve been reading Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River, the second historical novel by this Afro-Carribean man brought up in Leeds, England, and listening to Diana Gabaldon’s fourth Outlander book, Drums of Autumn, which is about Jamie and Claire Fraser’s settlement of themselves, & family in North Carolina. I was riveted by Phillips’s equally immensely sad and political Cambridge before this and mean soon to read his European Tribe. I find Davina Porter’s reading aloud of Gabaldon irresistibly entertaining and at heart a woman’s romance. This and other reading, and contextualizing Graham’s achievement and tracing the changes over the course of six decades of writing, and how these mirror both the era he was writing in as well as the changes in historical fiction during each era — all prompted me to come up with a CFP for the next EC/ASECS:

Crossroads in Historical Fiction

The evolution of historical fiction as a capacious creative genre in the last half-century is astounding (especially when you consider how far it had sunk as a genre in the early part of the 20th). Prestigious prize-winning, breaking with all sorts of conventions of verisimilitude (time-traveling anyone?), its politicization encompasses post-colonialism, identity politics, overturning previous historical consensus from seemingly crucial central events and agents to analyses of peripheries; life-writing, gothic and spirituality trajectories, fictionalized biographies; post-texts (sequels, prequels, rewrites), while carrying on delivering the usual traditional art, fictional & learning history pleasures. Authors themselves nowadays stand at cross-roads so it’s no possible to call a book say Afro-Carribean if the author grew up in Leeds, and now lives in the US and writes for an international market (Caryl Phillips); or even pronounce its text as securely in one or another language different, say from English if it’s mostly known in English translation or originally written in English by someone from a non-English speaking culture. I invite papers on authors who stand at such crossroads in an 18th century imaginary in books or films

It has (to say nothing more) become increasingly difficult to know where to catalogue or place in a library recent transformations in historical fiction and romance. What do you do with fictionalized biography? Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy has influenced directly all biographies of Cromwell since Wolf Hall. What about post-texts which are historical novels in their own right: Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly out of R.L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

I had joined the Historical Novels Review site some weeks ago and have now received my first paper issue: it is fascinating, its theme theme Australian HF: indigenous origins, colonialism, and diaspora. The novels are organized by country or period set in – and within that the central world-historical figure. And I am now at long last receiving one a month paper copies of History Today. It was a difficult subscription to achieve because negotiating the online website was beyond me. I am just getting paper copies the way I just get paper copies of Times Literary Supplement. Well the new (it is much changed since I last got it) periodical is much improved with its reviews addressing modern concerns more. One of the columnists is still Mary Beard. Last month had Suzannah Lipscomb’s review of the movie Mary Queen of Scots where she compares what the movie showed to what is factually agreed upon. This month an intelligent an intelligent article by Lauren Johnson on the mental illnesses of Henry VI as the result of his traumatizing experiences.

Sam Heughan as James Fraser (he resembles both Aidan Turner and Kyle Soller as Ross and Francis Poldark – same posture)

Last I’ve been keeping up with historical films and adaptations of historical novels, and got myself (at a ridiculous price) an anthologies of essays on the way protagonists are recently presented in popular film TV serial dramas (BBC, Netflix, Amazon Prime): Conflicting Masculinities, edd Katherine Byrn James Leggott, Julie Anne Taddeo.

Among the central TV texts (films) they discuss are a group I’ve watched obsessively: The Crown, Victoria, Downton Abbey, Poldark, Outlander. Banished (except for this last where I had the stomach to watch but once). The interesting central thesis of the volume is that recent TV dramas mirroring the undermining of men’s roles in the neo-liberal order as men and placing a new emphasis on “self-making and self-management” for men and women has resulted in a very different portrayal of lead male characters. You could call this a feminization (they are soft emotionally), but that’s not true if you look at what they do: they are endlessly at work, they are themselves a work in progress; those who don’t behave this way are stigmatized as drone, inferior, useless. They are themselves violated (downright raped sometimes). At the same time in the new colonial order it’s their job to resist, not comply with, the economic and social order they find themselves in. What the females do is support, adapt and show resourcefulness in helping them

Physicality is intensely valued, so nakedness; an ability at warfare or being a good breaker of law and rescuing people; they are haunted by the demons of war, often scarred – nakedness is curious though because they are not completely naked (only the chest)) and the males whose penis is shown are those who are suspect, inferior, not masculine enough (like Francis Poldark). The worlds these men live in are uncivilized or inhospitable to women or they are centrally hostile to them in some fundamental way. They are partnered with an active, desiring and strong pro-active females. All round the different programs swirl issues of power, identity, territory – the man is seeking a place to be powerful from, whether criminally or not.

Online I found this essay on why academics supposedly are paying attention to nakedness in male icons of Poldark and Outlander:

There is a problem of complicity in enjoying the spectacle of the ruined, raped, frightening body — the colonialist power through some individual has left its mark on the person. I think of all the cruel marks through burning irons placed on enslaved black people. I saw backs in the African-American museum — of women – just as terrifying as Jamie Fraser’s back (a point of deep shame).

All these shows are associated with colonization but also specific landscapes we long to be in — I remember when in The Crown Philip (Matt Smith) went round the world and asserted his masculinity, it was always in colonized non-white places. When he and Elizabeth (Claire Foy) honeymoon it is in the very British Malta where the dominant culture has become white, Anglo. Philip goes to the Olympics which are taking place in Australia, and this becomes the raison d’etre for a long journey round the world with all males on deck and him in charge; we see a much freer and more comfortably and probably sexually promiscuous Philip. Elizabeth is confined to places like Malta, where her activity in hunting is more in the taking photos vein, including at least taking photos of an elephant. But we do not see evidence or memories of the centuries of harm that produced the control over the native peoples these royal British have in either case.

On Safari

I’ll end on this: my feeling is that Andrew Davies’ film adaptations (one of the best film-makers, script writers, adapters of our era) have not moved to this kind of conflicted masculinity at all — nor nostalgia over landscape.  The characters may be sad in a landscape and the landscape used symbolically.  And sure, Davies in say The Way We Live Now makes sure that the very ambiguous hero, Paul Montague, works and is seen to work hard, but it’s not central to what makes him a sufficiently exemplary male; he is not a rebel against the going regime necessarily. It is more he’s a man of integrity and truth — which all these other heroes are not necessarily. OTOH, he can be sexually unfaithful to the heroine, nay love another woman over a weekend at the seaside and still find himself accepted, covered-up for. This is not held against him as it is say Philip in The Crown.

Maxwell as Henry VII (“The Power in the Land”)

I will be putting my paper on Graham on line later this month and will be blogging a review of an astonishingly superb older BBC serial drama, The Shadow of the King, featuring James Maxwell as a man whose strength is in his intellect and wily amorality. It deserves to be much better known and watched again avidly for it speaks to us again today in an more adult complicated, dare I say Shakespearean way.

Philip Glenister as a subordinate male who rescues Mary Boleyn (2003 Other Boleyn Girl)

Claire Foy again, this time as Anne Boleyn, as aggressive as any male (Wolf Hall)

It is fair to say that emigration, colonialism, and refugees are not at all or only marginally the subject matter of Davies’s chosen books or this older BBC serial drama. The same holds true for the other brilliant and serious Tudor film adaptations, say Wolf Hall and both The Other Boleyn Girl films: masculinity is undermined but from a locally powerful corrupt point of view (all is for sale, including women, one’s head, whatever). See my Overturning Gender Stereotypes. This global political slant is new in its omnipresence, everywhere in the new historical fiction at the crossroads with male and female roles transforming themselves. Whence my opening image.

Ellen

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Lee Virginia Chambers -Schiller: Liberty: A better husband, Single Women in the US, 1780-1840

[The article I wrote] was about old maids. ‘Happy Women’ was the title, and I put in my list all the busy, useful, independent spinsters I know, for liberty is a better husband than love to many of us — Diary of Louisa May Alcott, February 14, 1868

Friends,

This summary and review is a companion blog-essay to my review of Martha Vicinus’s Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920. It’s true that C-S’s book is about a previous generation of women, but C-S’s book is about the same topic from another angle. C-S examines the inward and private experience of women attempting to live independent useful fulfilled lives and where do they go for these? the institutions that Vicinus book argues was the only way single women in the UK could find the power and money and influence to enable future women and themselves also to choose a fulfilled life apart from their roles with men.

C-S’s is a much more upbeat book than Bridget Hill’s Women Alone: spinsters in England, 1660-1850 or Vicinus’s, not because of the tone so much but because C-S has found enabling norms and thought and behavior in the laws and customs of the US in the northeast after the revolutionary and before the Civil War. The average marital age creeping up, and more women were not marrying. S-C focuses on individual single women for whom liberty meant: economic independence, a room of their own, and the expansion of the mind in genial company. In her introduction, she looks to “the search for autonomy among women” and found that in her chosen era in the US this manifested itself in bourgeois individualism: women had “internalized” an “individualized ethic” that came from changes in structure and values of early modern families. Out of the Enlightenment came changing family relationships, and out of the first years of the US “republican motherhood” as an ideal emerged. I’d say the whole emphasis on how important mothers and motherhood is comes from Rousseau, that Janus-faced “feminist” for 18th century women. Under this aegis women asked for more respect, mutuality with men, authority for themselves. .

She asks why some women don’t marry: marriage market numbers get in the way, costs of supporting children, domestic arrangements in some cultures; opportunities for other kinds of self support. There are intangible reasons too: a daughter consigned to take care of the aged Pin some households (Verity in Poldark), the family or the girl deemed herself unmarriageable (this reminds me of Verity Poldark in the Poldark books too smart, too homely, thinking for herself) and didn’t seek a partner for her; some women shy away from sexual intercourse, because of the dangers of pregnancy, perpetual childbirth means she has too many children to do anything else.

But women began to voice more reasons: desire for greater intellectual life, more interesting one!, had a vocation marriage & motherhood inhibits. Ideas of self improvement, ambition, service, achievement, duty, independence shaped by different attitudes towards gender in the US. C=S is careful to distinguish vocation from career. A woman might still be embedded in family and not independent – vocation not bringing in money to live — this brings in Jane Austen to my mind. Teaching won’t hack it; low prestige, low pay, long hours, looked upon as temporary.

Statistics show rise in unmarried women in Massachusetts, and also west and less so south. Problem for women in a society based on enslaving large numbers of people to do the hard work of the and not themselves overtly enslaved, experience shows that they tolerate no rebellion or independence, hierarchy is presented as unquestionable. Sometimes white women could end up very isolated personally and socially if they couldn’t manage to marry or to obey. Southern slave-based culture ferocious towards white women who broke away in the least ways: makes them docile, a “lady” first. In the west there were pioneer settlers, and gradually women were permitted to homestead.

She names seven women and offers brief resumes; some were part of unacknowledged lesbian pairs — lesbianism was not acknowledged by most people at the time. Laura Clay (1949-19410, daughter of Cassius Clay of Kentucky, lived with divorced mother, ran successful farm, deplored any arrangement where someone is dependent on another for life’s necessities; Clare de Graffenried (1849-1921), labor bureau social investigator; Elizabeth Grimball, South Carolina teacher, refused to return home to live with parents; Eliza Frances Andrews (1840-1931) wrote and worked for women’s education; Olive Johnson White, moved out west 1866, a homesteader; so too Edith Kohl; and Clarissa Griswold; “bachelor” Bess Corey another. Laura Crews homesteaded in Kansas and Iowa.

The introduction to this book ends on Nancy Choderow’s ideas about women’s psychology in The Reproduction of Mothering with her ideas about motherhood, and Carole Gilligan, Lyn K. Brown and Kate Millett with their theories of female development, affiliation with mother and then one another (sisters, friends) and nurturing and caring for others, the community as the dominating ethic rather than competitive individualism.

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Edith Pijpers (1886-1963)

Chapter One: C-S makes the astonishing attempt to prove that there was a strain of thought that did not decry no marriage but looked at singleness as blessed. Just what Vicinus, Hill and others I’ve read on British women deny. C-S acknowledges customs against this idea: in the US communities actually required unmarried women not prostitutes to live in licensed families, headed by respectable property holding men. This reminded me of customs in Europe forcing a poor woman living alone to apprentice her sons and put her girls in service. No woman allowed to live unsupervised by a man. But she finds poetry and magazine columns saying that the question, why should a woman marry at all needs to be answered; these publications outline the misery and strife of being “fetter’d to a [man of a] different mold.” US literature acknowledges happy marriages are the exception, while marriage esteemed more highly, “old maids” were revalued. Religion helped: is the man corrupting her? she must ensure her own sanctity (this recalls Clarissa Harlowe refusing Lovelace after the rape). Women’s moral purity shows in lesser sex drive. God likes celibate people and grants them conversion experiences. “Fetter’d” was an adjective for marriage; religion’s powerful hostility to sex helped women in the US; women writers stories in the US of the happiness of a single life. She needed to be chaste and seen to be self-sacrificing, to be good because then she would be useful (defined as happy): the cause, US communities needed the services of single women.

Then she tells of stories Catherine Sedgwick a novelist told, of stories and columns in Godey’s Lady’s Book, which sanctify the celibate, a maiden sisterhood; Sedgwick emplies the less you bother yourself over love or sex the more you know peace of mind. Discipline is good for soul. Better to be single than suffer the miseries of a bad marriage or compromise one’s integrity to gain husband or competency: this idea found widespread currency In US newspapers, periodicals, fictions, advice books

Chapter Two, “Hymen’s Recruiting Sergeant” is supposedly about “factors influencing the rate of marriage,” except it’s not. The chapter does list all the factors pressuring women to marry but far more space is given up to speculating on why statistics and commentary shows us that in the northeast of the US and some areas of the west, considerably less women chose marriage than in the south, south east. There were opportunities for paying jobs, teaching among them, factories.

Women were made to be the daughter staying home and in this role could find much satisfaction in the US given the state of fluctuating social life. There was a shift from traditional family economies in the widening of capitalism and so much more land available so parental control over their children started to give way in the US far more than say the UK. In the US far less gov’t agencies or social network so unmarried women had a real function in a family and small community.

The discourse in the US was far more about the gravity of your choice and how once you chose to marry you give up your identity. You have to obey the husband, live for him, for your children and women were endlessly pregnant. I do think here out of Austen’s letters you can find out why she chose not to marry, not to lean on the few flirtations that did happen and fled the one proposal. Renaming yourself is loss of identity. Stories of male abuse, women deserted. She suggests that articulation of the importance of women’s friendships and that women find far more satisfaction in confiding in other close women friends than any husband or family member (who would be biased against many complaints). They open sought emotional and spiritual (back to how religious the US is at base) support from other women.

Yes spinsters dreaded old age, poverty, had a limited right for family support. What if you become invalided? Cult of domesticity was very strong. This line of thought takes us to

Chapter Three: “To what thraldom is her noble spirit subjected?” is about the meaning of antebellum marriage

C-S looking at women who chose not to marry. We get examples of women who just turned down good proposals. And stories and novels of women made miserable in all sorts of ways by marriage. Again Catherine Sedgwick, an important novelist, dwells on this terrain. The loss of individual goals, pursuits, one’s will — these stories remind me of Clarissa Harlowe’s meditations and reasoning for her refusal to marry not just Lovelace and Solmes but really anyone. “At stake was female autonomy.” And the one happy dream of Clary’s is she gets control of the small farm her grandfather left her and goes to live on it.

Yet US culture which supposedly prized individualism and autonomy did not value female autonomy and it was as hard here to get institutions to acknowledge women’s individual existences as anywhere else. So how did women come to value their private wishes. C-S says the US constitution influenced by philosophes whose thinking implies or states principles and laws and judicial decisions which value privacy, limiting states’ coercion of individuals; treatises and essays on the importance of protecting privacy and how the state should ensure this. Is not this the core of Rowe V Wade? Scaglia mocked the idea of individual privacy. The philosophes here are Marquis de Condorcet, Wm Godwin, and John Stuart Mill. S-C finds instances of spinsters resisting submitting themselves to state control. They would say they had things they wanted to do and to accomplish — children got in the way

S-C turns to American stories about misery and danger of endless pregnancies — filled with revulsion of feeling (reminding me again of Jane Austen, this time in her letters). S-C cites names familiar to me — e.g., Fanny Kemble’s diary of her time on her husband’s plantation. Kemble writes about the exploited, raped, women whose bodies were directly (by violence and marking and indirectly literally destroyed, their minds shattered, no identity allowed but that of cattle. S-C cites and describes Alcott’s Diana and Persis where the heroine is urged not to live alone with a group of like-minded women. Alcott proposes singlehood as a prerequisite for artistic development.

S-C feels the idea of a vocation grew in antebellum US — presented as for men, but women could of course think why not me? Individuals write about desire for high attainments. (I know when I try to say Austen had vocation not a career most Austen scholars and Janeites are not pleased with that: they want to hear she wanted to make money, have a public career — this is not what some of the US women presented here wrote about — this makes me think of Constance Fennimore Woolson’s heroine, Anne. Lucy Larcom’s life story is often used by S-C – she is one of those who pretended she was forced into publication, didn’t want reviews, was not ambitious but her stories show her true yearnings to use “the values of US culture” in support of individual courses of action — for women. Reading this helps develop a perspective for the “anomaly” that is new and inspiriting. You were not to be personally ambitious; that remained a no-no.

The chapter ends on the essential compromise S-C finds American women making: they actively pursued self-development and personal growth. You might say that’ll end them up in their room, a dependent daughter, and in fact there is where Emily Dickinson’s pattern fits in. The startling thing about the fourth chapter of this book is Emily Dickinson’s choices suddenly make sense as a kind of exaggerated version of what other spinster daughters/sisters/aunts chose when they could not find a vocation outside the house.

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Chapters Four to Five: “When I get my freedom” & “I have reached the age for action”

What was avoided was ambitiousness and selfishness: if you were seen to be working for others as part of your vocation, you could get away with it. The problem then was how to support yourself. And in curious ways what emerges in chapters 4 and 5 is a kind of reverse picture of Vicinus. Each of the women start out with a burning vocation, one which evades masculine sovereignty (sounds like Austen, no”) and the way they end up doing this is they become part of religious institutions, institutions doing philanthropic work (which Vicinus talked of in settlement houses associations) and nursing groups (during war). American women asserted their independence first, undertook a calling in a quest for autonomy and self-actualization in something she believed in and ended up as a part of a group that in the UK formed itself from the upper classes first.

What then were the images that came to represent a woman’s freedom: wearing men’s dress or dress that looked very man-like, “throwing away shackles” (fetter’d was a synonym for marriage in the UK too) and one finds three themes: how can she achieve “economic security,” that “room of one’s own” (how this does resonate with all these US women) and “the opportunity to expand intellectual horizons.” I’m struck with this last as in the UK material anti-intellectualism and disdain for bluestockings kept this kind of desire silent; not in the US at the time.

She tells stories of individual women and quotes famous voices, speeches, attitudes. Susan B Anthony was firm on the need for “the higher dignity of the paid occupation.” Autonomy rests on someone’s ability to support oneself. Well women tried to re-define economic independence so as to make this more minimal.

Emily Howland’s story is moving; it’s not well known because she was not a writer. Basically she fought to have the right to spend her life working to better the lives of black Americans; and could not have done it (been allowed to leave home) without the support of a quaker community and aunt. It took until she was 31 to free herself.

Rachel Stearns attended a female academy in Wilbraham, Mass, wanted to prepare herself for teaching; an uncle would not give her a dime whose own wealth was the result of her mother making sacrifices for him when she was a child. It’s not clear if she managed to teach anyway. She wrote of what she had been deprived (basically an allowance form a male) what she wanted and of the bleakness of a life “friendless, pennyless,” of the utter loneliness” of a womans economic dependence. It was she who enabled her niece Emily to leave home and find herself. Now S-C doesn’t take this further as Vicinus would so we don’t know what sacrifices and difficulties Howland knew as she worked her way to success in NYC. Howland’s life as told by S-C is an idealistic one; she identified what she wanted to do and lived up to her own vision.

Alice Carey (not in Wikipedia) spent 14 years working very hard for very little for the poor in NYC: her health was never better, she was never more gratified or in a better frame of mind, though she inveighed on how little women and poets were paid for anything

Mary Reed’s is the story of a woman who could not afford to continue in the Philadelphia Female Medical College. S-C tells of women teaching themselves by borrowing every book in the library (reminding me of Ferrante’s Lila). So for some self-education becomes a life-long pursuit. It did therefore help that (according to S-C) intellectual development was respected (pp 78-79)

Cornelia Hancock was luckier but her luck will seem strange. She found herself and came alive and loved the life of a nurse in the civil war. As told by S-C conditions were horrific, medicine didn’t begin to have enough, or enough people, but Hancock would work 20 hours a day, sleep in terrible conditions, continually soaked, hardly getting enough to eat. When the war was over, she moved to South Carolina where she taught ex-slaves under the auspices of the freedman’s bureau – it’s a story of achieving personal autonomy, working for the socially marginalized despised and needy and becoming a “self-directed, self-actualized independent woman’ (pp. 97-99).

What is striking about these women and makes them so different from European ones and hard for me to enter into is a large portion of their strength came from a conversion experience. It is in S-C’s book almost an assumption that just about all US people were religious, or least these sorts of middling women who were the first to have respect and autonomy made it based on a dependence on their relationship with God. What emerges is a religious country – to me all the more striking in that S-C appears utterly unself-conscious about this (as Vicinus was about the intensely cloying semi- and full blown lesbian relationships she describes as important for networking for women I colleges and boarding schools).

Without telling the specifics, Helen Hunt who wrote of how she looked forward to a time when women would not be socialized in schools and elsewhere just to be wives (exchange sex and domestic labor for material support was the way she put it in 19th century American English), Mary Lyon, Mary Moody Emerson. Some women found a room of her own was not enough: she needed a separate establishment to get free time – Helen Hunt to practice medicine.

Catherine Beecher was a public intellectual (part of the upper classes and got into print) training women to be independent, how to run a business, that they should live together. Underlying was a desire for privacy and power in feminine guise – it was “disguised as a woman’s natural love for a home,” she just didn’t need to have a man or children in it. Anthony wrote a speech that resonates with me: “The Homes of Single Women.” I loved the lines where she talks about making rooms for yourself that reflect you, your doing, desires – women alone market (shop for food), house-keep, garden and cook for themselves and are a “true woman” after all. There is psychological truth to this according to Durkheim: men don’t make homes for themselves as “naturally.” (p 77)

Unexpectedly, almost weirdly I find that Claire Fraser in Drums of Autumn, without the religion takes up some of these roles as she asserts herself. She was a nurse in WW2 and in 18th century America she is a surgeon, helps with a school, goes out like Lady Bountiful to teach and help others, write letters and keeps a journal about her medical activities. The diaries are not filled with romance but religion. They keep diaries “to have a ventilator from the interior” to talk to (p 80). They seek self-knowledge.

I have a feeling Vicinus would say this is hopelessly idealized: I suggest the difference between the books is Vicinus is looking to explain how women can build power and why didn’t they in the early to mid-20th century. S-C is not looking to see how women can have power to alter their society

“The age for action” concentrates on that moment women finish school – we saw with Barbara Pym, I saw in Claire Tomalin and also Katherine Mansfield, once the girl is finished school, she is given no place or job in society she can be fulfilled by. Tomalin’s early years are marriage and 4 babies. Mansfield destructive free sex and a bohemian existence without enough money. Pym write novels no one wants.

So here S-C writes of individual women’s struggles form this point of view. They suffer badly from depression because they don’t want to marry and are given nothing else. Some do “make it” by turning to God – this reminds me of Renassance learned ladies in their closets. Other first submit to God and then somehow escape (Howland, Hancock, &cc but Stearns not)

The section on Emily Dickinson comes here and it’s among the best things I’ve read – she just is another more extreme and S-C quotes some poems by ED I had not read before.

I’m ceded, I’ve stopped being theirs;
The name they dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church,
Is finished using now,
And they can put it with my dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools
I ’ve finished threading too.

Baptized before without the choice,
But this time consciously, of grace
Unto supremest name,
Called to my full, the crescent dropped,
Existence’s whole arc filled up
With one small diadem.

My second rank, too small the first,
Crowned, crowing on my father’s breast,
A half unconscious queen;
But this time, adequate, erect,
With will to choose or to reject,
And I choose—just a throne

Louisa may Alcott’s novel for women, Diana and Persis is about the process of artistic development as experienced by antebellum women. Persis goes to Paris, does study, take up her sculpture but in the end marries. Diana stays in Boston, works away at writing (who is this?), dedicates herself to this. If she never reaches what she aimed at, she has much satisfaction. Alcott (apparently) has in this novel a woman “extending control over her medium” and “expanding her vision.” But outside the studio, things are not so good. Compare this to Jewsbury’s Two Sisters, one goes on stage and self-destructs, the other marries someone who will not let her fulfill herself. Neither is allowed by the to practice self-fulfilling art. So there is an American paradigm quite different from the English.

S-C end this section with the comment that women could escape being a wife, widow, mother but not a daughter. The pose of the submissive daughter was “high emotional price to pay.” Dickinson ended up “the madwoman” of Amherst.

This book is about making the self, a private individual task which in some lucky cases the woman did branch out into public work – they are trying to find and test out new roles primarily from the home and through accepted roles. She comes back to how these single women had to deal with a “primary identity as a daughter.”

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Remedio Varo

Chapter Six: A Daughter, an Immortal Being (a line from Dickinson I believe)

Cecilia Hancock’s reply: “If I had been unfortunate enough to marry some forlorn person and been obliged to stay in some disagreeable part of the country, you would not feel you could control me in coming home at your discretion. Now in that case it might be very humane to send for me. But I am pleasantly located with congenial friends and congenial employment and an independent home but am not allowed to stay in it in peace (p 108)

This chapter charts the struggles many women had freeing themselves from their parents: unless you were married you were not recognized as a fully self-governing adult. How hard it was to break away, not only disobeying the norm but girls were brought up to love the parents, especially to care for the mother. Women were seduced by the compliments to their gifts; they were told domestic life was crucial to their health as women; they loved those to whom they rendered service. (I guess I escaped more easily because the last was not true of me.) Sacrifice, acquiescence, duty, and the idea someone else owned you just about. Parents were conservative – most of these daughters wanted to do radical reform work. They came close to wishing themselves dead when they stayed. How the structure of home life made a vocational identity impossible or frustratingly difficult. Think of Austen with her desk by a creaking door; were it not for Cassandra would she have had any time.

Chapter Seven: “My earthy all:” Sisterhood and the search for autonomy

Now she again crosses the terrain of Vicinus when she talks of how sisters bonded, and went to female academies and the role of academies, associations, institutions in both freeing but also binding women. Women needed we see again and again female support, females with you, female encouragement – you could get this from a sister, but the relationship could also be fraught, and one odd central norm was that sisters were interchangeable. Remember how it was pretended Cassandra and Jane were interchangeable. Actually the Austens discovered this was not so; thus Cassandra far more often sent for than Jane.

Families were large, and siblings counted. The death or marriage of a sister was a turning point in others sister’s lives – brothers too.
Some did find you were better off with friends but it was more likely the sister would be loyal. Money came form families to sisters; they opened schools together, studied, She goes over the complicated relationship of Emily and Elizabeth Blackenwell, the first women physicians and how Elizabeth became the known one, how Emily was controlled by Elizabeth, differences in temperament. This is a very interesting story because they opened an infirmary in NYC, went back and forth to the UK, Emily was in the provinces; Elizabeth just gave them their titles. In the end Emily retired with another woman, Dr Elizabeth Cushnier because there she also had “Love and mutuality” to give meaning to her independence and autonomy”
Some sisters had a hard time when autonomy was thrust upon them. S-C does not despise this understandable result of such upbringings. The story here is of Harriot and Sarah Hunt

Remember too – S-C does not enough emphasize how this autonomy was presented as failure, despicable and the little sympathy for radical reform causes. So it was important for such a woman to have female friends, an association to belong to, a sister. You did want to belong to someone, to help and be helped and achieve and be recognized for this achievement by someone. I know myself how hard it is to do without the recognition.
Some of these pairs anticipate Elena Ferrante’s Lila and Lenu (My Brilliant Friend) — were Lila to have been given an equal education and not married off for money (by parents) for foolish version of prestige (by herself).

Some of the relationships remind me of the women in The Secret Sisterhood in their misunderstanding, vexations, the kinds of interpretation S-C gives whats happening to triangular conflicts.

I also was reminded the groups of sisters/nieces in Deborah Cherry’s book about women painters in the 19th century – there were famous quartets, female painting families – so this is the inner life of those presented by Cherry. I don’t have time to record the individuals – none of them are well known literati; some a little known like Alice and Phoebe Carey. Louisa May Alcott did not have sisters following her vocation and professionalism.

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Isabel Bishop (1902-88): Reading and Art

Chapter Eight: conflicts in the single life: heavy heart and heavy head. Now this chapter becomes harder: now we talk of the problem of earning a living.

It’s at this point the book turns dark – at heart what C-S suddenly admits is that the inner life of women of this era – in the US (and I think by extension Vicinus without her attention to private life as her focus shows this) the UK – women were made to feel their desire for independence was a social disease.

Read carefully with attention Trollope’s CYFH? Suggests Alice is erotically sexually deeply in love with John Grey (the TV series is a travesty of this and reverses it) and would have been very happy with him but that she was given foolish ideas by her lesbian cousin and evil male cousin, and rejected the deeply peaceful good life he was offering. He made it worse by his self-control and drive to dominance, But she has a disease it’s said more than once.

Meanwhile in the US the outward world was giving women for the first time through the industrial economy, need for schools, training, changes in family life to delay marriage to pursue self-development, accomplishments in careers outside the family
This chapter through story after story shows they were not paid anywhere near enough to earn a living when they followed these outward vocations. They could not be free, they could not afford space in dignity. Death or marriage of a sister or friend (who clubbed with them) could be devastating. Greater strain as they were also expected to do home tasks.

The chapter shows women breaking down under theses pressures: Sarah Pugh, Emily Parsons working in hospitals needed self respect from validation from others – and got it only from those they were literally working for. Women at home bored, frustrated. Women not married feared menopause as that put paid to any further marriage and yet they had not means of support – and they would be too old to work even for minimum pay.

So heroines earlier in the book are driven: Cecilia Hancock who say she hated organizational and institutional is driven to accept and conform
The problem with teaching was not enough money, no respect really and little adult companionship in the way it was organized. Women can’t relax; and they find satisfaction and peace only in hard work – Clara Barton became sick when not permitted to nurse; allowed to work ferociously for the Red Cross, which she built, she throve. Again and again women are rejected for professional positions they are as capable of the men at doing. – I am not naming the individual stories again – very bad psychic stress which they then were blamed for – as hysterical women. Had they married you see all would have been well busy with their babies and then family later on – all this hopelessly idealized.

Chapter Nine: “The Mind Will Give Way” assertion and limits of social tolerance

This chapter is unusual for telling one woman’s story at length Mary S. Gilpin: her four brothers and father lived good productive lives in professions and did well financially; she had the same assertive competitive, ambitious personality they did, but each time she opens a school or starts an institution, either not enough people bring children, or it’s underfunded or her assertive personality is complained of and either she is thrown out or her venture fails. At the end she actually spends years in an asylum (imprisoned by a brother in effect) and late in life retreats to near a Naïve American village spending her years reading and writing down her own thoughts –

This is where her book transects Vicinus: institutions of church, university, medicine, law, science so the extension of female autonomy that was going on as a threat and worked to keep women in low places – -and the rhetoric is conscious. Social tolerance very rigid – don’t act out your independent mindedness or disobey (sexual) propriety or you will be cast out, punished, ostracized, ignore

Chapter Ten: The great social disease – on women and independence. In this chapter we see society closing ranks at the same time as there is gradual growth of liberty, independence for women – in the US the land-grant colleges let women enter and several colleges (sister schools) are opened just for women: Vassar, Wellesley

This social disease – could end in insanity; women weren’t using their organs and so would sicken. Companionate marriage offered but that does not allow for equality – John Grey offers Alice Vavasour a companionate marriage where what he says goes. And women who did go out to work did not experience independence or expansion of autonomy because they did for a short while and only as filler or to bring in “extra money” (usually very low status jobs).

Three important women writers about this topic: Ida Tarbell, Alice Repplier,Anna Garlin Spencer. They tried to reshape these arguments – they defended spinsterhood, showed women were marrying later in the 19th century, argued for the period of work before marriage and during.
What happened in the 1890s with the coming of Freudian ideas and studies in sex is that spinsterhood is sexualized: such women are miserable because not having sex, twisted, torment others. Celibacy a social disease (not I realize why Frances Power Cobbe wants to show “celibacy’ such a good way to be in life because you are free to do good, to actuate things that need to be done. Doctors dominating women in childbirth, against abstinence (they won’t give you contraceptive either so you are compelled into pregnancy).

So we see each time a new form of thought or change in social or economic structure comes, the patriarchal norms twist them to the subjection of women

So for a book that began with such hope and filled me with a sense of inspiration and goals for women that could be meant, C-S ends with a demonstration that women lost ground badly in the early part of the 20th century. There was a tremendous push-back against them not because so many more were independent and seeking not to marry but that they were for the first time ever _visibly_ so and more women than ever were self-supporting – because jobs had changed, because of WW1, after the suffragette movement. And the tragedy is that we can see that ceaseless propanganda and punitive norms worked, for as the decades from 1890 went on fewer women were marrying later, many marrying younger, despite the spread of contraception still having what we today would consider relatively large families.

All the vile talk and behavior in short worked: The sexualization of spinsterhood and the way Freud was used was an important factor. I’ll bring in last night I watched half-way through the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala film adaptation of The Bostonians and was horrified to see how this movie reinforced the sinister misogyny of the book so that Vanessa Redgrave playing Olive Chancellor is presented as a sick woman, her desire for independence a plot to dominate Varenna. Varenna herself is presented as a simpleton who is used by her unscrupulous father for his spiritual seances and they are presented as just as useless and corrupt in the sense of taking money for their cause. The more I watch some of these older Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala films the more disillusioned with them I become.

Especially striking is where S-C crosses the same terrain as Vicinus. I was shocked or startled at the positive representation of women’s friendships in boarding school when they crossed a line not only into homoeroticism and lesbianism but also creating dependencies and manipulative. Vicinus was for this because she argued (in effect) it is from such woman’s friendships and mentors and networks that power can be built

From the 1890s on and especially after Freud’s theories became popular women’s friendship were intensely stigmatized as deeply sick, as sexually perverted – all of them were now suspect.

S-C says that what had been a sense of “womanhood’ and pride in your sexuality as feminine and your network of women’s friendships was attacked and women had another bad loss of self-esteem. This was a bad blow

Women who nourished and supported other women were presented as deviant – So say in Trollope’s CYFH? Kate Vavasour’s love for Alice is not presented as lesbian but it’s hinted and she is presented as deviant and destructive, she betrays Alice – not to make her independent but to get her to break with John Grey and offer herself and her money body and soul to George.

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Dame Laura Knight (1931): Good Night

In the Conclusion to the book S-C goes over what to me begins to become a bit suspicious – because I’ve seen these patterns of how women were once in charge (matriarchies – never was; in some cultures the fathers and brothers were in charge instead of the fathers and sons) or could go out in public (this never was) or public not separated off from private (never was) so now S-C would have us believe a period between 1780 and 1830 or so showed real progress for women partly based on new protestant beliefs, the loosening structure of society in the US, it’s lack of a tight social network so that an independent woman could find a praised niche. This is now described as destroyed by the new norms reinforcing subjection of women at the beginning of the 20th century.

Whether S-C is right or not, she also described the mechanisms by which most women were kept subject to their families throughout the 19th century, and she describes some of the ways of thinking and feeling that did help towards some liberation

That frontier and opening of educational institutions who needed teachers – pay was abysmal

What helps confirm women in singlehood or independence and not repeat the patters of a life of self-sacrifice to men and men’s children and family:

1) being ambitious, taught to want to offer service to a wider community.

2) Very important the desire to expand your intellect. This Vicinus talks about in two of her chapters: on boarding school and all women’s colleges. We can see why the persistence mockery and derision of learning as making a woman (horrors) a bluestocking so she obviously doesn’t want men or babies

3) a desire to explore, revere, cultivate the self

4) simply a desire to be free and independent – Alice Vavasour has this but no opportunity because the money left her is handled by her father and she is given nothing worthwhile to use it for – only George’s intensely selfish ruthless politicking

She quotes the religious language by which American women justified their pursuit of writing and communing or doing good work in a community – this kind of language was mostly not available in the UK – or elsewhere it seems – it gave courage because of the notion God was on your side. You are not going it alone

I’ve never much taken Hilary Clinton’s supposed piety seriously and when she includes this kind of thinking in her book I have felt she was hypocritical but it may be her tin ear and turgid style, and inability to sound sincere – and upper class identifications that grate on me

5) a family context which valued you as an individual and education, and sisters, mothers who supported you (rare) friendships with like minded women

S-C talks of some women who tried to set up utopian communities and the settlement movement. So again we are with Vicinus.

She thinks present feminism’s roots owe a lot to these early spinsters writing and women who did write in feminist ways for independence or revealing the deprivation and nightmares of their existences (like Fanny Kemble about enslaved black women on her husband’s rice plantations).

It’s a moving book which ends in the same place Vicinus does: a kind of bleak despair.

A few more to go before finally choosing individuals: Onto Anne Boyd Rioux’s Writing for Immortality is very good: a history and analysis of the culture of 18th century American and struggles of 4 to write and publish successfully in it: Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Stoddard and Constance Fennimore Woolson her choices. Showalter in her Jury of Her Peers, a rare history of American women writers from the eighteenth to the later 20th century, has sections on Stoddar, Phelps, and Woolson. Rebecca Traister: All the Single Ladies, which begins with how living independently has become a norm for women well into their thirties and yet if you want to cast suspicion on someone (Anita Hill) you ask her why she never married (frigid or a lesbian?), or if she did, why she never had children (selfish and lazy). Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: a book on how millions of women lived out their lives after WW1 without getting married (a whole generation of young men wiped out), her other writings are on novels of the era about single women.

Ellen

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2018 Mary Queen of Scots, directed by Josie Rourke, scripted Beau Willimon

Mary, Queen of Scots: Ismael Cruz Cordova, Maria Dragus, Izuka Hoyle, and Saoirse Ronan in intimate flirting friendship scene

Don’t miss the latest Mary Queen of Scots: while it has its flaws, it is very much worth the watching. This is a must-see to gauge the sharp changes in the depiction of this icon once again. What makes the film intelligently different and interesting is it more or less follows the outline of a serious good biography of Mary by John Guy. … Each phase of Mary’s career is dramatized. Elizabeth as icon is also traced. After being initially all pageant, the stories are effectively dramatized. I disagree with some of Guy’s interpretation (especially over Bothwell) and say why. Moray’s importance emerges. There are fine performances, wonderful color palates.

Friends and readers,

Quite a number of women, even queen-centered films this winter: two on Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG, On the basis of sex), two on nannies, one poor and absurd, the other a masterpiece (Mary Poppins, Roma), the courageous reporter (A Private War), and the big budget costume drama variety updated to include what might seem to be uninhibited sex scenes: The Favourite, and Mary Queen of Scots. I’ve been nearly alone in calling out The Favourite for its repulsive, gut-level anti-feminism and have mentioned only in passing what makes Cauron’s Roma a compelling masterpiece. Josie Rourke’s Mary, Queen of Scots (the screenplay has as little complicated language as one could get away with so as to keep the film popular) shows some of the same obsessive masculinizing violence in women as The Favourite: Ronan as Mary is depicted on horse wherever possible; she’s as eager to shoot something as any of the crowd of men that crowd in, dominate the movie-screen. Still, I recommend going to see it, even if you are not fascinated and interested in this Tudor-Stuart Matter. If you are, this is a must-see to gauge the sharp changes in the depiction of these icon queens once again.

Mary is still or once again the victim; her downfall is once again (made explicit in this film) her erotic engagement with men, marrying, bedding, thinking she can rely on law and custom (towards divine rulers) to control rivals. Elizabeth has returned to her 19th century role as perhaps Machiavellian, and ghastly dried-up old maid by film’s end (because she must be this way since she never married, never had children).

Elizabeth with Dudley (also called Leicester)

During the film punctuating Mary’s story are swift suggestive moments of Elizabeth, now with Leicester (Joe Alwyn called Dudley), now Cecil (Guy Pearce); she gets small pox and looks just hideous for a time. Staring down at flowers because she hasn’t had children:

The scenes with Elizabeth are too stilted — popular depictions just don’t want to give Elizabeth I credit — in literary studies we have gone beyond choosing sides … but it is very rare for anyone to present her as the brilliant political success story. If people really wanted a heroine who made a success out of grim beginnings (including as a teenager harassment by her step-mother Catherine Parr’s husband, Thomas Howard, and accusations by Mary Tudor of plotting against her), it’s Elizabeth Boleyn Tudor.

Margot Robbie as the aging Elizabeth: a clown-face of grief (very similar to the way Elizabeth appeared in a recent Metropolitan opera production of Donizetti’s trio)

What has changed to make this pair once again palatable to the 21st century female film-goer? Make no mistake this is a film intended for women: when I went the audience was all women, except the husbands who came along: it was playing alternatively in the same auditorium as On the Basis of Her Sex (even in local art cinemas women’s art ghettoized). Nothing much for Elizabeth. For a while it seemed she was becoming the sentimental queen, first in love with Leicester and then Essex (Helen Mirren’s film with first Jeremy Irons and then Hugh Dancy as Essex); but here we revert without even giving Elizabeth any Machiavellian traits. Mary has changed; she is now ceaselessly pro-active, aggressive, and free of conventional restraining conventions and beliefs (see anibundel’s accurate assessment for NBC), at moments fierce.

This is the new type heroine from Offred/June in the second season of Handmaid’s Tale, to Demelza Poldark in the rebooted version, to Brianna Fraser in Outlander. Feminism turns out to be doing what you want, and complaining when you can’t.

First impression

What makes the film intelligently different and interesting is it more or less follows the outline of a serious good biography of Mary by John Guy. So you can learn where the icon has moved now. Each phase of Mary’s career is dramatized: however briefly, her time in France and first husband, Francois. The nature of her relationship with Darnley (Jack Lowden, he was central to Dunkirk and can be seen in good BBC serial dramas), her second husband: at first she did fall in love with him, but when she saw what a dullard he was, and felt his attempts to domineer and control her, she turned to her musician, David Rizzio. Apparently nowadays Darnley is “accused” (the word is accused) of homosexuality and in this film has sex with Rizzio. That was not part of the narrative in the older books and the way it’s presented here shows homophobia is by no means gone from movie audiences. We have the two murders, first Rizzio, horrifically violent with Mary pregnant there. Time for touching scenes of her with a baby boy, and (much later) a poignant effective scene of her being forced to part from an older child and him crying for her.

and then Darnley in the courtyard. In this version Mary is not at all guilty of Darnley’s murder, not even complicit.

I’m someone who has been reading biographies of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots since I was 18, and I know in the older biographies Mary was either accused of plotting to kill Darnley (pretending just collusion) as revenge and also simply to get rid of a nuisance; or she allowed it to happen. So the film whitewashes her here. More importantly, it denies she was in love with Bothwell. I remember being thrilled by Stefan Zweig’s, and then disagreeing with Antonia Fraser’s first revisionist story. It was she who began the idea that the letters Mary is said to have written Bothwell, her third husband: these first surfaced, suspiciously enough in a casket after her death, and were used to damn her as a “harlot.” Alison Weir’s best-selling biography makes the case for them as basically false and forged, conceding only there seems enough reality in them from Mary that they might be a set of letters tampered with and re-written.

Here is one of Mary’s poems, whose provenance no one has doubted:

Que suis-je hélas? Et de quoi sert ma vie?
Je ne suis fors qu’un corps privé de coeur,
Une ombre vaine, un objet de malheur
Qui n’a plus rien que de mourir en vie.
Plus ne me portez, O ennemis, d’envie
A qui n’a plus l’esprit à la grandeur.
J’ai consommé d’excessive douleur
Votre ire en bref de voir assouvie.
Et vous, amis, qui m’avez tenue chère,
Souvenez-vous que sans coeur et sans santé
Je ne saurais aucune bonne oeuvre faire,
Souhaitez donc fin de calamité
Et que, ici-bas étant assez punie,
J’aie ma part en la joie infinie.

Then a good modern English translation:

Alas what am I? What use has my life?
I am but a body whose heart’s torn away,
A vain shadow, an object of misery
Who has nothing left but death-in-life.
O my enemies, set your envy all aside;
I’ve no more eagerness for high domain;
I’ve borne too long the burden of my pain
To see your anger swiftly satisfied.
And you, my friends who have loved me so true,
Remember, lacking health and heart and peace,
There is nothing worthwhile that I can do;
Ask only that my misery should cease
And that, being punished in a world like this,
I have my portion in eternal bliss
— from an excellent Mary Stuart site.

The denial of the letters depends on ignoring Mary’s poetry, a whole body of lyrics and sonnets in French, a number to a lover-husband who could be Darnley but it more likely Bothwell. The Casket letters come from the same mindset of self-doubt, self-berating, depression behind the French sonnets, both religious and of of enthralled love. Yet a third infatuation (the first Darnley, the second Rizzio) does fit Mary’s character and makes sense of events after the murder of Darnley — some time elapsed — and Mary’s flight to England. One of the sites (dungeon tower fort) I saw in the border country of England and Scotland (debatable land) is presented as famous for Mary coming there to meet with Bothwell. She probably did. Many feminists just don’t want to believe in the casket letters. Sophia Lee’s powerful Recess (early gothic novel, 1782) about Mary’s unacknowledged twins by Bothwell doesn’t help increase belief since this romance is as fantasy and erotically driven as Outlander.

Nonetheless, there is credible evidence of a late miscarriage (or some illness) — from Bothwell (Martin Compston here), because who else? She was not promiscuous. In the time after Darnley’s murder, and Mary’s imprisonment, Mary did enter into the civil wars that her presence and poor (non-)diplomatic acts (like trying to get Catholicism accepted by showing herself tolerant of protestantism) engendered. She did fight with Bothwell too. In the film she is forced to marry him. But who would do that? it was not in her step-brother, James Moray’s interest (yes that’s James McArdle inside all that hair and beard). In the film she is (confusedly forced) and we see Bothwell rape her; this moves rapidly and the man we remember (rightly too) is Moray.

The film moves rapidly into Mary and Bothwell’s defeat by Moray. All along we’ve seen Knox inveigh against her: she is not legitimately the monarch because no woman can rule, because she’s Catholic (Mary tried to use the “toleration” card — she would tolerate all Protestanism but as this did not work for James Stuart II more than a hundred years later, it did not work for her) and anyway is a “harlot.” David Tennant offers a fierce old man (he too almost unrecognizable because of flowing hair and beard). Now the two sets of armies converge, and we fast forward to a council which in effect de-thrones her, gives her son to Murray, and leaves her isolated.

Next her on the shore with what ladies are left; cross to England and incarceration awaits her. Montage takes us through uncounted years (during which we see the aging Elizabeth grieve over her lack of child, writhe over the demands she execute Mary) and we have the confrontation, which never took place, first invented by Schiller. It is done at length in this film, and Mary (somewhat improbably) is driven at last to insult Elizabeth by telling her she Mary is the rightful queen. I agree that Mary Stuart thought Elizabeth a worthless bastard when it came to rank or illegitimacy but even she never would have thrown this idea in Elizabeth’s face.

The film opened up with the execution scene, and we revert back, re-see some of it, but this time are taken through the beheading and gruesome carrying of a head. Saoirse Ronan is accurately dressed: Mary did get herself up in black with white lace, pull the outer gown to reveal a martyr’s red shift. And so it ends with Elizabeth sitting there hollowly: this icon goes back to Scott, but in the 20th century was first realized by Bette Davies her film of Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex (recently re-done with Helen Mirren in the parts as a sympathetic sentimental queen first loving Leicester and then the treacherous Essex).

All that said the movie is worth it. The music is good, the color palates fascinating and effective.  Grey and blue for Mary except when happy, then warm reds, oranges, golden light; garish red and greens for Elizabeth, cool white light. (Too much computer enhancement on Scottish scenery.) We see how Mary as a young woman could not realize all the pretense of respect when she first arrived in Scotland was fragile veneer. We see how Knox’s fierce anti-feminism was her first obstacle, which she failed even to address. The film however indirectly and as a sort of bye-blow of what’s happening that it was James Moray, her step-brother, who played the pivotal role at important moments and ends up inheriting the throne as regent and the boy as his ward. The film begins as grim and then luxurious pageant and progresses to dramatic effectiveness, with many effecive performances, e.g., Brendan Coyle as Darnley’s father; a couple of the actresses as one of the four Marys. The two queens are juxtaposed repeatedly, twinned

I would like now to read John Guy.

Ellen

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Winston Graham’s Poldark novels: Cornwall, history, & l’écriture-femme

Angharad Rees as Demelza (1975 Poldark, Jack Pulman’s adapted script the basis for the first four episodes)

Friends,

In early November of this year I began steadily reading the fiction of Winston Graham in chronological order, trying to gather salient points about each still extant text he wrote, beginning with the first The House with the Stained Glass Windows (published 1934), and ending on 17th/18th Take My Life (1947, first a screenplay, which unsurprisingly became a striking WW2 type film noir, then a tightly woven novel). I’ve read many of his novels before but not in order and in this scrutinizing way. This early phase of his career is made up of nineteen texts and one movie, all of the male fantasy suspense, thriller, mystery, spy kind.

I stopped with Take My Life for around that time Graham became absorbed in a second historical novel set in Cornwall, Ross Poldark: A Novel of Cornwall, 1783-1787 (published 1945), which lead to a long series of Poldark novels. (Graham’s first historical fiction, later recognized as signaling a change, The Forgotten Story, with its thoughtful reverie premise, and young boy narrator, is basically also another suspense-murder novel, with lurid elements, set in Cornwall in 1898.) With or in the unabridged Ross Poldark, much longer than any previous book and written over a much longer time, he made this astonishing and unexpected leap in quality — depth and thoroughness, thick realization of imagined world, truly suggestive and non-stereotypical characterization, and real subversity of theme. RP was begun just after Strangers Meeting (1939) and took five years to compose. After RP, I read the uncut Demelza: A Novel of Cornwall, 1788-90 (1946) written just after or around the time of Take My Life (like many working novelists he’d be writing more than one novel at a time); now known as the second Poldark, Demelza adds true complexity of many interacting characters, and a deeper more maturing of themes begun in the first

Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza (2015 Poldark, Debbie Horsfield’s adapted scripts the basis for the whole series)

Strangers Meeting itself is one of the four early novels which show some real fineness and rich creativity; it’s no coincidence that it, and two of the others, Dangerous Pawn (1937) and Merciless Ladies (1944) are set either in Cornwall or partly a marginalized edge area of Britain (Cumberland); also that the fourth, set on the day Hitler’s armies invaded Prague, No Exit (1940), uses the technique of historical fictive accuracy. I’m coming to believe that Graham transcended his conscious gifts when he turned to the genre of historical fiction and set his books in Cornwall. But there is more to it than that.

Snapshot of painting I saw in a local museum in Cornwall in the summer of 2015

Walk Where They Fought. Battle of Waterloo. June 18, 1815. (Petho Cartography)

Since I have a paper due on the Poldark novels for an 18th century conference in March (ASECS, in Denver), and soon teaching will begin I put down my march through Graham time for the moment, and have fast forwarded to the second of the three Poldark fictions I’m going to write about: The Black Moon: A Novel of Cornwall, 1794-1795 (1973), the first of the second set of Poldark novels Graham wrote, what can be called the first of two trilogies. I couldn’t make up my mind which of these closely-intertwined and plotted three books to cover, so I read half-way through the second of this second set, The Four Swans: A Novel of Cornwall, 1795-1797 (1976) and looked into the dark conclusion, The Angry Tide: A Novel of Cornwall, 1798-1799 (1977), which I re-read two summers ago. Soon I’ll move on to the first of the two final singletons, The Twisted Sword: A Novel of Cornwall, 1815 (1990, or the eleventh Poldark of twelve), the third novel I’ve chosen for this paper. I suppose I’m immersing myself. Oh, the first of the three for the paper is Demelza.

For the interested reader, a fuller context: I now see the Poldarks as consisting of five phases, each of which has some distinctive features because each reflects the different era it was written in.

World War II and aftermath: RP, Demelza, Jeremy Poldark: A Novel of Cornwall, 1790-1791 (a much better title would be Francis Poldark) and Warleggan, A Novel of Cornwall, 1792-93, published 1950 and 1953 respectively.

The 1970s, which seem to explore themes of individual liberty and social responsibility: The Black Moon, The Four Swans and The Angry Tide

The 1980s, a turn to look at Thatcherism (capitalism as piracy, colonialism versus community): The Stranger from the Sea: A Novel of Cornwall, 1810-1811 (1981); The Miller’s Dance: A Novel of Cornwall, 1812-13 (1982); The Loving Cup: A Novel of Cornwall, 1813-15 (1984).

1990: anti-war, with a global or Eurocentric perspective: The Twisted Sword, A Novel of Cornwall, 1815 (published 1990)

2003: the pathologies of alienation, disability, culmination of pro-non-human animal themes: Bella Poldark: A Novel of Cornwall, 1818-1820 (utterly mistitled, it ought to be signposted Valentine Warleggan)

From the most recent adaptation, an opera by Muhly, Marnie (2017) — we see the villain-heroine and her psychologically twisted antagonist

I said there is more to this great leap than Cornwall and deep past dreaming and research. First let’s look at the results of Graham’s compulsive drive to produce and then re-write as a form of hiding or making (he thinks) more sellable masculinist fantasy material:

Three more suspense novels, one of which, Cordelia (1949) is another historical fiction (this time 19th century Manchester, the city in which Graham grew up) between Demelza and Warleggan. Two poor, Night Without Stars (1950) and Fortune Is a Woman (1952), both made into feeble film noirs.

Then after Warleggan, and before Graham resumed the Poldarks 20 years on with The Black Moon: eight suspense novels, another historical novel set in Cornwall (this time Elizabethan, The Grove of Eagles, 1963), one book of short stories and one non-fiction set in Cornwall (about The Spanish Armadas — there was more than one). And again these are highly uneven, though for among those few people who still read Graham’s suspense books, they contain his best in the kind (e.g., The Little Walls, 1955, with its Golden Dagger award; The Tumbled House, 1959; After the Act, 1965 and Graham’s favorite; The Walking Stick, 1967, made into a sensitive remarkable film, well written, featuring David Hemminges; and Angell, Pearl and Little God (1970, offered to Marlon Brando and interesting Dustin Hoffman as type actors this novel could project). They also contain the highly problematic Marnie (1961), fodder for Hitchcock misogyny, and two homosexual sensibility texts, Sean O’Connor’s play (2001), Muhly’s opera (2015).

And finally an autobiographical topographical Poldark’s Cornwall (1982), yet four more of these potboiler suspense, e.g., Tremor (1995), one a partly historical in Cornwall, The Ugly Sister (1998), and between TS and (or around the time of) Bella Poldark, a posthumously published memoir, A Private Man (2003),

I omit as hard to catalogue, and sudden, the short stories, a few of which have the sensitive merit of Cornish ghost and gothic fiction, e.g, his very last piece of writing, “Meeting Demelza” (2003), where near his death he meets her still grieving for the deaths of her children and as she invites him back to meet Ross and Dwight once more, the vision dissolves (podcasts have been made of three of this kind); attempts at screenplays, occasional journalism. He was involved in radio adaptations of some of his novels, but he wrote no literary criticism — though there are signs he did read it — as in his admiration for Frank Swinnerton’s The Georgian Literary Scene (Everyman, 1938).

I also omit another and crucial aspect of his writing: continual revisions of his work. Above I have listed only the first versions of his novels; several he thoroughly revised, usually by cutting, sometimes to the point he re-titled them. He also was continually making small changes. I’ve now read enough of this compulsion to be able to state categorically while some of the revised work has felicitous sentences, fresh ideas setting the book in its new time frame (for publication), mostly he ruins his work. He seems to have no conscious understanding of what makes his gifts valuable. This is not uncommon, but he goes further in trying to please the mass taste or some editor who wants to save money or have something this year’s fashions and shorter. Tellingly he is embarrassed and gets rid of what shows his own personal sensibility at play.

The whole of this little known film noir (includes Margaret Kennedy as one of the script writers): Take My Life

So what is the something more that makes eight of these Poldark books (the first seven and The Twisted Sword) stand out as one another level of creativity from his other work, and the weaker four and brief Cornish gothics far far more humane or rounded than the several better male genre books, which do come near them at moments. I’m going to suggest that they belong to what my friend, Diane Reynolds, named l’ecriture-humaine and (out of French sources mostly) I’ve been calling l’ecriture-femme. A love of animals and concerned for the disabled, important currents and providing touching images and incidents symbolic throughout Graham’s oeuvre are typically found in women’s writing. Insofar as the suspense novels have some of this (Strangers Meeting, Dangerous Pawn, Walking Stick) they participate and have this stronger level of open vulnerability to life’s griefs, a (not quite Proustian, more Anthony Powell) feel for the personal knives of hurt and memory seeping in — and probably Graham’s private life experience as he tells us in his last page of his autobiography. In his masculinist fantasies, such impulses early on come out luridly, and later are counteracted by ironies, and severe control by a superego in the form of hard mean & dense characters. That’s why Graham said he learned to become a novelist with Demelza. He wrote his first true l’ecriture-femme then. I’ve no doubt he is Demelza and Dwight, with Ross playing the deeply pained and renegade male forcing himself to participate in the world to protect who he can.

A cover illustration for the 1970s editions of Ross Poldark, to precede and accompany the first serial drama – note the centrality of the mining building, a central image for the second 2015 serial drama too

Typical opening shot for Horsfield’s new Poldark

Who he was influenced by and what he read is of great interest then and will constitute one half of my source materials and research base. Graham knows he was influenced by all that is imaginatively associated with Cornwall (he wrote about this again and again); Graham Greene’s disillusioned suspense entertainments (especially in his novels leading into WW2); and various lesser known Cornish writers e.g., Denys Val Baker (The Face in the Mirror). I have read some of the best criticism of these suspense novels e.g. Julian Symons’s Bloody Murder: most of these keep us only on the surface of what Graham writes, the literal least important parts of it albeit these were what enabled him to structure and work out as coherent rationales his dream material

Aligning his work also with writers like Daphne DuMaurier (also a writer of Cornish 18th century fiction), will be helpful because there is a critical tradition for some of these as well as Cornish culture and landscape, and for historical fiction that can be applied to Graham.  There is much to be learned about Graham’s work & attitudes from non-fiction books like John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (read assiduously by Ross) and Wendy Hille’s George Canning. And also his Memoir of a Private Man.

And finally, though perhaps I should have cited these first:  Graham’s Poldark’s Cornwall, DuMaurier’s Vanishing Cornwall, Claude Berry’s Portrait of Cornwall, Philip Marsden’s Rising Ground and nature-writing books like Jacquenetta Hawkes’s The Land and Philip Paytan’s Cornwall. And historical research books into specifics of 17th through 18th century Cornwall:  Graham himself says this material enabled him to fill his books with content, A. l. Rowse’s and (the contemporary update), John Chynoweth’s Tudor Cornwall and many many individual (long) 18th century books on medicine, prisons and mining. The one topic Graham left out was china clay.

But the key, the core, that which made the difference between these other books and the 12 Poldark when when he began to write l’ecriture-femme.  The leap is from Strangers Meeting to Forgotten Story to Demelza; the content filler Cornwall and history.

Winston Graham with his dog, Garrick — beloved also by Demelza

Ellen

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Outlander: telling Dickens’s Christmas Carol

Drums of Autumn (detail from original 1996 cover)

Friends and readers,

Having queried three lists, I discovered that there is very little in the thousands of pages Diana Gabaldon wrote for her Outlander series on Christmas. The rational presented for this is that in Scotland after the repression of medieval customs by the Presbyters, hardly anyone keeps Christmas. Instead the winter solstice is celebrated on New Year’s Eve and day as Hogmanay. I pointed out that Catholics surreptitiously kept up Christmas even in the later 17th century in Scotland (see The Days of Queen Anne [Hamilton]), and that parts of the Outlander books occur in Boston and North Carolina. I was told that in A Fiery Cross (No 5), there is a brief mention of Christmas, Jamie gives Claire a kitchen utensil that looked to my eyes like a thin spatula, and a celebration of Hogmanay occurs (Chapters 31-33). As far as I could tell, the emphasis is not only this ritual holiday.

But there is a long passage in Drums of Autumn where a Christmas story is made doubly central. I’ve linked in the story line of this fourth Outlander novel, and baldly retold the way it’s being dramatized this year – without the many interludes – the novel seems ridiculous. Jamie mistakes poor Roger for Briana’s rapist, beats Roger up badly, and with Ian, sells him to the Indians; Briana has become pregnant by Mr Bonnet (the actual rapist) and is almost persuaded to marry Lord John Grey, who happens to be visiting her Aunt Jocasta at River Run ….

What saves this resort to patently obvious contrivances are these long interludes where little overt action in term of story moving occurs and we get long meditative sequences, sometimes about a victim they come across, sometimes an idyllic fantasy of Gabaldon’s own, e.g., Jamie and Claire walking in a lush forest come across a field of strawberries. There are sequences where the idea is to present them as colonial settlers, coping with the different classes, upper establishment and middling rebels (against unfair taxes), floating down river, building their house, furniture, getting stock together, he hunting, she sewing.

Outlander winter landscape

In one of these where they are building their home together, he goes out in the night to bring back an animal to cook for a meal, and seems never to return. It’s late December, snow everywhere. She worries after several hours and goes to seek him. She finds him wounded and nearly frozen in a sunken sort of meadow. Claire tells Jamie Dickens’s A Christmas Carol to help keep him awake and both of them warm while they are stranded in the snow late in December, having built themselves a nest out of logs, leaves, their cloaks; and where she remembers also being stranded in the snow more than 20 years ago inside a car with Frank and Brian as a child where Frank Randall told the story to Briana, with Claire filling bits, as they huddled in their car amidst blankets.

Here is the passage: Drums of Autumn, Chapter 21: “Night on a Snowy Mountain, December 1767

From the serial drama Outlander: Promotional Snow scene (not sure if this is Scotland or North Carolina ….)

Jamie’s hair and shoulders were lightly dusted with snow, and flakes were settling on the exposed backs of his legs. I pulled the hem of his cloak down, then brushed the snow away from his face. His cheek was nearly the same color as the big wet flakes, and his flesh felt stiff when I touched it.

Fresh alarm surged through me as I realized that he might be a lot closer to freezing already than I had thought. His eyes were half closed, and cold as it was, he didn’t seem to be shivering much. That was bloody dangerous; with no movement, his muscles were generating no heat, and what warmth he had was leaching slowly from his body. His cloak was already heavy with damp; if I allowed his clothes to become soaked through, he might very well die of hypothermia right in front of me.

“Wake up!” I said, shaking him urgently by the shoulder. He opened his eyes and smiled drowsily at me.
“Move!” I said. “Jamie, you’ve got to move!”
“I can’t,” he said calmly. “I told ye that.” He shut his eyes again.
I grabbed him by the ear and dug my fingernails into the tender lobe. He grunted and jerked his head away.
“Wake up,” I said peremptorily. “Do you hear me? Wake up this moment! Move, damn you! Give me your hand.”
I didn’t wait for him to comply, but dug under the cloak and seized his hand, which I chafed madly between my own. He opened his eyes again and frowned at me.
“I’m all right,” he said. “But I’m gey tired, aye?”
“Move your arms,” I ordered, flinging the hand at him. “Flap them, up and down. Can you move your legs at all?”
He sighed wearily, as though dragging himself out of a sticky bog, and muttered something under his breath in Gaelic, but very slowly he began to move his arms back and forth. With more prodding, he succeeded in flexing his ankles—though any further movement caused instant spasms in his back—and with great reluctance, began to waggle his feet.
He looked rather like a frog trying to fly, but I wasn’t in any mood to laugh. I didn’t know whether he was actually in danger of freezing or not, but I wasn’t taking any chances. By dint of constant exhortation, aided by judicious pokings, I kept him at this exercise until I had got him altogether awake and shivering. In a thoroughly bad temper, too, but I didn’t mind that.
“Keep moving,” I advised him. I got up with some difficulty, having grown quite stiff from crouching over him so long. “Move, I say!” I added sharply, as he showed symptoms of flagging. “Stop and I’ll step square on your back, I swear I will!”
I glanced around, a little blearily. The snow was still falling, and it was difficult to see more than a few feet. We needed shelter—more than the rock alone could provide.
“Hemlock,” he said between his teeth. I glanced down at him, and he jerked his head toward a clump of trees nearby. “Take the hatchet. Bi branches. Six feet. C-cut four.” He was breathing heavily, and there was a tinge of color visible in his face, despite the dim light. He’d stopped moving in spite of my threats, but his teeth were clenched because they were chattering–a sign I rejoiced to see.
I stooped and groped beneath his cloak again, this time searching for the hatchet belted round his waist. I couldn’t resist sliding a hand under him, inside the neck of his fringed woolen hunting shirt. Warm! Thank God, he was still warm. His chest felt superficially chilled from its contact with the wet ground, but it was still warmer than my fingers.
“Right,” I said, taking my hand away and standing up with the hatchet. “Hemlock. Six-foot branches, do you mean?”
He nodded, shivering violently, and I set off at once for the trees he indicated.
Inside the silent grove, the fragrance of hemlock and cedar enfolded me at once in a mist of resins and turpenes, the odor cold and sharp, clean and invigorating. Many of the trees were enormous, with the lower branches well above my head, but there were smaller ones scattered here and there. I saw at once the virtues of this particular tree—no snow fell under them; the fanlike boughs caught the falling snow like umbrellas.
I hacked at the lower branches, torn between the need for haste and the very real fear of chopping off a few fingers by accident; my hands were numb and awkward with the cold.
The wood was green and elastic and it took forever to chop through the tough, springy fibers. At last, though, I had four good-sized branches, sporting multiple fans of dense needles. They looked soft and black against the new snow, like big fans of feathers; it was almost a surprise to touch them and feel the hard, cold prick of the needles.
I dragged them back to the rock, and found that Jamie had managed to scoop more leaves together; he was almost invisible, submerged in a huge drift of black and gray against the foot of the rock.
Under his terse direction I leaned the hemlock branches fan-up against the face of the rock, the chopped butt ends stuck into the earth at an angle, so as to form a small triangular refuge underneath. Then I took the hatchet again and chopped small pine and spruce branches, pulled up big clumps of dried grass, and piled it all against and over the hemlock screen. Then at last, panting with exertion, I crawled into the shelter beside him.
I nestled down in the leaves between his body and the rock, wrapped my cloak around both of us, put my arms around his body, and held on hard. Then I found the leisure to shake a bit. Not from cold—not yet—but from a mixture of relief and fear.

Frank and Claire’s Boston apartment (Season 2)

He felt me shivering, and reached awkwardly back to pat me in reassurance.

“It will be all right, Sassenach,” he said. “With the two of us, it will be all right ….
“All right, all right,” I said. “What if I tell you a story, instead?”
Highlanders loved stories, and Jamie was no exception.
“Oh, aye,” he said, sounding much happier. ‘What sort of story is it?”
“A Christmas story,” I said, settling myself along the curve of his body. “About a miser named Ebenezer Scrooge.”
“An Englishman, I daresay.”
“Yes,” I said. “Be quiet and listen.”
I could see my own breath as I talked, white in the dim, cold air. The snow was falling heavily outside out shelter; when I paused in the story, I could hear the whisper of flakes against the hemlock branches, and the far-off whine of wind in the trees.
I knew the story very well; it had been part of our Christmas ritual, Frank’s and Brianna’s and mine. From the time Bree was five or six, we had read A Christmas Carol every year, starting a week or two before Christmas, Frank and I taking it in turns to read to her each night before bed.
“And the specter said, ‘ I am the Ghost of Christmas Past…’”
I might not be freezing to death, but the cold had a strange hypnotic effect nonetheless. I had gone past the phase of acute discomfort and felt now slightly disembodied. I knew my hands and feet were icy, and my body chilled half through, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore. I floated in a peaceful white mist, seeing the words swirl round my head like snowflakes as I spoke them.
“…and there was dear old Fezziwig, among the lights and music…”
I couldn’t tell whether I was gradually thawing or becoming colder. I was conscious of an overall feeling of relaxation, and an altogether peculiar sense of déjà vu, as though I had once before been entombed, insulated in snow, snug despite desolation outside.

Boston Christmas — Roger visiting from Scotland

A memory within this subjective narrative:

As Bob Cratchit bought his meager bird, I remembered. I went on talking automatically, the flow of the story coming from somewhere well below the level of consciousness, but my memory was in the front seat of a stalled 1956 Oldsmobile, its windscreen caked with snow.
We had been on our way to visit an elderly relative of Frank’s, somewhere in upstate New York. The snow came on hard, halfway there, howling down across the icy roads with gusts of wind. Before we knew where we were, we had skidded off the road and halfway into a ditch, the windscreen wipers slashing futilely at the pelting snow.
There was nothing to be done but wait for morning, and rescue. We had had a picnic hamper and some old blankets; we brought Brianna up into the front seat between us, and huddled all together under coats and blankets, sipping lukewarm cocoa from the thermos and making jokes to keep her from being frightened.
As it grew later, and colder, we huddled closer, and to distract Brianna, Frank began to tell her Dickens’s story from memory, counting on me to supply the missing bits. Neither of us could have done it alone, but between us, we managed well. By the time the sinister Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had made his appearance, Brianna was snuggled sound asleep under the coats, a warm, boneless weight against my side.
There was no need to finish the story, but we did, talking to each other below the words, hands touching below the layers of blankets. I remembered Frank’s hands, warm and strong on mine, thumb stroking my palm, outlining my fingers. Frank had always loved my hands.
The car had filled with the mist of our breathing, and drops of water ran down inside the white-choked windows. Frank’s head had been a dark cameo, dim against the white. He had leaned toward me at the last, nose and cheeks chilled, lips warm on mine as he whispered the last words of the story.
“’God bless us, every one,’” I ended, and lay silent, a small needle of grief like an ice splinter through my heart. It was quiet inside the shelter, and seemed darker; snow had covered over all the openings.
Jamie reached back and touched my leg.
“Put your hands inside my shirt, Sassenach,” he said softly. I slid one hand up under his shirt in front, to rest against his chest, the other up his back. The faded whip marks felt like threads under his skin.
He laid his hand against mine, pressing it tight against his chest. He was very warm, and his heart beat slow and strong under my fingers.
“Sleep, a nighean donn,” he said. “I wilna let ye freeze.”

Three different covers thus far

This retelling is fun because so many readers enjoy realizing that we remember the story with others. I do. I feel less lonely tonight at the thought.

I am just now watching Outlander Season 5, episode by episode, and listening to Davina Porter read the novel aloud in car (audiobook in CDS) and next year, Season 5, I’ll again watch and listening to Porter again read the next novel, A Fiery Cross, and should be able to supply the scenes of Hogmanay.

Ellen

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Winter Solstice at Trenwith (12/1787) and Nampara, Werry House & Trenwith (12/1790)

Christmas at Trenwith, Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza questioned by Caroline Blakiston as Aunt Agatha (Poldark, 2014, Season 1, Episode 4 — corresponding to the last quarter of Ross Poldark

Christmas at Nampara, Angharad Rees as Demelza with the children carolers (Poldark, 1976-77, Part 8, Episode 2 — corresponding to last quarter of Demelza)

Friends and readers,

Last year I commemorated Christmas with a blog essay showing how central a role the Christmas or Winter Solstice seasons plays in the cending of a number of the Poldark novels. I went on to show how the passing of the seasons is also emphatically realized across the Poldark novels, to link them to one another, and the land, landscape, & seascape in Cornwall. This fits them deeply into traditions of writing and art about Cornwall (see Ella Westland, Cornwall: The Cultural Construction of Place) from DuMaurier to lesser knowns Rumber Godden, Denys Val Baker, and then again to Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse).

This year we’ll dive into the experience of two of these: To begin with, Christmas at Trenwith (Ross Poldark)

Ross Poldark shows us where the first Christmas Ross and Demelza are married: they are invited to Trenwith, and find themselves struggling to keep the identities they are building against the undertow of great old house, grounds, a cultured family for generations back, military norms (you name the obstacle), and come together through music (December 1787).

Aidan Turner as Ross, with Demelza walking there

There are five phases to that first Christmas at Trenwith in the book (Book 3, Chapters 7-11, or the last), and I equally enjoy its slow realization (Season 1, Episode 4) In the book I find the complex characterization of Demelza’s encounters with each of her new relatives, especially Frances; Ross’s fluctuating feeling about Elizabeth, his relationship with the rest of his family, his pride in its history (which separates him from Demelza, the conversation, the rivalry between Elizabeth and Demelza as musicians (some of it taken from Austen’s Emma), their discomfort and the threat they feel to their relationship, but how their deeper congeniality and values overcome this; in the film I can’t help but dwell (as they do) on Demelza’s uncertainties, dress, when more characters are brought in than were in the book (beyond the Trenegloses, with a very catty jealous Ruth Teague, Warleggans come in) and we have Demelza’s song in the evening.

Demelza dressing for dinner

At dinner — a table full of characters

Singing

I’d pluck a fair rose for my love
I’d pluck a red rose blowing
Love’s in my heart, a-trying so to prove
What your heart’s knowing

I’d pluck a finger on a thorn
I’d pluck a finger bleeding
Red is my heart, a-wounded and forlorn
And your heart needing

I’d hold a finger to my tongue
I’d hold a finger waiting
My heart is sore, until it joins in song
Wi’your heart mating
(Poldark Complete Scripts 1, Episode 4, Scene 96: Int. Trenwith, pp 244-45)

In fact the 2015 film reverses the meaning of the book: in the book the two are almost torn apart, the pictures and furniture especially get in the way; Elizabeth and Ross’s private talk drives a circle around them apart from the others, and equal weight is given to Elizabeth’s delicate renditions of Mozart and a canzonetta by Handel are as alluring as Demelza’s folk tune. In their mutual talk and love-making upstairs they renew themselves as a pair

Graham’s Ross Poldark: at the house as they begin to adjust: “the strength of the past could not just then break their companionship:

Demelza sat there, her arms behind her head, her toes stretched towards the fire while Ross slowly undressed. They exchanged a casual word from time to time, laughed over together over Ross’s account of Treneglos’s antics with the spinning wheel; Demelza questioned him about Ruth, about the Teagues, about George Warleggan. Their voices were low and warm and confidential. This was the intimacy of pure companionship.

The house had fallen quiet about them. Although they were not sleep, the pleasant warmth and comfort turned their senses imperceptibly towards sleep. Ross had a moment of unspoiled satisfaction. He received love and gave it in equal and generous measure. Their relationship at that moment had no flaw.

In the 2015 episode the experience unites them with their family members, Demelza to a much nicer Elizabeth than in the book, and Frances accepting Demelza as he sees that Ross is far happier & satisfied than he. Much as I enjoy the richness of the varied scenes of Horsfield’s drama, I prefer Graham’s book here: it’s more nuanced and about inward life, for it is only in coming home, the walk away, outside in the natural world of Cornwall where there is no human ordering, that Demelza thinks more accurately about what she has seen (Frances bored, Elizabeth strained, Verity without), and Ross’s spirit is truly lifted

Someone — a Latin poet — had defined eternity as no more than this: to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come.

He thought if we could only stop life for a while I would stop here. Not when I get home, not leaving Trenwith, but here, here reaching the top of the hill out of Sawle, dusk wiping out the edges of the land and Demelza walking and humming by my side.

He knew of things plucking at his attention. All existence was a cycle of difficulties to be met and obstacles to be surmounted (Ross Poldark Book 3, Chapters 10-11)

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One of the poor children come caroling at the gate and window of Nampara

Now three years later at Nampara (Demelza). Their daughter now two, Ross’s copper smelting business and it seems his mine too are being thwarted and control through shares taken from him, and Demelza feels she has wronged Ross and the Poldark family by facilitating Verity’s romance and marriage to Blamey. But Verity’s letter intervenes, she thanks Demelza for enabling her “to make my own life,” he and Demelza are then next seen having a modest celebration where she tries to borrow a substantial sum from Sir Hugh and is rebuffed by all.

In the 1975 film Sir Hugh Brodrugan and Lady Constance are at Nampara

Robin Ellis as Ross relaxing (Season 1 Episode 8, Part 2)

Not in the revised Demelza at all, but in the 1975 film there follows in the film a brilliant strained scene over Christmas dinner between Frances, now drinking all the time, lonely, going for mistresses, and having told George Warleggan who the men are in the Carnemore Copper Company after the flight of Verity and his blaming Ross. Elizabeth has told him she means to leave him. The dialogue is acute, painful, utterly believable. In the first version of Graham’s Demelza (he cut down the 1947 version later), there are more scenes between Elizabeth and Frances and there is something of a loss in the book because we are not watching them fall apart bit-by-bit, so the 1075 film-makers supplied this:

Scene begins when Clive Francis as Frances comes to the table, Jill Townsend as Elizabeth with Stefan Gates as Geoffrey Charles already there

Trying to carve

At Trenwith Frances hysterical with grief, remorse, self-hatred, guilt, loneliness (still Season 1, Episode 8, Part 2)

In Graham’s book, we hear of how the other men and families are being hard hit by the Warleggans now that they know which men were in the Carnemore company, and they are invited to Werry house by the Constance, Lady and Sir Hugh Brodrugan:

Demelza with Christopher Benjamin as Sir Hugh Brodrugan

As our narrator tells us, “Christmas passed quietly inside Nampara and out — the calm before the storm.” There is some fascination in the completely disordered house, in the behavior of the host and hostess before the fire, and how they have a managerie of animals inside the house: “a family of owls, some dormice, a sick monkey, a pair of raccoons. Downstairs they went again to a passage full of cages with thrushes, goldfinches canary birds, and Virginia nightingales.”

In 1975 three couples are paralleled, contrasted and the effect of all three scenes, with a fourth just below, are deepened. All this before a gale brings a wrecked ship onto the beach, and a riot over “the flotsam and jetsam” ensues. It is after this that Demelza goes to nurse a desperately sick Frances Poldark and Elizabeth too, then returns to sicken her baby, herself and Julia die while we wait to go in the theater (Demelza, Book 4, Chapter 2). Arguably the 1975 serial drama improves on the book — if you discount the loss of Werry House

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Later in the evening, in the 1975 film, Richard Morant as Dwight Enys drops by and three become cozy and comfortable, when a message comes to say Frances is deeply ill; and while Ross at first forbids Demelza to go, she declares she will anyway go with Dwight to help them

The two sets of serial dramas make opposite choices over these two Christmas: as to the first Christmas, the 1975 Poldark simply ignores it (!), substituting a slew of events not in the book at all; the 2015 Poldark lovingly, lingeringly recreating every phase of first Christmas in this first Poldark book. In the case of the second Christmas, the 1975 Poldark elaborates upon Christmas somewhat more than in the book to create a sense of poignancy, loss, and desperation amid an ethic of stoicism before the hell of tempest, fatal illness, and despair take over. Here the 2015 Poldark skips Christmas altogether in order to dwell more at length on aspects of the bitter close of the book the earlier film skips: like George Warleggan’s urging Frances successfully to betray Ross and Ross’s white-hot anger at Demelza when she confesses it was she who brought Verity and Blamey together and enabled them to effect Verity’s escape from a frustrated semi-servitude to her family.

Let us look upon all four iterations as enrichening our experience and be glad of them all.

Dear reader, next year if I’m here and you are here, and we can do this again, I will cover another two of the end book Christmas or Winter Solstices in the Poldarks. Today is either the shortest nor near shortest day of the year and I hope I have brightened it for you as I have occupied myself absorbedly.

Ellen

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