Deerbrook by Harriet Martineau

Edition: Deerbrook (Penguin Classics)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Deerbrook was published in 1839 (in three volumes) and was Martineau's first serious work of fiction, having already made a name for herself as a journalist and social commentator. The novel met with lukewarm reviews, though George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte were among the novel's appreciators.

SUMMARY:
Having been recently orphaned, the two young women, Hester and Margaret Ibbotson, stay with their relations, the Grey's at Deerbrook. The two of them are from Birmingham, and are enamored with the beauty of the country landscape. The primary concerns of members of the village, however, seem to be local gossip. The girls' primary circle of first acquaintances include Mr. and Mrs. Grey, their daughter Sophia and son Sydney, Mr. and Mrs. Rowland and their children, Mrs. Enderby, Mrs. Rowland's mother, and Philip Enderby, Mrs. Rowland's brother and Mrs. Enderby's son, Mr. Hope, the doctor, and Miss Young, a governess. Mrs. Rowland is particularly malicious in her gossip, and generally does not get along with the Grey's because of they are religious "dissidents." Mr. Hope and Miss Young are distinguished from this crowd of people in that they seem to rise above the petty interests of the other villagers. In the early chapters there is an extended passage in which Miss Young reminisces in a manner of talking out loud, accepting her lot as a governess and limited pleasures because of her own position: once, she would have been accepted into society as someone's wife, but as a result of an accident, she had become lame and also lost her father. Miss Young, however, isn't bitter about her situation: instead, her acceptance has led her to embrace a marginal yet accepted position in Deerbrook society which has enabled her to live there and also retain a certain degree of independence. She delights, therefore, in observing the people around her in a deeper fashion than most. Margaret immediately takes to Miss Young and agrees to study German with her.

Eventually, both Mr. Hope and Mr. Enderby develop feelings for Margaret--Hope confesses his feelings to his brother Frank who is in India through a lengthy letter, and Enderby leaves a note for Margaret in the schoolroom. Miss Young shows the slightest hint of discomposure when she realizes that Enderby has feelings for Margaret; there was a time when he may have been hers before her fall and loss of her father. Meanwhile, Margaret and Hester continue to delight the people of Deerbrook, engaging in parties and teas. A freak accident in which Mr. Hope is thrown from his horse leaves him an invalid for a time, and the toll that this takes on Hester is seen by Margaret and others. Margaret and her sister have a candid conversation in which Hester reveals that she did not yet know how she felt about Mr. Hope until  discovering to herself how she felt after his accident. After Mr. Hope recovers, Mrs. Grey takes on the duties of matchmaker and points out to him how Hester has looked unwell with worry over him. Mr. Hope, though he is really in love with Margaret, feels pressured by expectations and, as the narrator gives, "he decided upon making the great mistake of his life," that is, to ask for Hester's hand in marriage. He asks Margaret's advice before doing so, and finding Margaret overjoyed on behalf of his sister, convinces himself that though he might not love Hester, she is certainly a noble and good choice for a wife in theory and that anyone should be proud to make her his wife.

Hester and Hope marry, and go on a brief honeymoon to Oxford. During that time, Margaret works to furnish their new home (she too will live with them) and spends some time with Maria. Among other things, the two women talk philosophically of love and the nature of marriage--Maria, in particular, has a rather startling understanding of true love as a kind of death for individuals, fraught with difficulty. When Hester and her new husband return, they settle into their new life as a married couple, giving their first dinner party. Soon, a rumor gets started in Deerbrook that Mr. Philip Enderby was engaged to a young woman named Miss Bruce, and had been so engaged for a long time. Margaret finds that she cannot take this news without a significant amount of discomposure, despite her notions of herself as being generally calm about the whole thing. In fact, though she didn't know it, she had been expecting that Enderby would one day ask her for marriage. Mr. Hope and Hester have their own troubles; because Mr. Hope voted for an unpopular candidate in the local election, many of his patients shunned him and he began to lose business. Hester met with cold attitudes from the local tradespeople, and loses her own composure. To make matters worse, rumors begin to circulate about Mr. Hope stealing bodies from graveyards in the name of science. As a result of all of these tensions, relations between Margaret and her sister also deteriorate a bit, though they both do much to try to prevent this from happening.

One day, Margaret falls into a frozen pond. Hope is too late to be among one of the men who pulled her out, but he arrives just as she was emerging from the pond and she sees the agony on his face, and witnesses his low cry, "My Margaret." His feelings for her rush back, but he soon suppresses them again. Eventually, things take a turn for the better when Philip comes to town and reveals that his connection to Miss Bruce was a full fabrication, likely by his own sister, Mrs. Rowland, who didn't want her own family marrying a relation of the Grey's, and poor relations at that. Philip chides Margaret for believing the rumor, but she says it is more that she believed that maybe he had never loved her in the first place and that she had been mistaken. The two reconcile and things look up for the time being. For Mr. Hope, however, troubles continue and culminate in a riot inspired largely by Mrs. Rowland's rumors about Hope. An unruly mob burns Mr. Hope's effigy, and destroy his property. Inside, Margaret, Hester, and the servants stand strong. After the ordeal, Mr. Enderby tries to convince Mrs. Rowland to renounce what she knows to be untrue, and to answer for why she said that he would marry Miss Bruce. Mrs. Rowland does not come around, however, and vows to fight her brother against the Hope's, Margaret, and the Grey's. Mrs. Rowland brings in another doctor, Walcot, to replace Mr. Hope, but Hope refuses to leave town. Meanwhile, Mrs. Enderby takes a turn for the worse and dies, but not before Margaret and Philip have had a chance to tell her of their engagement.

Mr. Walcot turns out to be rather young and easily influenced, a sort of tool for Mrs. Rowland's vendetta.  Thus, no one finds there to be much against him, so the Greys, the Hopes, and Margaret take him on a boating excursion. Enderby, who has left town to advance his career before marrying Margaret, returns during this excursion, and is oddly cold to Margaret. Mr. Hope ascertains that Mrs. Rowland has told him of Mr. Hope's initial attachment to Margaret rather than Hester, and Mrs. Grey confirmed Mr. Hope's initial surprise when she encouraged him to marry Hester. Mrs. Rowland has also fabricated that Margaret held an attachment to Hope previous to his marrying her sister. Devastated, Philip writes a letter to Margaret after his interview with Hope, vaguely berating her for not "trusting" him and revealing her past attachments. Margaret has no idea what he means, and says so much in a response, which is unfortunately intercepted by Mrs. Rowland and burned. Time passes, and Margaret resigns herself to such joys available as taking care of Hester and Hope's new baby, and takes on the cares of an increasingly impoverished household. They reach such a level of poverty that they must let Morris, the Ibbotson sister's old housekeeper, go. Still they manage to stand together through difficult times, and Margaret happily watches her sister and Mr. Hope develop a much healthier and mutually dependent and supportive relationship.

Soon, a fever comes to Deerbrook, and it is clear that Walcot is not up to the task of managing all of the cases. Though many leave the village, including the women and children of the Grey family, Margaret and Hester elect to stay behind to help Hope. Among the people that Margaret helps is a man named Platt and his family, a member of the country poor, whom Martineau depicts as highly superstitious, in addition to being desperately destitute. Margaret realizes as Platt dies that he was the man who came to their house one night when Hope was away to steal their food and money; she recovers from him a ring given to her from Philip. Among the villagers struck by the fever is Matilda, Mrs. Rowland's daughter. With her daughter on her deathbed, Mrs. Rowland allows Hope to come help, and renounces all that she has fabricated in the past. Philip has also returned to town, ostensibly because he still wants to make sure that Margaret and her family are okay. Mrs. Rowland comes clean, and Margaret and Philip reconcile. Matilda, sadly, doesn't make it. The novel ends with Margaret taking leave of Maria, about to begin her new life with Philip in London. Margaret confesses that she is now at ease with the state of Hester and Hope's marriage.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Martineau's task was to present a large-scale realist novel on middle-class country life, something hitherto unattempted. The indebtedness of Eliot's Middlemarch to Deerbrook is clearly evident. Besides the more superficial similarities like the characters Mr. Hope and Tertius Lydgate, both novels deal clearly with the limitations placed on an individual's capacity to act morally within the bounds of a particular social system. Mr. Hope's and Lydgate's struggle with continuing their profession is a direct result of their attempts to cast ethical votes, and to maintain an "independence" from petty gossip and politics which, they end up learning, is entirely impossible. Both men become deeply embroiled in what they have idealistically viewed as petty and beneath them, learning, humbly, that such petty things can end up meaning everything. For strong women in particular--Margaret, Hester, and Maria, the only social roles available are wife, if she should not lack both beauty or wealth, and governess if she should lack both. All three women struggle differently to live out socially acceptable lives given such constraints without losing sight of their own individuality. All three of these women end up finding solutions that "work" for each of them: Hester finds in Hope a husband that will temper her fiery flares of occasional jealousies such that she might freely live as her incredibly devoted and ardent self without fear of allowing her passions to get out of control, Margaret finds an apt partner in Philip (this relationship isn't really explored in depth in Martineau's novel, unlike Hester's and Hope's, so the only full picture of a successful marriage which Martineau offers is one in which the wife ends up under the "rule" of her husband, though she consents to this, and he is made better with her love and support), and Maria finds a way to hold a respectful position in society, earning her keep from a distance, which she comes to terms with as not loneliness to be pitied but a salutary solitude which grants her a more independent life than the likes of Margaret or Hester could live.  

One of the more interesting inventions of Martineau's narrative is Mrs. Rowland, who is also kind of a victim of social forces. Though Mrs. Rowland is clearly the "villain" of the story and the narrator reveals very little information that would encourage readers to sympathize with her. It isn't clear, in the end, why exactly she holds such malice for the Ibbotsons: after all, she isn't exactly a woman of strong religious or political commitments such that the Greys' "dissenter" status would really be behind her continued, obsessive machinations against those associated with them. At one point, very briefly, Hope tries to explain his theory of what might be behind Mrs. Rowland's evil:

"I take hers to be no uncommon case. The dislikes of low and selfish minds generally bear very much the character of hers, though they may not be pampered by circumstances into such a luxuriance as in this case. In a city, Mrs. Rowland might have been an ordinary spiteful fine lady. In such a place as Deerbrook, and with a family of rivals' cousins incessantly before her eyes, to exercise her passions upon, she has ended in being..."

Here, Hope leaves off and Margaret concludes, "what she is." This is a very clinical explanation of why Mrs. Rowland commits evil, one which is appropriately relayed by the doctor. Margaret, however, prevents Hope's final "diagnosis," preserving, in a way, Mrs. Rowland's humanity and not turning her into merely a "case." What Hope's assessment reveals, nevertheless, is that he believes some natures to simply be "selfish," and prone to competition--in a city, where capitalism is the rule of life, she might be neutralized by other competition. In the country, there is no check on her selfish competitiveness, and so its exercise becomes excessive and uncontrolled. Hope's view here checks out with Martineau's solution for Hester, who also has certain tendencies that need to be regulated by social institutions (in her case, jealousy by marriage). The difference with Mrs. Rowland's case is that she lives under the wrong social institutions necessary for the regulation of her selfishness. Deerbrook's faith in social regulation if applied "correctly" seems to me to be one of the essential differences which sets it apart from Middlemarch. Social institutions seem more like realities to live with and to continually struggle and carefully contend with in the latter work, whereas Deerbrook seems to really hold faith in the capacity of social institutions to regulate innate human sinfulness, if only they were applied appropriately to each "case" of the sinful human.

Selections from Algernon Charles Swinburne (Poems and Ballads, 1866)

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The first series of Poems and Ballads was published in 1866 and immediately met with considerable controversy and scandal largely because of its subject matter. Swinburne boldly covered topics like lesbianism, hermaphroditism, necrophilia and sadomasochism, and also made clear expressions of antitheism and pessimism more generally. In a famous review for the Saturday Review, John Morley called Swinburne a "scornful apostle of a crushing iron-shod despair" or "the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs." Swinburne's publisher withdrew the work, but Swinburne reprinted the text under another publisher accompanied by a personal justification of the work.

SUMMARY/THEMES:

A Ballad of Life
The collection begins with "A Ballad of Life" followed by "A Ballad of Death." Swinburne's imagery is immediately unexpected; in "A Ballad of Life," a woman has sorrow in her eyelids, holds a cithern of a dead lute player, and is surrounded by three men: Lust, Shame, and Fear. As he looks upon this scene, the speaker realizes that lust was love, shame was sorrow comforted, and fear was pity that was dead. Here, Swinburne revises orthodox conceptions of love, sorrow, and pity, showing their close relation to other values which may seem much more negative.
A Ballad of Death
"A Ballad of Death" continues the subject matter from "A Ballad of Life" but here, the lady has died and the speaker laments. He imagines seeing Venus, who tells him to "Arise, lift up thine eyes and see / if  any glad thing be or good / Now the best thing is taken forth of us." In the rest of the poem, the speaker fondly describes in detail the beautiful sight of the lady's corpse, with lips "Sweet still, but not now red."    
Laus Veneris (The Praise of Venus)
This poem is based on the medieval Tannhauser legend, in which the poet Tannhauser spends time with Venus in her subterranean home, emerging to seek absolution from the Pope. The Pope doesn't grant it, but later realizes that he should have when the papal staff breaks out in flowers. Tannhauser has returned to Venus by that time. Edward Burne-Jones created a painting in 1879 to accompany Swinburne's poem. In the poem, the speaker can't escape his desire, though he wants escape, through death:  "Ah yet would God this flesh of mine might be / Where air might wash and long leaves cover me, / Where tides of grass break into foam of flowers, / Or where the wind's feet shine along the sea." The speaker also reveals clearly sadomasochistic tendencies: "Ah, with blind lips I felt for you, and found / About my neck your hands and hair enwound. / The hands that stifle and the hair that stings / I felt them fasten sharply without sound." The sharpness of desire, and its imbrication with pain directly has bearing on how the poet views his faith. Going before Christ, he realizes that he cannot receive mercy because he feels that the burning love which he feels is "more beautiful than God." The poet ultimately suggests that the intensity of his sensory and sensual experience communicated in violent yet sensual recurring images of "crushed fruit" and flames is like the intensity of Hell's fires, so what might he care that he should burn in Hell for enjoying erotic experiences in the present? Vividly, he writes, "And I forget tear and all weary things / All ended prayers and perished thanksgivings, / Feeling her face with all her eager hair / Cleave to me, clinging as a fire that clings..." This fire is clearly akin to "such-like flame / Shall cleave to me for ever; yea, what care, / Albeit I burn then, having felt the same?" The idea that there might be pleasure in Hell fire, if it should be like love's fire seems to be the logical extension of Swinburne's unprecedented ideas.

Isobel Armstrong succinctly reads the poem as presenting "two equally unsatisfying poles of Eros and Christ," though Eros is strong, it is not necessarily stronger than God. The matching of Hell fire with love's fire certainly suggests a kind of equality in inflicting pain.

The Triumph of Time
Written in ababccab stanzas. The speaker reproaches an unnamed lover for her infidelity: "We had grown as gods, as the gods above, / Filled from the heart to the lips with love, / Held fast in his hands, clothed warm with his wings, / O love, my love, had you loved but me!" He reflects on how time triumphs in that it perpetuates the transitoriness of all strong feelings. He laments beautifully that "It is not much that a man can save / On the sands of life, in the straits of time...Some waif washed up with the strays and spars / That ebb-tide  shows to the shore and the stars; / Weed from the water, grass from a grave, / A broken blossom, a ruined rhyme." Eventually he reaches a kind of pessimistic resolution, saying that he will surrender himself by drowning in the sea, "the great sweet mother, / Mother and lover of men, the sea." This is kind of a scary sweetness, though, as she is "fed with the lives of men," "subtle and cruel of heart." The speaker's reasoning, however, is that death "is the worst that comes of thee," referring to the sea, and that although she feeds on the dead, his lover has done worse by feeding on his heart. Near the end of the poem, the speaker moves abruptly to talk about how he would rather be a "singer in France of old" who had  a woman who loved him, bade him to live, and then who died right afterwards because for the speaker, "Love will not come to me now though I die, / As love came close to you, breast to breast." Ultimately though, the speaker's seemingly defiant acceptance of death doesn't really cement itself, he wonders longingly in the final lines, in reference to his lover, "...in heaven, / If I cry to you then, will you hear or know?"


Anactoria
Extreme, sadomasochistic desires are expressed in this poem which imagines Sappho's lesbian love of Anactoria: "I would my love could kill thee; I am satiated / With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead." Desire only grows, and having been satisfied, must now seek a realm beyond--the wish that the beloved may suffer pain and die: "I would find grievous ways to have thee slain, / Intense device, and superflux of pain / Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake / Life at thy lips, and leave it there to ache." Cannibalism also forms a part of the speaker's desire, she expresses of Anactoria, "That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat / Thy breasts like honey! that from face to feet / And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed!" As suggested also in "Laus Veneris," this kind of intense love imbricated by pain is all the more attractive because it seems to rival the intensity of God: it is "crueller than Hell," "crueller than God." Ultimately it is even a resistance to God, in that the speaker refuses to be suppliant and satiated with the little things that God generally allots us with: she refuses to be "like those herds of his / Who laugh and live a little, and their kiss / Contents them, and their loves are swift and sweet..."


The Leper
In simple tetrameter lines rhymed abab, the speaker details his love of a woman who has gotten leprosy. Again his desire is in resistance to God: "Yea, though God always hated me, / And hates me now that I can kiss / Her eyes..." after she is a corpse. Everyone casts her out when she gets leprosy, but he takes her in, giving her water and bread because "such joy I had / To do the service God forbids." The poem ends with some ghastly images of her being dead for six months, while the speaker still holds "In two cold palms her cold two feet." "Her hair, half grey half ruined gold, / Thrills me and burns me in kissing it." Still, his dominion over her isn't quite enough for him, despite the radical intensity of his desire and devotion. At the end of the poem, he still envisions that "she kept at heart that other man's," and this undoubtedly yet bothers him.

Fragoletta
This poem unrestrainedly celebrates the unorthodox beauty of androgyny which the speaker claims is beautiful because of its strangeness: "I dreamed of strange lips yesterday / And cheeks wherein the ambiguous blood / Was like a rose's--yea, / A rose's when it lay / Within the bud." There's something deliciously transgressive about someone who isn't just man or woman, and the speaker feels oddly reverent towards the genitalia of a hermaphroditic individual, while also expressing sexually explicit desires without much abandon: "I dare not kiss it, lest my lip / Press harder than an indrawn breath, / And all the sweet life slip / Forth, and the sweet leaves drip, / Bloodlike, in death." The poem also connects something virginal to the strangeness ("virginal strange air") further signaling the pleasure in transgression.

Hermaphroditus
Written as four stanzas, each a modified Petrarchan love sonnet: abbaabbacdcdcd. The final sestet "cdcdcd" strongly suggests entanglement rather than the push forward of the traditional cdecde. The first sonnet describes the struggle at the center of the hermaphroditic experience: "Two loves at either blossom of thy breast / Strive until one be under and one above." There is actually quite a bit of despair in this, and the sense of entrapment paints a very different picture of hermaphroditism than "Fragoletta": "A strong desire begot on great despair, / A great despair cast out by strong desire." The second sonnet imagines a hermaphrodites as "a pleasure house" made by Love "for all the loves his kin" but ultimately a kind of mistake on Love's part because the unresolved struggle leads to Love himself not really wanting to enter in to this "pleasure house." The third sonnet offers some measure of redemption, admitting that there is yet something beautiful, other-worldly about hermaphroditism: "To what strange end hath some strange god made fair / The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?" (Yet, note that the flowers are "fruitless"). Finally, in the fourth sonnet, the speaker can't decide how he feels about hermaphrodite: there's kind of a both a love and a fear, "So dreadful, so desirable, so dear?"


Dolores (Notre-Dame Des Sept Douleurs - Our Lady of Seven Sorrows)
This poem is written in anapestic trimeter, usually a comic and light meter but in Swinburne's poem, clearly feels serious, struggling, desirous yet reverentially restrained. It is essentially an ode to Dolores, "Our Lady of Pain" (this address ends each stanza). Subtitled "Our Lady of Seven Sorrows," Swinburne makes the controversial move of linking an epithet for Virgin Mary to this pagan goddess of pain. The poet imagines briefly Dolores's origins, wondering: "Wert thou pure and a maiden, Dolores, / When desire took thee first by the throat?" This might suggest a development from Virgin Mary to Dolores, signaling that Dolores occupies a more advanced, mature, and ultimately more desirable way of living. Most of the poem spends time detailing the sadomasochistic pleasures that Dolores is goddess of, and prays to her to bring these pagan pleasures back to the Christ-loving world. In Blakean fashion, the speaker reverses traditional notions of virtue as a good and turns it into a vice. For example, he prefers the "raptures and roses of vice" to the "lilies and languors of virtue," associating happiness and passino with vice and laziness and wasting away with virtue. The novelty of inflicting or receiving pain is at the heart of the speaker's eagerness in what he feels to be a stilted modern age: "what new work wilt thou find for thy lover, / What new passions for daytime or night?" Here he is almost obsessive and can't help repeating the word "new" over and over again almost like a child awaiting gifts. Importantly, though, such eagerness is a result not of childishness but of great maturity: he is "wearied of sorrow and joy," key concepts of Christian morality and faith which no longer have the power to hold him. He suggests a need for a reversion back to classical times, when "the gladiator, pale for thy pleasure, / Drew bitter and perilous breath;...when the world was a steed for thy rein; / when the nations lay prone in thy porches." The speaker laments quite explicitly the Christian creed when he calls directly upon Dolores to "redeem" them, as if standing in for Christ: " What ailed us, O gods, to desert you / For creeds that refuse and restrain? / Come and redeem us from virtue / Our Lady of Pain." The final line, celebrating the "Joys of thee seventy times seven" directly beats out the "seven sorrows" of Mary.

The Garden of Proserpine
This is a poem of negation in that the speaker says he is "tired of tears and laughter, / And men that laugh and weep; / Of that may come hereafter / For men that sow to reap." He rejects any sense of futurity and wishes just to sleep, the state of being which the Garden of Proserpine offers. The garden is described by a list of things that do NOT grow there, except poppies (signaling forgetfulness). Unlike many of the other poems described so far, this speaker seems completely exhausted from the intense desires which have held such a fascination before: "From too much love of living / From hope and fear set free, / We thank with brief thanksgiving / Whatever gods may be / That no life lives for ever..." Read in conjunction with poems which deal primarily with the fiery and powerful intensity of unorthodox love and its capacity for wrestling with God himself, this poem acknowledges that such intensity isn't sustainable, and calmly finds comfort in death's release from such passions.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Edition: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Norton Critical Editions)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Although Jekyll and Hyde has since won critical attention for its literary merits, its original publication as a shilling paperback led to audiences questioning the work's merit and morality, linking it to the sensationalistic, "low" fiction that tended to be published in the same format. Indeed, Jekyll and Hyde appeared in January of 1886, just a year after Stevenson's story called "Markheim" was published, a sensational Christmas "crawler" which critics have linked to Jekyll and Hyde. Stevenson's own account as far as the writing of Jekyll goes is that a nightmare gave him the primary idea for his plot.

SUMMARY:
The account opens with a character sketch of the lawyer, Mr. Utterson, who isn't particularly warm or interesting but "somehow lovable." He had a "catholicity of good-nature" which made him the welcome companion of many, including his kinsman, Richard Enfield, briefly described as "the well-known man about town." On a walk one day in the evening, Enfield and Utterson approach an abandoned house, and Enfield tells a story in connection with that house (The geography of where they are in London is unspecific). One night, Enfield witnessed a strange man trampling over a young girl child. Needless to say, this caused a ruckus, and Enfield collared the man, demanding reparations from him. The man's name is "Hyde" and he takes out a key, goes into the abandoned house, and returns with a check in someone else's name. Enfield doesn't reveal whose name the check is in, because it is a respectable one--Utterson says, however, that he knows what name Enfield refers to because of some prior information that he had.

Back at home that evening, Utterson re-reads a will he has drawn up for his childhood friend, Dr. Jekyll, which bequeaths all of his money and estate to this same "Hyde" which Enfield has mentioned. Disturbed, Utterson thinks that he should find out more about Hyde. Utterson manages to make Hyde's acquaintance, and is struck by his aversion to Hyde even though he can't quite pin down what is wrong with him. Before confronting Jekyll about this unsavory character, Utterson visits Dr. Lanyon, a close mutual friend. Lanyon talks about how he doesn't know what has been going on with Jekyll in recent years; only that the two friends had been estranged for some time. When Utterson ventures out to Jekyll's house, he sees Hyde going into Jekyll's laboratory through a back door. Jekyll isn't home, and this disturbs Utterson. When Utterson finally gets to confront Jekyll about Hyde, Jekyll assures Utterson that it isn't a case of blackmail, saying that he might be rid of Hyde whenever he might choose to be rid of him. Jekyll enjoins Utterson to promise that he will carry out his wishes as far as his will went.

Approximately one year elapses, and the illustrious M.P. Thomas Carew is brutally beaten to death in the street. Carew had in his possession a letter for Utterson. It turns out that a maid has seen Hyde beat Carew to death with a club which belonged to Jekyll. Utterson again visits Jekyll, who shows him a letter from Hyde that informs Jekyll he has escaped and will not return. Mr. Guest, a clerk, compares this letter to a letter of invitation which Utterson receives from Jekyll and suggests that the handwritings are similar. Utterson suspects Jekyll of forging a letter to cover up for Hyde. For a time after Hyde's disappearance, Jekyll seems to have recovered his former spirits, entertaining friends and even reconciling, it seems, with Lanyon. Suddenly though, Jekyll is out of sorts, and refuses to see his friends. Utterson is further disturbed when Lanyon falls ill and dies. Before his death, Lanyon had left Utterson with two letters: one in his own hand to be opened only by Utterson, and the other specifying that it should only be opened upon Henry Jekyll's disappearance or death.

One night, Poole, the Butler at Jekyll's house, calls on Utterson, fearing that something has gone wrong--specifically, that Hyde has murdered Jekyll and taken over his place. Banding together, Poole and Utterson break into Jekyll's lab, and find the dead body of Edward Hyde, apparently having commited suicide by ingesting cyanide. Near the body is Jekyll's will, altered to leave all of his money to Utterson. Utterson also finds a letter from Jekyll addressed to him which directs him to read Lanyon's account because he has "disappeared, under what circumstances I have not the penetration to foresee." Back in his study, Utterson reads Lanyon's account, which tells of how he was called upon to do a favor for Jekyll via a letter: he was to break into Jekyll's lab and to retrieve some items from a drawer and to deliver them to someone who would come for them at midnight. That "someone" is Hyde, who mixes the contents of the drawer (some powder, and red liquid) and drinks it. Upon drinking this concoction, Hyde is transformed into Jekyll. Lanyon says that the sight of this transformation has shaken him to the core such that he will die soon. The final document that is revealed is Henry Jekyll's own account, which fully reveals how Jekyll tried to divide the "good" and the "evil" sides of his humanity through a potion. At first, his transformation into "Hyde," his evil counterpart, offered him the liberty to live a sordid, underground life of vice in London without repercussions to Dr. Jekyll's good name and character. Soon, however, Dr. Jekyll would find himself spontaneously and involuntarily turning into Hyde--his purely evil self was getting stronger and stronger. At one point, he locked himself out of his lab, and so needed Dr. Lanyon's help to retrieve his potion. In the end, Hyde proved too strong for Jekyll, and he ran out of potion (he was unable to replicate the potion because the first batch contained an unknown impurity which turned out to be effective for the transformation). Jekyll has written this letter while on the last draughts of the old potion, and he ends saying that he will not know what will happen when he becomes Hyde permanently: "Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? Or will he find the courage to release himself at the last moment?"

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Understandably, much of the critical work on Jekyll and Hyde has focused its energies on the titular figures: is Hyde a kind of racial "other" of Jekyll? A doppelganger whose enjoyment of freedom, and liberty comments on the limits Victorian social roles have on Jekyll? A lower figure on the evolutionary scale than Jekyll (especially as Utterson described Hyde as "tryglodytic" or ape-like)? Or simply, the evil part of man's nature because of being tempted by Satan during the fall?

I want to turn my focus, then, on some of the other characters and how they function in the narrative. In other famous late Victorian stories like Stoker's Dracula, upstanding members of society assemble documents together for the purpose of successfully discovering and then defeating the monster. Stevenson's group of respectable "professional men"--Utterson, Lanyon, Guest, and also Poole might be included as one who occupies a specific professional role, though not middle-class as the rest--fail, however, to discover anything at all and in the end, the monster destroys himself. Yet the narrative's inclusion of documents in the form of Jekyll's will, his letters, and chapter headings and subject matter that like official accounts like newspaper articles or court testimony ("The Carew Murder Case," "Incident of the Letter," "Remarkable Incident of Dr. Lanyon") reminds us of works like Dracula, sensation fiction novels like Collins's Woman in White, or detective fiction. These official or official-like accounts, however, are impotent as far as solving the mystery goes. The mystery is controlled to the very end by the possessor of the secret: Jekyll (and then Lanyon, in Jekyll's service) compels Utterson not to open the letters which reveal the full truth to him until after everything has been fully-played out. The reason given for Utterson's following these directions is the bond of friendship, of male camaraderie of early years. This camaraderie and close bonds of male friendship, however, prove to  ensure Jekyll's final isolation. He is alone from beginning to end.

The impotence, then, both of the documents/testimony and of male friendship (and furthermore, the complete absence of female characters in the novella) might comment on the limits of middle-class bachelors living respectable, professional lives. Before the great struggles of human import (good versus evil), these men are rather useless: Lanyon broke off ties with his supposedly close friend Jekyll because Jekyll was thinking about ideas beyond the scope of what was acceptable for the polite scientific community, and Utterson's rather bland inclination to follow the rules of male homosociality prevents him from getting to the truth sooner so that he might help his friend. Perhaps, actually, the very first lines that sketch out Utterson's character are the most damning: he is fond of saying, "I incline to Cain's heresy," in that he would "let [his] brother go to the devil in his own way." This, exactly, is the whole problem with men like Utterson: he is well-liked because he has a "catholicity of good-nature" but as far as connecting with others on any level more than a superficial and tolerant friendliness (which polite society expects from him), he is fearfully inept.

Selections from Christina Rossetti

“Goblin Market,” Rossetti's most famous poem, tells the story of Laura and Lizzie, two sisters, one of which is tempted by the goblin's fruit and one who saves her sister after she has fallen. The poem begins catchy adverstising jingle of the goblins: "Morning and evening / Maids heard the goblins cry: / Come buy, come buy our orchard fruits, / Come buy come buy." Laura is tempted by their catchy phrases, and wants to partake of the fruits but has no coin. The goblins answer that she might cut off one of her golden locks in exchange for fruit. She agrees and sensually enjoys the fruits she buys. Back at home, Lizzie tries to warn Laura away from the goblin men, reminding her of "Jeanie, / How she met them in the moonlight" and then "pined and pined away." This is, of course, what ends up happening to Laura and so Lizzie must save her. Lizzie goes herself to the goblins, tosses them a penny and asks them to toss her some fruit. The goblins don't allow her to leave and they harass and assault her. Lizzie withstands the attack, "White and golden Lizzie stood / Like a lily in a flood," maintaining her chastity and refusing to eat the fruits which are shoved into her mouth. Triumphant, Lizzie goes back to Laura back at home and allows Laura to kiss her on the mouth. Having licked the fruits off of her pure sister's mouth, Laura is cured. In the end, though the poem strongly suggests the primacy of sisterhood over male-female relationships, the two of them marry. Still, they pass on the importance of sisterhood to their daughters, telling them of the story of the goblin man: joining hands, the children would chant, "For there is no friend like a sister / In calm or stormy weather; / To cheer one on the tedious way, / To fetch one if one goes astray, / To lift one if one totters down, / To strengthen whilst one stands." The poem seems to suggest that men are really only needed in order that women might have children (and specifically, daughters)--otherwise, Lizzie and Laura's triumph against the male sex seems rather complete. Additionally, the male sex (via the goblins and their advertising jingle) is associated with an unhealthy economy of buying and selling and delirious consumption which the women successfully resist by reaffirming less "modern" relationships and traditions (sisterhood, and cautionary tales passed down through the generations).  

“The Prince’s Progress” is the story of a prince who takes a long time to get to his waiting bride. When he reaches her finally at the end, she has died (apparently, ten years have passed). Along the way, the Prince encounters a milkmaid enchantress (“Was it milk now, or was it cream? / Was she a maid, or an evil dream?”) from whom he begs a glass of milk. In return, she exacts from him the price of keeping her company for one day. Next, the prince encounters a “land of chasm and rent, a land / of rugged blackness.” Needing shelter, he finds a cave in which an old man is stirring a pot. The old man says he is preparing the elixir of life, and tells the prince he may stay with him if he helped him with the potion. The old man dies before he can take a draught of the potion; the prince takes a phial of it, thinking that his bride would forgive his delay if he brought her the elixir. Finally, the prince nearly drowns on his journey, and is recovered by unknown beings (“Kind hands do and undo, / Kind voices whisper and coo”). When he finally reaches the bride’s palace, he meets with her funeral: she wears poppies in her hair, which has turned from brown to silver.

“Song [‘When I am dead my dearest’]”: In this short poem of sixteen lines, the speaker asks her lover to sing no songs for her after she is dead, negating also the usual tributes of roses or cypresses on her grave. She would rather he be the “green grass above [her]” and charges him to remember or forget, as he will. The second stanza explains that this is because she will not experience earthly sensory experiences such as shadows, rain, or the nightingale and that she too will either forget or remember after death. 

“In an Artist’s Studio” describes how "one face" haunts the canvases of a (male) artist's works. The ending reveals that the face in its various contexts is "Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; / Not as she is, but as she fills his dream," suggesting the actual woman's separation from the image, which seems subordinated to the life of the male artist. 

“A Better Resurrection” consists of three stanzas, each of which metaphorize the speaker's fallen condition and the need for Jesus Christ to bring her out of this condition. The first stanza says that her heart is like a stone, "numbed too much for hopes and fears" and her life is a "falling leaf" so she exhorts Jesus to "quicken" her. The second stanza says that her life is as barren as a "harvest dwindled to a husk," so she exhorts Jesus to "rise" in her. Finally the speaker imagines herself as a cracked bowl that needs to be repaired by the fire of Christ in order that he may drink from it. The progression suggests that the third metaphor is the most effective--it is more violent, less naturalistic, and more subservient, as the bowl needs to be repaired in order to serve Chris. 

“Christian and Jew: A Dialogue” imagines a Christian speaker describing the various joys in perceiving God while the Jewish speaker fails to perceive these joys. The stanzas alternate between the Christian's joy and the Jew's denial--for example, the first stanza reads, "'Oh happy happy land! / Angels like rushes stand / About the wells of light.' -- 'Alas I have not eyes for this fair sight: / Hold fast my hand.'" Finally the Christian tells the Jew, "Be not afraid, arise, be no more dumb; / Arise, shine / For thy light has come." The solution which the poem offers is that God will "blot out their sin / Let life begin." The poem's overall structure sets up a problematic relation, and answers that God alone (and not the Christian) can do the work of saving the Jew from his sins.

In “The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children [Under the Rose],” the speaker is Margaret, an illegitimate child born to an unknown father. She begins by telling that she was born "under the rose," knowing her mother but not her father. Because of the shame of her birth, she was sent away to a village where dwelt "my Lady at the Hall," a well-to-do, unmarried lady who did not stint anyone who needed something from her. When Margaret's old nurse dies, Margaret receives a ring which holds the secret of her birth. Saddened by her old nurse's death, Margaret also begins to waste away, but the lady comes to sit by her bedside. Gradually, Margaret comes to see that the lady is her mother, though this relation must remain unspoken. When Margaret gets better, she becomes a maid (really a "friend, servant, child," she says) at the lady's hall. There, she lives without acknowledging the relation, though in the end she does not blame her mother but curses her father, and makes the radical statement that she'll not own any man's name: "I'll not blot out my shame / With any man's good name / But nameless I stand, / My hand is my own hand, / And nameless as I came go to the dark land." This final line signals that the only "equality" that might be available is that of when everyone goes to their grave, but this is better than submitting to the inequalities perpetuated by society.

“The Lowest Room” contrasts two sisters: the speaker reflects on the heroism and passion of the classical age, having read Homer, and her sister dismisses past heroism and is content with the life of the pious, contemporary Christian wife. The speaker protests that in classical times, "They hated with intenser hate / And loved with fuller love," living life with a greater passion than today. The sister shrugs off these sentiments and answers that "To me our days seem pleasant days, / Our home a haven of pure content...Homer, though greater than his gods, / With rough hewn virtues was sufficed / And rough hewn men: but what are such / To us who learn of Christ?" The poem breaks after the sister hears her name called outside in the garden; presumably it is her lover, and she immediately forgets the subject at hand. After the break, the speaker says that twenty years have passed, her sister now a happy wife. The speaker, in contrast, has accepted a very different fate: "While I? I sat alone and watched; / My lot in life, to live alone, / In mine own world of interests, / Much felt but little shown." In a word, she has accepted the "lowest place." Interestingly, the poem ends on a Christian note, despite the speaker feeling more of a penchant for the classical world, and this Christian note suggests she believes that her version of Christianity to be truer than her sister's conventional version: Yea, sometimes still I lift my heart / To the Archangelic trumpet-burst, / When all deep secrets shall be shown, / And many last be first." She, in the "lowest place" will be first, as God has so promised in Matthew 20:16. 

“A Christmas Carol [In the bleak mid-winter’]” expresses how a "stable place sufficed / To Lord God Almighty Jesus Christ" even though neither Heaven nor Earth can hold or sustain him. This spurs the speaker to wonder what the speaker can offer God. Realizing that what seemed so humble (a stable, or "a breastful of milk" and "a mangerful of hay") was enough, the speaker offers his heart.

“A Birthday” is a short, lighthearted poem in easy tetrameter in which a speaker says that it is the "birthday of [her] life" because "my love is come to me." This seems a conventional love poem, but the imagery suggests a religious meaning. She says that she is "gladder" than a bird with a nest on a watered shoot, an apple-treat bent over with ripe fruit, a rainbow shell on a halcyon sea--all images of nature which seem rather precarious. Instead, the speaker desires to be adorned with clothing which alludes to Christ's sovereignty, which seems far more substantial than the (pagan) images of nature (though not that they aren't also powerful): "Raise me a dais of silk and down; / Hang it with vair and purple dyes..."  

Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw

Edition: Mrs. Warren's profession
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
George Bernard Shaw finished writing Mrs. Warren's Profession in 1893, but it was not produced on stage until 1903. Not surprisingly for its subject matter at the time, the play was met with controversy and unkind reviews labeling the work as immoral.


SUMMARY:
Act I:
Mr. Praed, a friend of Mrs. Kitty Warren's, arrives at a cottage garden and finds Vivie Warren, Mrs. Warren's 22-year old daughter reading books in a hammock. He informs her that Mrs. Warren has promised him a meeting with her and that she will also be presently arriving. Vivie shocks Praed with her firm masculine handshake, practical desire to be a law clerk, and her claim that she won a prize at Cambridge only because her mother promised her 50 pounds for it. Indeed, Praed finds that Vivie acts out the part of a young professional man: she affirms, "I like working and getting paid for it. When I'm tired of working, I like a comfortable chair, a cigar, a little whisky, and a novel with a good detective story in it." Soon, Mrs. Warren arrives, with another older man who is her friend, George Crofts. In a private conversation with one another, the somewhat sleazy Crofts tells Praed that he thinks he might be Vivie's father and he is worried because he is attracted to her. Meanwhile, Frank Gardner, a young and sporty young man arrives at the cottage as well. He is the son to a clergyman who tries to be an authoritative figure but thoroughly fails to do so, and a suitor to Vivie. When Mrs. Warren sees the Reverend Gardner, it is revealed that she is well-acquainted with him.

Act II:
Inside the cottage, Crofts and the Reverend counsel Frank against marrying Vivie (ostensibly because they all know Mrs. Warren's "profession"). When Vivie and Praed return from a walk together, it seems that she may have learned of her mother's profession from him. She tries to get Frank alone to talk to him, but his flippant flirtatiousness leads to her giving up having a serious conversation with him. Crofts, meanwhile, tells Mrs. Warren that it might be best if he marry Vivie, because then they could keep the secret of her profession within the family. Mrs. Warren resents Crofts's sleaziness. When Vivie and Mrs. Warren have a moment alone, Mrs. Warren finally explains her profession to her daughter, offering a compelling story that her circumstances led to there being no other option. Both Mrs. Warren and her sister Liz decided to capitalize on their appearances, indignantly refusing to "let other people trade in [their] good looks by employing [them] as shopgirls, or barmaids, or waitresses, when [they] could trade in them [them]selves and get all the profits instead of starvation wages." Vivie comes to understand her mother's position as a result of the limited options offered to women and admits: "My dear mother: you are a wonderful woman: you are stronger than all England." Thus, mother and daughter reconcile, Vivie feeling that they are both unconventional, independent women.

Act III:
The act opens the next morning at the Reverend's place. Praed and Crofts have stayed with him overnight, and apparently in his drunken state the previous evening, the Reverend had suggested inviring Mrs. Warren and her daughter over. This will be displeasing to the Reverend's wife, Frank's mother, for Mrs. Warren is not a "nice" woman (even if his wife may not know of his previous liaisons with Mrs. Warren). The wife decides to go out of town. When Vivie and her mother arrive, she has a chance to speak with Frank and to tell him that she has come to an understanding with her mother. Vivie also speaks with Crofts, who offers a marriage proposal which she naturally rejects, Crofts's offers of money and security not being particularly attractive to a person like Vivie who wants to hold her own. Vengefully, Crofts reveals to Vivie that her mother is still involved in the business of prostitution, trafficking other girls for profits. Moreover, Crofts was her business partner. He also reveals to Vivie and Frank that they are half sibilings, the Reverend being Vivie's father. Frank raises his rifle to shoot Crofts, but Vivie stops him. Vivie runs out and decides to seek work at Honoria Fraser's chambers as a kind of escape.

Act IV:
Frank eventually goes to the chancery after Vivie. There, he finds that she has become a partner at the firm. He tries to convince her to go out with him for a Saturday afternoon so that they may talk, but she refuses. Praed also shows up at the chancery, and together, Frank and Praed try to convince Vivie that she wants something more than the practical life she has chosen, but she resists both of their attempts to make her more "romantic" than she really is: "There are two subjects I want dropped, if you don't mind. One of them [to Frank] is love's young dream in any shape or form: the other [to Praed] is the romance and beauty of life, espcially Ostend and the gaiety of Brussels...If we three are to remain friends, I must be treated as a woman of business." Subsequently, Vivie reveals to the two of them what has happened and what her mother's profession has been and continues to be. The men are shocked, and leave off only to find that Mrs. Warren has arrived. Since Vivie has run off for a moment, the men try to convince Mrs. Warren to cancel her visit, but she decides to stay. When Vivie meets with her mother, she berates her for continuing her business, and lets her know that she wants nothing to do with her money. It isn't because of the profession's taint, Vivie says, but because her mother's continuance in the business reveals her to be a "conventional woman at heart" who desires the same trappings as any rich woman might desire: a life of leisure, nice clothes, operas, and diamonds. Vivie disowns her mother, and turns back to her work.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
While George Bernard Shaw wrote in his 1902 preface that "Mrs. Warren's Profession was written in 1894 to draw attention to the truth that prostitution is caused, not by female depravity and male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together," it is clear that this isn't all that the play reveals. Mrs. Warren doesn't turn out to be the heroine who only engages in prostitution because she is pressed by circumstances (Augusta Webster's "castaway" is, by contrast). Mrs. Warren may have started her profession because circumstances allowed her no other way of maintaining as much freedom as possible, but later on she continues in the business of prostitution in order to live a conventional life of leisure. In valuing the trappings of a lady of leisure, Mrs. Warren has entrapped herself and lost her freedom.

Vivie might come closest to being the heroine of the story, in that she is able to reject the conventions  of living as a lady of leisure. However, Shaw seems to suggest that the only other alternative is yet another trap: Vivie ends up "trapped" in the capitalist (masculine) economy of working "to make more money than I spend." In that sense, Vivie acknowledges that she is like her mother, only that her mother cares more for spending than she does. Vivie seems completely absorbed in the task of working and money making for the sake of the task itself. There is something very unsatisfying about Vivie's final, "matter-of-fact" behavior--is this machine-like state truly the only sort of radical freedom available?

Portraits by Augusta Webster

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Augusta Webster's collection of monologues, Portraits was published in 1870. Portraits constitutes some of her her most major works. Although the collection has often been characterized as consisting of "dramatic monologues," Webster's poems in this collection often lack a silent listener so might be more aptly referred to as interior monologues or soliloquies.

SUMMARY/MAJOR THEMES:
Women in a world which favors men
"Medea in Athens," the poem which opens the collection, begins (as many of the poems will later on) in a disorienting way for the reader because the speaker seems to be in the middle of a long train of thought. "Dead, is he?" Medea begins, referring to her lover Jason who has left her to make a political marriage to Glauce. In Greek myth, Medea killed her two children in revenge and eventually marries King Aegeus of Athens. The poem seems to be the occasion of hearing of Jason's death after her new marriage. Medea  finds it strange that the news of Jason's death doesn't "seem either good or ill" to her but merely "strange." From here, she launches into imagining a prophecy "a god breathed by my mouth," musing vividly on Jason's thoughts as he is shipwrecked on the sea. She imagines him looking upon her beauty, appreciating her worth, and rejecting Glauce's: "Medea, with her skills, her presciences, / Man's wisdom, woman's craft, her rage of love / That gave her serve me strength next divine, / Medea would have made what I would; / Glauce but what she could." Like most male figures in Webster's poetry, Jason here appreciates women for what she can do for his own ambitions. Yet, one can easily imagine, from the exaggerated nature of Jason's repentance towards Medea that Jason's thoughts are Medea's own desires, rather than the "prophecy" which she says she gives. Finally, Medea says she sees Jason's death; he breathes out "Medea's prophecy" with his expiring breath. Having gone through his death in her mind, Medea then berates herself for dwelling on it: "Medea! / What, is it thou? What, thou, this whimpering fool, / This kind meek coward!" She thinks how she wants him still alive only that he might dream and yearn for her--these things he "did," but since he is dead, he is no longer. It turns out that the greatest part of her lament is that his death has allowed him to forget her. In certain moments, Medea again bursts out that she loved Jason, painfully detailing her hurt and how he had ruined her calm, how he "Didst burn [her] cheek with kisses hot and strange," forever robbing her of her innocent composure and goodness. The poem ends antagonistically, asserting that Jason has been the author of his own children's death, and that he shall have no one on earth to remember him by. This is her ultimate revenge against a man with great ambitions--to forget him after his death.

"Circe" begins with a description of a coming storm; it isn't clear from the beginning that this is a monologue. This becomes clear in the line, "Oh welcome, welcome, though it rend my bowers," signaling Circe's own happiness that change is coming to her calm isle (this is the storm during which Odysseus's and his men come to her isle). Circe is bored by the monotony of her perfect, pleasant isle (an allegory for the kinds of lives Victorian women are supposed to relish within the home?). "Give me some change. Must life be only sweet, / All honey-pap as babes would have their food?" About sixty lines into the poem, she reveals that it is a soulmate that she longs for. She turns over the nature of her soulmate's relationship to her in her mind, thinking how he may be the answer to the question of why she is fair, and even more extremely, how his existence answers the question of her existence: "Why am I who I am? / But for the sake of him whom fate will send / One day to be my master utterly." The notion that women come to see their own existence only through seeing how men see them finds repeated expression in Webster's poetry. Like Medea, Circe has prophetic abilities and sees Odysseus's men coming to her isle where they will drink of her wine and turn into beasts. She clarifies, however, that they will not be turning into beasts, exactly, but that they will merely be revealing their true selves. The poem ends with the approaching "speck" of the men's ship.

"The Happiest Girl in the World" is an unnamed individual, who thinks aloud of her lover's promises to return just a week ago. Love has made the passing of time strange to her, and herself strange to herself: "I am so other than I was, so strange...And I think nothing, only hear him think." She expresses something similar to Circe in how loving a man forces women see themselves as they are seen by the man. Her love is somewhat uncertain, she thinks, because she can't tell when it began. In another moment of thinking about herself through his eyes, she imagines the vision of herself that he saw as he saw her in her field: "And while he watched the yellow lights that played / With the dim flickering shadows of the leaves / Over my yellow hair and soft pale dress..." She worries that this strange reflexivity in which the supposed moment of love at first sight is actually, for her, seeing herself as he sees her (rather than seeing him), means that she doesn't love him. She struggles with "forgetting myself in him," and fittingly, her lover has told her that he sees that she loves him when she is asleep (and hence probably the only state in which she forgets to think about herself through his gaze). Her questionings of loved aren't worked out before her lover approaches at the end of the poem.  

"A Castaway" is the longest poem in the collection and boldly imagines a high-class prostitute's monologue. Webster's castaway breaks the stereotypes (as evident from Rossetti's speakers' assumptions about Jenny, for example) of the prostitute as either disempowered and victimized, or debased and evil. The prostitute here is a kind of free-thinker; she chooses her profession because she hates the available, conventional roles for women, and needs to make a living. Her position is not apparent from the beginning of the monologue, where she reflects on the "simple thoughts" of her past self, writing mundane tasks down in her diary like "Studied French for an hour," "Read Modern History," and "Trimmed up my grey hat." Such activities, she later realizes, make up the prisoner-like life which women are expected to inhabit. Above all, she is disgusted with society's hypocrisy, going through how each profession--preacher, doctor, journalist, and tradesman all are hypocritical in their own way. She claims herself free of such hypocrisy, however, in admitting she is equal to the lower-class prostitute, only that she deals in "choicer ware." Housewives are self-righteous in their "virtue," "glass-case saints / Dianas under lock and key" of whom the speaker asks, "what right / More than the well-fed helpless barn-door fowl / To scorn the larcenous wild-birds?" Though she has been cast away from society, she is free and importantly, she asserts, "I have looked coolly on my what and why, / And I accept myself"--more than what most people can do in Victorian society. The speaker tackles the issue of "surplus women" in this period, acerbically blaming "God himself / Who puts too many women in the world." In the same tone with which she challenges the patriarchal systems of society, she boldly challenges God to make it right by killing off his extra women. Her critique is sharp and widespread, covering such topics as the female education system, society's logic that a woman's worth fades with her youth, the nature of love between men and women as actually "all selfishness" on the part of men, and the indifference of modern society. The poem ends with an interruption by visiting female company, the only thing which seems to relieve her from the emotional toll that her intellectualizing has taken.

"Faded" is a female speaker's address to a portrait of herself in younger days. At first, she resents the portrait for its unfading beauty--like other women in Webster's poetry, coming to the sad conclusion that a woman's worth fades with her beauty and youth. She protests that society allows men who continue to be ambitious, "wast[ing]" their tired brains on schemes a child should laugh at" but that women "must give ruin welcome, blaze our fact / Of nothingness." She ends with a thought that brings her solace, however: that the portrait too will eventually decay, though it will take a long time to do so. The portrait and herself will have a shared fate: "Both shall have had our fate...decay, neglect, / Loneliness, and then die and never a one / In the busy world the poorer for our loss." Like "The Castaway" the poem's heavy reflections are interrupted by cheery female company.

Religious faith and doubt
In "A Soul in Prison" a "Doubter lays aside his book" and begins to speak, yearning for the "teacher" (the learned man who has written the book) to help him believe. Try as he might, however, he cannot believe--he can't find the ledges with which to climb out of the prison. He feels that the teacher has forsaken him, whereas he hasn't forsaken murderers, thieves, cozeners, and harlots. The speaker provocatively points out that doubt is actually a very humble state which very much desires faith: "Doubt's to be ignorant, not to deny: / Doubt's to be wistful after perfect faith." A bit later in the poem, a similar sentiment is expressed in "I love not God, because I know Him not, / I do but long to love Him--long and long / With an ineffable great pain of void." The central problem of the poem is that the strong desire to love God doesn't help someone get closer to loving God. As the poem draws to a close, the speaker becomes more and more dismissive of the "teacher": "Our doubt is consciousness of ignorance, / Your faith unconsciousness of ignorance."


"A Preacher" reflects on the need for someone to preach to him because though he has an impact on the faith of others, he feels that he has lost something of his own faith in the process of enabling other people to believe. "I who am no more / Than steward of an eloquence God gives / For others' use not mine." Like the speaker in "A Soul in Prison" the preacher has a "longing to love" but somehow he feels his own falseness. Try as he might, he can't awaken his sleeping heart. He considers if he might be able to terrorize himself into faith, reading "scriptural terrors" but realizes that this is a false kind of method. Though he genuinely feels "thrilled to see [his sermon] moved the listeners" he can't help but to perceive the thoughts in his well-written sermon to be nothing more than "habit," something rote and not alive.


Individuals out of joint
"Tired" is a monologue given by an older man musing on his peasant wife, whom he has idealized as somehow more "natural" than the women of greater social standing. He has discovered that she is just the same, and cares as much for conventions as any other woman: "She is just a bird / Born in a wicker cage and brought away / Into a gilded one." He admits, however, that it is his own hypocrisy as well that has made her thus. He tried to make his "violet" into a "rose," deeply caring to ensure that the other wives wouldn't laugh at her and that she would fit in. Thus, the speaker sadly admits that "my poor Madge / Has unawares informed me of myself" in that she has shown him that he was not free from the artificial cares of social convention. Moving on from thinking about Madge, the speaker expresses his weariness in an age where it seems, from the surface, that things are cleaner, more charitable, and "better," but that in reality "underneath" there are "spreading foulnesses." Hypocrisy rules the day, and men are not men but "types and portraitures / And imitative shadows." A more sensitive man than most, the speaker admits that "we make our women's lives" a "round / Of treadmill ceremonies, mimic tasks." Yet, he is too tired to fight against it all.

In "Coming Home," a soldier returns from the Crimean war, catching the train and thinking about how his family will have changed. Rather, he thinks that they will not have changed--his father will be reading the Times, his mother and sisters will be "tender" and "foolish," and his brother Hugh, a parish priest, will patiently offer his blessings. Only little Maude, he anticipates, will have changed because grown into a woman. He muses on the "dingy cross" that he has won in battle and decides that he will not bring it out to show his mother because "she'll prize it more / That a life saved went to the winning it," that she will not approve of the bloodiness of war. The speaker himself moves into a subtle critique of war, thinking of how he will know more of the war's purposes when he sits down to read accounts and newspapers than when he was actually fighting: while a soldier, "I only know my part / And theirs with whom I waited at our post / Or dashed at the word." War is a vast system and he only a cog in the machine. He winces when he thinks that he'll have to visit the wife of his dead friend. Here, his reflections end and he sees his house between the trees.

"In An Almshouse" features another speaker who feels out of joint with the "modern age," which is "anxious," "driven half mad with work, / It bids us all work, work; no need, no room / For contemplating sages that count life / A time allowed for solving problems in / And its own self a problem to be solved." He, however, is a thinker on such issues and refuses to "work," and hence he has ended up where he is. His love interest has married herself off, "a busy prudent farmwife all the week" and he feels alone, apart, but unable to live out the demands of modern life.

"A Dilettante" speaks his mind to his angsty friend, telling him that he ought to make his life easier by thinking not so much and simply accepting things with a passive sort of resignation: "And God has made a world that pleases Him, / And when He wills then He will better it; / Let it suffice us as He wills it now." The dilettante partakes of his natural surroundings and refuses to judge whether men and women around him are good or evil. Since his friend might think him callous or selfish, he offers a parable in which a little brook which readily fed a household water and the flowers it daily passed was re-directed into a "sandy arid waste" which needed water for corn to grow. The brook was too small for such a task, and it ran out. The tale is supposed to warn people that their actions against the way things were intended do more harm than good. In the end, the dilettante suggests that he and his angsty friend might not be so different: though the friend might be a "great boisterous wind," he is a "small fluttering breeze / To coax the roses open" and "perhaps [he has his] use no less than [the friend]."


Marriage and the artist in modern life
"A Painter" and "An Inventor" tell similar stories of how marriage levels an economic burden which is often at odds with the freedom of doing true creative work. Poor men, the painter says, must "have a sort of aptness for the style" of the day in order to earn his keep. He can't be independent; to achieve one's "masterpiece" means to wear oneself out because of the economic hardships that follow from being true to oneself rather than to the market. His poor wife (other than speaking her acknowledgment that she may have been a burden on him) seems silenced by the speaker asserting that she is happy in her supporting him and his work, yet another woman behind the scenes who is expected to live for her husband's ambitions. The speaker in "An Inventor" monomaniacally pursues his task and struggle to find the "secret" that will unravel the "petty flaw" in his great work of his life. Similarly, this monomaniacal ambition means "Stolen days; / Yes, from the little ones and grave pale wife / Who should have every hour of mine made coin / To buy them sunshine." The inventor laments that one needs to make such a choice as this: to be "traitor" to one's work, or to be "traitor" to one's family. There's a third consideration, he realizes--to be "traitor" to oneself. This just makes it all the more complicated and he decides to turn back with fervor to his task.

The Way of all Flesh by Samuel Butler

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Way of All Flesh, though written in the years between 1872 and 1884, was not published until 1903, after Butler's death. This was likely because the novel drew heavily from Butler's own upbringing in a strictly religious and patriarchal household. At the same time he was writing The Way of All Flesh, Butler was working on Life and Habit, a scientific work which challenges the assumption of random variation in Darwin's Origin of Species. Though an orthodox Darwinian in earlier years, Butler came to believe in the idea of "hereditary memory," unconsciously inherited from one's parents and shaped/modified throughout the generations. R.A. Streatfield, friend of Butler's and first publisher of The Way of All Flesh, suggests that the novel "ight be "taken as a practical illustration of the theory of heredity embodied in that book."


The publication ushered in Butler's reputation as an "anti-Victorian" and a "proto-modernist." His admirers have included late Victorians George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells as well as D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce.

SUMMARY:
The Way of All Flesh is narrated by a family friend of the Pontifexes, one Mr. Overton who came to be a sort of guardian and friend of Ernest Pontifex, the oldest son of Theobald Pontifex, himself the son of George Pontifex, who made a sizable fortune as a publisher and savvy advertiser of religious texts. Though Ernest is the novel's hero, the first part of the book expends a considerable amount of space to introduce Theobald Pontifex. Theobald was the second son of George, whose strained relations with his father are in part told by the inclusion of letters between father and son. George wanted Theobald to be a clergyman, and when Theobald weakly protests, George quashes his rebellion with a threat of disinheritance. Theobald give in, and soon becomes trapped by the matchmaking Mrs. Allaby into a marriage with Christina Allaby, a woman of rather overblown romantic attachments to religion which the narrator constantly ironizes. Theobald gains a position as the rector at Battersby, and the narrator strongly suggests that Theobald isn't particularly happy with his position or his marriage, but as a generally timid character, finds a way to settle into it.

Ernest was born to Christina and Theobald in 1835. In a rather pathetic scene, George Pontifex rushes into the cellar to retrieve some water from Jordan which he had collected for the purposes of baptizing his first grandson, only to trip on a hamper and break the bottle in his haste. George's servant resourcefully sops up the water with a sponge, and at a ridiculously pompous dinner to celebrate the occasion of Ernest's birth, George pretends like nothing of the sort has happened. At this point, the somewhat secretive narrator reveals that he was in love with Alethea, Theobald's sister, but that "it is impossible for me to explain how it was that she and I never married" though "we knew that neither of us would marry anyone else." The narrator is severely critical of Ernest's upbringing: "Before Ernest could well crawl he was taught to kneel; before he could well speak he was taught to lisp the Lord's prayer, and the general confession." He offers an instance of Theobald's unjust cruelty when he beats Ernest for his inability to pronounce the word "come" (the young boy was only able to stammer out "tum"). Nevertheless, the narrator does allow that Theobald and Christina brought him up as they thought best for him.  

Christina had two more children, Joseph and Charlotte. During the unsuccessful birth of her fourth, she writes an overblown and highly melodramatic letter to Ernest and Joseph, entreating them to be pious and dutiful to their father and their God because she thought she might die. It is later revealed that Ernest wanted the narrator to include this letter (which Ernest eventually gets after Christina's actual death much later) in his account, so he does so--next to the narrator's commentary, Christina's letter is severely undercut and made light of. Soon, the Pontifexes decide to send the young Ernest to study with Dr. Skinner, the Cambridge man whom everyone knew to be a "genius" (though really a pedant, as the narrator reveals). At Dr. Skinner's in Roughborough, Ernest is subjected to monotonous and strict training in Latin and Greek. While Ernest is at Roughborough, his aunt Alethea decides to visit him, and determines also to take him on as one of her own cares. The two of them bond over their mutual interest in music, and Alethea encourages Ernest to build his own organ (hoping, secretly, that this will also help him bulk up a little and have a little more confidence as a result). Alethea even decides to move to Roughborough to further suss out if Ernest might be worthy of receiving her own money upon her death.

When Alethea falls ill suddenly, the narrator is called upon to be the executor of her will. Her conditions are that Mr. Overton would accept in trust everything which she had minus £5000 until Ernest reached the age of twenty-eight. If Ernest were to go bankrupt before then, Mr. Overton could keep the money. Additionally, Mr. Overton would be charged with investing the remaining £5000 in ways that he sees fit; these earnings would go to Ernest with Mr. Overton taking a small cut for his troubles. Back at Battersby after Alethea's death, the Pontifexes all believe that Alethea has left everything to Overton, and Theobald berates Ernest for not earning his aunt's trust enough to get her money. Ernest has some trouble in school, spending his pocket money on drinking and smoking and receiving less than ideal report cards (which the narrator includes as part of his account). Back at home for the holidays, Ernest meets a pretty servant named Ellen who, during the time when Ernest is home, gets pregnant and is sent away. Ernest doesn't know why she has been sent away, but feels bad for her, deciding to give her a silver watch (which his aunt gave him) and some money. Unfortunately, Ernest lies about what happened to the watch and his money, and his father finds out later what has happened through a pawnbroker who has received the watch from Ellen. Needless to say, he gets in no small amount of trouble with his father.


Ernest manages to make his way to Cambridge, where he does much better than at Roughborough. The narrator relays that Cambridge in 1858 was a time of relative calm, though Ernest would encounter a low-church, religiously evangelical group known as the Simeonites. Ernest at first makes fun of the Simeonites for their deliberately poor dress and austere ways, until he hears a sermon by a characteristic preacher. Ernest suddenly becomes intensely evangelical himself, experiencing a sort of sudden religious awakening which alarms his father. Ernest is soon ordained a deacon, but his religious beliefs again take a dramatic turn when he falls prey to a boy named Pryer's high church ideas when he serves as a curate. Along with Pryer, Ernest wholeheartedly embraces the idea that the masses need priestly mediation, that an elite should only have access to the Bible, and that a spiritual transformation of society on a grand scale was necessary. Their idea is to erect a "College of Spiritual Pathology" founded on systematic, scientific notions of how best to spiritually transform society. Ernest idealistically takes himself up amongst the London poor, comically trying to convert his neighbors, one of whom ends up knowing more than he does about theology. Things take a bad turn when the money Ernest gives to Pryer to put into the stock exchange is squandered and when Ernest visits a prostitute in hopes to "convert" her. In a misunderstanding of the situation, Ernest gets arrested and sentenced to six months labor. In prison, he falls ill and learns that Pryer has not only lost all of his money but also disappeared. 


In prison, Ernest turns to a more rationalistic way of looking at life. He also importantly comes to the realization that he must cut off ties with his parents, who have been responsible for his inability to have an independent mind of his own. The narrator concurs, and contends that this is actually the most Christian thing that Ernest has ever done: he was "giving up [his] father and mother for Christ's sake." After he leaves prison, Ernest decides to work his way up from the bottom of the social ladder, learning how to be a tailor. He experiences some slow but steady success. Back in London, Ernest runs into Ellen, and he ends up marrying her. The narrator reveals that he and Ellen "instinctively" don't get along; affirming how homosocial bonds inevitably become frayed when either member of a homosocial bond gets married. This antagonism that the narrator has against Ellen seems to one of the most psychologically and emotionally revealing aspects of his character thus far. The narrator's "instincts" toward Ellen turn out to be correct when Ellen ends up being an alcoholic and a bigamist--she had already been married to (and pregnant by) John, Theobald's former coachman. Between himself and Ellen, Ernest has two children, whom he sends away to be cared for, using money which Overton tell him as being from his aunt's estate. With the financial support of Overton, Ernest gets along okay, turning his attention to building up his income again and turning to literary pursuits in his spare time. Ernest even ends up making enough money to travel on the continent, and to engage in a brief (but failed) stint writing for the periodical press. Ernest is soon twenty-eight, and he inherits the money from his aunt's estate plus the profits from Overton's smart and steady investment, totaling £70,000. 


Soon after he has been made comfortable by his inheritance, Ernest receives a letter from his dying mother. He decides to visit Battersby, and finds that everything there seems the same, whereas he has changed much. He finds that subtle cutting remarks from Charlotte, Joey, or his father no longer affect him. Back in London after his mother's death, Ernest turns to writing unorthodox books "in which he insisted on saying things which no one else would say even if they could, or could even if they would." His first book proves the most successful, an anonymous collection of essays on theological and social subjects "purporting to have been written by six or seven different people," because the reviews were kept guessing that it might have been written by someone famous. Ernest books don't turn out to be successful, the narrator says, because they are "impractical," and because he didn't belong to any sort of literary "set" or "club." Ernest's only response is "wait," signaling his belief that his writings will be important to later generations. The novel concludes with the narrator calling Ernest an "advanced Radical," the first to have broken free from the molds and conventions which have shaped his family through the generations.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
Butler's "anti-Victorianisms" are fairly apparent: he critiques patriarchal austerity (Theobald and George), romantic religiosity (Christina), family and marriage (tellingly, both Ernest and the narrator end up bachelors), educational systems which stunt natural development (Dr. Skinner), religious movements/fads amongst university elites (Simeonites, Pryer), and the periodical press and its reviewers, to name just a few of Butler's obvious major targets.

Butler's "proto-modernism," however, seems less apparent. I want to approach the question of The Way of All Flesh's purported proto-modernism through a view of its form. I will focus particularly on its first person narrator, his compilation techniques of letters and other historical documents from Ernest Pontifex's life, and the ways in which the account is a "bildungsroman" of Ernest Pontifex. Overall, while these different aspects of the text contribute to a potential sense of its fragmentary nature, to place Butler's work into a genealogy which culminates in Woolf or Joyce seems a bit forced. However, to say, at least, that experimental elements in Butler's novel loosens the conventions of the Victorian novel seems appropriate to what Ernest ends up doing in becoming an "advanced Radical."

The First-Person Narrator/Chronicler: All that we really know about the narrator is that he is a bachelor (though it's "impossible" for him to say why), a writer of popular burlesque drama, godfather to Ernest, and someone who has always taken a critical view of how things were done in the Pontifex family. It isn't clear why he should turn family chronicler, or why he should offer this account of Ernest as his "hero" at all. For the most part, the narrator tries to maintain some sense of distance from the story, in his telling the story through the inclusion of documents, or withholding information about his own romantic attachment to Alethea. The moment where he seems the most emotionally invested and close is his anger when Ernest marries Ellen. He concludes that his hatred for her is "instinctive" and seems to strongly indicate that he favors homosocial relationships between bachelors, and more specifically, seems to regard his relationship with Ernest as one such homosocial relationship (before this moment, the narrator styles his role as primarily guardian to Ernest). Additionally, the narrrator's attitude towards Ellen's demise is fairly callous; indeed his portrayals of other women (Christina and Charlotte, for example), with the exception of the unmarried Alethea, seem equally callous and unsympathetic. We can safely say, I think, that the narrator favors homosocial relationships between bachelors as the most enabling relationships. The homosocial desire of the narrator complicates our view of his account of Ernest: how much influence does Mr. Overton in fact have on Ernest? He suggests that Ernest ends up a bachelor free-thinker on his own, that Mr. Overton lets him "fall," and simply helps him along when it becomes absolutely necessary to do so. That Ernest ends up exactly as the narrator does, however, tends to cast some suspicion on Mr. Overton as being much more of a "guardian" than he might admit to. One wonders, finally, how sufficient of a substitute "family" this kind of homosocial community might be--after all, Alethea's bequeathal is a necessary part of what makes this possible, and also it seems good that Ernest has children who end up being productive member of society in "conventional" ways (George becomes a bargeman, and Alice marries well).

Compilations/Documents: The narrator compiles letters, report cards, sermons, musical notations, and epitaphs to support his chronicle. One letter in particular, Christina's to her sons when she thought she was going to die, is one which Ernest tells the narrator to include, which suggests a kind of collaborative aspect to the work (this notion is strengthened by the various moments where the narrator tells of how Ernest "winces" at the narrator's inclusions, as if Ernest had much to do with the narrator's writing process). This suggestion of collaboration and the inclusion of other documents don't really contribute to an overall sense of greater objectivity--practically without exception, the documents occupy a place in the narrator's text as caricatures of people who produce them or the ideologies that they represent. Christina's letter caricatures her own melodramatic religiosity, and the report card from Skinner's school tallying the number of times each boy drank or smoked satirizes its own strict inflexibility. Thus The Way of All Flesh fails to be heteroglossic in the way that many Victorian realist novels strive to be--the account is through and through Mr. Overton's because his editorship and controlling commentary subordinate these lesser texts to his master narrative.

Bildungsroman: The irony with which Overton treats Ernest's development from Roughborough to Cambridge to his "epiphany" in prison and finally to his failed marriage makes the account feel much like Joyce's Portrait of an Artist at times. Like Stephen Dedalus, Ernest gets really into certain beliefs (his Simeonite period, his high-church principles, the collaborative marriage with Ellen), only to realize suddenly that these beliefs are false. The ending reveals Ernest to be triumphant in his artistic self, a bachelor and an "advanced Radical" who cared not for the market or the present-day audience, but only to convey the ideas which he thought right despite their being likely too unorthodox for the current generation. Ernest's triumph and final incarnation is actually much more certain than Dedalus's; there isn't a "fall" coded into his name. The only potential check to this triumph is that as in the case of Bulwer-Lytton's comedy, Ernest is only finally be the kind of independent artist that he wants to be because he has the money to do so, which came to him through no exertions of his own.