Natalia Ginzburg: one of the great writers of the 20th century — an Italian woman

Natalia Ginzburg in her older years (1917-1991)

Dear Friends and readers,

I’ve written twice now about Natalia Ginzburg in my blogs, once as one of several women writers I’ve been reading in the last few months; and once as one of four Jewish Italian writers whose lives were shaped by the fascist regime and horizon of fascism they had to live with across nearly 3 decades, one of which was a time of a peculiarly brutal war. It included an attempt to exterminate millions of people on the basis of an ethnicity, Jewishness, on the basis of socialist, anti-fascist and communist beliefs, and on the basis of a perceived non-traditional or non-heterosexual sexuality. All of them knew the terror of fleeing militia come to their houses, to take them away to arrest, imprison, perhaps torture and kill them (which did happen to Natalia’s husband, Leone, one at least came close to death (see On Surviving Fascism: Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Levi, Giorgio Bassanio).

I want to reprise Natalia at full length (for a blog) because since then I’ve read four more of her books, more of her essays, more about her, and I think she belongs here on my blog dedicated to women artists (rather then my more general blog). I feel I know her better. I’ve reread her Family Lexicon or sayings at least three times more. Equally to the point, I’ve read her far more open, revealing, thoughtfully original and riveting books of autobiographical meditations: The Little Virtues and A Place to Live In. Delightful satiric sketches of England alternate with meditations on places of exile. Winter in Abruzzo is a good introduction to Christ Stopped at Eboli. How she went walking and neighbors thought her crazy to do it in winter. At one point in the book she says she did not realize the couple of years she spent there with Leon and two children and had a third were in some ways the happiest of her existence. They began Proust. They were thrown upon one another. Their apartment hunting in Rome. How her world comes alive from within.

Family Sayings is the book by her known best, and includes a wide swathe of 20th century history in Italy as a backdrop to this family chronicle. It has all the characteristics of l’ecriture-femme: cyclical, a deeply private or personal (if inarticulated) viewpoint, a mother-daughter paradigm at its center; a portrait of herself as a mother, marriage to a beloved man as pivotal. de-centered: she hardly ever gives us her or her family’s thoughts hidden from the collective outward life; the anecdotes are mostly about others, with her as the quietly presiding POV. Yet the book is about her life, starting with the time she has consecutive memories at age 5 to near the end of her life when she visited England with her second husband, and now somehow freed of her immediate Italian world can spill out what happened the intimate events and calamities inflicted on her family and close friends and associates as well as their relationships, achievements, losses

Part of the reason for her reticence is this is a memoir, all the people are real, and the events really happened, so she must protect them and herself. I suggest frustration at this led Peg Boyers to write the feelings and thoughts we do surmise (we are given enough to extrapolate) in a series of fictionalized autobiographical poems (written as if written by Natalia), Hard Bread, that give Natalia’s repressed reactions and only partly expressed critiques (even in the autobiographical essays) and celebrations full play. The most extended section is about Cesare Pavese who worked closely with her husband, who she worked with at Einaudi, and who appears to have frequently had suicidal thoughts – who wouldn’t during WW2 – and hated surprises. I take it he didn’t care for liminality – crossing from one mode of existence into another, enduring uncertainty. He visited the US, translated famous American classics into Italian (like Moby Dick famous book is very Thomas Hardy like: The Moon and the Bonfires.

Family sayings are repeated phrases, words, sentences that the family uses as collective comic glue for themselves. And we can track them (as they add and subtract people) from one place to another as they move around Italy, or are forced to move, hide, become imprisoned, escape (her brother swam across a part of the Mediterranean in winter to reach unoccupied France). I loved her plain matter-of-fact style: simple sentences expect us to provide in-depth understanding as when she says of Jewish and other displaced now vulnerable peoples they are “without a country.” While the surface is prosaic, quietly telling about all sorts of interesting people (many involved in politics and literature), the underlying pattern is tragic. Boyers calls her style and tone “astringent yet passionate.” The refrain: I never saw him again (of her husband); they never saw one another again. Like Virginia Woolf in Jacob’s Room, she produces a portrait of humanity as seen through the lens of an Italian secular and political and only partly Jewish culture (her family had been thoroughly assimilated until suddenly ostracized, under attack, mortally threatened) — during a time of aggressive fascism.

This poem is imagined as by Natalia when she brings out of prison the small box of things found in her husband’s cell after his terrible death:

Prison Box: Inventory (Rome, February 1944)

copy War and Peace
cyrillic type
(fading, spine bent)

cashmere scarf,
arm length
(dirty, white, torn)

photographs of a girl,
two boys
and a woman (frayed at the edges)

pencil stubs
(carbon
tips spent)

lined spiral notebook
(nine pages left,
yellowed, blank)

pair of wire-rimmed glasses
(left lens shattered,
nose support gone)

— from Peg Boyers’ Hard Bread, a poetic autobiography for Natalia, this poem the imagined box of things she could have gotten after her husband, Leone, had been tortured to death

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In the New Statesman, the book was called a portrait of her family

A more concrete way of describing Family Lexicon:

The book follows the contours of Natalia’s life. She omits dates and it’s fair to say some crucial events in her personal life seem to be brushed over – like how did she and Leone fall in love, what was their wedding like, the couple of years together in exile; how did she come to marry a second man, live with him in England – yet I put to you she is central – her tone, she is the narrator shaping our feelings and thoughts about the characters she presents and although not a novel there is a high point and crises and denouement for her and her brothers and mother and father.

A real structure emerges aligned with her family’s life. It is the story of her family. A few dates: she’s the fifth child of a Jewish a renowned Professor and Catholic mother living in Turin. She was born 1916, died 1991. So across the 20th century. Her parents secular, her brothers atheists, very active as anti-fascists – of the artisan intellectual class – think of Thomas Paine not that far off. Married Leone Ginzburg 1938 and there were 3 children. One of them Carlo became a much respected historian. Leon died in prison after enduring horrific torture (it’s said including a mock crucifixion). He had been a communist but so were many so I don’t know why he was so singled out. It reminds me of the German philosopher Dietrich Bonhoeffer who also died terribly after participating in a semi-famous attempt to kill Hitler. When they returned from exile they went to Rome and proceeded to publish an anti-fascist newspaper – had it been me I’d have fled. She remarries in 1950, Gabriele Baldini a scholar of English literature, spent time with him in England (very funny sketches), he died in 1969.

Her writing career began early in the sense she began to write early but first publication was 1933 I Bambini. She spent a long time as an editor at the respected publisher Einaudi; she was probably one of the people who rejected Lampedusa’s Leopard and who made the publication of holocaust memoirs slow. Curious they were very keen on Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, the American assumed it was simply an anti-communist book. She wrote. 11 what’s called novels, 5 books of essays, much of it partly life writing, much profound despite easy style and wry manner, a number of plays.

Further Contexts:

One is the connection to the holocaust memoirs: her book shows a drive to remember, to record what was and to tell of what the experience of fascism was within the family. A desire to bear witness. She is very concerned not to exaggerate or say something that is not. That’s partly why it seems so jagged. She has not smoothed things out. She tells what she remembers almost as she is remembering it and some of it is way out of chronology.

Two the questions I sent I list pages where you can find the adventures and final fates of her three brothers and Adriano Olivetti who married her sister Paola. No. 4. Another question I simply listed all the places in the text that Leone Ginzburg occurs in – if you want to see how she feels about him you have to go from point to point.

I think after her father and her mother the most coherent portrait of a character in the book is Cesare Pavese, a novelist and essayist and translator (of American texts) of the era – as she was. Like Carlo Levi, Pavese worked with Ginzburg’s husband as an anti-fascist political activist (though he did join the fascist party to get a job as a teacher), he also worked with Natalia at Einaudi, the publisher. She was very close to him and for three pages tries to explain how he came to kill himself.

The second context is nostalgia, a deep desire to retreat, a turning away from what is imminently in front of you. Last week someone mentioned Bassani’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis; Family Lexicon is sometimes written about as a very similar kind of book. Her theme is the insufficiency of language to express what is happening about them. So too Bassani – rich Jewish and a fascist for a while – as was Pirandello.

It’s a post-modern book. A post-modern book is one which rejects traditional ideas about hierarchy, what is virtue, and wants to find much more accurate descriptions of what motivates people. They disavow belief in progress. A kind of collapse. I mentioned the first day that Carlo Levi’s book is a poetic masterpiece. If you’ve started you will have seen why I saw that. It is also a political masterpiece. He does something you won’t find in any of our other texts: he goes behind the definitions of fascism or ways of categorizing it to depict specific characters/people he meets who are fuelled by an embittered rage or hatred and explains why and how they got there and how that links to what might seem ridiculous opinions: like at the time being for invading Abysinnia and Ethiopa.

Time after time in the book you feel you have seen the inward working of what is expressed as political ideology. She doesn’t believe in political ideology She’s often quoted (people who are anti-feminist or not feminist love this) as denying she is a feminist though her later books especially focus on women’s worlds and how they are abused, not given equal rights in most areas of life. She isn’t. A political ideology is a mask, a tool. All our writers are strongly sceptical observers. In 1960 when Dr Zhivago won the Nobel prize it has been translated only into Italian where it was an enormous hit. Its sense of a govt that is deeply decadent and and a people out of whack with what were thought historical forces by learned people is the same

There are people who can’t or won’t flee; driven to it, after hiding, a long time elsewhere, return to stay. She was one of these.

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

A few critics:

Rachel Cusk wrote a short essay or column on her which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (April 2018, p 25): Violent Vocation: Natalia Ginzburg, and a “New Template for the Female Voice.” It served as an introduction to Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues. usk suggests that after all Ginzburg was a feminist writer – she denied she was in the category. Not unusual I’m sorry to say. What I told you of was that when she started out she was concerned lest she be dismissed as a woman writer and tried to write like a man. That seems to have meant to her to be impersonal, to hide herself; that Family Lexicon is the turning point and after she writes so very appealingly of herself candidly within limits. Epistolary novels flow from her, more memoirs in the form of life-writing essays on themes. Cusk tells us she was instrumental in forming a woman’s voice for the era; for producing books for the first time which were feminocentric: woman at the center and their lives. Still not easy to do and we still find women using pseudonyms to protect their private lives. The template includes highly violent feelings after silent or not-so-silent violence is inflicted on you; irony, nastiness, indifference to money, courage, contempt for danger, not a desire for success but to be who you are and do what enables you to know your worlds. Yes all that. Not open about sex itself.

Her followers include then Elsa Morante, Anna Banti, Anna Maria Ortese, Sibylla Aleramo, Alba de Cespedes, Elena Ferrante.

Mary Gordon’s life and works of Ginzburg in the New York Times Magazine. She’s a well-known American novelist, often writes stories where her characters are influenced by Catholicism. She tells us she first came across Natalia Ginzburg when she was traveling in 1971 as a young college student and in Florence came across a copy of The Little Virtues, was entranced, the only women writer of a book in the whole Italian book store. This essay is about her coming to visit and interview Ginzburg many years later, and they go out to supper together. Mary Gordon basic idea is Ginzburg is an iconoclast; she takes up positions that are not expected or popular. At the time Ginzburg had written a piece siding with adoptive parents in a controversial trial. Very unusual. Gordon retells the family’s endurance and ordeals and flights in WW2, the terrible fate of Leon Ginzburg; how few women were published writers when Ginzburg began her writing career; she smoked heavily – the ambiance of her apartment, Ginzburg’s love of Chekhov. Why did she write a family chronicle? She had just written one of Manzoni’s family instead of a biography of the famous author of the Bethrothed.

Small virtues are the ones that matter. You should not be trying to pass on the great bourgeois norms of prudence, money-making, ambition, thrift, self first, caution, but rather idealism, generosity, greatness of vision, self-sacrifice and whatever is best in the child’s character. I agree with her – no need to repeat what they’ll hear on TV commercials and maybe in mainstream schools. Her writing was not a career to make money and gain fame, but her vocation.

Joan Acocella in the New Yorker finds parallels between attitudes of mind in Ginzburg and Virginia Woolf – Ginzburg a slightly younger generation but also with an academic father, well educated and upper class but at home mother. She quotes from Ginzburg’s My Vocation:

A particular sympathy grows up between us and the characters we invent—that our debilitated imagination is still just able to invent—a sympathy that is tender and almost maternal, warm and damp with tears, intimately physical and stifling. We are deeply, painfully rooted in every being and thing in the world, the world which has become filled with echoes and trembling and shadows, to which we are bound by a devout and passionate pity. Then we risk foundering on a dark lake of stagnant, dead water, and dragging our mind’s creations down with us, so that they are left to perish among dead rats and rotting flowers in a dark, warm whirlpool.

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Eric Gudas offers more traditional literary criticism. He found it funny at moments but it is a meditation on memory and story telling. Our author is dredging up memories as they come to her and writing them down.

Turati and Kuliscioff [not married to one another and so an embarrasment to the mother] were ever-present in my mother’s reminiscences. I knew they were both still alive and living in Milan (perhaps together, perhaps in two different apartments) and that they were still involved in politics and the fight against fascism. Nevertheless, in my imagination, they had become tangled up with other figures who were also ever-present in my mother’s reminiscences: her parents, Silvio, the Lunatic, Barbison. People who were either dead or, if still alive, very old and belonging to a distant time, to far-off events when my mother was a child … even if I were to meet them and touch them they were not the same as the ones I imagined and even if they were still alive they were in any case tainted by their proximity to the dead with whom they dwelled in my soul; and they had taken up the step of the dead, light and elusive

My own last thought for noiw: that Family Lexicon represents a turning point in her life – that before this time in England, she was anxious, frightened, nervous about publishing as a woman, as a distinctively woman’s voice. And that she identified women’s voices with subjectivity and private life; but that writing this book freed her.

We might look about all these family sayings – however painful and ambiguous all these jokes are – as a form of cleansing. For her father I think his rants – are a way of exorcizing anger, anxiety, a sense of helplessness. I shall return and read much more by and about her.

Ellen

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Politics & Prose classes on women’s fiction & authors; genre fiction for, by, about women; Lot’s wife re-seen

Hilary Mantel’s superb non-fiction essays, a selection from the London Review of Books

A rare almost Radcliffean female gothic fiction for Oates

Dear friends and readers,

For about 12 weeks now I’ve been taking on-line courses at Politics and Prose and the quality and level of the discussions, the information and insights offered have been as excellent as those I’ve been taking now online from Cambridge, early evening British time, early afternoon East Coast on Saturdays and/or Sundays.  These have occurred across the pandemic and I chose mostly women and mostly Bloomsbury era women (exceptions include a session on E.M. Forster, and a session each on Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Christina Rossetti’s poetry).

At Politics and Prose I can’t recommend highly enough Helen Hooper, Elaine Showalter, and at Cambridge University in their programs just about every Literature professor I’ve been privileged to listen to and watch (as these are video zooms). I’ve read books I’ve never read before by Mantel, Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates — including Black Water, the astonishing tour-de-force retelling of the drowning and suffocation of Mary Jo Kopecknek at the close of her mad drive with Ted Kennedy down unpaved roads over an unsteady bridge. I’ve now a rounded point of view on Mantel, a way of putting her works together coherently for the first time. Maybe my favorite session from Cambridge in the last few months was on Vita Sackville-West by Alison Hennegan. I discovered Sackville-West’s love of animals.

The question I asked myself about Mantel was how much of her fiction was an escape for and protest against her from her fraught family life, traumatic health problems, and religious ways of thought (especially her interest in seance mediums). Paradoxically it’s not her imaginative fiction-writing self that is most aggressive in building a new identity, but her non-fictional arguments and the first two of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.  For Shirley Jackson she takes on the type of the older woman alone, unable to navigate herself in a deeply hostile world (“The Bus”); she cannot escape cruelty it seems. To me Joyce Carol Oates in much of her fiction is herself living vicariously thrills and adventures at whatever price these cost her heroines (death, fearsome rape), with no concern for safety – so often so central to women’s stories. There is something troublingly irresponsible in Oates. It seems to me that American female gothic as practiced by these two women almost avoided the supernatural in order to make concrete to women readers what the life of an American woman is today. By contrast, Mantel is drawn to it in her contemporary British gothic comedic novels.

At the same time I’ve been going further in my popular genre books by, for, about female characters and discovered I can enjoy P.D. James’s Cordelia Grey books (detective fiction), Italian women women’s fiction: I just began Alba de Crespedes’ Forbidden Notebook, as translated by Ann Goldstein:

This last, perhaps not as well known in English-readers’ circles as I hope it might become is about a woman who after WW2 decides to keep a prohibited notebook. The closer word in Italian is prohibited. (Another instance of Goldstein’s inadequacy). The whole set of attitudes Valeria has to get beyond to even purchase and then hide her notebook brings home the inner world of Lila when she keeps a series of notebook and the profound betrayal Elena enacts when she throws them in the river in Florence. Purchase laws are against her, she has no space for it, little time because she hasn’t a maid and she has a job (this money is why she can buy it); she’s afraid to tell her husband who might suggest she give it to her son. I can see that the tragedy might be that she discovers herself … Very modern tale. Jhumpa Lahiri provides an insightful contextual introduction, and Elena Ferrante is quoted urging us to read it

For a couple of weeks I immersed myself in the fiction of Natalia Ginzburg, and the poetry and life of Elsa Morante in the course I’m teaching on Italian memoirs and novels and poetry of the 20th century — more than a couple of weeks because this was a culmination of several months on and off.

With my friend and mate over on Trollope&Peers, Tyler Tichelaar, a historical novelist, I read the whole of Devoney Looser’s very long study of Jane and Anna Maria Porter, two early historical fiction (and other genre) writers around the time of, or just before Jane Austen and the Brontes: Sister Novelists: Trailblazing Sisters. The Porter sisters left a huge treasure trove of candid letters from which Looser constructed their hard and fascinating lives as independent women writers. Their courage, stamina, ability to network and live on very little, their romances and enormous amount of fiction produced puts before us a new angle on the world Austen lived in, a lot freer sexually than is usually supposed: the question was did they invent historical fiction or did what they call historical fiction lack a deep consciousness of the past (and real research into it) as shaping force of what was and is, such as we find in Scott.

As I found myself thinking about the archetypal heroine’s journey, so I’ve been looking to see if when women take over popular genres, there is some subset or continuous underlying themes, tropes, norms that cross these genres (each having to conform to readers’ expectations). An image one sees on many of the covers of their detective fiction is the typewriter:

I’ve not come to any conclusion that will allow me to concretize the l’ecriture-femme elements in these books but the topic is on my mind and I’m not alone as I pursue it.

I’m neglecting no one; I’m now watching serial dramas based on Agatha Christie’s famous series of Miss Marple: two nights in a row found me really engaged by one of the original episodes with Joan Hickman (The Body in the Library) and tonight I began a brand-new one: Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, which includes Emma Thompson and Jim Broadbent in a hilarious scene as our amateur female sleuth’s parents.

At night I’ve re-begun Christie’s Autobiography, read by me 40 years ago and still remembered.

So this is some of what has been occupying me over these past weeks — some eighteenth century matter in Looser’s book while I listened to David Rintoul’s exhilarating reading aloud of Scott’s Waverley (very entertaining tones and Scots accent). I will end on a poem by Anna Akhmatova as translated by Annie Finch. The poem was brought to mind by Graham Christian’s writing of postings about poets daily for this month of April on face-book

Lot’s Wife

“But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.” –—Genesis 19:25-26

The righteous man followed where God’s angel guide
shone on through black mountains, imposing and bright —
but pain tore his wife’s breast. It turned her aside
and said, “Look again! There is time for one sight
Of towers, and Sodom’s red halls, and the place
Where you sang in the courtyard or wove on your loom
By windows now empty — where you knew the embrace
Of love with your husband—where birth filled the room —.”

She looked. And the sight was more bitter than pain.
It shut up her eyes so she saw nothing more;
She shimmered to salt; her feet moved in vain,
Deep rooted at last in the place she died for.

Who weeps for her now? Who can care for the fate
Of someone like that—a mere unhappy wife?
My heart will remember. I carry the weight
Of one who looked back, though it cost her her life.

I like this one because the POV is not the implicitly masculine POV or Lot’s male POV. We begin with an impersonal verse; at “it turned her aside” we move into the woman’s perspective (whose name we are still not told. Then we move into the second person, “You” and the last three lines are the torture she’s feeling — just for wanting a sliver of freedom within enslavement unto death.

Just arrived! and this was a hard one to find for a reasonable price ($9.99 at WorldofBooks): The other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow (Mary at last)

And Isobel completed this beautiful puzzle: that’s Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Nora Zeale Hurston and Virginia Woolf

Ellen

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By way of Richard III: A post-modern praise of Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time & the film The Lost King

Truth is the daughter of time, not authority — Francis Bacon

A very enjoyable film I saw this afternoon! The Lost King, an account of Philippa Langley’s successful push to get many authorities to dig up Richard III’s remains in a parking lot near Leicester Cathedral. Also an unusual, actually strange mystery book also about Richard III (did not kill nephews is the foregone conclusion) which consists of a detective scrutinizing types of history writing in bed. I describe the real merits of the book and defend the film against its now legion of detractors (lamenting what a shame such a good film should be so marred …) all the while discussing R3 too.

Dear Friends and readers,

Over the past month I’ve been reading on and off a curious and strange or unusually written mystery story, The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (one of the two pseudonyms of Elizabeth MacKintosh)

The above one of its many covers (having been published in many editions) captures the action and (for me) what’s central to the interest of the book: its self-reflexivity and presentations of different ways of telling supposedly truthful history in at first a playful way. The way the story is for about half the tale conducted. The level of language in which the book is written feels very simple but not the thoughts implied inside Alan Grant’s mind nor his and Tey’s narrator’s descriptions and imitations of kinds of history books. I chose this book as one of those I’d read for a planned course I’d teach in mystery-thriller-detective stories by women: see my A Tangent I cannot Resist: Women’s Detective Stories

The story is that Grant is a policeman-detective from Scotland Yard who has been badly hurt chasing a criminal (down a manhole?). He is bored in the hospital and looking for something to do. He is drawn towards Renaissance and Tudor history and after canvasing several fascinating figures (all women, Lucrezia Borgia, Elizabeth Tudor versus Mary Stuart), lands on the unsolved (as he sees it) mystery of of who killed the two young sons of Elizabeth Woodville by Edward IV — heirs to the throne upon his death. This is an old problem. As he puzzles this out, with main candidates being at first (but not for very long) Richard III or Henry VII (who took over the throne after Richard III was killed); we go through the whole Plantagenet York group (Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York and wife, their grown sons, grandsons, various wives), not omitting the Lancastrians (Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, Margaret of Anjou &c).

Tey’s book’s story is told through characters, his friends, bringing him books of different types — each of which gives Josephine Tey and opportunity to imitate it — first silly history offered to children with child-like motives and pictures, all personalities, and then the opposite, fat tomes of small print where only large abstract causes and realities are discussed (hardly personalities), then one of his historical fiction-romances centered on Cecilly Neville, Duchess of York (wife of the above Plantagenet), entitled The Rose of Raby said to be by Evelyn Paine-Ellis (typical pseudonym down to not allowing the first name to be narrowly gendered). That’s the kind of title Philippa Gregory might give a book; in fact these kinds of books can be better than one thinks — as Tey through Grant implies. And then he gets to the “sainted” Thomas More’s “much respected” life of Richard of Gloucester. The fun is comparing the different kinds of truths and un-truths.

Sally Hawkins again, this time as Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, wife to the Duke Humphrey (Hugh Bonneville) — from The Hollow Crown

But you have to know the history to enjoy this kind of thing — partly because otherwise you would get immersed in notes at the book thick with names and differing explanations. Not entirely by chance I just happened to be re-watching the three Hollow Crown plays, TV productions made up of selections from Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays and most of Richard III, here called The Wars of the Roses — a really excellent close and yet accessible rendition, often shot on location. And I do know this history from previous reading and watching of costume drama, and at one time deciding to do my graduate work in the early modern period. I also happened to have been reading a book by Stephen Greenblatt called The Tyrant where he argues that one can read Shakespeare to learn about politics when a political order is falling apart. The Hollow Crown focuses on the Joan of Arc material in Shakespeare; Greenblatt focuses on Jack Cade’s rebellion and it’s striking how many parallels there are with January 6th …. Shakespeare wrote dramatic forms of historical fiction. And it’s historical fiction I’m interested in for real — for a book say. That’s probably why I chose Tey’s books as one of my candidates to teach for a course in women writing detective stories. But I digress in several ways at once.

For me the book began to fall off towards the end when I could see its thrust was to defend a thesis begun around the time of Horace Walpole and become a fervently believed in “truth” by Ricardians (they are called), especially in The Richard III Society. It is a daring book to make it about a man reading in bed, but the matter for me not endlessly intriguing enough. Suffice to say I am not convinced and found a good deal of special pleading and strained emphases. And nowadays, since Richard’s hacked-away and curved skeleton (he has scoliosis it is now felt) was found and re-buried in pomp, there has been a great deal of push back against the Ricardians, e.g., Tim Thornton, Jennifer Ouellette, “New Evidence Richard murdered his the princes in the tower.”; on the other hand, there’s The Vilification of Richard III by Vanessa Hatton.

One could go on very easily to many more essays on various POVs and the many involved characters/people. But I want tonight to again keep my promise to keep these blogs shorter and here dwell on a mostly upbeat film that just delighted me this afternoon, The Lost King, based on the life, character and books by and about Philippa Langley, the amateur historian, archeaologist and fervent fan of Richard III, who was the driving force responsible for digging up the remains of Richard III from a car park not far from Leicester Cathedral.

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Philippa standing up to Richard Buckley who does not want to dig in Trench 1 (where she thinks and it turns out Richard III’s remains are)

I am now prevented from praising it as strongly as I want to because in the spirit of all previous authorities like Thomas More, a new authority, the University of Leicester, and the central people (e.g., Richard Buckley, played in the film by Mark Addy) there who worked with or for, or ultimately dominated over Langley has come down hard against and pervasively complained loudly that the film falsifies their role. They name several untruths, like Buckley had just been unfunded by the university when Langley came to him with her fervent faith, like Richard Taylor (played by Lee Ingleby), a deputy registrar, who is presented as at first obstructing and in the end unfairly marginalizing and taking credit from Philippa — there is a list of these, as doubtless one can do for many a biopic (among them, Spike Lee’s epic heroic Malcolm X). The film, we are told, underplays the number of women involved. It seems most, maybe nearly all of the major news outlets is carrying this slant on the film, with strong laments that now we cannot enjoy it as we would have, were it not so marred: “Cracking film totally tainted,” “Legal action likely,”, from the University, “Setting the Record straight,”, and “Sally saves the day.” Who can like a film that defames real living people who meant very well?

Deep fantasy

I began to wonder if Steve Coogan has enemies (joke alert); he indirectly defended his film in one of the videos released showing the principals doing promotional shots as about a “humble ordinary person” challenging authorities; she is conceived as a disabled woman (with ME) whose first identification with Richard III comes from her having been demoted because she cannot do the things others can; we see her husband is living with another woman when the movie begins — as the trajectory of her success moves on, he moves back and begins to support her. She starts out as fitting with misfits (the way the Richard III society members are at first presented). This is a common role for Hawkins — she was a nearly hysterical Anne Elliot, twisted with grief, rejection, isolation, put-upon, underdog (parallel with Fanny Price) — I loved it myself.

Here, as in those Austen heroines, but not so poignantly, she wins out, almost, and in the academic world, archaeological or historical-literay in my experience, those w/o titles, the right school and “mentors” behind them are erased, at best condescended to. My instincts and 27 and more years of experience of university people lead me to distrust their account however in what can be documented theirs might win out in a court of law. I can see from wikipedia and the accounts of Langley’s publications and networking, she is far more middle class, self-assertive and altogether entrepreneurial – which would make sense. Philippa Langley have had to be to have gotten various people to dig up the parking lot. The film exaggerated at both ends — as well as providing her with a (as the actor called the ghost king) an imaginary friend for support she desperately needed.

Richard III’s revenant (Harry Lloyd), imaginary supportive companion to Philippa Langley (our Sally)

So in order to praise the film if you are not to be disrespected you’ve got to cope these (ugly?) departures from truth; what interests me is other biopics have as many and yet are not attacked — The Lost King film-makers made the mistake of attacking an university whose presence in the world is not dependent on money but respect and reputation for integrity.

But I also think they are going after this film because they think they can — because Langley was/is an eccentric woman. The whole thesis that Richard III is this unfairly maligned king is very weak even if Thomas More was writing propaganda on behalf of the Tudors. So the way to write it up if you want to praise it is to begin there, an ironic parallel between R3 and Langley. Another is to take a post-modern stance: let us be sceptical of all assertions, and all individual certitudes, all of them slanted by self. There are several suggestions in the material on Richard III, The Daughter of Time and now this film that it was suspected for quite a time that the body-skeleton was in that vicinity so Langley’s thesis was not some wild dream no one ever thought of — all writing just now are all insisting that the very improbable event that Langley’s instinct the body was beneath an R for reserved was absolutely true. They are happy to give her full credit for that. So since no one is attacking that I wonder about that equally.

John Langley (Steve Coogan) and Philippa walking and (she) anxiously talking

It is a very enjoyable film. Beautifully filmed, buoyant with relief and release when Philippa is vindicated, Hawkins and Steve Coogan manage to convey a couple slowly coming together once again, and when we hear that hint that Benedict Cumberbatch Himself who played Richard III in The Hollow Crown) will be at the funeral ceremonies, just that needed thin frisson comes through.

Ellen

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Women’s Holocaust Memoirs

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

Kluger reading aloud the first paragraph of her memoir ….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Convoy To Auschwitz

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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On being a Janeite

Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood writing to her mother (1995 S&S)

The idea that an Austen character influenced and carried on influencing us is, to my mind & out of my experience, the mark of the “Janeite.” Anyway I dream/think this. It’s a belief I like and almost believe in that when I was in my later teens Elinor Dashwood was a figure for me I could try to emulate, imitate analogously and in so doing save/rescue myself. Her self-control, her prudence, her thinking about things and for herself however she might behave in accordance with apparent or pretended-to social norms (=social cant). As fanciful perhaps I see her in somewhat of that light still now I’m in my 70s. It’s called a role model except I don’t believe people read this way or for role models …

Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood towards the end of the story, looking out at the sea, enduring (2008 S&S)

Ellen

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

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

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

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

Judith Ivey as one of the group “elders”

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

This has a feel of reality:

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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A winter syllabus 2023: The Heroine’s Journey at OLLI at Mason online

Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) and Henry Tilney (J.J. Feilds) entering the realm of the ancient Abbey, crossing the bridge (2007 Granada/WBGH Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies)

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: 4 Thursdays midday, 11:50-1:15 pm online,
F405Z: The Heroine’s Journey
Office located at 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va 22032
Dr Ellen Moody

Description of Course:

We will explore the archetypal heroine’s journey across genres and centuries in the western Eurocentric tradition, from classical times to our 21st century female detectives. Our foundational books will be Maria Tatar’s The Heroine with 1001 Faces (written as a counterpart to Joseph Campbell’s famous and influential The Hero with a Thousand Faces), and Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey (click to reach the whole text online for free). Our four books will be Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales; Elena Ferrante’s Lost Daughter; and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. We will discuss what are journeys, the central experiences, typical plot-designs, characterizations, and events of the lives of our heroines of classical myth, fairy & folk tales (and connected to this historical romance and time-traveling tales), realistic fiction, and the gothic (and connected to this mystery/thrillers, detective stories). There are two recommended films as part of our terrain to be discussed: Outlander, S1E1 (Caitriona Balfe as Claire Beauchamp transported), and Prime Suspect S1E1 (Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison). I will supply some poetry (Atwood, Carol Ann Duffy, Marge Piercy), two scripts (for the serial episode of Outlander and the 2022 film adaptation of The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal), and one parodic modern short story (“Rape Fantasies” by Atwood), all as attachments.

Leda (Olivia Colman) stopping off to look at the sea sometime during her journey there and back (Lost Daughter, 2021)

Required Books (these are the editions I will be using but the class members may choose any edition they want):

Margaret Atwood. The Penelopiad. NY: Grove Press (originally O. W. Toad), 2005, ISBN 978-1-84195-798-2
Angela Carter. The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales. NY: Harper and Row, 1981. ISBN 0-06-090836X (reprinted with new codes many times)
Elena Ferrante. The Lost Daughter, trans. Ann Goldstein. NY: Europa, 2008.
Jane Austen. Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman. NY: Norton Critical Edition, 2004. ISBN 978-0-393-097850-6. Another excellent (good introduction, good materials at the back of the book) modern edition is the Longman Cultural text, ed. Marilyn Gaull. NY: Longman (Pearson Educational), 2005. ISBN 0-321-20208-2

Strongly suggested films:

Outlander, Season 1, Episode 1, called “Sassenach” Written Roger Moore, directed John Dahl. Featuring: Caitronia Balfe, Sam Heughan, and Tobias Menzies. Available on Netflix (and Starz), also as a DVD. I can supply a script for this one.
Prime Suspect, Season 1, Episode 1, called “Price to Pay 1 & 2.” Written Lynda La Plante, Directed Christoper Menaul. Featuring Helen Mirren, John Benfield, Tom Bell. Available on BritBox, YouTube and also as a DVD

Kauffmann, Angelica: Penelope Taking Down the Bow of Ulysses (18th century fine painting)

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion

Jan 26th: Introduction, Atwood’s Penelopiad, with a few of her Circe poems, and Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Big O” (from The World’s Wife)

Feb 2nd: From Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales read “The Bloody Chamber” (Bluebeard), “The Courtship of Mr Lyon,” (Beauty and the Beast)”Puss-in-Boots,” “The Lady of the House of Love” (Sleeping Beauty plus), “The Company of Wolves” (Little Red Riding Hood). Please have seen Outlander S1, E1. Another movie you could see is the 1984 Company of Wolves, an extravagant fantasy bringing together a number of Carter’s fairy tales and fables; she is one of the scriptwriters. It’s available on Amazon Prime.

Feb 9th: Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, with Marge Piercy’s “Morning Athletes” If you are interested, see the film adaptation, The Lost Daughter, scripted & directed Maggie Gryllenhaal; while much is changed, it is absorbing and explains the book (Netflix film, also available as a DVD to buy); it features Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, and Jack Farthing (as Leda’s husband). I can supply a script for this one too.

Feb 16th: Austen’s Northanger Abbey, with discussion that links the gothic to modern mystery-thriller and detective stories. I will send by attachment Margaret Atwood’s “Rape Fantasies” (a very short story). Please have seen Prime Suspect S1, E1-2. If you are interested, see the film adaptation, Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies, directed by Jon Jones; while much is changed, this one is also absorbing and adds to the book (available as a YouTube and DVD); it features beyond the two principals, Carey Mulligan, Liam Cunningham (General Tilney) and Sylvestre Le Touzel (Mrs Allen)

First still of Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison, late arrival at crime scene, driving herself (Prime Suspect, aired 6 & 9 April 1991, “Price to Pay”)

Select bibliography (beyond Tatar’s Heroine with a Thousand Faces and Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey):

Beard, Mary. Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations. Liveright, 2013. Early refreshingly jargon-free feminist readings of documents left to us.
Bojar, Karen. In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018.
Carter, Angela. Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings [non-fiction, essays, sketches, journalism], ed Jenny Uglow, introd. Joan Smith. NY: Penguin, 1998
Cavender, Gray and Nancy C. Jurik, Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect. Urbana: Univ of Illinois Press, 2012.
Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 2004.
Frankel, Valier Estelle. 3 books: Symbolism & Sources of Outlander: Adoring Outlander: On Fandom, Genre, and Female Audience; Outlander’s Sassenachs: Gender, Race, Orientation, and the Other in the TV series. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015-17 (also on later books, Duane Meyer, The Highland Scots of North Carolina, 1732-1776. Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina, 1961.)
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. 1983; rep, rev Harvard UP, 1993.
Gordon, Edmund. The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 2016.
Hirsh, Marianne. The Mother-Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Indiana: Bloomington UP, 1980
Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. 2nd Edition. Chicago: Univ of Illinois, 1995.
Moody, Ellen, “People that marry can never part: A Reading of Northanger Abbey, Persuasions Online, 3:1 (Winter 2010): https://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol31no1/moody.html ; The Gothic Northanger: A Psyche Paradigm, Paper delivered at a EC/ASECS conference, November 8, 2008 online: http://www.jimandellen.org/austen/gothicna.html ; The Three Northanger Films [includes Ruby in Paradise], Jane Austen’s World (Vic Sandborn, April 6, 2008: online: https://janeaustensworld.com/2008/04/06/the-three-northanger-abbey-films/
Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.
Southam, B.C., ed. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion: A Casebook. London: Routledge, 1968.
Stevenson, Anne. “Diana Gabaldon: her novels flout convention.” Publishers Weekly 6 Jan. 1997: 50+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 15 Apr. 2016. Online.
Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out. Canada: Harper Flamingo, 1998.
Tomalin, Clair. Jane Austen: A Life. NY: Vintage, 1997.
Williams, Anne. The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: Univ Chicago P, 1995.

Claire (Caitronia Balfe) among the stones, just arrived in 1743 (Outlander S1, E1, 2015)

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Talene Monahan’s Jane Anger — a play featuring two almost silenced women: @Shakespeare Theater Company, Klein Theater DC

Amelia Workman as Jane Anger

Talene Monahan as Anne Hathaway

Gentle friends and readers,

Talene Monahan’s Jane Anger is not a great play; after an initial superbly delivered monologue by Workman as Anger in front of a stage-size title page (Jane Anger), we (or I) was puzzled to be confronted by a farcical and static treatment of an apparently arrogant callow Shakespeare (Michael Urie) and his newly hired servant, Francis (Ryan Spahn) acting out a (to me) senseless comic routine worthy Jack Benny and his valet, Rochester (Eddie Anderson).  Remember him? Rochester was superb in his way and so too in this same raunchy sycophantic yet self-assertive way Spahn.  We learn that poor Will is experiencing writer’s block over an apparently plagiarized King Lear, that there is a previous version of this Celtic legend in a book Will is copying from. Perhaps we were to surmise Francis is gay.  This play makes great visual hay with Shakespeare’s sonnets which are addressed to a young man Will is in love with and a dark lady.

This took a lot of time, but somehow I felt this play wasn’t going anywhere and couldn’t figure out what we the audience were there for, even if (as we were reminded) below the room through a window we were made to feel a mob in the streets experiencing plague, and remember many doors were X’d.  Then suddenly climbs up and over the window sill, Jane. She is dressed wholly in black with a Venetian style bird mask.

The character, Jane Anger (her pseudonym) is modelled on a woman who lived and wrote one of the earliest feminist defenses of women. Monahan wrote the play during time of plague, our own, Covid-19, in 2020 (see Thomas Floyd’s story of the origins of the play).  The central life of the play is provided by the extraordinary performance of Amelia Workman who presents herself as a survivor in the “soft power” working class mode, laundress, prostitute, barmaid, whatever fell to hand (cook?), and has come to Will to ask him to sign her pamphlet, for without his signature she will never be able to persuade any printer to print her polemic. It quickly emerges she and Will have been sexual partners; she has a kind of rival in Francis (so my speculation about the sonnets has some evidence), and these three proceed to squabble until interrupted by drama’s fourth player, Anne Hathaway, also seemingly climbing up and over the window sill. Monahan plays the part in a stylized “bright comic” mode.

Colleen Kennedy has done justice to the tone and quality of the dialogue. Though it’s not quite as hilarious as Kennedy makes out, the characters discuss the plague (with obviously modern allusions thrown out), play-making, and become physically aggressive.  It is in the mode of other more brilliant crude riffs on masterpieces, history (as told seriously), and issues of the day. We witness how the men treat the women with contempt, and how they and Francis take out an almost embarrassing revenge on a thoroughly dislikable Will: he shows himself to be idle, lazy, a plagiarist who sneers at his long-suffering wife (left at home to cope with the children, one of whom died at age 11 or so). There was hearty spontaneous laughter at the slapstick, of which there is a good deal more; the use of sprayed blood all over a supposed painting of Shakespeare as backdrop especially.  Both Will’s arms are hacked off, as his penis (mockingly), which is thrown about. So the old banana routine really works. The language was as demotic as I have seen it in crude costume dramas on Starz (lots of reiterations of the word “fucking”) but this did not seem to bother the audience. Of course all the old rumors and printed words are rehearsed, including how Will left Anne the second best bed. Early on we had heard a lot about the dark lady; now the question is, was she Anne?  Anne claims this.  Spahn managed to dominate the stage and for that matter the whole theater when the actors turn to include the audience in their conscious antics. Spahn gave out photos of himself and told us that he was looking for an agent.

I admit to feeling disconcerted by this utterly irreverent emasculating of someone all of whose plays I have read, as well as the poetry (the sonnets form part of what is quoted from Shakespeare’s works) – and loved and respected very much.

The pair of men as morons

I like to remember John Heminge and Henry Condell, the friends who worked so magnificently to produce the astonishing first folio and professed themselves worried lest we not understand and appreciate their beloved noble-hearted colleague. So this was a low point in the proceedings for me.

But the play picked up when Will leaves the room in order to work for real on his coming play (I don’t remember what happened to Francis), and we were left with Hathaway and Anger. Why it took so long and was in comparison with the rest of the play so short I know not but the last twenty or so moments of this play had these two women telling each other of their lives. The death of Hamnet brought in earlier to point out how Shakespeare has not come home to see them die was now recounted. The friend whom I was with told me some of the lines were taken from Maggie O’Farrell’s sequel historical novel, Hamnet.  So now maybe I should buy that and read it.  And finally Anne reads aloud Jane’s pamphlet and (I was once, still am, an early modern literature scholar) it seemed to a real Elizabethan text was being read:

This was (I felt) the high point in the proceedings; the men did return, inexplicably chastened, and a quiet mood of respect for the previously silent and dismissed women ended the play.

It has been played elsewhere and I gather there is hope for other stage productions. This one is directed by Jess Chaynes. Other people could choose to do it differently. So I’d say if you are living near this or another production, or there is a video made of the play and it is eventually streamed on the Internet, Monahan’s play is very much worth sitting through.

Ellen

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Do you hear their hair? — on the Iranian women’s rebellion

Ghazaleh Hedayat (2008)

Dear friends and readers,

I’m honored today to have as a guest blogger M. Mansur Hashemi’s essay, “‘Do you hear their hair?’: About a piece of conceptual art” as translated by Fatemeh Minaei

Three months ago, a protest movement began in Iran. It was instigated by the tragic death of a young girl (Mahsa-Zhina Amini) while detained by the “morality police” who arrested her for not dressing according to the rules of compulsory hijab. The media echoed the event that moved the nation in the name of “woman, life, freedom”.

The following is a translation of a Persian writing that reflects some debates over hijab. It was written about nine years ago highlighting the problem through an interpretation of a work created by an Iranian female artist. The author has written other detailed articles criticizing the mandatory hijab, in which he has predicted the present situation in Iran. But this short poetic writing on an artwork (created by Ghazaleh Hedayat) extracts the essence of the matter. Naturally, the discussed conceptual art can be interpreted in various ways. The author has put it in the context of two bans in Iran, trying to emphasize the complexities of a social conflict. A conflict manifested now in the violent confrontations between the government and persevering teens and youth who fight for their freedom.­ Fatemeh Minaei, 2022 December.

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Imagine the broad plane of a wall. From a distance, you might miss it. But if you look closely, you will see nails. Eight nails, to be exact. Getting closer, you will see the eight iron nails connected by four strands of hair. You feel a tension between the stiffness of the nails against the tender strands of hair. It looks as if the strands are chained to the wall. You hear the daunting sound of a hammer that heightens that feeling. But, with all their fragility, the strands of hair are there. They are not destroyed, despite the collusion between the hammer and nails. They are stretched on the hard surface and this tautness on the broad area, this being tied to the iron nails, enhances their presence.

The strings on a musical instrument are stretched on it and tied to its body, just as those hair strands are tied to the wall. Nevertheless, the very tied-up strings make the unrestricted sound of the music. Those four strands of hair are like strings on the wall. We do not even need to hear any sound those imaginary strings would make. We’ll hear them as soon as we take a look. Apparently, the strands of hair are not supposed to be visible. But they are. Just as for a while, under the new Islamic regime in Iran, musical instruments were not supposed to be seen. Showcases got cleared from any musical instrument. Yet the sound kept on coming out from behind the veils the government ordered. Music survived. It survived until one day the musical instruments came back to the windows and now the only place the musical instruments are not seen is on the Islamic regime’s TV. However, musical instruments are not for watching; they are to be heard. And their sound, the music they create, is now filling up even the official broadcastings of the regime. So seems to be the state for the sound of the locks that were supposed to not be heard. Now the sound that sneaks out from under the slipping scarves can no longer be ignored. The sound of the objecting strands of hair that display themselves despite the morality police, despite the violent surroundings. The veil is no longer working.

A piece of conceptual art sometimes represents a situation not easy to express otherwise. “The Sound of My Hair” by Ghazaleh Hedayat (pictured below) can be interpreted as a representation of a situation. A metaphorical visual translation of a conflict.

I grew up in a pious family and spent my childhood mostly in mosques and Islamic schools. So, I understand how much symbolic that ‘sound’ can become. I feel the taboos and their dreadful power. The imposed patriarchal mentality puts unbearable pressure on a religious man. His mind gets overwhelmed by obsessions that are extremely hard to overcome.

People raised outside the religious stratum of Islamic societies would never comprehend the Hijab issue. Just like the issue of music being impermissible (Haram), sounds being sinful, or musical instruments being devices of ‘libidinous pleasure’, makes no sense to them. The hair of Iranian girls and women not raised in religious families is covered by the force of the regime rules. Just as decades ago, a patriarchal government (ruled by Reza Shah) unveiled the hair of religious Iranian women by force because of a shallow understanding of modernity. The value of individual freedom is missed in both cases. And since the logic of force is not convincing, it was and is doomed to fail.

Now the times are changing. Besides women forced to have hijab or those who chose hijab for a while under the influence of the Zeitgeist, nowadays, even many Iranian girls from religious families prefer not to cover their hair. In an ironic turn of events that can be called, in the words of Hegel, “die List der Vernunft” (the cunning of reason), those girls participated in civic life because the Islamic regime prepared the circumstances their families required, and now they do not see the need for veils.

When you wander in the streets of Iranian cities now, it will be strange if you don’t hear the sound of the strands of hair that want to get free. To get their voice heard despite the repressive surroundings. That reminds me of the interpretable work of Ghazaleh Hedayat. She has visualized a situation that I am sure will continue to cause a stir in our society for a long time. The issue is as complicated and intricate as that work of art: The Sound of My Hair.

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Women’s Rights Activist on Protests Sweeping Iran, the Intensifying Gov’t Crackdown & Executions:

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/12/15/iran_protests_sussan_tahmasebi

Sussan Tahmahsebi:

Over nearly 500 people have been killed — 480, I think, is the last figure that the Human Rights Activists Network reported. Sixty-eight of them are children who have been killed. And the majority of those who have been killed — I mean, at least 50% of those who have been killed are from ethnic minority regions, Kurdish areas and Balochi areas. In Balochistan, just in one day, on Black Friday, which was September 30th, 103 people were shot dead. These were peaceful protesters leaving Friday prayers. And most of them were shot in the back, running away from bullets that the police were shooting at them.

Now, as you mentioned, the violence has reached a new level, where protesters are being sentenced to death. They’re being charged with enmity with God or waging war against God, and they’re being sentenced to death in these sham trials that, you know, don’t take very long, where people are not afforded — allowed to have access to their lawyers. And it’s extremely concerning …

On the women’s reproductive rights front: “How quickly anti-abortion activists abandon plans never to be punitive: demand jail time for “pill trafficking:”

https://tinyurl.com/2fzsvd6a

But it is true that the democrats’ solid wins in many states and for many offices, and putting into state constitutions women’s rights to autonomy, care, and choices over their bodies show who in the US are also in the majority

Posted by Ellen

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Renaissance Society of America: A virtual conference, the first I’ve attended in many years … (1)

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652) — self portrait of herself as a painter

Dear friends and readers,

Although I have only a few sessions to describe out of the many that the RSA presented online for a few days, that is, from November 30th, to December 1st, I want to record what I heard and participated in. The primary reason is in two of the sessions I heard ideas and information which will help me the next time I want to write and deliver at a conference a paper on Anne Finch. But I also want to record some sense of how wonderful in tone and content the conference seemed to me — and perhaps therefore will be of interest to others outside the early modern scholars who attended it.

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I can no longer take stenography the way I once did, and spare my reader my attempts in other sessions than those on women studies which is the aspect of the Renaissance I’ve been most interested in. Here I do provide longer synopses because both of the panels taken together will provide me with a new perspective for a new paper on Anne Finch. These two panels are on Women Leaders and Their Political Behavior, and Reworking Literary Representations of Women’s Bodies and Voice. for the second blog I’ll be reviewing: the depiction of women in the era; dance, gender and sexuality; women on the stage, women during plague time, and creative approaches to telling the lives of women. For the second I will keep the synopses short, giving the gist of the talk and omitting details. I have enough material for two not overlong blog reports.

There were three presentations in the session on Women Leaders and their Political Behavior.

Elizabeth I when a princess (attributed to William Scrots, 1564)

Yafit Shachar talked about Elizabeth I, and how since she was a woman and ceaselessly regarded from the point of view of her literal woman’s body, during the early years of her reign she was under severe pressure to marry. Parliament made every attempt to exclude her from knowing about their talk on other issues! They regarded her refusal to marry as an attempt to ungender herself. Her female body was seen as a conduit for continuing the Tudor regime (and all the people in place staying in their places). At the same time a foreign man could potentially lead the country into wars. She responded in words by insisting they should see her body metaphysically (the queen’s two bodies) and that paradoxically her not marrying was their safety. She would protect the kingdom by bodily staying outside the world of matter. As time went on and she was not able to conceive, and her astute political behavior, especially during the threatened invasion by Spain, the pressure gave way.

An imagined statue for Anne Murray, Lady Halkett at Abbot House, Dunfermline — she was a spy!

Caroline Fish discussed the transterritorial power of Costanza Dora del Carretto, a widow. When her son died, and her grandson was still a young child, she was given the legal authority (power of attorney) to administer the family’s estates. Women were apparently usually disenfranchised, but she was very effective also in provisioning and maintained squadrons of ships (that included enslaved people working in the galleys). She also appointed governors wisely. Andrea Bergaz discussed Anna Colonna, a marquise (first in Madrid?). During her seven years in Vienna she initiated and ran public mostly musical events at court, became an active patron of the arts. The idea was to show how a woman could use the spaces of allowed sociability to contribute to the arts. There was much interesting general talk from inferences the speakers made from their material; among the most interesting to me was the assertion that women did act as spies far more than we realize (lacking documents).

There were three presentations on Reworking Literary Representations of Women’s Bodies and Voices, and one respondent (Anne Larsen).

Giulia Andreoni spoke of how women’s association with elements of nature, specifically trees, enabled women to assert their identities. Her main stories were derived from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered and Ovid’s Metamorphosis. We see heroines dress up as shepherds, mark up trees which become a kind of containing vessel for the female characters’ bodies (women turn into trees to escape rape). Trees protect the women, are pleasant places to dwell in, and become the woman’s tomb after she dies. She showed illustrations of pregnant trees, trees with female imagery. Some of the women are sorceresses whom the impassive hero refuses to pity. Julia Varesewski told of the mother daughter team Madeleine (1520-87) and Catherine des Roches (1542-87). They wrote within Renaissance poetic genres, e.g., the blazon. The poetry they produce is lyrical, ecstatic, erotic (women are touching, touchable) and their virtue is never questioned. In one story the women behave reciprocally and restore one another’s health and beauty. They adapted a literary tradition from men and made it serve a community of women. The style fits the kind of writing Helene Cixous describes as l’ecriture-femme and very aggressively through women’s collaboration. The mother and daughter invented a textual space within which women were seen to converse and live.

A modern Echo and Narcissus (David Revoy) — the early modern & beautiful Victorian ones might be taken for or responded to as soft-core porn and Revoy has imagined the relationship between these two: the man loving his image, the woman compelled to hang on his every gesture or sound …

Nancy Frelick discussed male and female writers of the French Renaissance (Louise Labe, Marguerite de Navarre), their motives for writing and the reception of their work. She dwelt especially on the figure of the disembodied echo. Echo stands for the sorry state of a desiring subject or poetic persona where women repeat male forms: Echo was cursed and could repeat only the last sounds she hears; she haunts places and then dissolves away. Her predicament can be read as women’s powerlessness, but also make visible or felt a poignant poetic inner struggle, a divided self. She quoted playful poetry; and a critic talking about male poets as capable of inspiring stones (Orpheus?). She went through poems by men, e.g., Donne, and then went on to the Des Roches women, showing the daughter using this figure to echo her mother’s voice with a sense of deference and respect. They were creating a poetry of mutual support which gained prestige. There were contests as to who was a muse, seeking immortality, but they turned back to Sappho. The daughter stayed single, so she does not become someone’s property and does not support the patriarchy. And they get away with their subversion. In a poem called “Echo” (1586) in response forms the characters show how to find comfort; in a poem of a Sybil reads, writes and is simply herself. Frelick argues the figure of Echo is multifaceted and used to evoke different aspects of subjectivity; Echo is not unidimensional.

In the talk afterwards the women talked of landscape poetry of the era where we see gender and concerns over environment mingle. One woman was much interested in Gaspara Stampa; another what women do with epic genres. I brought up how Anne Finch read Tasso (and Ovid too), translated Tasso, wrote poems on trees, and one on Echo, aligned herself for immortality with Sappho. It seemed to me their way of talking could give new perspectives to Anne’s so-called romantic lyrics by moving backwards to the early modern women poets. They spoke of a Tasso poem where trees were cut down, reminding me again of Finch. The tree is creative, alive, beauty in itself. They seemed to appreciate what I had to say.

So I bring forward from a blog I wrote in 2020, Finch’s poem to a “Fair Tree,” in an early form not in print (so it’s a text you will not read in the new standard edition), from one of the minor manuscripts:

Fair Tree! for thy delightfull shade
‘Tis just that some return be made;
Sure some return, is due from me
To thy cool shadows, and to thee.
When thou to birds doest shelter give,
Thou musick doest from them receive;
If Travellers beneath thee stay
‘Till storms have worn themselves away,
That time in praising thee, they spend
And thy protecting pow’r, commend.
The Shepheard here, from scorching freed,
Tunes to thy daancing leaves, his reed;
Whilst his lov’d nymph, in thanks bestows
Here flow’ry Chaplets on thy boughs.
Shall I then, only silent be,
And no return be made by me?
No, lett this wish upon thee waite,
And still to florish, be thy fate.
To future ages may’st thou stand
Untoutch’d by the rash workmans hand,
Till that large stock of sap is spent,
Which gives thy somers ornament;
Till the feirce winds, that vainly strive
To shock thy greatnesse, whilst alive,
Shall on thy lifelesse hour attend,
Prevent the axe, and grace thy end,
Their scatter’d strength together call,
And to the clouds proclaim thy fall,
Who then their evening dews, may spare
When thou no longer art their care,
But shalt, like Ancient Hero’s, burn,
And some bright hearth be made thy Urn.

Here it is, read aloud accompanied by “Epping Forest” from John Playford’s “The English Dancing Master 1670, 11th Edition,” the painting which emerges, “The Oak Tree”, is by Joseph Farrington, 1747-1821.

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My header includes the phrase “the first I’ve attended in many years.” In the later 1980s my husband wanting me to return to my Renaissance world, partly because I had embarked on a many year project to learn Italian and translate the poetry of Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara, and continued during that decade to keep up reading about the early modern period, its poetry, drama, and doing research at the Folger Shakespeare Library an Library of Congress on my own. I was what’s called an Independent Scholar. He meant very well. He took care of our two children while I went. I had been writing reviews that were published in the Renaissance Quarterly by that time; I had gone to Renaissance sessions at the MLA and published a paper on Katherine Philips in Philological Quarterly. Well for me to go to that conference by myself was a disaster for me. I knew no one any more, and when I talked to a few people, I was greeted with silent stares. I will not tell the social faux pas I made; suffice to say I refused to go to another early modern conference for many years. The trauma of what had happened remained with me.

Then one year after I had returned to scholarship and conferences through my work on the 18th century and Austen after 1999 (2000 I published my first book, Trollope on the ‘Net), gone to and delivered a talk on Trollope in London at the Reform Club. Also gone to a Virginia Woolf session and then party at one MLA. Jim said we should go to Florence one April (during spring break). There was another early modern conference there. He thought we could have good time in that city during the times I was not at the conference. I now feel very bad that I refused to go to an early modern conference in Florence in 1998 or so. He never went to Florence and is now dead and will never go. I now realize what I should have done is ask him to come with me to the conference proper (we could have paid) and I would have recovered. Rien à faire. Irretrievable.

Antonio Canaletto (1867-1786), Northumberland House

I just got off a zoom where I told friends how getting on the Internet in 1995 had transformed my life beyond what I’ve written above: it had enabled me to make friends without having to cross official thresholds: I began by writing on listservs, and that eventually brought me friends, respect, an invitation to write my book, and to write reviews regularly, to attend small regional conferences. The pandemic caused events to occur online which I could never have gone to even with Jim. Online you are welcomed as the image of someone in a tile and if you behave conventionally, no one questions you.  For example, I’ve now attended two virtual Virginia Woolf conferences in isolated obscure places in the mid- and Northwest USA — and joined in during the talks after the papers — I read and study Woolf a lot, have written a number of blogs on her here.

Come to our topic at hand: it was the second year of the pandemic and the RSA had its first virtual conference. I was brave enough to register, and tried to join in. I don’t know now why I didn’t manage but I found the site user-unfriendly, and managed at most to attend two sessions and gave up. Not this time. They have learned how to present the sessions and it’s now easy to get in and find things. I heard in the sessions that this year’s virtual conference had been set for Dublin, Ireland but now had added a virtual conference in November. People were lamenting they had decided to go virtual. I regret for them, they could not have the more fulfilling time they imagined (plus travel), but for me it was the first time since 1998 I was at an early modern conference, and for the first time successfully joined in.

So there we are. I broke the barrier at last. I finally also spoke during the talk afterwards in two of the sessions.

Ellen

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