Christmas in the Poldark World brought back (or forward) from December 2017

Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) singing, after Christmas dinner (2015 Poldark, episode 4)
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 — last chapter of Ross Poldark)

Ross (Aidan Turner) with Aunt Agatha (Caroline Blakiston) at dinner (again end of Ross Poldark)

Gentle Friends and devoted readers,

I have said I mean someday or time to return to the Poldark novels and write half a book on them (the other half to be on the first four Outlander novels). One of the deep pleasures of Graham’s series is his recreation of the rituals of the era in terms of feelings then and feelings now. There was nothing he enjoyed better to do than recreate Christmas as a way of marking time and showing the community getting together in however compromised terms. So this year instead of bringing back (as I have in other years) Jane Austen Christmas blogs, I’m bringing back one (2017) from the Poldark novels. Here is a second (2018).

I’ve been rereading the novels again, and have confirmed an old memory that while Christmas is in itself not valued for any kind of religious belief, a number of the novels end around Christmas time with the characters gathering together to enact a yearly ritual, and memories, and talk emerges far more for real at moments than other times of year. Some of these endings are melancholy sweet, strained, or near breaking point: Ross Poldark, Demelza and Warleggan (1st, 2nd & 4th Poldark books) respectively. At the close of Demelza:

“They watched the scene on the beach.
‘I shan’t have to finish that frock for Julia now,’ she said. ‘It was that dainty too.’
‘Come,’ he said, ‘you will be catching cold.’
‘No. I am quite warm, Ross. Let me stay a little longer in the sun.

Some are bitter, and then the emphasis is on winter itself, December into January, dark, cold, bleak or wild: The Angry Tide (the 7th) when Elizabeth has just died.

All we know is this moment, and this moment, Ross, we are alive! We are. We are. The past is over, gone. What is to come doesn’t exist yet. That’s tomorrow! It’s only now that can ever be, at any one moment. And at this moment, now, we are alive — and together. We can’t ask more. There isn’t any more to ask … Demelza to Ross (last page of The Angry Tide).

Some are quiet-reflective, The Miller’s Dance and The Loving Cup (the 9th and 10th books). In The Twisted Sword (the 11th), the deep tragedy of Jeremy’s death continues to the end, only lifted somewhat by the birth of Lady Harriet Warleggan and then Cuby Poldark’s baby, while Demelza keeps the festival.

Deliver us from swords & curs — The Twisted Sword

Lastly, Bella (the 12th) just after Valentine’s death and Ross’s nightmare, the characters all return to Cornwall for Christmas. We pass a bleak Christmas in the second half of the novel Jeremy Poldark, but it is not emphatic, just part of the year made much harder because of desperate conditions during this festival time, and we observe Christmas more emphatically in The Black Moon during the birth of Clowance when the news comes to Nampara that Dwight Enys is still alive.

I’ve only followed the devices and desires of my own heart … Demelza, again the close)

So only four novels do not end in December/January or Christmas: Jeremy Poldark (a christening), The Black Moon (very bitter at the close), The Four Swans(very uncertain, all the women having been forced into bad choices), and The Stranger from the Sea (an uneasy unsettling).

A painting of Cornwall, the shore for fishing, early 20th century impressionism (photographed from a visit to a Cornish museum, summer 2016)

As important, all the novels are carefully keyed to seasonal time-lines, from autumn to winter, winter to spring and summer again; attention is paid to the relationship of what’s happening to daily customs, agricultural and other rhythms, the weather, and Christmas is part of this, and made more of when it coincides with some crisis. I conclude the natural world as central to human existence (and Graham’s love of Cornwall), and holiday rituals meant a good deal to Graham for their creation of a sense of community and humane comradeship, for their enacting memory and for hope of renewal.

Stanhope Forbes, Fisherman’s wife (Cornish painter, 1890s – 1910s)

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Even among my nearest and dearest there is no transference — can be no transference — of experience. One can feel empathy for someone suffering, but one cannot feel the suffering. We are all alone —- desperately alone. What are we in this world? A conjunction of subjective impressions making up something that is accepted as reality — Graham, Memoirs of a Private Man

One reason these patterns may not have been noticed is they are not observed in the either the older or newer serial drama. When Christmas does emphasize something special in the story at the moment (new marriage, desperate poverty, worry over the life of an imprisoned friend), then it’s there. But not the seasons and no sense of a sequence of customs to which Christmas belongs for themselves. The interest in Cornwall is decorative; in the older, there is reveling in the place, in the recent they attend to the workaday world.

We don’t have adaptations past The Stranger from the Sea for either series, but looking at the older 1975-76, 1977-78, the only transitional moments from one novel to the next where this kind of coda is observed is in a mid-book, the bare bleak half-starving Christmas from Jeremy Poldark, complete with a family dinner, caroling, Demelza wanting to ask the Brodugans for money).

Bare strained family dinner (1975-76 Poldark, Part 11, Episode 3)

At Nampara, Demelza (Angharad Rees), pouring port, asks Ross (Robin Ellis) why cannot they ask other friends for money (1975-76, Poldark Part 11, Episode 4)

One could cite the mood and bleak outdoors in the final episode of the second (and as it turned out) last season (1978), The Angry Tide, which ended, with Demelza and Ross looking at their children holding hands, and George grieving at the window from which the camera takes us to gaze at wild waves and rocks. Except it is not Christmas nor December as it explicitly is in the novel. A good deal of the original series was filmed on sets, and the focus was strongly on particular personalities in a story. So even just two scenes from the older Poldark show the intense attention paid to interweaving a Christmas piece with the realities of the characters’ dispositions, circumstances at each moment.

Christmas dinner at Trenwith (2015 Poldark, episode 4)

The recent 2015-16, and now 2017: in the first season (2015), the fourth episode near the end corresponds closely to the end of Ross Poldark, Ross and Demelza now Poldark go to Trenwith for a visit and (as it turns out temporary) reconciliation, and details from the book are dramatized, such as Demelza’s singing (above), though not Elizabeth on the harp.

Then again in the second season (2016), scenes corresponding to the observation of Christmas during a hard time in Jeremy Poldark, and the third season (2017), scenes corresponding to The Black Moon and placed just before the rescuing of Dwight Enys where there is a quiet Nampara Christmas and Caroline and Demelza and Verity seek funds at a party.

For all the rest while we might have a funeral at a close of an episode (we do twice, Jim Carter and then Julia), nothing is made of the year’s seasonal patterns nor Christmas. The perpetual coming out on the cliffs is not keyed to any season, any activity but the openings of the episodes at the mines. Scenes are not complexly nuanced in quite the way they were in the older series.

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Elizabeth Adele Armstrong Forbes, later 19th century woman painter in Cornwall, a Ring of Roses

What this suggests is how different are the rhythms and internal structures of the episodes of both Poldark film series from that of the novels: the exception in the series is Jeremy Poldark and The Black Moon in the first iteration (1975, 1977), and Jeremy Poldark and The Black Moon in the second (2016, 2017). But also how important season, time, holiday ritual was to Graham and has not been to the any of the film-adapters of his work thus far.

A curtain of mist hung over the Black Cliffs at the further end of Hendrawna Beach, most of it caused by spray hitting the tall rocks and drifting before the breeze. There was a heavy swell which reached far out to sea, and a couple of fishing boats from St Ann’s had gone scudding back to the safety of the very unsafe har¬bour. Gulls were riding the swell, lifting high and low as the waves came in; occasionally they took to the air in a flurry of flapping white when a wave unexpectedly spilled its head. No one yet expected rain: that would be tomorrow. The sun was losing its brilliance and hung in the sky like a guinea behind a muslin cloth.
Clowance squinted up at the weather. ‘Have you got a watch?’ ‘No. Not one that goes.’ — Bella

It might be objected, Does any movie? some do, and some film adaptations. One set that comes to mind are the film adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma, especially the 1996 ITV by Andrew Davies (with Kate Beckinsale as Emma, Mark Strong as Mr Knightley, Samantha Morton, Harriet) and the 209 BBC Emma by Sandy Welch (with Romola Garai as Emma, Johnny Lee Miller as Mr Knightley, Tamsin Grieg as Miss Bates), keep to seasons and emphasize Christmas or the winter holiday, snow. Have a look here: Jane Austen’s Perception of Christmas. And now Graham:

So they all went to look, at least as far as the stile leading down to the beach)· further it was unsafe to go. Where the beach would have been at any time except the highest of tides) was a battlefield of giant waves. The sea was washing away the lower sandhills and the roots of marram grass. As they stood there a wave came rushing up over the rough stony ground and. licked at the foot of the stile) leaving a trail of froth to overflow and smear their boots. Surf in the ordinary sense progresses from deep water to shallow) losing height as it comes. Today waves were hitting the rocks below Wheal Leisure with such weight that they generated a new surf running at right angles to the flow of the sea) with geysers of water spouting high from the collisions. A new and irrational surf broke against the gentler rocks below the Long Field. Mountains of spume collected wherever the sea drew breath) and then blew like bursting shells across the land. The sea was so high there was no horizon and the clouds so low that they sagged into the sea (from The Angry Tide, quoted by Graham at the opening of Poldark’s Cornwall, 1983 version).

This matters because these books are in the peculiar position of fake knowledge. A lot of people think they know them because they’ve seen these film adaptations. Others may read the books after the adaptations and have their understanding framed by the films. What they remember is what the film emphasized. There is a long respectable history of publication for the first four books from 1945 to 1953; and the second trilogy (the novels of the 1970s, Black Moon, Four Swans, Angry Tide) have been in but watched partly as a result of the films and seen through the films. The last five are much less well-known.

Many classics are in effect in this position: far far more people saw the film Wuthering Heights in 1939 than had read Emily Bronte’s book in the previous 150 years of publication and availability. But the Brontes have true respectability and people went on to read WH and other Bronte books; they have now gotten to Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the film adaptation was made as a result of Bronte popularity. That’s not the case with Graham’s books. For my part I’d love to know what sales of the books have been like over the past 60 years and have a way of measuring how much that reflects actual readership.

To return to the book’s several Christmases; this first one has the depth of particularity and realism. I have not begun to go into the feeling Ross Poldark and Elizabeth have for one another, how suddenly embittered Ross appears because life has not gone as he had wished, and the hurt Demelza feels, caught up in these two stills from the 1975-76 serial

Real feelings during these ritual times as are found in Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale

On New Year’s Eve I will recreate the 2018 blog I wrote concentrating on just two of the Christmases across the books.

Ellen

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What have Sir Charles Grandison and James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser got in common?

A mid-18th century illustration of Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison: Grandison rescues Jeronymo

Jamie as a young Scots farmer (a memory of himself from Outlander, Season 1, Episode 2, Castle Leoch)

I attended (went to?) a superb talk on Sir Charles Grandison sponsored by the Digital Seminar group at Eighteenth Century Studies, and found it so stimulating I managed to take good enough notes to at least give the gist of the talk, and then compare what was said to contemporary startling instances of male virginity (in Outlander, my current addiction). What was particularly valuable about Dr Rebecca Barr’s talk was how she related the misogynistic anger at the core of male virginity (weaponized, a way to control women) not only to characters in novels (St John Rivers in Jane Eyre), but also to what we saw in Brett Kavanaugh.

Gentle friends and readers,

Have you guessed what Grandison and Fraser have in common? both were virgins on their wedding nights. Yes.

I today attended a very interesting Open Digital Seminar (zoom lecture and meeting) today sponsored by Eighteenth Century Studies, a talk delivered by Dr Rebecca Anne Barr, Lecturer in Gender and Sexualities at the Faculty of English, at the University of Cambridge, “The Good Man on trial, or male virginity and the politics of misogyny.” It fascinates me because the pattern she uncovers is the same one found in Outlander for the two top heroes, Jamie Fraser and his eventual son-in-law, Roger Mackenzie Wakefield, and helps explain what I thought paradoxical oddities of attitudes in women readers especially (but also men) towards sexuality in other heroes of today’s historical romances. As usual this is by no means all Dr Barr said; it is only an outline with the particulars I could get down in my notes.

Rebecca Barr argued (and demonstrated from Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison) that by a combination of mood techniques (including humor) that male virginity is used to create rhetorical and actual power for men to control female sexuality. Unexpectedly perhaps this characteristic usually demanded of women before marriage, and thus associated with women, when found in, indeed insisted upon by a man, enables him to persuade women to accept his power over them. “Male virginity becomes “a key constituent of an intrinsically reactionary arsenal of public virtue.” I think most people who have read Grandison remember that Sir Charles was a proud virgin and after marriage chaste man. What was startling was Ms Barr went on to display a photograph of Brett Kavanaugh a couple of days after Christine Blasey Ford, under oath, accused him of leading a group of male fraternity members at a party to strip and gang-rape, or (as the individual case might be) humiliate her. The photograph was said to have caught  Kavanaugh insisting he was a virgin until he married.

This is not the photograph Dr Barr showed, but another where we see how he yelled during the hearing, so fiercely angry did he let himself become (on whose advice I wonder? — click to enlarge)

I had been told but forgotten that with his wife to one side of him, and Kelly Conway on the other, he vehemently asserted that he could not have done such a deed because he was a virgin. His description of himself in high school and college as an intensely shy, sensitive, moral young man (=good) was a show-stopper. He was asserting an intense femininity of himself, aligning himself with a “feminine niceness” — at the same time as he spoke in an enraged, choleric voice, shouting his words, to make chastity the bedrock of (his and all) male goodness. A man who did lead a group of fraternity guys to rape women who were so foolish as to come to their parties.

Clarissa (Saskia Wickham), (1991 BBC Clarissa, scripted David Nokes)

Dr Barr asserted that in Richardson’s Clarissa, the rake is the worst sort of husband; in Grandison, chastity and virginity guarantee the best sort of husband. She went on to talk of how in Clarissa Charles Hickman, it is suggested, is a delicate chaste man, mocked and ridiculed by Anna, he is as part of his character a gentle, kind, loving and protective husband. (A little later she said that Mr B in Pamela II anticipates Sir Charles.) This derision of Hickman was (in effect) echoed by Terry Eagleton who in his famous book on The Rape of Clarissa wrote an acerbic dismissal of Sir Charles; bluntly he remarked that in a patriarchal society it does not matter if the man is chaste or not. There is no price, no value put on a man’s virginity, such a virtue would be a personal characteristic with no general inference; this critic was repulsed by this assertion of Sir Charles. Ms Barr disagreed and argued that Richardson’s ploy here is more relevant than ever even if such a virtue is kept silent. Hickman, yes, is made a joke out of, he is despised by Anne as meek; she does not know whether to pity or laugh at him; he looks guilty like someone who committed a fault.

But Richardson is careful to align and attribute to Sir Charles all other usual male characteristics: physical bravery, virility when tested, wealth, intelligence, the prestige of rank, socially able. His kin all around him adore and value him, and call him “a good man;” this “womanly private virtue” becomes a sort of weapon in his repertoire to assert his superiority to other men and to the women involved with him. They have to come up to his chastity, themselves be just as “good.” This is not a form of feminism, or femininity but “triumph of discipline,” all the more because it is asserted he has a hot temper, is proud, not naturally timid at all. In this way the male is exalted, and the women all around him made to dwindle into fallible people.

Philip Skelton, one of Richardson’s correspondents, responded to this portrait by demanding that Grandison “be persecuted” and be paired with a “bad woman” (of course the worst trait given a woman is drunkard so she should be a drunkard, slattern), and if Sir Charles is able to cope with such women, it will make him a favorite among female readers. (Whether Skelton was alive to the irony of this I couldn’t tell.) Ms Barr pointed to passages in Grandison where we are told Sir Charles would have agreed with God to annihilate the first Eve and produce a second one, and she suggested that Harriet is the second best in the novel. Sir Charles loved Clementina first. Richardson’s correspondents, Catherine Talbot and Elizabeth Carter (two friends) also voiced that less than moral attitudes would characterize women’s responses to Sir Charles’s women — they saw other women as wanting to possess Sir Charles themselves. Ms Barr reminded us that in Jane Eyre, St John Rivers is a austerely chaste man who appeals intensely to Jane, but who would suffocate her with his intensity and offer her a torturing kind of love; he could become an unnatural tyrant over her. Bronte is showing us how such a good man oppresses a heroine. Male virtue here is weaponized when virtue (self-control) extends to virginity; it can be an excuse for male virulence, male rage, his frustration is implicitly sympathized with.

Dr Barr ended her talk around this point; she has written a paper on this topic, which will appear in the next issue of Eighteenth Century Studies; the paper is part of a book project.

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Jamie and Claire (Caitriona Balfe), “The Wedding Night” (Outlander, Season 1, Episode 7)

There was time for a question and answer period through chat or through making yourself un-muted and visible. I just found it irresistible to tell of how Jamie Fraser turns out to be unexpectedly a virgin when it is time for him to marry Claire — in order to rescue her from the probable beating, torture, imprisonment and rape by the evil villain of the first books and seasons of Outlander, Black Jack Randall. By contrast, Claire has been married and at first she is supposed to be teaching him. He does not need much instruction: it turns out he has kissed and “made out” many a girl; they just didn’t consummate. Why not, we are not told. Ms Barr was right because this state of gentle purity does give Jamie a special status — especially because he has all other male traits, and he says and makes good his promise to keep Claire safe as long as she stays by him.

Brianna (Sophie Skelton) beginning to understand that Roger Wakefield (Richard Rankin) wants an engagement and marriage as the price of a relationship with him (Outlander, Season 3, Episode 4, Of Lost Things)

I also realized that the second generation hero of the romances, Roger Wakefield, exhibits a similar superiority and gets to control Brianna, Jamie’s daughter by Claire, because he will not have sex with her unless they become engaged and are about to be married or married. She wants to be free and have sex with him as she pleases and then return to university to finish her degree. If they feel later they want to continue the relationship, fine. If not, fine. She has committed to nothing, with no promise of fidelity either. Well, he’s not having that, and they quarrel fiercely over this. Needless to say, Roger wins — after all Brianna will and cannot force Roger to fuck her. Slowly and surely, Roger comes to dominate Brianna (mainly because she wants a relationship with Roger and can only have it on his terms) though she struggles against his asserting her right after they are “handfast” (have a private ceremony between themselves with God presumably looking on). And then she is punished because now alone she is quickly raped when she attempts to go into a tavern and be accepted as an equal human being to the men there.

Roger does suffer terribly. Later in the evening, Brianna is raped by Stephen Bonnet, and when, having discovered Brianna has returned to her parents, Roger seeks her there, Jamie and Brianna’s cousin, Ian, think he is the rapist, beat him ferociously, and sell him to the Indians. So Roger is enslaved and humiliated and treated horribly for a long time. But when the ordeal is over, he has won.

Similarly Jamie is persecuted because Black Jack Randall is homosexual and deeply attracted to Jamie and captures him, and beats, tortures him, threatening to rape and kill Claire; he shatters Jamie (this is what torturers do) and rapes him to the point that Jamie loses his sense of an identity, and agrees to accept Randall. So Skelton’s demand that the male paragon be persecuted as part of the complex icon here is repeated in the 21st century.

Jamie’s Agon (Outlander, Season 1, Episode 16: To Ransom a Man’s Soul)

It may be that Hickman is made fun of, is “a comic figure” with little power over Anna Howe, whom he is pathetically grateful to marry. But it was noted that “if Lord G, Charlotte Grandison’s husband, is similarly ridiculed” for not being able to control his wife or stop her from domineering over him; nonetheless. “the marriage disciplines her.” She must accept pregnancy and breast-feeding his child. He is “second best to Charles, whom Charlotte would have married if Charles has not been her brother.”

Several other people offered ideas and parallels to Sir Charles in eighteenth century characters and twentieth. Richardson is “re-fashioning the rake,” and making a “new culturally attractive” moralized “Christian” icon. Carol Stewart offered the idea that by presenting a male this way you detach heterosexuality from agency. A character can be forceful and active and not heterosexually involved with anyone.

Dr Barr responded that there is a “heterosexual pessimism” at the core of this kind of icon; heterosexuality is not presented as good for people; sex is distrusted; we are committed to love and to sex, but it is not necessarily in our best interests to be sexually active; it can be against our interests; the best thing you can do is resign yourself. You end up with a resigned or deflated happiness. Harriet is a second best choice. The sexual life of Sir Charles and Clementina is deeply troubled.

This reminded me of the attitude towards sexuality in J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country where sex causes anguish and grief, especially to homosexual or emotionally vulnerable and tender men. It can lead to heroines marrying someone who is non-congenial and with whom life is a form of deprivation.

The self-tortured James Moon (Kenneth Branagh) (1987 A Month in the Country, scripted Simon Gray)

There was talk of the second Eve or Lilith as an icon in 19th century fiction. That these underlying complexes of feelin suggest why Sir Charles is attractive to women readers — or was. George Eliot is said to have loved the novel. There is an eroticism in this femininity, or feminine aspect of a man. I know this to be true of Sam Heughan as Jamie Fraser.

I also know in the case of Winston Graham’s Ross Poldark, the readership is ferocious in denying that he raped Elizabeth Poldark — they dislike intensely any reference to any liaisons he may have had before he marries Demelza, and in the book any hints that he has affairs while an M.P in London are kept very discreet. It should be said that most of males in the Poldark series show no trace of homosexuality; they and the women characters, though, have strong same-sex friendships.

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St John Rivers (Andrew Bicknell, very handsome, brooding, absolutely chaste (1983 Jane Eyre, scripted Alexander Baron, probably the best of the 20th century adaptations)

The meeting concluded with bringing up a global dimension. We were reminded by one of the people who introduced the session that St John Rivers is a missionary going to Africa to convert African people to Christianity. He wanted Jane to be disciplined to be part of his imperial project. Jane, though, says the demands of such a role would have killed her and much prefers to return to Rochester to make a home for herself and him. That missionaries are aggressively destroying the identities of “other” people, and St John would have regarded Jane’s death as “collateral damage” in the way the US regards all the native peoples we destroy. In some post-colonial formulations, these “other” people become “spectral bodies” who will then be dominated.

This made me remember the fate of some of the Native Americans or Indians that the Frasers interact with in Drums of Autumn, and that the woods of North Carolina are haunted by the revenant of Otter-Tooth, a young man once called Roger Springer, who came from the 20th century back to the 18th and was assimilated into an Indian tribe, was killed “as a troublemaker” and now is an apparently grieving ghost haunting both present and past.

I may be overdoing these parallels, for, as we move away from Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, Bronte’s St John Rivers, and the hypocritical thug-rapist, now Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh, we lose sight of Dr Barr’s central core point: literature’s male virgins have a peculiarly misogynist anger at their core. Perhaps one of the differences in more humane 20th and 21st century literature is that homoeroticism and homosexuality form part of the complex of sexuality openly shown to be part of male iconic characters.

Jane Eyre (Ruth Wilson) (2006 TV JE, scripted Sandy Welch)

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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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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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

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

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, in another 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 among shortest days of our year and I hope I have brightened it for you as I have occupied myself absorbedly.

Ellen

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Christmas in Jane Austen’s letters (and novels once again)

Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen reading and writing outside a cottage (Becoming Jane, 2007, scripted Kevin Hood, Susan Williams, directed Julian Jarrod)

Dear friends and readers,

I have over the years written several blogs on Christmas, mentions and uses by Austen in her novels (see especially her perception of Christmas in the novels) and the films adapted from them. In brief here is a sample:

Sense and Sensibility: The Miss Steeles “were prevailed on to stay nearly two months at the park, and to assist in the due celebration of that festival which requires a more than ordinary share of private balls and large dinner parties to proclaim its importance.”

Pride and Prejudice: Caroline Bingley’s cruel letter to Jane ends: “I sincerely hope your Christmas in Hertfordshire may abound in the gaieties which that season generally brings.”

Mansfield Park: Mary Crawford : “Is it Christmas gaieties that he is staying for?” (she doesn’t believe that for a minute)

Emma (chosen from the long sequence): Mr. Weston: “At Christmas every body invites their friends about them, and people think little of even the worst weather.” (Mr Weston’s benign unsubtle view is not agreed with …)

Northanger Abbey: ‘Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim. Catherine knew all this very well; her great aunt had read her a lecture on the subject only the Christmas before; and yet she lay awake ten minutes on Wednesday night debating between her spotted and her tamboured muslin, and nothing but the shortness of the time prevented her buying a new one for the evening.’

Persuasion: “Immediately surrounding Mrs. Musgrove were the little Harvilles, whom she was sedulously guarding from the tyranny of the two children from the Cottage, expressly arrived to amuse them. On one side was a table occupied by some chattering girls, cutting up silk and gold paper … the whole completed by a roaring Christmas fire, which seemed determined to be heard, in spite of all the noise of the others. Charles and Mary also came in, of course … Mr. Musgrove made a point of paying his respects to Lady Russell, and sat down close to her for ten minutes, talking with a very raised voice, but from the clamour of the children on his knees, generally in vain …”

You may skim the whole lot swiftly here.

Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth supposed reading Jane’s letters the winter after the Christmas visit of the Gardeners (who took Jane off to cheer her up, 1995 P&P, scripted Andrew Davies, directed Simon Langton)

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Tonight I went through her letters and an overview for the first time in a couple of years brings home to me once again, how much is missing. For some years and phases of the year we see a regular rhythm to the letters, say two or three journal-style over two or three days will repeat itself, and then nothing. Major events not noted because they don’t occur on the days of the letters left to us. As to mentions of Christmas or the weather, one can conjecture that if a group of balls, dances, parties, dinners are all occurring between the last week of December and first of January they might be related to a holiday and there is a feel of regularity of occurrence at this time of year, but I found but no mention of Christmas itself (the word) and it is itself a reference to a general time when someone is expected to return to where the Austens are living (Southampton). It’s almost surprising this lack of reference to Christmas in the letters; yes a majority were destroyed, even so if you read what’s there I could find but two mentions specifically.

This is the slim matter I gleaned; there is much more matter in these letters but I pulled only that which could conceivably relate:

Anna Maxwell Martin as Cassandra reading one of Jane’s letters (2007 Becoming Jane)

No 14, Dec 18-19, 1798, Tues-Wed; Tues, Dec 18, Steventon: “I enjoyed the hard black Frosts of last week very much, & one day while they lasted walked to Deane by myself.” (4th ed, p 27)

No 15, Dec 24-26, 1798, Mon-Wed; Dec 24, Mon, Steventon: Frank is in Gibaltar, she has returned from Manydown, her mother “does not like the cold Weather, but that we cannot help,” there has been a ball, but that it was for Christmas is never said. She does write: “I wish you a merry Christmas but no compliments of the Season.” Cassandra has danced away at Ashford, there was to have been a dinner at Deane the night she is writing this sentence, “but the weather is so cold that I am not sorry to be kept at home by the appearance of Snow.” There is no other mention of the holiday or weather (4th ed, pp 31-32)

No 17, Jan 8-9, Tues-Wed, 1799; Tues, Jan 8, Steventon: “a Ball at Kempshott this evening” … she had told Cassandra that “Monday was to be the Ball Night,” but no such thing.” Elizabeth has been very cruel about my writing Music; — & as a punishment for her, I should insist upon always writing out all hers and for her in future.” “I love Martha better than ever, & I mean to go & see her if I can when she gets home.” How there was a dinner at “Harwoods on Thursday, & the party broke up the next morning,” she shall be “such a proficient in Music by the time I have got rid of my cold, that I shall be perfectly qualified in that science at least to take Mr Roope’s office at Eastwell this summer … of my Talent in Drawing I have given specimens in my letters to you, & I have nothing to do but invent a few hard names for the Stars … ” Of a party at Manydown, “There was the same kind of party as last year, & the same want of chairs. — there were more Dancers than the Room could conveniently hold, which is enough to constitute a good Ball at any time.” She was not “very much in request –. People were rather apt not to ask me till they could not help it” … But no mention any of this specifically for Christmas nor the weather (4th ed, pp 34-36)

No 29, Jan 3-5, Sun-Mon, 1801; Sat, Jan 3, Steventon: What is “uppermost in my mind” is “you often wore a white gown in the morning, at the time of all the gay party’s being with you.” They visited Ash Park last Wednesday, “went off in a come-ca way; we met Mr Lefroy & Tom Chute, played at cards & came home again … ” This is letter is about what is happening at home because they are moving to Bath (providing for servants) and all the plans and doings about where they will live … (4th ed, p 69)

No 61, Nov 20, Sun, 1808; Sun Nov 3, Castle Square (Southampton): Mary Jane Fowle will “return at Christmas” with her brother.” Second and last use of the word in the collection that I found (4th ed, p 161)

No 63, Dec 2-28, Tues-Wed; Tues Dec 27, Castle Square: Eliza “keeping her bed with a cold … Our Evening party on Thursday, produced nothing more remarkable than Miss Murden’s coming too …. ” she “sitting very ungracious and silent with us … The last hour, spent in yawning & shivering in a wide circle round thefirst, was dull enough — but the Tray had admirable success.” She is talking of the food they ate, which by association leads to “Black Butter do not decoy anybody to Southampton.” No mention of any of this having anything to do with Christmas (4th ed, p 166)

A truly sparse amount of references. The novels give a sense of traditional parties, dances, festivities, rituals — as if in writing to the world she had to give such references and notice. Everything we read in other documents shows there were such, and from the early 16th century on we find such descriptions in diaries, journals, verse, documentary records. In the 1790s we begin to find references to Christmas a ritual of family getting together and a feeling of deep missing out if you don’t have such, if you live far from home (see for Southey’s Written on Christmas Day, 1795), from which I quote a passage here

I do remember when I was a child
How my young heart, a stranger then to care,
With transport leap’d upon this holy-day,
As o’er the house, all gay with evergreens,
From friend to friend with joyful speed I ran,
Bidding a merry Christmas to them all.
Those years are past; their pleasures and their pains
Are now like yonder covent-crested hill
That bounds the distant prospect, indistinct,
Yet pictured upon memory’s mystic glass
In faint fair hues. A weary traveller now
I journey o’er the desert mountain tracks
Of Leon, wilds all drear and comfortless,
Where the grey lizards in the noontide sun
Sport on the rocks, and where the goatherd starts,
Roused from his sleep at midnight when he hears
The prowling wolf, and falters as he calls
On Saints to save. Here of the friends I think
Who now, I ween, remember me, and fill
The glass of votive friendship …
Thus I beguile the solitary hours
With many a day-dream, picturing scenes as fair
Of peace, and comfort, and domestic bliss
As ever to the youthful poet’s eye …

And since in her novels, Austen characteristically tells only as much as is needful for her story in her novels, except for the scenes around Christmas in Emma, which themselves occur because the Knightley family gets together at Christmas (the way people do today), what emerges is the satiric nature of her work: most of the references are half-mocking, fatuous hypocritical meretricious behavior at Christmas is what she registered first just the way she registers this for musical concerts (when people pretend to understand and be ravished by music) or romantic poetry, except this time in the few cases of characters who can really feel sincerely: Marianne for music and poetry, Elinor for drawing, Fanny for pictures, Jane Fairfax for music, Mr Knightley for sitting over a fire, Anne Elliot music and poetry, Catherine Morland reading, but nothing for Christmas. Perhaps she did have distaste for what she saw come out of the holiday customs specifically, humanely speaking.

Comparatively, to cite a few other authors, while Trollope also dislikes all the hypocrisy and commercialism arising from Christmas, he has stories where there is quiet thematic use of Christmas attaching to it true charity or kindliness of spirit when rightly observed. Because of the strong distaste for ceremonies of lies here (and elsewhere in his fiction), I have never made a Christmas blog about his work that I can recall, but perhaps this year I’ll break that non-pattern and write about the nature of what Christmas stories he gets himself to write, and the ones that work well. A 20th century novelist who wrote a famous series of novel set in the 18th century uses Christmas regularly: the close of the Poldark books show Christmas as practiced in the 18th century Cornwall had a meaning for him. Tonight I quote Tennyson from In Memoriam where he has grieved so for the loss of a beloved friend expresses feelings somewhat like mine this morning:

Again at Christmas did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;
The silent snow possess’d the earth,
And calmly fell our Christmas-eve:

The yule-log sparkled keen with frost,
No wing of wind the region swept,
But over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost.

As in the winters left behind,
Again our ancient games had place,
The mimic picture’s breathing grace,
And dance and song and hoodman-blind.

Who show’d a token of distress?
No single tear, no mark of pain:
O sorrow, then can sorrow wane?
O grief, can grief be changed to less?

O last regret, regret can die!
No -– mixt with all this mystic frame,
Her deep relations are the same,
But with long use her tears are dry.

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

In going over Austen’s letters and then my blogs on the novels, and in context of the eras nearby, what I am again impressed with, is what is easy to find in the novels registered through many pictures in the films is Austen writing of letters, reading, writing, and dramatic uses of letters (far more than books). As my four stills chosen quickly and somewhat at random revealed — from a supposed biographical movie I have discussed hardly at all here.

Olivia Williams as a mature Austen writing Persuasion (Miss Austen Regrets, 2009, scripted Gweneth Hughes, directed Jeremy Lovering)

Ellen

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The new Poldark: the third season, another handy list; The Cult of Poldark …

Demelza and Ross Poldark (Eleanor Tomlinson, Aidan Turner, the last still of this year’s first episode, both looking grim or distressed)

Demelza and Ross in front of fire. She: “If you do not challenge the corrupt and unjust, who will?” He: “What would you have me do? I am not that man, Demelza, I have never been that man [someone who seeks power, loves the grand gesture, yet blows to authority].

Ross to Warleggan: “I believe belief is a beautiful thing” — from the final episode of this season

Friends,

It’s time to bring together another year’s worth of episodes in the saga of the new Poldark mini-series. We now have three year’s worth, five and one-half of the novels. To begin with, the the first season’s episodes and blogs on topics (like mining, poaching. I wrote also of the scripts of the first season. The novels adapted were Ross Poldark and Demelza (Poldark novels 1 and 2).

For the second season, the handy list is longer than the following for the third because the series itself had more history and the scripts had been published before the season ended. The novels adapted were Jeremy Poldark and Warleggan (Poldark novels 3 and 4):

This year no scripts have yet been announced; there was intense interweaving of the personal and public where the personal became contrived and at times far too melodramatic. I wish I had had the scripts to compare to see if this impression is the result of the director’s choices. The novels adapted were The Black Moon and most of The Four Swans (Poldark novels 5 and 6).

Poldark 3:1 & 2: again changing emphases, bringing out deep sense of community

Poldark 3: 3 & 4: the difficulty of returning to material 20 years dormant

George and Elizabeth Warleggan (Heida Reed, Jack Farthing — seen as a pair intimately for the first time …., he putting jewelry on her)

Poldark 3:4 & 5: deeper emotionalism but loss of verbal subtleties; late stage capitalism replaces exciting adventure

Poldark 3:6 & 7: Coerced and reluctant relationships; Agatha’s death, Ross’s refusals, Demelza charmed

Agatha Poldark (Caroline Blakiston)

Poldark 3: 8 & 9: like a song, previously individualized scenes

I’ve been putting this year’s blogs on my site for film adaptations and cultural arts in general, but these are also films from books very much rooted in the 18th century. Next up will be a list of the second season of Outlander, a sort of companion and comparable set of films partly set in the 18th century.

Morwenna Chynoweth Whitworth and Geoffrey Charles Poldark (Elisse Chappell and Harry Marcus)

In general, this year’s season compared in the same way as the previous two did to the 1975-78 Poldark mini-series. Both depart from the books, with the older series keeping much more to values of individual liberty and social justice, revolutionary Enlightenment norms, and the newer returning us to community as safety, compromise and desperate cooperation as modes of survival for its characters. See Poldark Rebooted, Twenty Years On.

For intelligent comments by the actors on the 1970s mini-series you cannot do better than this YouTube of The cult of Poldark:

The older series is subtler and more successful in conveying complex psychologies of characters interacting; the newer one is more overtly and interestingly political, a woven tapestry of juxtaposed epitomizing scenes (at its best symbolic art, with the character no longer presences on a stage, but figures in a picture). This year was much drabber than the previous — as befitting characters growing older, wearier, yielding the world’s demands.

Compare these at the close of the first season:

A mythic Ross

An archetypal Demelza

Ellen

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Return to Emma, 18th century intellectual women — and Cornish Gothic

Emma (Doran Goodwin) and Mr Knightley (John Carsons) genuinely talking to one another — the eye contact shows this (1972 Emma, scripted Denis Constantduros)

Friends,

It is the fate of someone who is trying to do too many things at one time, that she seems never to finish any particular task or book sufficiently to blog regularly. One of my readers has asked why I am not blogging as much and to resume regularity once again. Partly too by a piece of my own crass honesty (never a good thing) I’ve found myself cut off from Mason’s vast databases for at least two weeks and then I will have only campus access. So much for my women artists series. I’ve also been depressed, lost heart. Finally, I’ve not been reading Jane Austen of late, though I much admired many of the essays on Emma in the most recent issue of Persuasions (38:2016). I had lamented how in last year’s AGM on Emma, there had been but four sessions of panels and I had not been able to hear enough of the presentations. Well Persuasions more than made up for this emptiness. I sometimes think all the new fashionable — from the sequel or fan point of view to the academic deconstruction post-modern, we erase Austen’s own text. Not in this Persuasions.

To begin with Austen (this being an Austen blog), Juliet McMaster on “The Critics of Talk in Emma“, and Maria McClintock Folsom’s “Emma Knowing Her Own Mind” — the length of the latter signifies its subtle nuanced close reading analysis is very worth the reading. Both articles discussed the talk in Emma. Folsom begins with how Emma’s trauma over leaving Hartfield reflects Austen’s own trauma at leaving Steventon; Emma has the security of a home, the problem is the home is stultifying in every sense of the word, including irresistible (to Emma) flattery, that closes her mind that anything that will enable her to see her real faults. Folsom builds up to how Emma needs intelligent companionship in every way and how Mr Knightley provides it by going over the conversations across the novel between Emma and others and then Emma and Mr Knightley. It exonerates (my love of film adaptations comes out here) the 1972 Emma which focuses on just this growing importance of conversation between Mr Knightley and Emma. Juliet McMaster says words not deeds are the action of Emma and looks at how Emma perceives the truth that is in front of us (rather like Fanny Price), but interprets it out of her own blindness — which could lead to serious harm — it’s in the nuances of the conversations and what they mean that McMaster says tells us why we as a group keep reading this book, what we learn from and about life. Elaine Bander’s is first and asks why Austen chose an heroine who is given very unlikable traits, some of which never go away. It’s here she sees Austen fighting against novel conventions (which reminds me of brilliant French book on Austen against romance as its first impulse); the way Elizabeth behaves is at first very like her father: both see, but both see to critique and laugh mostly. I find Elaine’s less satisfying I admit as there’s a tendency to excuse and usually take a thoroughly upbeat view. Lorraine Clark on “The Ethics of Attention,” I especially liked Anita Solway on “The darkness in Emma:” about Austen’s deeply melancholy outlook once you begin to look , so many vulnerable people …

William Gilpin, Picturesque Beauty, Travel, Sketches

In the latter part of the volume the essays departed from Emma. James Evan suggests a different source for the Northern Tour than the Gilpin volume usually cited (by Mavis Batey I know) and another house, Keedlestone, in that area for Pemberley. It’s not alternate source finding that is so valuable but how Evan finds real idiosyncratic phases in the source which enriches our sense of the novel’s (dare I say this) subtext (he mentions how many source studies are not convincing). One of my favorite recent appropriations, Lost in Austen by Paige Pinto is not yet on-line — it appears to be about how this film replaces Austen’s Persuasions.

Fanny (Sylvestre Le Tousel) humiliated into trying to act by Mrs Norris (1983 Mansfield Park, scripted Ken Taylor)

I wish I had enjoyed the recent BBC radio “The spirituality of Austen” more than I did: It’s misnamed. This modern concept of religious feeling divorced from doctrine is anachronistic. But they understandably did not turn to the three prayers once attributed to Jane (now they are thought to be by Charles) where perhaps what a modern person would call Austen’s spirituality is in evidence. For Austen’s generation and type of Anglicanism ethics are a function of religion, and they did turn to the moral compass (so to speak) of the characters.But they became enamoured of their own talk and wanted to entertain and say what they thought listeners might bond with. A new idea of religion was spreading through Methodism, but it was combined with radicalism. Evangelism as in our time was a growth and spread of narrowing attitudes, repression — Austen did not like Hannah More’s Caleb in search of a Wife which is a version of these Evangelical attitudes dramatized through novel conventions. But without actually connecting MP to More’s novel, soon they were talking of Fanny Price (as self-evidently a prig), ending on the far-fetched assertion most of her readers dislike most of her “good” characters — Austen’s comic and witty characters are supposed to be good people. It’s the Mrs Norris’s, Ferrars, bullies, people with malicious tongues, who say hurtful things we don’t like and they represent very poor ethics. They kept veering into Mary Bennet for similar reasons, with the outrageous assertion that Mary Bennet would make a good dinner companion, that’s nuts – the point is she wouldn’t and doesn’t; she’s too stressed — not that Austen feels for her — and that’s why they wanted to support her. I tend to think of her as a reading girl and so Austen is into self-flagellation but Austen sees her simply as without understanding of what she reads. She’s not a real character so to talk of how she is not forgiven doesn’t make sense. She’s used to make satiric points, write a satiric scene. I liked the idea that Mr Knightley represents strongly ethical views and behavior — they didn’t use that term.

Antonio Canaletto (1697-1768), Alnwick Castle (1747)

Elizabeth Percy, Duchess of Northumberland, responsible for the conception and 18th century work done in this famous country castle

I did complete a study of the achievements of intellectual women in the 18th century — in areas like science, theology, medicine, architecture. It will be published by ECCB; in the meantime a longer copy of a review of Teresa Barnard’s British Women and the Intellectual World in the eighteenth century is at my site at Academia.edu. I’ve not been neglecting the 18th century but working away on material connected to the Poldark world, where I now I have permission from the copyright holder to write a book on (working title), “Winston Graham, Cornwall and the Poldark matter.” Soon I hope to be writing and to be introduced to an editor at one of the publishing companies closely associated.

Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza (from Poldark, Season 2)

Paradoxically I have least to say on “the Cornish Gothic,” precisely because I’ve been reading a good deal, from Claude Berry’s inimitable Portrait of Cornwall (he evokes the feeling and landscape, and culture of the place), to histories of Cornwall (F. E. Halliday), to discussions of how Cornwall has figured so strongly in the imaginations of those who visited (more than those who grew up), which include Daphne DuMaurier, Graham, Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse), the poet Betjeman, Thomas Hardy. Cornwall is one of these periphery places, offering liberty, space, a chance to be an authentic self, to choose one’s life (as Verity Poldark tells her father she has a right to). It’s a psychological landscape which frees the imagination. Historical fiction enables a break with temporality, especially when there is time-traveling too (as in Gabaldon’s Outlander which uses the highlands as its Cornwall): we can escape gender limitations, time-bound identities.

The latest film adaptation of DuMaurier: that’s Rachel Weisz as the (we see) strangely weakened central heroine (her name fits My cousin Rachel)

Last year I wrote about DuMaurier’s Vanishing Cornwall and Enchanted Cornwall: I’ve just finished reading her The King’s General, set in an accurate historical retelling of the King’s armies’ last stand against the Parliamentarians in Cornwall. Menabilly which DuMaurier so loved was sacked completely during this time (a depiction included in the novel). It opens the way so many of DuMaurier’s do: at the end of the story, in the bleak melancholy aftermath of the story (this is true of My Cousin Rachel, Rebecca) which opening is fully explained only when we read story’s end so we then have to re-read the book because what we learn makes us see what went before and our narrator quite differently. The villain-hero, Richard Grenville is another of these amoral brutal men at the center of so many of DuMaurier’s fiction (again Rebecca, Max de Winter; Jamaica Inn, Joss Merlyn; the male narrator of My Cousin Rachel). Its heroine is literally crippled, cannot walk soon after its prologue-like; and is another of the pro-active, strong yet abject central women. But Cornwall: they fought one another to the sea, over the cliffs, in bricked-up hiding spaces.

Photo of Cornish sea by Simon McBride

Ellen

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Outlander as a descendant of Waverley: The Gathering and Rent (4 & 5)

Central hall for The Gathering (Outlander 4)

Repeating scene for Rent: the line of male tenants bringing money or barter to Ned Gowan (Outlander 5)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been asked to review an excellent book, Descendants of Waverley: Romancing History in Contemporary Historical Fiction by Martha Bowden. I have begun reading it; and, though Bowden does not instance Gabaldon’s Outlander (nor for that matter Graham’s Poldark), I realize the Poldark and Outlander novels are two of the many-great grandchildren of the Waverley novels.

Nineteenth-century edition

A Penguin

For Gabaldon this is by way of DuMaurier, who also indulges centrally in romancing, allusive textuality, and fantasy myth-making.

The Civil War politics of this novel makes it link as well as the time-traveling of DuMaurier’s The House on the Strand

King’s General centers on a heroine (she is the subjective presence) who is crippled and must stay in a wheelchair thereafter due to an incident involving the wild ferocity of her lover, Rashleigh, in battle

I don’t want tonight to dwell on these artful and literary elements, but rather something more obvious: Episodes 4 and 5 of the mini-series cover a sliver of Gabaldon’s book, Outlander (Chapters 10 and 11, Oath-Taking and Conversations with a Lawyer) with intense elaboration so as to build a picture of a rich Scottish cultural world worth living in, and its many pleasures for men and women alike. Gabaldon and this mini-series show how the English colonialist armies, and resulting Scots and English protection rackets impoverished a subsidence people, and sought to exploit, kow, and punish them at every opportunity.

Scottish farmers homes burnt, crops destroyed (Rent)

This is the post-colonial tapestry of the series that allures and interests me. Though I’ve put the first two of my blog on the first season on Outlander on my general cultural blog (Sassenach, and Castle Leoch and The Way Out), I feel these two episodes belong with 18th century matter. There is little movement forward of the story; instead what we get a dramatization of the reasons for Culloden, and how it came about. All Scott’s Scottish history Waverley novels center in some aspect of the Scots rebellion, dwell lovingly on its traditional culture, and if they come out on the side of progress, toleration, enlightenment (reason, “scientific” or probablistic explanation). Gabaldon differs mostly through the heroine’s perspective which is to try to stop this disaster for the Scots from happening. Through flashforwards (we could call Claire’s memories), we learn from Claire’s 20th century husband, what happened at Culloden.

Claire (Catrionia Balfe) and Frank Randall (Tobias Menzies) on the field of Culloden (Rent)

The film-makers take Gabaldon’s anti-British point of view on board and make it stronger

The band come across two crucified (tortured) dead corpses of Scotsmen

What I enjoyed was the loving recreation of Scots culture for two hours, and threading through these of continuing slow development of a friendly and trusting relationship between Claire and Jamie (Sam Heughan): where she keeps him company, tends to him, and he in turn rescues, tries to understand Claire who he stops from a wild impossible escape to nowhere:

Jamie: “How far did ye think ye’d get, lass, on a dark night with a strange horse, with half the Mackenzie clan after ye by morning?
Claire: “Won’t be after me. They’re all up at the hall. And if one in five of them is sober enough to stand in the morning, let alone ride a horse, then I ‘ll be most surprised.”
Jamie: “Running away on a whim just because the men are drunk? On a whim?
Claire: “You know I’ve wanted to leave here for weeks. And I know exactly how many sentry posts surround the castle. And I know how to make my way through the forest and find the road back to Inverness.”
Jamie: “Well, that’s a very sound plan, Sassenach — Or would be, did Colum not post extra guards through the woods tonight.”

There is a real lyricism in their relationship with seeps across the episodes. It’s hard for me to capture that: it has to do with the feeling generated between the two, the words used, gentle and yet reaching out, and how the camera captures them talking and their body stances when in the same area. In these episodes this extended to Claire and Ned Gowan, Claire and her first meeting with the British officer who was disguised as a working person in one of the Scots villages (but turns up at the end offering to take her back to England in effect, rescue her from this Highland culture), and Claire with the women. With Dougal the atmosphere is testy and aggressive; by contrast with Frank her husband, their is a quiet blandness that is secure and feels peaceful but does not seem to go anywhere. In the 1940s scenes she is ever walking away or smiling enigmatically as he talks on ever so kindly but no poetry in it.

Many details are added but none contradict the thrust of the novel. My favorites are the conversations of the witty, thoughtful lawyer, Ned Gowan (played exquisitely well by a favorite actor of mine, Bill Patterson), with Claire. He may appear to tell her much, but only confirms enigmatically when she is beginning to see: she had thought Dougal MacKenzie (Graham McTavish) was sluicing off money for himself (a second extraction from the deluded tenants) when he is gathering funds for an envisioned coming campaign. As when they speak a John Donne poem together:

Claire: Absence.
Absence, hear thou my protestation against thy strength, distance, and length.
Do what thou canst for alteration
BOTH: For hearts for truest mettle.
She: Absence doth still and time doth settle.
He repeats: Absence doth still and time doth settle.

The verse also functions to let us know Claire is still missing Frank, longing to re-join him in the 20t century.

I’ve suggested the dramaturgy of Outlander is so much better than many of the episodes of the new Poldark and studying the scripts for these episodes has suggested to me why: Gabaldon’s film-maker trust her text. They feel no need to fill it out, to change the characters, to complicate the action by having parallel lines of stories, all quickly juxtaposed, lest we get bored or restless. They luxuriate in the text. There is time to develop the contradictions in relationships: it is humiliating to Jamie to have to strip his shirt off as an exhibit to seduce people into giving money, and his uncle must tear it off the first time; when Jamie threatens not to participate, the uncle threatens and pulls rank.

Time is taken out to develop a “sub-palate of colors: for example, while on the road the color of the sky is white, the land pastel, all softened shades to create a mood of quietude in the land and sky. And the characters emerge inside the patterns:

Jamie addresses Claire against backdrop of tree designs

More than once Claire voices how much she likes the culture even though it is so masculinist — she is forced to listen to continual male boasts about crude sexual prowess (they do this at her).

Gabaldon and her writers after her are comfortable in making Claire in continual danger: when she tries to escape from the gathering she is stopped twice by men seeking to rape her; when Jamie sleeps outside her door to protect her, his action is not superfluous. It ought to be troubling that Horsfield and her crew are far less comfortable with Graham’s transgressive women, and turn them back to domestic creatures (see Scripts & Problematic parallels). Gabaldon has no cruel vindictive women — which slant is added on to the Poldark snobbish women by Horsfield — and no salacious sluts; Horsfield unlike Graham and the 1970s writers find no excuse for promiscuity on the part of a woman.

The feminism here is again in Claire’s casual relationships with other women: in these episodes of Scottish highland culture, she seems to enjoy herself with the women even when they soaking dyed cloth in heated piss

She as yet is willing to help Leoghaire attract Jamie (though female rivalry over the hero will come soon and be as strong as we find in Poldark) and this is used to bring out beliefs in love potions.
And she is deeply useful from her experience as a nurse in WW2. When during a boar-hunting in the Gathering, one man’s chest and thighs are severed by a boars tusks, and he lays dying in his chieftain Dougal’s arms, it is Claire who thinks how to ease the death by prompting from him memories of boyhood, home, and the beautiful places longing to live conjure up:

Claire: “Geordie tell me about your home.”
Geordie: “It’s near a wide glen, not far from Loch Fannich.”
Claire: “What’s it like there? I’ll wager it’s beautiful.”
Geordie: “Ah, ’tis.”
Claire: “In the spring Yes?”
Geordie: “The heather’s so thick, ye can walk across the tops without touching the ground.”
Claire: “That sounds lovely.”
Geordie: “Wish I could be there now.”
Dougal: “Oh, you’ll be there soon, lad.”
Geordie: “Aye. Will ye stay with me?”
Dougal: “Aye.”
Claire: “Yes.”
Dougal: “There you are.”
Claire: “There.”

In a scene directly afterwards when he visits her “surgery:”

Dougal: “You’ve seen men die before and by violence.”
Claire: “Yes. Many of them.”
Dougal: “Ye’ve done a fine job here as healer. Mrs. Fitz would have ye sit for a portrait if it was up to her. And, uh, I wanted to thank you personally for what you did for poor Geordie up there on the hunt.
Claire: “In truth, I did nothing. I wish I could have helped him.”
Dougal: “Ye did. Ye took him to a peaceful place, and that’s all any of us can ask when we pass …”

He then requires her to come out on the rental journey with the band. She earns her place as strong, pro-active, competent woman who in effect competes with men in all areas — but sex. She is more than the token woman taken on the road.

Riding out (The Gathering)

And of course, as I’ve said, in the over-voice, female perspective, control of the movement in time.

As the confines of the castle walls faded behind me like a bad dream, I took my first full breath in weeks. I had no idea where this journey would lead me, what opportunity might present itself. I could only hope it would bring me closer to the standing stones of Craigh Na Dun. If so, I was determined to reach them, knowing this time I must not fail.

Ellen

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A day in Daphne DuMaurier’s Cornwall

From Enchanted Cornwall — Cornish beach — to them this recalls Andrew Davies’s 2009 Sense and Sensibility

Dear friends and readers,

Since tomorrow I’m going to try to travel to Cornwall where I will spend a week with a beloved friend, I thought I’d orient myself by reading an overview of the place, and found myself again reading DuMaurier’s Enchanted Cornwall and Vanishing Cornwall. Though I’ve long loved a number of her books (basically the historical romances with female narrators, Rebecca, her biographies, life-writing, travel writing) my yearning to see Cornwall does not come from them, as what drew me were the atypical romance stories; it comes from the Poldark novels where the life experience, landscape, kinds of employment offered, society of Cornwall is central. Thus (with little trouble) I’ve picked photos from DuMaurier’s book which relate directly to the Poldark world:

I remember Demelza frolicking on such a beach with her lover, Hugh Armitage (The Four Swans)

19677-78 Poldark: Part 8, Episode 8: Demelza (Angharad Rees) and Armitage (Brian Stirner) cavorting along the beach —

and DuMaurier tells a tale of haunted vicar living a desolate life after he alienated the few parishioners he had in Warleggan church:

— From Vanishing Cornwall — Warleggan church

I’ve read all sorts of books on Cornwall since my love of these Poldark novels began, from mining to Philip Marsden’s archeaological reveries, Rising Ground, Ella Westland: Cornwall: The Cultural Construction of Place, to Wilkie Collin’s ode to solitude and deep past in his Rambles beyond Railways); to smuggling, politics beginning in Elizabethan times, poetry (its authors include Thomas Hardy, John Betjeman’s Summoned by Bells), to women artists (Elizabeth Armstrong Forbes, Dame Laura Knight), corrupt politics in this patronage-run Duchy. If I were to go back to count in the books on Arthur and the legends surrounding his figure, and literature, I have conquered whole shelves. Bryychan Carey’s website will lead you to much from a modern abolitionist left point of view, plainly set out. So much from one corner of a country.

A photograph my friend took today, near Truro

DuMaurier’s lyrical prose carries so much information so lightly, one is in danger of not realizing how much is there. There is a film adaptation of Vanishing Cornwall (half an hour); it accompanies the movie, Daphne with Geraldine Somerville and Janet McTeer as the leading lovers) developed from her letters, memoirs, and Margaret Forster’s biography. Her stance is less subjective than Graham’s, legend, myth, than Graham does in his Poldark’s Cornwall, which dwells on his life, his career, the place of Cornwall in his fiction right now. Appropriate to Graham’s fiction so concerned with law, justice, in his travel book, we have a photo of Launceston jail gate today:

The DuMaurier’s may be regarded as instances of l’ecriture-femme too: in Enchanted whole parts of her novels emerge from this or that landscape memory as well as the sea. I had forgotten how many of her novels are situated there, from the one I think her finest, The King’s General (set in the later 17th century, the heroine in a wheelchair almost from the beginning) to the later one, Outlander takes off from, Hungry Hill. Her historical novels are historical romances: at core they are gothic, erotic fantasies. Vanishing is circular in structure, at the core her retelling of legend is minimized so she can do justice to the geography, archaeaological history, various industry. There is a paragraph on the coming of pilchards every spring which owes a lot to Graham’s lyrical miracle in the third book of Ross Poldark (there used to be a podcast on-line from the BBC, now wiped away, alas). Legend blends into history; history becomes poetical writing. She is not much on politics, dwelling on the upper classes as they’d like to be seen (mostly the later 17th into later 18th century and again the 20th).

For now here a piece from Vanishing Ground read aloud, evocative.

As qualifiers:

A poem by Betjeman: Cornish Cliffs

Those moments, tasted once and never done,
Of long surf breaking in the mid-day sun.
A far-off blow-hole booming like a gun-

The seagulls plane and circle out of sight
Below this thirsty, thrift-encrusted height,
The veined sea-campion buds burst into white

And gorse turns tawny orange, seen beside
Pale drifts of primroses cascading wide
To where the slate falls sheer into the tide.

More than in gardened Surrey, nature spills
A wealth of heather, kidney-vetch and squills
Over these long-defended Cornish hills.

A gun-emplacement of the latest war
Looks older than the hill fort built before
Saxon or Norman headed for the shore.

And in the shadowless, unclouded glare
Deep blue above us fades to whiteness where
A misty sea-line meets the wash of air.

Nut-smell of gorse and honey-smell of ling
Waft out to sea the freshness of the spring
On sunny shallows, green and whispering.

The wideness which the lark-song gives the sky
Shrinks at the clang of sea-birds sailing by
Whose notes are tuned to days when seas are high.

From today’s calm, the lane’s enclosing green
Leads inland to a usual Cornish scene-
Slate cottages with sycamore between,

Small fields and tellymasts and wires and poles
With, as the everlasting ocean rolls,
Two chapels built for half a hundred souls.

Laura Knight paints the contemporary world’s hopes.

Laura Knight’s rendition of a China Clay Pit (a detail, painting from early in the 20th century)

Ellen

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