Edition: New Selected Poems of Stevie Smith
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The New Selected Poems (1988) of Stevie Smith were collected over a decade after her death in 1971. Interest in Smith's work was high in the 1980s; two different biographies of her were published, one in 1986 and the other in 1988.
SELECTED THEMES/COMMENTARY:
Death: Death figures in Smith's poetry as a frequently a kind of solace because of its certainty. Unlike God, Death when called will come, as the speaker asserts in "Come, Death." The speaker says, "I'd ask God to have pity on me, / But I turn to the one I know, and say: / Come, Death, and carry me away." In the short second stanza which forms the second half of this poem, the speaker finds Death to be sweet because of his sure subjection to the speaker's will: "Ah me, sweet Death, you are the only god / Who comes as a servant when he is called, you kno, / Listen then to this sound I make, it is sharp, / Come death. Do not be slow." The sense of Death as "sweet" rather than fearful makes it a companion charged with affect in other poems. "Tender Only to One" is a kind of love poem to death, in which the poet expresses her tenderness for only one, revealing at the end, "His name, his name is Death." "Company" is about how when other human company--friends, lovers, for instance--desert an old man, and he hears voices telling him, "Rely on yourself," Death comes as true company, who will surely not desert him at the end.
Academia, Literature: Smith explicitly distances her poetry from the literary canon and academic institutions; when she makes allusions, they are often irreverent and speak back to canonical poets ("Thoughts Upon the Person of Porlock," for example, humorously welcomes Coleridge's "Person of Porlock" and neutralizes the poet's indignance, even suggesting that he had already been stuck in the writing of Kubla Khan before the person's entrance). Poems like "Souvenir de Monsieur Poop," written in the voice of a self-important academic, scathingly critique the institutionalization of the literary canon and academic hierarchies: "I am the self-appointed guardian of English literature," he proclaims, following with a litany of blind "beliefs" without justification. He is devoted, of course, to Shakespeare and Milton, and Housman in modern times. He degrades youth and dogmatically upholds old age and "established classics" as the measure of wisdom. "To School" critiques the kinds of poetry encouraged in institutions of learning, asserting that the "Muse" has flown away from these schools, knowing better.
God/Christianity: As mentioned above in the commentary on how death figures in Smith's poetry, God (and more specifically, Christianity) repeatedly fails to give comfort or satisfying answers. Much of Smith's poetry speaks back defiantly against this lack of comfort and satisfaction, even while aware of this defiance's egocentricity. In "Egocentric" the speaker asks, "What care I if good God be / If he be not good to me," lines which are repeated again at the end of the poem as if creating a kind of egocentric mirror. The egocentric speaker's question, however, is one Smith takes seriously; the speaker is trapped and forced into her egocentrism because of the lack of sufficient explanation from God. This yearning for satisfying answers is repeated in many of Smith's other poems, perhaps most poignantly in "Oh Christianity, Christianity" and How do you see?," a longer poem which contains lines from "Oh Christianity, Christianity" in it. "Oh Christianity, Christianity, / Why do you not answer our difficulties?" the speaker simply asks. She follows with a series of equally simply-stated and earnest questions about how Christ could take on our sins, if he felt guilty, how he is a "perfect man" if man is by definition sinful, and how the Trinity is supposed to be unchanging when clearly Christ altered things. These are big questions, and the speaker asks them here not at all defiantly, and just the same as in "Egocentrism," receives no answers. In "How do you see?" the speakers doubts and questions transform themselves from yearning and desire into a more radical statement that Christianity is a just a "fairy story" and can't be real. But, because it has been so often the reason for doing "good," the speaker realizes that there is a real urgency to make sure our children learn to be good without Christianity, since they might soon all realize that it is just a "fairy story": "I think if we do not learn quickly, and learn to teach children / To be good without enchantment, without the help / Of beautiful painted fairy stories pretending to be true...we shall kill everybody, / It will be too much for us, we shall kill everybody."
Perhaps because God is so absent to Smith, she takes the opportunity to envision what He might be like, given his intransigent absence. "God the Eater" posits a gluttonous God feeding on human feeling, an idea which finds repetition in "Childe Rolandine" where an artist forced to work as a secretary-typist, suddenly decides to speak out the truth on how "There is a Spirit feeds on our tears, I give him mine, / Mighty human feelings are his food / Passion and grief and joy his flesh and blood, / That he may live and grow fat we daily die / This cropping One is our immortality." "God and Man" presents another possibility of God as a kind of fickle, flakey lover to man. The poem is written in the voice of God, exaggeratedly drawling, "Man my darling, my love and my pain," while also stipulating harshly, "Do not come till I call, though thou weariest first."
Animals and people: Domesticated animals (as pets, or in captured in zoos) often serve as occasions for critiquing human treatment of animals. "Parrot" is about an "old sick green parrot / High in a dingy cage"; the speaker wishes that his death might come soon to put him out of its misery. "The Zoo" reveals, through irony, the lack of human awareness of what he does when putting away a lion in a cage. A voice of authority tells a little boy that the lion "does not like you, little boy, / It's no use making up to him," wisely asserting that "God gave him lovely teeth and claws so that he might eat little boys." The poet chimes in, commenting on the irony of how despite such professions of understanding the nature of lions, humans cause the condition wherein "[h]is claws are blunt, his teeth fall out, / No victim's flesh consoles his snout, / And that is why his eyes are red / Considering his talents are misused."
"Nature and Free Animals" provides an explanation (and interesting defense?) for why people warp the nature of their animals. The poem starts with a didactic voice criticizing human domestication of dogs: "You have taught them the sicknesses of your mind / And the sicknesses of your body / You have taught them to be servile / To hang servilely upon your countenance." Later, we find that this is the voice of God, and not of the poet. The human's response is a reproach to God, suggesting that this is kind of the same thing which He does to humans, and if we are in His image, it is natural for us to do the same to animals.
Gender Relations: Relations between men and women in Smith's poetry are hardly ever satisfactory; selfish cads seem preponderant in her poetry, and so are victimized women who often participate in the process bringing about their victimization. "In Felice" is a good example of Smith's portrayal of these two types in heterosexual relations. The speaker is a woman who no matter how much she is ignored or cheated on by "Sir Rat," imagines he loves her. She delusionally repeats, "my heart is singing," even in cases where it is clear that her heart should not be singing: "No Madam, he left no message, ah how his silence speaks / He loves me too much for words, my heart is singing." "Valuable" juxtaposes the situations of girls in society and panthers kept in cages. Unlike the panthers, however, whose eyes say, "I am too valuable to be kept in a cage," girls themselves say "yes" to often to their own debasement and subordination, and need to learn how to say no. The speaker laments that "Nobody teaches anybody they are valuable nowadays." The speaker imagines the common retort from girls, that "I shall be alone / If I say 'I am valuable' and other people do not say it of me / I shall be alone, there is no comfort there." The speaker points out the difference between comfortable versus valuable, and how the latter is more important. Furthermore, "if everybody says it in the end / It will be comforting." Smith seems to think Christianity responsible for some of the cruelty against women which she observes around her; this idea is directly suggested in "How Cruel is the Story of Eve" in which the poet ascribes to the story "reponsibility / in history / for misery. The poet contrasts the story's unreality, its "legend" status, with the very real, "historical" harm which it perpetuates, imagining how the story "colours / All human thought."
"A House of Mercy" is one of Smith's autobiographical poems, on the house which she lived in with her mom and aunt and sister, in which she remained for much of her life. Smith has very positive associations of strength with their all female house, "For all its faults, / If they are faults, of sternness and reserve, / It is a Being of warmth I think; at heart / A house of mercy."
War: Romana Huk's recent study of Stevie Smith links her work to the two world wars which she lived through, reading against the grain of the assumption that because she spent most of her life in the suburbs, and styled herself as a bit of an eccentric, that her work doesn't really engage with the big questions of what poetry or literature more broadly had to bring to a post-war, traumatized western world. "The Poets are Silent" wrestles with the very question of the place of poetry after the trauma of war, providing the answer, in four short lines that silence is in fact a kind of poetic response in itself: "There's no new spirit abroad, / As I looked, I saw; / And I say that it is to the poets' merit / To be silent about the war." There is nothing to be said, but saying nothing is in fact saying something, and silence seems the most profound response to the experience of war.
Smith's poetry expresses alienation before the wars which happened in her lifetime, often figured along gender lines. In "The Little Daughters of America" (subtitled, Pearl Harbor, 1941), the bellicose, virile "Admirals Curse-You and No-More" have nothing to do with "the little daughters of America"; the poet points out the great gap between domestic images of patriotism and the combative spirit which carries on the operations of war. "I had a dream" similarly comments on the alienation of women from the battlefield, the speaker imagining herself as Helen of Troy, talking to the prophetic but cast-aside Cassandra. Helen becomes a kind of universal female figure, who views the men on the battlefield as possessing a spirit totally alien to her own: "Like the spirit of all armies, on all plains, in all wars, the men / No longer thinking why they were there / Or caring, but going on; like the song the English used to sing / In the first world war: We're here because, we're here because, / We're here because, we're here." Helen and Cassandra's positions in this poem are critical and intelligent before the drone-like mindlessness of the men on the battlefield.
Misanthropy/Post-Human Point of View: Perhaps related to Smith's suggestion in "The Poets are Silent" that words probably can't bear the burden of the world shaken to its core by the experiences of war, is Smith's frequent reference to a perspective beyond a human one to account for the universe. This often takes the form of a kind of misanthropy, rather disturbing in poems like "The Suburban Classes" in which the speaker suggests a pamphlet, "Free for every Registered Reader's table" which will tell the suburban classes, "Your King and your Country need you Dead." "The Face" describes a common face which the poet encounters in modern England, someone with a "monkey soul" (presumably signifying imitative and unthinking) "that bangs about, that beats a gong," embodying conventions and platitudes, "utter[ing] social lies." The poet concludes, much in the spirit of "The Suburban Classes," "You well may say that better far / This face had not been born." "The English," again, plays on a similar theme of how so many so-called "intelligent English / Of the Arts, the professions and the Upper Middle Classes, / Are under-cover men," signaling a modern-day loss of something deeper to humanity than such vocational and class designations as "of the Arts, the professions, and the Upper Middle Classes." Pessimistically, the poet notes that what is under the covers is often gone, and hence these men are now mere "corpse carriers" and what's worse, "infective" through their ideologies.
Smith makes the transition from misanthropy towards something potentially more uplifting in imaginings of a post-human perspective in a number of other poems. "The New Age" is probably the most explicitly post-human, decrying "how these crying people spoil the beautiful / geological scene." "Unpopular, lonely, and loving" problematizes love as a human emotion, the absence of which would mean less misery. "In Protocreation," the poet expresses a strong desire for the world before man's existence ("Oh had it but stopped then / Oh had there not come men") because with man came knowledge of good and evil: "There was no good deed and no crime / No oppression by informed mind / No knowledge and no human kind." These all are in existence because the human mind has created them. Smith turns often to the current animal world for a solacing perspective beyond the human one: in "Away, Melancholy," the speaker notes that nothing else in nature is melancholy, "The ant is busy / He carrieth his meat, / All things hurry / To be eaten or eat," continuing on to think about how "Man, too, hurries, / Eats, couples, buries / He is an animal also." Thus, if animal also, man ought to be able to banish melancholy, a mental construct of his own and not a necessary condition of existence. "Frog Prince" is one of Smith's more playful poems, in which the speaker is the frog prince, telling his non-human perspective of the fairy tale. Basically, the frog prince is happy before his "disenchantment" by the royal princess. He has been doing just fine as a frog: "I have been a frog now / For a hundred years / And in all this time / I have not shed may tears, / I am happy I like the life." The princess promises that with "disenchantment," he can be "heavenly," but as the frog notes, not happy.
I'm reading for my qualifying exam for graduate school in English literature. This is my system to help me study.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Trollope's The Way We Live Now was published in twenty monthly parts between 1874 to 1875 (serialization in parts was, by this time, anachronistic). The title references contemporary discussions on whether society was improving from a moral point of view or degenerating. Trollope's Autobiography situates his own commentary alongside that of contemporaries like Carlyle and Ruskin. Also in the Autobiography, Trollope writes that as he "ventured to take the whip of the satirist" in writing The Way We Live Now, he found himself satirizing more than just the "iniquities of the great speculator who robs everybody," but also "intrigues of girls who want to get married, the luxury of young men who prefer to remain single, and...the puffing propensities of authors who desire to cheat the public into buying their volumes." Reception of Trollope's novel was actually fairly negative, critics often charging it with poor form, despite current views of the work as possibly his best--more on this in the critical analysis section (Source: Lindsay Sullivan, LitEncyc).
SUMMARY:
The novel begins with three letters written by Lady Carbury to three editors: Mr. Broune of the "Morning Breakfast Table," Mr. Booker of the "Literary Chronicle," and Mr. Alf of the "Evening Pulpit." She has recently completed a book called Criminal Queens and wishes for favorable reviews. Lady Carbury is a widow, whose son Sir Felix squandered away his inheritance, spending much of his time gambling and dining at the Beargarden club. Lady Carbury has high hopes, however, that Sir Felix will marry Marie Melmotte, the daughter of Mr. Augustus Melmotte, a wealthy financier of foreign origins with a "Bohemian Jewess" as a wife, and who had settled comfortably into the society of Grosvenor Square within a single year. Although it seems that the Melmottes have come to their money in shady ways (there were rumors of their being kicked out of Paris), all the important members of the aristocracy (including the Prince himself!) attend Madame Melmotte's ball. At the ball, Sir Felix makes some overtures towards Marie, though he isn't particularly enthusiastic: Marie is rather plain and unremarkable, after all. After the ball, Lady Carbury berates her daughter, Henrietta, for dancing with Paul Montague, a young man without immediate fortunes, but who is a partner along with his uncle and an American named Mr. Fisker at an investment firm. Lady Carbury wants Henrietta to marry Roger Carbury, a forty-year old cousin who owns a large country estate--in a word, a figure of "old money" who finds the wealth of "new money" like Melmotte's to be of disreputable character.
Roger Carbury and Paul Montague are also distantly related, and Roger has been something of a guardian figure for Paul in the absence of his deceased father and mother. The two are both in love with Henrietta, and so their relationship became strained. Henrietta has not admitted to loving Paul, but she steadily refuses Roger, telling him that she only likes him as a cousin. Meanwhile, Lady Carbury tries to get Roger to help her to regulate Felix's reckless gambling, but Felix is disrespectful to both his mother and Roger. Paul's partner Fisker has suddenly come to England, having decided independently of Paul that he wished to engage Melmotte in an investment scheme for a new railroad from San Francisco to Vera Cruz. Fisker uses Paul to get an invitation to see Melmotte, who ends up agreeing to putting his name to the scheme, since it is understood that he would not really be investing in the railroad per se but merely aiding in floating the shares of the railroad. Melmotte inspires confidence amongst other investors, and the scheme takes off, and ostensibly, the men will make money by puffing up the railroad and selling their shares for profit. Before leaving to go back to San Francisco, Fisker attends the Beargarden club and wins some money from gambling. Because Fisker clearly doesn't take the claims of I.O.U.s very seriously, he is happy to leave without collecting money from his English friends, but many of the Englishmen are anxious to send him off with something more than I.O.Us. The English lords manage to get together some money nevertheless.
Lady Carbury soon receives some bad news: Mr. Alf has allowed one of his staff to write an exceedingly crushing review of her book (this is, however, what Mr. Alf does because only bad reviews sell). The review points out all of the historical inaccuracies of her work. Mr. Broune and Mr. Booker, however, have done their duty and praised her book. To keep up appearances, Lady Carbury still extends an invitation to Mr. Alf to come to her house along with other literati. Mr. Alf makes as if he didn't know that such a review would be published, but this too is keeping up appearances. Lady Carbury writes to visit with Roger Carbury at Whitsuntide, largely because she has heard that the Melmottes will be visiting the Longestaffe's who live in an estate near Roger's. It seems that the Longestaffes have run into some money troubles, and are trying to get the Melmottes to buy one of their properties, the Pickering Estate. Dolly (Adolphus) Longestaffe, Mr. Longestaffe's son, is resistant to the idea. We find out later that the Longestaffes are in a much worse position than might be supposed at first; Mr. Longestaffe says they must give up their London townhouse. When Georgiana Longstaffe, his younger daughter, throws a fit because she will not be able to participate in London life during the "season" and hence will not be able to secure a husband, he agrees that she may go live with the Melmottes when in London (even though she declares them "vulgar").
When Roger's relatives arrive, he gives a dinner party, his choice of guests showing something of his independent character--he tries to bring together a Protestant Bishop and Roman Catholic priest. Sir Felix arrives at the Carbury estate as well, urged on by his mother to make inroads with Marie. Though Felix does in fact make some progress as far as winning Marie Melmotte goes, he also takes the opportunity of being at Carbury to meet up with Ruby Ruggles, a previous love interest who lives with her grandfather at Sheep's Acre nearby. Her grandfather wishes her to be engaged to John Crumb, a sort of country bumpkin but a good man whom Ruby shuns in favor of the good-looking, city-mannered Sir Felix. When Sir Felix gets up the courage to ask Melmotte for Marie's hand in marriage, Melmotte shoots off a barrage of questions at Felix as to his financial matters, and the conversation does not go well for Felix because he has nothing more than his baronet title. Melmotte has decided his daughter will be engaged to Lord Nidderdale, son of a Marquis. When Felix finds out that others involved with the railway are selling shares in order to profit, he thinks that he too would like to do so, perhaps by using the I.O.U.s he won from gambling to purchase shares.
Though Paul Montague is partial to Hetta Carbury, he has had a prior relation with one Mrs. Hurtle, an American widower, who causes trouble for him because she has followed him to London. It turns out that Paul had once been engaged to her, before hearing rumors about her having shot a man in Oregon, and of her husband potentially still being alive. Mrs. Hurtle is clearly a savvy woman, and she manages to guilt Paul into spending time with her. Marie, her heart won by Felix, tells him that even if her father resists the marriage, she actually has some money of her own that he had put in her name for his own financial security. She is confident that should they run away, she might draw from this stash. Meanwhile, Lady Carbury also trues to make inroads with Melmotte by introducing him to her editor friends trying to suggest that she might of help to him in making these introductions; Melmotte pays very little attention to her machinations. Lady Carbury, though, gets her own proposal from Mr. Broune, whom she rejects (on second thought, Mr. Broune is relieved when he sees just how dissipated and irresponsible Sir Felix is). At Sheep's Acre, Ruby rejects John Crumb's proposal for marriage, and her grandfather beats her, resulting in Ruby running away to live with her Aunt Pipkin in London. There, she has further liaisons with Sir Felix.
Meanwhile, Melmotte's financial success means that he will welcome the Emperor of China to his house for dinner and a party. People fight for tickets to these events, and Melmotte is pretty much at the apex of his power and influence, though some still consider him "vulgar," including Lady Monogram, who snubs her friend Georgiana for living with them. At a Board Meeting, however, Melmotte's shady dealings are underscored when he doesn't let Paul speak out his objections and reservations about the ethicality of their investments. He even tries to bribe Paul but this scheme fails. After the meeting, he gets Felix to sign away rights to Marie, promising that in return, he would help make Felix some money. The Longestaffe's Pickering Estate is sold to Melmotte, which he intends for Marie and Nidderdale after they get married. Back, briefly, to the Hetta, Paul, Mrs. Hurtle storyline, Paul finds Ruby Ruggles when he goes to visit with Mrs. Hurtle--it turns out that both women are lodging with Mrs. Pipkin. Paul reports Ruby to Roger Carbury, and resolves to himself that he will let Mrs. Hurtle go. This turns out to be ineffectual because Mrs. Hurtle is really good at guilt-tripping him; instead, Paul agrees to take her to Lowestoffe, a seaside town, on account of her health. Unfortunately, at Lowestoffe, they run into Roger Carbury, who is angry at Paul for Hetta's sake.
Marie soon convinces Felix to run away with her to New York; Felix agrees, despite the waiver he has just signed. The plan is to meet in Liverpool after getting their separately. Marie and her maid, Didon, make it onto the train to Liverpool, but they are intercepted--Marie is sent home and Didon takes the opportunity to continue onwards and move on from the Melmotte family. Felix, on the other hand, doesn't keep his side of the bargain because he got drunk and gambled the night away. Melmotte's success continues to grow, to the point where he actually runs for the Westminster Conservative seat in Parliament against Mr. Alf, the editor of the "Evening Pulpit." At Melmotte's dinner for the Emperor, however, several important attendees cancel at the last minute, largely because of some fresh rumors circulating of a potential forgery he had committed. These rumors were precipitated by Dolly Longestaffe, who has employed a new laywer, Mr. Squercum (his father's lawyers are Bideawhile and Sloe, not unexpectedly, rather useless), to look into a title-deed for Pickering which he did not sign but which yet had his signature on it. At the party following the dinner, the Emperor leaves early, and other guests take the cue and do so as well. Melmotte's downfall now seems impending, but he maintains his cool.
Georgiana Longestaffe is busy meanwhile, engaging herself to a Jewish banker named Brehgert. Mr. and Mrs. Longestaffe are horrified, and they forbid her engagement. In the end, Georgiana loses Brehgert. Montague finally having cast off Mrs. Hurtle, proposes to Hetta, but unfortunately, when visiting Ruby at Mrs. Pipkin's, Sir Felix learns about Paul's prior engagement to Mrs. Hurtle, and tells Hetta before Paul has told her. Sir Felix soon runs into his own troubles, however, when he goes out with Ruby again, and encounters John Crumb, who, fancying Ruby in trouble, beats Felix to a pulp. Crumb is arrested, and Felix carted off to recover at his mother's home. Hetta seeks advice from Roger, who tells her to go ask Montague herself. In an exchange of letters, Paul tries to explain himself to Hetta but to no avail--Hetta rejects him. Ruby, finally, is forced to accept Crumb, finally, when her aunt and Mrs. Hurtle contrive a plan in which she either accepts Crumb, or has to seek service as a nursemaid and live off of her own means
A rather humorous scene depicts Melmotte's first time in Parliament, in which he breaks a bunch of procedural rules and is clearly unfit for the role. Feeling the crunch from Dolly's investigations, and the fall in the value of his railway stocks as a result of plummeting confidence in his schemes, Melmotte tries to convince Marie to sign over her money to him. She refuses, and Melmotte commits yet another set of forgeries, signing for Marie and his own clerk, Herr Croll. People start defecting from Melmotte, and despite the greater and greater certainty that he will be arrested for his forgeries, he remains adamant about keeping up appearances in an almost heroic fashion. Marie, her father's daughter, also perseveres, visiting Lady Carbury and Felix to see if Felix might still marry him even when it is fairly clear that Melmotte's ruin would soon be a reality and not a rumor. The Carburys snub her. In Melmotte's final "performance" before the House, he gets up to address Parliament, but being drunk, falls over. Later that night, he is found dead, having ingested Prussic acid. Nidderdale is one of the first outsiders to find out about Melmotte's death because Marie asks him to come over. Dolly and the lawyers, Squercum, Bideawhile, and Sloe, find out about death when they arrive for a meeting with Melmotte. Nidderdale helps Marie and mother get in contact with lawyers, but everyone else pretty much leaves the two of them to fend for themselves.
Paul appeals to Roger for help with Hetta and Roger begrudgingly gives it. Hetta decides in the end to see Mrs. Hurtle, who, in speaking badly of Paul's treatment of herself, actually vindicates him to Hetta. This is her giving in, and a testimony to her strength, since Paul hasn't really been fair to her, shunning her primarily because of rumors in the first place. The rest of the novel feels like the tying up of "loose ends." Mr. Melmotte's debts are settled, Hamilton Fisker returns for a visit and makes inroads with Madame and Marie, eventually asking Marie to marry him. Paul decides to dissolve his share of the partnership with Fisker, and finally reconciles with Hetta and are engaged. Ruby and Crumb get married, and Georgiana finally settles on running away with a clergyman. The Bear Garden Club is closed for good. Mrs. Hurtle does manage to have a final interview with Paul, in which she again demonstrates her continuing influence on him--it is clear, at this point, that Paul isn't really capable of handling someone as complicated as Mrs. Hurtle, the innocent Hetta is probably the better match. Madame Melmotte engages herself to Herr Croll, Melmotte's clerk, and the whole lot of them--Marie, Fisker, Madame, Croll, and Mrs. Hurtle set sail for New York. Marie, having learned her lessons in love, makes sure to tell Fisker that their engagement is contingent on how she feels about his financial situation once she has seen his houses in San Francisco. Back in London, Lady Carbury finally accepts Mr. Broune when he proposes again. In a sort of odd chapter which seems to stand entirely on its own, apparently Lady Carbury has been writing a novel called "The Wheel of Fortune" this entire time. Mr. Broune reads it and encourages her not to continue writing. Mr. Broune really seems to have taken over everything for Lady Carbury at this point, even arranging for Felix to go abroad with a clergyman to Germany so that he will stay out of trouble. The novel ends with the happiness of Hetta and Paul, and Roger's decision to settle his estate on the couple, promising Hetta's son Carbury as his willful act of continuing to love her, though as a father-figure.
CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
John Sutherland does a detailed analysis of The Way We Live Now's serialization and Trollope's writing schedule (Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37:3). A few of the key points are that Trollope worked on a really tight calendar (pretty much completing the entire manuscript in approximately 30 weeks), didn't go back to for revision as a result, and that although he kept to strict metrics (unlike Dickens and Thackeray) in that he wrote exactly 100 chapters, with 5 to each number, and later 50 per volume, a comparison between his plans and the eventual publication shows Trollope's flexibility in decisions as far as plot and character development go.
With respect to this last point, one particularly striking example of his improvisational methods was his decision, fairly late in his writing process, to kill off Melmotte. Sutherland shows Trollope's decision as not only having to do with considerations of dramatic or novelistic effects but also plot considerations, in this case, whether or not to avoid a trial scene. Overall, the flexibility evident from a work that came out so quickly offers an interesting view into what plot lines and characters Trollope takes up, even if not part of the original plan. Sutherland points out that there were originally three main theaters for Trollope's social commentary, but that the third one ended up overshadowing the other two. They are: 1) the publishing and literary world, kicked off by the novel's beginning with Lady Carbury and her "scene"; 2) the religious and political landscape of the countryside, as represented by the long section on the Carbury and Longestaffe estates during Whitsuntide; and finally, 3) the corrupt world of social climbing via the new professions in finance in London embodied by Melmotte. If there is a "hero" (or anti-hero) of The Way We Live Now, it has to be Melmotte because he is hands down the most psychologically complex and interesting character in the novel, and it seems Trollope knew it, in allowing Melmotte's theater to overshadow the others. Trollope's decision, when commissioning a cover for the monthly issues, to have the picture illustrate Melmotte's rise and fall seems to show a clear awareness of Melmotte's imaginative impact. (Roger, by contrast, seems hopelessly and disturbingly bland, even if meant as the most moral agent in the work).
I want to focus then, on a couple of passages on Melmotte that struck me as particularly revealing of how Trollope generates interest in him beyond his serving as an object of his "satirizing whip." The first is from the narrator's psychological explication of Melmotte as he contemplates his nearly certain downfall:
"Judging of himself, as though he were standing outside himself and looking on to another man's work, he pointed out to himself his own shortcomings...No idea ever crossed his mind of what might have been the result had he lived the life of an honest man. Though he was inquiring into himself as closely as he could, he never even told himself that he had been dishonest. Fraud and dishonesty had been the very principle of his life, and had so become a part of his blood and bones that even in this extremity of his misery he made no question within himself as to his right judgment in regard to them."
This description of Melmotte says that he possesses a completely different and radical system of morality than everyone else and that he simply cannot think himself out of his warped system. "Fraud and dishonesty" are so ingrained in him that they are normal, everyday operations. As far as such operations go, Melmotte actually does a pretty good job of being objective about how well he performs these operations; he's able to "stand outside himself" and "point out to himself his own shortcomings." This reflexivity is a trait which most other characters sorely lack. Though Melmotte's reflexivity is limited to his warped outlook on what constitutes the norm for morality, it works rather well as far as the operations of his own out-of-joint system go. This internal portrait of Melmotte as essentially different from everyone else seems strongly suggestive of madness, a concept which the narrator ponders in an extended passage on madness and suicide later on. Essentially, the narrator points out that no one says Melmotte is "mad," only because they don't find the reasons that he kills himself to be sympathetic from a conventional point of view (because, in this view, he brought about his own downfall). But what if, as I think the description of his radical difference (and even embodied difference, as suggested by the blood and bones) in orientation towards morality suggests, his madness is this difference, which he has no power to control or get outside of? Thus, the passage above seems in a way to exonerate more than condemn Melmotte. And finally, is there not something clearly seductive and heroic (yet full of pathos) attached to Melmotte's death, as depicted by the following lines? "Drunk as he had been,--more drunk as he probably became during the night,--still he was able to deliver himself from the indignities and penalties to which the law might have subjected him by a dose of prussic acid." In the words I have italicized, the narrator seems to go into free-indirect discourse, directly sympathizing with Melmotte's sense of "indignities" and "penalties," rather than with everyone else who would probably call these things "justice."
Friday, May 6, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
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.
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.
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.
Labels:
criticism,
proto-modernism,
religion,
Victorian Literature
Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Edition: The Satanic Verses: A Novel
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Satanic Verses was published in 1988 (Rushdie's fourth novel). Its publication met with great controversy, resulting famously in a fatwa placed against Rushdie by leaders of radical Islam like the Ayatollah Khomeini. Rushdie's portrayal of the prophet Mohammed (as Mahound) was particularly controversial and considered to be blasphemous.
SUMMARY:
I. The Angel Gibreel
Two men, Gibreel Farishta, and Saladin Chamcha, are the sole survivors of a hijacked plane, the Bostan AI-420 bound for London, miraculously falling from the sky and emerging unscathed. Gibreel was a famous Indian actor, who had little regard for the women he bedded down with. One woman, Rekha Merchant, plunged to her death from a tall building along with her children in an act of protest against Gibreel. As he falls from the plane, Gibreel sees Rekha on a magic carpet, vowing to follow him with her vengeance. This section gives details on Gibreel's childhood and rise to fame, his spontaneous recovery from spontaneous hemorrhaging, among other things. Chamcha's history is one of rejecting his homeland, desiring to leave behind his past and become a true Englishman after one particularly traumatic encounter of sexual abuse. After a few years of education in London, Chamcha becomes estranged from his Indian parents, particularly his father. Chamcha's mother dies choking on a fishbone while refusing to hide during a Pakistani air raid; no one had come to her rescue because they were all hiding. Chamcha's father re-married another woman of the same name, and Chamcha goes of to settle permanently in London, becoming a voice-actor (and unable to land screen roles generally due to racism). Chamcha, bent on his own Anglicization and assimilation, marries a white, English girl, Pamela Lovelace. On a trip back to Bombay, a woman named Zeeny Vakil tries to "convert" Chamcha back to his roots but fails, despite a love affair that the two embark on. Chamcha is on his way back to London from this trip when the plane crashes.
II. Mahound
In a town called Jahilia, "built entirely of sand," the poet and satirist Baal is forced to write verses for the Grandee Abu Simbel against the prophet Mahound and his followers. Mahound's primary disciples are Khalid, a water-carrier, Salman, a Persian immigrant, and Bilal, a slave. Mahound preaches monotheism against the primarily polytheistic town and so does not have much luck. Abu Simbel suggests to Mahound a compromise: if his all-powerful Allah will accept three of the city's lesser Gods, he might win more followers and continue to live there. Mahound's uncle tells him he should consult the archangel Gibreel. Mahound goes in search of the archangel, who is reluctant to be summoned by this demanding Mahound. Hardly knowing what he is doing, Gibreel delivers the message that Lat, Uzza, and Manat are to be accepted gods, not on the level of Allah, but under him. When Mahound returns to the city, the message is met by taunts and rioting; he is rescued by Hind, Abu Simbel's wife, who tells him that Al-Lat demands equality with Allah. Mahound sees Gibreel again, and this time he gets the idea that the first message was actually from Shaitan, the evil archangel (Gibreel knows that it was him both times, actually). He goes back to Jahilia to reveal this new message. Again, Mahound and his followers are persecuted, and forced to leave the city altogether.
III. Ellowen Deeowen
Rosa Diamond, a woman of 88 years, claims to see ghosts, so she isn't all that surprised when she picks up Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha (both transformed into a kind of good angel, bad angel during their falls). Gibreel has a sort of halo surrounding him, and Chamcha has horns. The police come and arrest Chamcha, and for some reason, Gibreel is transfixed by Rosa and does nothing to help Chamcha. The central story in Rosa's life has been her brief encounter with one Martin de la Cruz, a married man with whom she had a brief tryst in Argentina, while herself being married to Henry Diamond. The narrative strongly suggests that Gibreel was Martin in a past life, and that is why Rosa has such power over him. Gibreel stays with her for a while, even making love to the old woman a little bit before she dies. Meanwhile, Chamcha is taken to a hospital detention center where he is shocked to discover that there are other changes to his form other than the horns (including new hoof-like feet). It turns out that there are other animal-men in the ward, and together, they hatch up a plan of escape. After the escape, Chamcha returns to his wife, Pamela, whom he finds in bed with his friend, Jumpy Joshi, a frail man who had always been unpopular with the ladies. Gibreel, after Rosa's death, gets on a train, where he runs into a man named Maslama, who recognizes him as Gibreel Farishta, famous actor but also treats him like some kind of deity. The scene shifts to Allie (Alleluia) Cone, a woman who climber Mount Everest with whom Gibreel is in love. In a classroom-full of young girls, Allie thrills them with stories of her climb and ghosts in the mountains. Gibreel finds Allie in London.
IV. Ayesha
In Gibreel's dreams, an exiled Imam (likely based on Ayatollah Khomeini) in London. Gibreel carries him to Desh, where he wars with the Empress Ayesha. Gibreel fights on the Imam's side, and defeats Al-Lat, Ayesha's deity. The rest of this section is about Mirza Saeed in London on his fortieth birthday, and how he sees outside of his window a beautiful girl named Ayesha eating butterflies in the garden. He is filled with great desire, and out of guilt, commences on a period of making love passionately to his wife Mishal. Mishal gets breast cancer, and has little time left to live. At the same time, Mishal has struck up a close friendship with Ayesha. Ayesha eventually says that the angel Gibreel has told her that the town must take a pilgrimage to Mecca, and that the Arabian Sea will part for them as they walk across. Mishal's cancer will be cured if she goes on the pilgrimage, Ayesha promises.
V. A City Visible but Unseen
Mishal in this section is the daughter of one Muhammad Sufyan, the proprietor of Shaandaar Cafe. His wife's name is also Hind. Sufyan and Hind have a rather unhappy marriage, characterized, among other things, by bad sex. Chamcha arrives before this family looking for a place to live; they allow him to stay. He talks to Mimi, his previous co-worker, on the phone to see if he might get a job again. The show which he had been on, The Aliens Show, was unfortunately cancelled. Gibreel, on the other hand, has been making new films, including one where he is an archangel in a city of sand, conveying messages to a prophet. Gibreel has told the media that he is alive because he never got onto the plane. During the time of Chamcha's stay, Mishal (who is just seventeen) confesses that she has been having sexual relations with a lawyer named Hanif Johnson. Both Mishal and her sister Anahita are fairly considerate of Chamcha, beauties tending to a beast. Eventually, Chamcha grows too big for the house and must leave--by this time, he has made quite a splash in London, a sort of devil-cult has grown up around him, his image plastered onto various commercial venues. Chamcha is moved to a nightclub where there is more space. The narrator offers Allie Cone's history in this section: her father was of Polish ancestry, and like Chamcha, wanted to blend in so he changed their names from Cohen to Cone. Allie had a sister, Elena, who had become a successful model but who had died in an "acid bath" at the age of twenty-one. Allie's career capitalized on her image as the "ice queen," and like Gibreel, managed to have many rather meaningless sexual liaisons. Allie found a different sort of passion with Farishta, however. Gibreel soon thinks that he hears God telling him to do work for him, to leave Allie. He commences on some delusional attempts to convert people, humorously thinking that he will redeem the city, a London A-Z map in his pocket. Rekha continues to show up to mock him. Eventually, Gibreel ends up once again with Allie after being hit by a car during his "missionary work." The man who hit him, Whisky Sisodia (who has a stutter), a filmmaker who thinks that Gibreel should return to the big screen. Gibreel is soon fully back in the business at Sisodia's urging, though Allie and Gibreel become more estranged as a result of his career. The doctors generally think that Gibreel's "visions" are due to schizophrenia.
VI. Return to Jahilia
This section is again narrated as part of Gibreel's dreams. Many changes have come to Jahilia; it is now no longer a "city built of sand," but a rather destitute, "prosaic" town. Hind has not aged at all, though her husband Abu Simbel has--she is the de facto ruler. Salman, the Persian immigrant, is telling Baal the poet that Mahound will soon return from exile. Salman's account of Mahound is now negative, having lost faith in the prophet's power because the rules that he receives from Gibreel always seemed so oddly convenient to him. Salman had tested the "word of God" by replacing words in Mahound's verses as he wrote them down to see if Mahound would notice. He didn't. After Mahound's return, Jahilia is subject to a number of new, strict rules. Baal spends a lot of time behind The Curtain, a whorehouse. The whorehouse happened to have twelve whores, and Mahound twelve wives. The members of the brothel decide to each act the part of one of Mahound's wives and to receive visitors as such. Baal is charged with marrying all of them, and thus becomes a gross parody himself of Mahound. Eventually, the brothel is shut down. The madame commits suicide, and the girls are taken to prison. Baal confessesto what has been happening behind the Curtain, and is sent to be beheaded. Soon afterwards, however, Mahound falls ill and dies.
VII. The Angel Azraeel
Chamcha finds his way to Pamela's house again and insists that he live there. She doesn't resist, though they don't rekindle a relationship--Chamcha allows Jumpy Joshi to continue to live there with his wife. Chamcha continues to work hard to reinstate his good-old English life, but generally fails. At a meeting where people were giving testimony in hopes to exonerate a man named Simba, Chamcha realizes that he lusts after Mishal Sufyan. He thinks he sees the angel Azraeel behind her though, signaling that she's off limits. Chamcha approaches Gibreel at a strange party (themed Dickensian times) and goes over to face his adversary, thinking to take revenge on him for betraying him at Rosa Diamond's. Before their encounter, the narrator embarks on a rather long exegesis on good and evil, and of how the two of them might be "different types of self," Gibreel a type which wished to remain continuous, and Chamcha a type which constantly preferred and selected for discontinuity. The actual encounter is a bit anticlimactic after all of this; Chamcha pretends to be an old friend, telling Gibreel about how his wife had left him for Jumpy Joshi. Gibreel, who had recently become very jealous because his career prevented him from watching Allie's every moment, goes after Joshi and hits him over the head and throws him into the Thames river (he survives). Chamcha is later invited into Allie and Gibreel's temporary home in Scotland. Chamcha works to make Gibreel crazy, impersonating voices of Allie's supposed lovers over the phone. Gibreel had been revealing many things in confidence to Chamcha about Allie's body when they made love, so Chamcha made the best of this information in his calls. Gibreel is particularly disturbed by Chamcha's impersonation of a poet who composes verses that suggest Allie is cheating on him. He can't get them out of his head and pretty much goes insane. The rest of the section is the scene of apocalypse: Simba is wrongly accused of being a murderer of Grandmothers (the Granny Ripper) and dies in jail. Race riots break out and buildings burn down. Gibreel takes on the role of Azraeel, angel of destruction, blowing his trumpet all over London. Gibreel and Chamcha meet again in the burning Shaandaar Cafe, where Gibreel forgives Chamcha and rescues him. In the fires, Joshi and Pamela die, as do Hind and Muhammad Sufyan.
VIII. The Parting of the Arabian Sea
This section returns to Ayesha's pilgrimage. Mirza tries to stop the pilgrimage, especially as it becomes clear that his wife is exhausted. Eventually, the old start dying, including Khadija, Sarpanch Muhammad Din's wife, and Ayesha says that there is no time to give her a proper burial. As more and more people die on the journey, doubts increase. There is a flood, and many of the pilgrims disappear afterwards. Mirza is about to convince Ayesha to give up, when miraculously, a bunch of butterflies bring back all of the remaining pilgrims. Doubts surface again, however, when Ayesha allows a baby found in the road to be stoned to death because it was likely "illegitimate." Desperate to make sure his wife is okay and an unbeliever, Mirza tries to make a deal with Ayesha, saying that he'll find a way to fly all of the pilgrims to Mecca--he suggests that she ask Gibreel, having the sneaking suspicion she'll give in because she might not be as confident about her notion that the sea will part as she was at the beginning. Ayesha resists the offer, and they reach the sea. As the pilgrims walk into the sea, they become dead, drowned bodies, but afterwards, eyewitness accounts by the survivors said that they had indeed seen the sea part. Mirza is the only one who did not see the sea part. Mirza subsequently starves himself to death, and on his last night of life, (fancies that) he sees the sea splitting apart, himself joining the rest.
IX. A Wonderful Lamp
Chamcha is called back to Bombay to see his estranged father who has only a few days to live, having contracted cancer. On the plane, Chamcha runs into Sisodia. Back in his childhood home, father and son are reconciled. Changez, Chamcha's father, dies with terror on his face for a moment, but then his mouth curved up into a smile. Chamcha wonders what it all means. His father's rather "radiant death" brings Chamcha together with Zeeny--he somehow feels that he has found himself and no longer needs to take on multiple identities. He joins Zeeny in a Communist Party event: a human chain of people linking hands throughout the whole city. This demonstration is interrupted by the news that Gibreel and Allie Cone were in Bombay, and that Allie had been thrown out of a window, and Sisodia shot, while Gibreel disappeared once again. Chamcha (the inheritor of his father's wealth) finds Gibreel in his house. Gibreel tells him in garbled and broken sentences how he had been plagued by the verses that he heard and that it was not he that pushed Allie over the edge but Rekha. At the very end, Gibreel takes Chamcha's father's (magic) lamp, which contains a gun. Gibreel places the gun in his own mouth and shoots himself. The novel ends with Zeeny calling Chamcha away, telling him, "Let's get the hell out of here" (which has a double meaning given Chamcha's association with the Satanic).
CRITICAL APPROACH:
Rushdie himself offers perhaps the most helpful comments as to how to read his book:
"If The Satanic Verses is anything, it is a migrant's-eye view of the world. It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis (slow or rapid, painful or pleasurable) that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity."
Rushdie's comment does the work of linking post-colonial concepts (migrancy, uprooting, metamorphosis) with post-modern concepts (disjuncture, metaphor for all humanity). As many critics have noted, perhaps the aesthetic achievement of The Satanic Verses is proving that a post-colonial novel can be simultaneously post-modern, implying, more importantly, that the lives of post-colonials might actually serve as not marginal, but central and universal. The multiply hybrid nature of these characters (on almost every imaginable level--race, culture, class, gender, religion, sane/insane, human/animal, human/angel) represents the instability of identity in a post-modern world. It isn't at all a story of center and margin, the results of the colonial encounter. Characters in Bombay and London in The Satanic Verses feel equally migrant, uprooted, and in a word, unstable in a world where individuals just can't be pinned down by systems previously believed to be stable like Culture or Language.
The Satanic Verses goes even further, however, than to deconstruct the ways in which people identify themselves by culture or language. Its radicalism is in its deconstruction, through magical realism, of man's very material being--Rushdie's novel takes post-modernism to its logical extreme. If such categories as culture or language fail to identify us for who we really are, then perhaps what we believe to be the very materiality of our bodies can't identify us for who we really are either. The concept is radical, but it is also funny (Rushdie himself has noted the intended playfulness and comic elements of his work). Gibreel's surprise when the questions of Mahound intrude upon his body or Chamcha's horrified discovery his new goat's body in the hospital detention center are comic scenes wherein human bodies realize that what they thought to be fixed boundaries in fact were not. Immaterial bodies like Rekha's ghost, for example, are also decidedly comic rather than horrifying; she keeps showing up at Gibreel's side, nagging and mocking him but not being particularly scary.
What might be the function of comedy and playfulness in this work? In the scene before Chamcha and Gibreel's confrontation at the "Dickensian Times" party (also funny), the narrator breaks in to offer a suggestion:
"What follows is tragedy. --Or, at least the echo of tragedy, the full-blooded original being unavailable to modern men and women, so it's said. --A burlesque for our degraded, imitative times, in which clowns re-enact what was first done by heroes and the kings."
Essentially, the tragedy of good versus evil to be played out between Gibreel and Chamcha has been repeated so many times that there isn't room for anything else but imitation and parody. Relatedly, the post-modern divorce between sign and signified and the rejection of the possibility of getting to any sort of stable Truth claim about the Human Condition which the divorce perpetuates prevents belief in grand struggles of good and evil. Everything then becomes rather light and playful, when the depths of Truth either don't exist or aren't accessible to the world.
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Satanic Verses was published in 1988 (Rushdie's fourth novel). Its publication met with great controversy, resulting famously in a fatwa placed against Rushdie by leaders of radical Islam like the Ayatollah Khomeini. Rushdie's portrayal of the prophet Mohammed (as Mahound) was particularly controversial and considered to be blasphemous.
SUMMARY:
I. The Angel Gibreel
Two men, Gibreel Farishta, and Saladin Chamcha, are the sole survivors of a hijacked plane, the Bostan AI-420 bound for London, miraculously falling from the sky and emerging unscathed. Gibreel was a famous Indian actor, who had little regard for the women he bedded down with. One woman, Rekha Merchant, plunged to her death from a tall building along with her children in an act of protest against Gibreel. As he falls from the plane, Gibreel sees Rekha on a magic carpet, vowing to follow him with her vengeance. This section gives details on Gibreel's childhood and rise to fame, his spontaneous recovery from spontaneous hemorrhaging, among other things. Chamcha's history is one of rejecting his homeland, desiring to leave behind his past and become a true Englishman after one particularly traumatic encounter of sexual abuse. After a few years of education in London, Chamcha becomes estranged from his Indian parents, particularly his father. Chamcha's mother dies choking on a fishbone while refusing to hide during a Pakistani air raid; no one had come to her rescue because they were all hiding. Chamcha's father re-married another woman of the same name, and Chamcha goes of to settle permanently in London, becoming a voice-actor (and unable to land screen roles generally due to racism). Chamcha, bent on his own Anglicization and assimilation, marries a white, English girl, Pamela Lovelace. On a trip back to Bombay, a woman named Zeeny Vakil tries to "convert" Chamcha back to his roots but fails, despite a love affair that the two embark on. Chamcha is on his way back to London from this trip when the plane crashes.
II. Mahound
In a town called Jahilia, "built entirely of sand," the poet and satirist Baal is forced to write verses for the Grandee Abu Simbel against the prophet Mahound and his followers. Mahound's primary disciples are Khalid, a water-carrier, Salman, a Persian immigrant, and Bilal, a slave. Mahound preaches monotheism against the primarily polytheistic town and so does not have much luck. Abu Simbel suggests to Mahound a compromise: if his all-powerful Allah will accept three of the city's lesser Gods, he might win more followers and continue to live there. Mahound's uncle tells him he should consult the archangel Gibreel. Mahound goes in search of the archangel, who is reluctant to be summoned by this demanding Mahound. Hardly knowing what he is doing, Gibreel delivers the message that Lat, Uzza, and Manat are to be accepted gods, not on the level of Allah, but under him. When Mahound returns to the city, the message is met by taunts and rioting; he is rescued by Hind, Abu Simbel's wife, who tells him that Al-Lat demands equality with Allah. Mahound sees Gibreel again, and this time he gets the idea that the first message was actually from Shaitan, the evil archangel (Gibreel knows that it was him both times, actually). He goes back to Jahilia to reveal this new message. Again, Mahound and his followers are persecuted, and forced to leave the city altogether.
III. Ellowen Deeowen
Rosa Diamond, a woman of 88 years, claims to see ghosts, so she isn't all that surprised when she picks up Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha (both transformed into a kind of good angel, bad angel during their falls). Gibreel has a sort of halo surrounding him, and Chamcha has horns. The police come and arrest Chamcha, and for some reason, Gibreel is transfixed by Rosa and does nothing to help Chamcha. The central story in Rosa's life has been her brief encounter with one Martin de la Cruz, a married man with whom she had a brief tryst in Argentina, while herself being married to Henry Diamond. The narrative strongly suggests that Gibreel was Martin in a past life, and that is why Rosa has such power over him. Gibreel stays with her for a while, even making love to the old woman a little bit before she dies. Meanwhile, Chamcha is taken to a hospital detention center where he is shocked to discover that there are other changes to his form other than the horns (including new hoof-like feet). It turns out that there are other animal-men in the ward, and together, they hatch up a plan of escape. After the escape, Chamcha returns to his wife, Pamela, whom he finds in bed with his friend, Jumpy Joshi, a frail man who had always been unpopular with the ladies. Gibreel, after Rosa's death, gets on a train, where he runs into a man named Maslama, who recognizes him as Gibreel Farishta, famous actor but also treats him like some kind of deity. The scene shifts to Allie (Alleluia) Cone, a woman who climber Mount Everest with whom Gibreel is in love. In a classroom-full of young girls, Allie thrills them with stories of her climb and ghosts in the mountains. Gibreel finds Allie in London.
IV. Ayesha
In Gibreel's dreams, an exiled Imam (likely based on Ayatollah Khomeini) in London. Gibreel carries him to Desh, where he wars with the Empress Ayesha. Gibreel fights on the Imam's side, and defeats Al-Lat, Ayesha's deity. The rest of this section is about Mirza Saeed in London on his fortieth birthday, and how he sees outside of his window a beautiful girl named Ayesha eating butterflies in the garden. He is filled with great desire, and out of guilt, commences on a period of making love passionately to his wife Mishal. Mishal gets breast cancer, and has little time left to live. At the same time, Mishal has struck up a close friendship with Ayesha. Ayesha eventually says that the angel Gibreel has told her that the town must take a pilgrimage to Mecca, and that the Arabian Sea will part for them as they walk across. Mishal's cancer will be cured if she goes on the pilgrimage, Ayesha promises.
V. A City Visible but Unseen
Mishal in this section is the daughter of one Muhammad Sufyan, the proprietor of Shaandaar Cafe. His wife's name is also Hind. Sufyan and Hind have a rather unhappy marriage, characterized, among other things, by bad sex. Chamcha arrives before this family looking for a place to live; they allow him to stay. He talks to Mimi, his previous co-worker, on the phone to see if he might get a job again. The show which he had been on, The Aliens Show, was unfortunately cancelled. Gibreel, on the other hand, has been making new films, including one where he is an archangel in a city of sand, conveying messages to a prophet. Gibreel has told the media that he is alive because he never got onto the plane. During the time of Chamcha's stay, Mishal (who is just seventeen) confesses that she has been having sexual relations with a lawyer named Hanif Johnson. Both Mishal and her sister Anahita are fairly considerate of Chamcha, beauties tending to a beast. Eventually, Chamcha grows too big for the house and must leave--by this time, he has made quite a splash in London, a sort of devil-cult has grown up around him, his image plastered onto various commercial venues. Chamcha is moved to a nightclub where there is more space. The narrator offers Allie Cone's history in this section: her father was of Polish ancestry, and like Chamcha, wanted to blend in so he changed their names from Cohen to Cone. Allie had a sister, Elena, who had become a successful model but who had died in an "acid bath" at the age of twenty-one. Allie's career capitalized on her image as the "ice queen," and like Gibreel, managed to have many rather meaningless sexual liaisons. Allie found a different sort of passion with Farishta, however. Gibreel soon thinks that he hears God telling him to do work for him, to leave Allie. He commences on some delusional attempts to convert people, humorously thinking that he will redeem the city, a London A-Z map in his pocket. Rekha continues to show up to mock him. Eventually, Gibreel ends up once again with Allie after being hit by a car during his "missionary work." The man who hit him, Whisky Sisodia (who has a stutter), a filmmaker who thinks that Gibreel should return to the big screen. Gibreel is soon fully back in the business at Sisodia's urging, though Allie and Gibreel become more estranged as a result of his career. The doctors generally think that Gibreel's "visions" are due to schizophrenia.
VI. Return to Jahilia
This section is again narrated as part of Gibreel's dreams. Many changes have come to Jahilia; it is now no longer a "city built of sand," but a rather destitute, "prosaic" town. Hind has not aged at all, though her husband Abu Simbel has--she is the de facto ruler. Salman, the Persian immigrant, is telling Baal the poet that Mahound will soon return from exile. Salman's account of Mahound is now negative, having lost faith in the prophet's power because the rules that he receives from Gibreel always seemed so oddly convenient to him. Salman had tested the "word of God" by replacing words in Mahound's verses as he wrote them down to see if Mahound would notice. He didn't. After Mahound's return, Jahilia is subject to a number of new, strict rules. Baal spends a lot of time behind The Curtain, a whorehouse. The whorehouse happened to have twelve whores, and Mahound twelve wives. The members of the brothel decide to each act the part of one of Mahound's wives and to receive visitors as such. Baal is charged with marrying all of them, and thus becomes a gross parody himself of Mahound. Eventually, the brothel is shut down. The madame commits suicide, and the girls are taken to prison. Baal confessesto what has been happening behind the Curtain, and is sent to be beheaded. Soon afterwards, however, Mahound falls ill and dies.
VII. The Angel Azraeel
Chamcha finds his way to Pamela's house again and insists that he live there. She doesn't resist, though they don't rekindle a relationship--Chamcha allows Jumpy Joshi to continue to live there with his wife. Chamcha continues to work hard to reinstate his good-old English life, but generally fails. At a meeting where people were giving testimony in hopes to exonerate a man named Simba, Chamcha realizes that he lusts after Mishal Sufyan. He thinks he sees the angel Azraeel behind her though, signaling that she's off limits. Chamcha approaches Gibreel at a strange party (themed Dickensian times) and goes over to face his adversary, thinking to take revenge on him for betraying him at Rosa Diamond's. Before their encounter, the narrator embarks on a rather long exegesis on good and evil, and of how the two of them might be "different types of self," Gibreel a type which wished to remain continuous, and Chamcha a type which constantly preferred and selected for discontinuity. The actual encounter is a bit anticlimactic after all of this; Chamcha pretends to be an old friend, telling Gibreel about how his wife had left him for Jumpy Joshi. Gibreel, who had recently become very jealous because his career prevented him from watching Allie's every moment, goes after Joshi and hits him over the head and throws him into the Thames river (he survives). Chamcha is later invited into Allie and Gibreel's temporary home in Scotland. Chamcha works to make Gibreel crazy, impersonating voices of Allie's supposed lovers over the phone. Gibreel had been revealing many things in confidence to Chamcha about Allie's body when they made love, so Chamcha made the best of this information in his calls. Gibreel is particularly disturbed by Chamcha's impersonation of a poet who composes verses that suggest Allie is cheating on him. He can't get them out of his head and pretty much goes insane. The rest of the section is the scene of apocalypse: Simba is wrongly accused of being a murderer of Grandmothers (the Granny Ripper) and dies in jail. Race riots break out and buildings burn down. Gibreel takes on the role of Azraeel, angel of destruction, blowing his trumpet all over London. Gibreel and Chamcha meet again in the burning Shaandaar Cafe, where Gibreel forgives Chamcha and rescues him. In the fires, Joshi and Pamela die, as do Hind and Muhammad Sufyan.
VIII. The Parting of the Arabian Sea
This section returns to Ayesha's pilgrimage. Mirza tries to stop the pilgrimage, especially as it becomes clear that his wife is exhausted. Eventually, the old start dying, including Khadija, Sarpanch Muhammad Din's wife, and Ayesha says that there is no time to give her a proper burial. As more and more people die on the journey, doubts increase. There is a flood, and many of the pilgrims disappear afterwards. Mirza is about to convince Ayesha to give up, when miraculously, a bunch of butterflies bring back all of the remaining pilgrims. Doubts surface again, however, when Ayesha allows a baby found in the road to be stoned to death because it was likely "illegitimate." Desperate to make sure his wife is okay and an unbeliever, Mirza tries to make a deal with Ayesha, saying that he'll find a way to fly all of the pilgrims to Mecca--he suggests that she ask Gibreel, having the sneaking suspicion she'll give in because she might not be as confident about her notion that the sea will part as she was at the beginning. Ayesha resists the offer, and they reach the sea. As the pilgrims walk into the sea, they become dead, drowned bodies, but afterwards, eyewitness accounts by the survivors said that they had indeed seen the sea part. Mirza is the only one who did not see the sea part. Mirza subsequently starves himself to death, and on his last night of life, (fancies that) he sees the sea splitting apart, himself joining the rest.
IX. A Wonderful Lamp
Chamcha is called back to Bombay to see his estranged father who has only a few days to live, having contracted cancer. On the plane, Chamcha runs into Sisodia. Back in his childhood home, father and son are reconciled. Changez, Chamcha's father, dies with terror on his face for a moment, but then his mouth curved up into a smile. Chamcha wonders what it all means. His father's rather "radiant death" brings Chamcha together with Zeeny--he somehow feels that he has found himself and no longer needs to take on multiple identities. He joins Zeeny in a Communist Party event: a human chain of people linking hands throughout the whole city. This demonstration is interrupted by the news that Gibreel and Allie Cone were in Bombay, and that Allie had been thrown out of a window, and Sisodia shot, while Gibreel disappeared once again. Chamcha (the inheritor of his father's wealth) finds Gibreel in his house. Gibreel tells him in garbled and broken sentences how he had been plagued by the verses that he heard and that it was not he that pushed Allie over the edge but Rekha. At the very end, Gibreel takes Chamcha's father's (magic) lamp, which contains a gun. Gibreel places the gun in his own mouth and shoots himself. The novel ends with Zeeny calling Chamcha away, telling him, "Let's get the hell out of here" (which has a double meaning given Chamcha's association with the Satanic).
CRITICAL APPROACH:
Rushdie himself offers perhaps the most helpful comments as to how to read his book:
"If The Satanic Verses is anything, it is a migrant's-eye view of the world. It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis (slow or rapid, painful or pleasurable) that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity."
Rushdie's comment does the work of linking post-colonial concepts (migrancy, uprooting, metamorphosis) with post-modern concepts (disjuncture, metaphor for all humanity). As many critics have noted, perhaps the aesthetic achievement of The Satanic Verses is proving that a post-colonial novel can be simultaneously post-modern, implying, more importantly, that the lives of post-colonials might actually serve as not marginal, but central and universal. The multiply hybrid nature of these characters (on almost every imaginable level--race, culture, class, gender, religion, sane/insane, human/animal, human/angel) represents the instability of identity in a post-modern world. It isn't at all a story of center and margin, the results of the colonial encounter. Characters in Bombay and London in The Satanic Verses feel equally migrant, uprooted, and in a word, unstable in a world where individuals just can't be pinned down by systems previously believed to be stable like Culture or Language.
The Satanic Verses goes even further, however, than to deconstruct the ways in which people identify themselves by culture or language. Its radicalism is in its deconstruction, through magical realism, of man's very material being--Rushdie's novel takes post-modernism to its logical extreme. If such categories as culture or language fail to identify us for who we really are, then perhaps what we believe to be the very materiality of our bodies can't identify us for who we really are either. The concept is radical, but it is also funny (Rushdie himself has noted the intended playfulness and comic elements of his work). Gibreel's surprise when the questions of Mahound intrude upon his body or Chamcha's horrified discovery his new goat's body in the hospital detention center are comic scenes wherein human bodies realize that what they thought to be fixed boundaries in fact were not. Immaterial bodies like Rekha's ghost, for example, are also decidedly comic rather than horrifying; she keeps showing up at Gibreel's side, nagging and mocking him but not being particularly scary.
What might be the function of comedy and playfulness in this work? In the scene before Chamcha and Gibreel's confrontation at the "Dickensian Times" party (also funny), the narrator breaks in to offer a suggestion:
"What follows is tragedy. --Or, at least the echo of tragedy, the full-blooded original being unavailable to modern men and women, so it's said. --A burlesque for our degraded, imitative times, in which clowns re-enact what was first done by heroes and the kings."
Essentially, the tragedy of good versus evil to be played out between Gibreel and Chamcha has been repeated so many times that there isn't room for anything else but imitation and parody. Relatedly, the post-modern divorce between sign and signified and the rejection of the possibility of getting to any sort of stable Truth claim about the Human Condition which the divorce perpetuates prevents belief in grand struggles of good and evil. Everything then becomes rather light and playful, when the depths of Truth either don't exist or aren't accessible to the world.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
Edition: North and South (Penguin Classics)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Gaskell's North and South was serialized in weekly parts in Dickens's Household Words from September 1854 to January 1855. Gaskell found the format limiting; she commented in a note to the volume edition that she felt that she had had to compress her novel. She added, therefore, expansions to the volume edition. In addition to narrative expansions, Gaskell also added epigraph quotations to the beginning of chapters.
SUMMARY:
North and South begins with the marriage of the main character Margaret's cousin Edith to Captain Lennox, and Margaret's subsequent departure from Harley Street in London to go back to Helstone, a country town in the south where she grew up. The wedding puts Margaret in contact with the lawyer and brother of the Captain, Henry Lennox. They exchange some niceties about Helstone, and Margaret feels that he belittles Helstone by making it out to be some kind of fairytale village and refuses to talk about it. To Margaret's surprise, Henry visits her back at Helstone a little while later, and after the enjoy an afternoon sketching together, he proposes to her. Margaret refuses him and he leaves. Meanwhile, Margaret feels that her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hale, don't seem quite as happy and at ease as she had remembered them to be. Mr. Hale, a parson, soon confesses to Margaret that he has decided to leave his post because of doubts that he had as to the true faith espoused by the Church of England. He proposes that they will move to a northern manufacturing town, Milton, where he will serve as a tutor. His own mentor at Oxford, Mr. Bell, had already connected him with a wealthy manufacturer named Mr. John Thornton, who will be his first pupil. Margaret is charged with the difficult task of revealing this plan to her mother, who is of generally weak constitution. Margaret accomplishes the task, and helps her father makes arrangements to move, suggesting that Mrs. Hale remove to a seaside town while she and her father figure out where they will live in Milton.
After settling into the smoky, gray environment of a manufacturing town, Margaret makes the acquaintance of Thornton, and thinks him rather coarse and inflexible. She also makes other acquaintances by chance in the street--Nicholas Higgins, a poor factory worker who is organizing a strike against factory masters like Thornton, and his ailing daughter Bessy who is sick from working at cotton mills. Thornton lives with his mother, with whom he is very close; after his father's failed speculations, Thornton, with the support of his mother built his business up and worked very hard to come to the wealth which he has now. His sister, Fanny, also lives with them, but she is rather vapid and snooty. Mrs. Thornton doesn't really take to Margaret, finding her to be ignorant of the ways of the north, a pampered southern aristocrat who does not appreciate or understand the strength of her son's industrious and manly character. Margaret, after all, is not shy to critique Thornton, especially when discussing the factory workers' strike, she takes a more humane position as to a master's responsibility for the well-being of his "hands." Thornton's philosophy is a capitalist par excellence, believing in the strength and efficiency of machines and ruthless competition, and maintaining a position of laissez-faire as far as the lives of his workers go: "But those hours [referring to the labouring hours of his men] past, our relation ceases; and then comes in the same respect for their independence that I myself exact."
Mrs. Hale's health at Milton continues to decline, and Dixon, Mrs. Hale's faithful maid and Margaret keep the news of her decline from Mr. Hale. Margaret continues to visit with the Higginses, sympathizing with their hardships, and also learning of the divisions amongst the working class: hearing about a poverty-stricken family (the Boucher's) and the difficulty posed by the holding out which the Union strikers require, Margaret begins to see the Union as just as tyrannical as the master's. Higgins respects Margaret for her so-called "plain-speaking," but does not agree. When Mrs. Hale takes a turn for the worse, Margaret is charged with the errand of asking Mrs. Thornton if they might borrow a water bed. At their estate, an angry, rioting crowd has gathered because Mr. Thornton had been attempting to use Irish workers to break the strike. Feeling the injustice which the crowd feels, Margaret charges Thornton to do his manly duty and speak to the crowd as a human speaks to his brother human. Margaret rushes out to face the crowd with him, and a pebble grazes her. Terrified at what they have done, the crowd retreats. After this incident, Thornton realizes that Margaret has taken harm upon herself while protecting him, and feels himself actually deeply in love with her. He asks her for her hand in marriage, which she insolently rejects; Thornton responds by saying that he will nevertheless love her, as a kind of defiance to Margaret's intransigence.
Mrs. Hale, feeling herself fast fading, makes a request that she might be able to see her son Frederick, who has been forced to take shelter in Spain because of his participation in a mutiny aboard a ship. Though Frederick's action was just, he will likely be hanged if he returned to England. Margaret and Dixon make arrangements for Frederick to visit his dying mother in secret. Mrs. Hale also requests of Mrs. Thornton to watch over Margaret as a mother might after she is gone; reluctantly. Mrs. Thornton agrees though she clearly resents Margaret for her pride and rejection of her own, dear son. Bessy dies before Mrs. Hale, and Margaret takes it upon herself to put Mr. Higgins in contact with her father in hopes that he might develop some faith in God which would have been so important to Bessy. The two of them strike an unusual sort of friendship through Margaret. Frederick's visit goes off without a hitch, and Mrs. Hale dies. Afterwards, Margaret suggests that Frederick go to London to seek out Henry Lennox to see if he might help him return to England legally. This turns out to be a mistake, because someone recognizes Frederick at the railroad station; Frederick pushes this man off the platform and boards the train for London and is for the time being safe. Unfortunately, the man dies (likely because he was a heavy drinker and drunk at the time) and Margaret is asked by an inspector if she had been witness to a young man pushing this man off the platform. Stoically, Margaret lies that she was not there, but Thornton has actually seen her. Thornton, thinking that Margaret was out with a lover, actually strives to protect her by canceling the inquest (he has the power to do this because he is the magistrate for the case). Margaret is devastated by this involvement because she realizes that Thornton probably thinks badly of her.
Tragedy soon strikes the Boucher family as well; John Boucher is found drowned in a brook, having committed suicide. Higgins feels badly for his own harsh treatment of Boucher and his pressuring him to maintain the strike. Boucher's widow is rather unsympathetically portrayed in the narrative; she is vulgarly selfish and not particularly responsible as far as tending to her own children goes after her husband's terrible death. On a visit which Mr. Hale makes to visit Bell at Oxford, he suddenly dies, leaving Margaret and Frederick orphans. Margaret is hastened to London, where she can stay with her Aunt Shaw and Edith. Eventually, Bell comes to take Margaret to visit Helstone, thinking it will do her good after the tragic experiences with which she has had to contend. Margaret finds Helstone changed from her idyllic remembrances, though of course, she too has probably changed from her experiences in the north. More tragedy follows when the old Mr. Bell also dies, leaving Margaret with considerable property as his heiress. In the end, Margaret becomes Mr. Thornton's landlord at Marlborough Mills, and also offers to give him some capital when he suffers financial losses. Margaret's own name is cleared when Higgins, who has decided to work for Thornton (now, a much more humanistic factory master), reveals to him that the young man on the railroad platform was Frederick and not Margaret's lover but brother. The novel ends with Thornton as a reformed master, figuring out a better system in which worker and master engage in greater human-to-human interaction and as a result, gain a more personal understanding of each others' roles and the value of these roles. Thornton and Margaret finally reconcile and decide to marry, symbolizing Gaskell's vision of a union between the ruthlessly capitalistic, industrial north and the more humanistic but somewhat stagnant south.
CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Gaskell's vision of a marriage between north and south crystallized by the marriage of John Thornton and Margaret Hale signals an acceptance of industrial power of machines as key to progress while also suggesting the need for human-to-human interaction between different classes in order for progress to work properly. Margaret's ability to find "human interest" and to connect people of different backgrounds and ideologies, whether Mr. Hale and Mr. Higgins, or Mr. Higgins and the Boucher's, is a corrective to Thornton's de-humanizing laissez-faire which sees his hired workers as merely "hands" (and even if he acknowledges their personhood, he wants nothing to do with that part of their existence). In turn, Thornton's powerful work ethic and faith in capitalism as a way of realizing greater heights of human productivity than ever-to-be imagined before is a corrective to Margaret's complacency in the stagnant, agricultural economy of the south. Though rich and poor might interact on a more personal, and less hostile relation in the south, hard subsistence remains a reality for large amount of poor southerners. The agricultural economy lacks projects backed by capital to carry society beyond this rather feudal state of relations between those who own land by birth and those who work on it in order to survive.
The title, North and South, however, was not Gaskell's original title: Dickens suggested it. Gaskell's title was Margaret Hale. While Dickens's title is useful insofar as it really pulls out the larger allegorical significances of Mr. Thornton and Margaret's marriage with respect to class and historical import, Gaskell's original title tilts the balance of this marriage in favor of Margaret's importance in the marriage. After all, Margaret ends up doing more than just helping to soften and humanize Thornton's capitalism; she also provides the capital for him to rebuild after suffering significant financial losses. In this sense, the "south" bears the greater burden, since not only does it correct the ideologies of a purely dehumanizing capitalist machine, but also pumps money into it so that it might continue to do the positive work of progress. Thinking of North and South as a story of an individual, too, underscores the importance of what an individual (and even more importantly, a woman) can do to contribute to wider workings of social progress.
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Gaskell's North and South was serialized in weekly parts in Dickens's Household Words from September 1854 to January 1855. Gaskell found the format limiting; she commented in a note to the volume edition that she felt that she had had to compress her novel. She added, therefore, expansions to the volume edition. In addition to narrative expansions, Gaskell also added epigraph quotations to the beginning of chapters.
SUMMARY:
North and South begins with the marriage of the main character Margaret's cousin Edith to Captain Lennox, and Margaret's subsequent departure from Harley Street in London to go back to Helstone, a country town in the south where she grew up. The wedding puts Margaret in contact with the lawyer and brother of the Captain, Henry Lennox. They exchange some niceties about Helstone, and Margaret feels that he belittles Helstone by making it out to be some kind of fairytale village and refuses to talk about it. To Margaret's surprise, Henry visits her back at Helstone a little while later, and after the enjoy an afternoon sketching together, he proposes to her. Margaret refuses him and he leaves. Meanwhile, Margaret feels that her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hale, don't seem quite as happy and at ease as she had remembered them to be. Mr. Hale, a parson, soon confesses to Margaret that he has decided to leave his post because of doubts that he had as to the true faith espoused by the Church of England. He proposes that they will move to a northern manufacturing town, Milton, where he will serve as a tutor. His own mentor at Oxford, Mr. Bell, had already connected him with a wealthy manufacturer named Mr. John Thornton, who will be his first pupil. Margaret is charged with the difficult task of revealing this plan to her mother, who is of generally weak constitution. Margaret accomplishes the task, and helps her father makes arrangements to move, suggesting that Mrs. Hale remove to a seaside town while she and her father figure out where they will live in Milton.
After settling into the smoky, gray environment of a manufacturing town, Margaret makes the acquaintance of Thornton, and thinks him rather coarse and inflexible. She also makes other acquaintances by chance in the street--Nicholas Higgins, a poor factory worker who is organizing a strike against factory masters like Thornton, and his ailing daughter Bessy who is sick from working at cotton mills. Thornton lives with his mother, with whom he is very close; after his father's failed speculations, Thornton, with the support of his mother built his business up and worked very hard to come to the wealth which he has now. His sister, Fanny, also lives with them, but she is rather vapid and snooty. Mrs. Thornton doesn't really take to Margaret, finding her to be ignorant of the ways of the north, a pampered southern aristocrat who does not appreciate or understand the strength of her son's industrious and manly character. Margaret, after all, is not shy to critique Thornton, especially when discussing the factory workers' strike, she takes a more humane position as to a master's responsibility for the well-being of his "hands." Thornton's philosophy is a capitalist par excellence, believing in the strength and efficiency of machines and ruthless competition, and maintaining a position of laissez-faire as far as the lives of his workers go: "But those hours [referring to the labouring hours of his men] past, our relation ceases; and then comes in the same respect for their independence that I myself exact."
Mrs. Hale's health at Milton continues to decline, and Dixon, Mrs. Hale's faithful maid and Margaret keep the news of her decline from Mr. Hale. Margaret continues to visit with the Higginses, sympathizing with their hardships, and also learning of the divisions amongst the working class: hearing about a poverty-stricken family (the Boucher's) and the difficulty posed by the holding out which the Union strikers require, Margaret begins to see the Union as just as tyrannical as the master's. Higgins respects Margaret for her so-called "plain-speaking," but does not agree. When Mrs. Hale takes a turn for the worse, Margaret is charged with the errand of asking Mrs. Thornton if they might borrow a water bed. At their estate, an angry, rioting crowd has gathered because Mr. Thornton had been attempting to use Irish workers to break the strike. Feeling the injustice which the crowd feels, Margaret charges Thornton to do his manly duty and speak to the crowd as a human speaks to his brother human. Margaret rushes out to face the crowd with him, and a pebble grazes her. Terrified at what they have done, the crowd retreats. After this incident, Thornton realizes that Margaret has taken harm upon herself while protecting him, and feels himself actually deeply in love with her. He asks her for her hand in marriage, which she insolently rejects; Thornton responds by saying that he will nevertheless love her, as a kind of defiance to Margaret's intransigence.
Mrs. Hale, feeling herself fast fading, makes a request that she might be able to see her son Frederick, who has been forced to take shelter in Spain because of his participation in a mutiny aboard a ship. Though Frederick's action was just, he will likely be hanged if he returned to England. Margaret and Dixon make arrangements for Frederick to visit his dying mother in secret. Mrs. Hale also requests of Mrs. Thornton to watch over Margaret as a mother might after she is gone; reluctantly. Mrs. Thornton agrees though she clearly resents Margaret for her pride and rejection of her own, dear son. Bessy dies before Mrs. Hale, and Margaret takes it upon herself to put Mr. Higgins in contact with her father in hopes that he might develop some faith in God which would have been so important to Bessy. The two of them strike an unusual sort of friendship through Margaret. Frederick's visit goes off without a hitch, and Mrs. Hale dies. Afterwards, Margaret suggests that Frederick go to London to seek out Henry Lennox to see if he might help him return to England legally. This turns out to be a mistake, because someone recognizes Frederick at the railroad station; Frederick pushes this man off the platform and boards the train for London and is for the time being safe. Unfortunately, the man dies (likely because he was a heavy drinker and drunk at the time) and Margaret is asked by an inspector if she had been witness to a young man pushing this man off the platform. Stoically, Margaret lies that she was not there, but Thornton has actually seen her. Thornton, thinking that Margaret was out with a lover, actually strives to protect her by canceling the inquest (he has the power to do this because he is the magistrate for the case). Margaret is devastated by this involvement because she realizes that Thornton probably thinks badly of her.
Tragedy soon strikes the Boucher family as well; John Boucher is found drowned in a brook, having committed suicide. Higgins feels badly for his own harsh treatment of Boucher and his pressuring him to maintain the strike. Boucher's widow is rather unsympathetically portrayed in the narrative; she is vulgarly selfish and not particularly responsible as far as tending to her own children goes after her husband's terrible death. On a visit which Mr. Hale makes to visit Bell at Oxford, he suddenly dies, leaving Margaret and Frederick orphans. Margaret is hastened to London, where she can stay with her Aunt Shaw and Edith. Eventually, Bell comes to take Margaret to visit Helstone, thinking it will do her good after the tragic experiences with which she has had to contend. Margaret finds Helstone changed from her idyllic remembrances, though of course, she too has probably changed from her experiences in the north. More tragedy follows when the old Mr. Bell also dies, leaving Margaret with considerable property as his heiress. In the end, Margaret becomes Mr. Thornton's landlord at Marlborough Mills, and also offers to give him some capital when he suffers financial losses. Margaret's own name is cleared when Higgins, who has decided to work for Thornton (now, a much more humanistic factory master), reveals to him that the young man on the railroad platform was Frederick and not Margaret's lover but brother. The novel ends with Thornton as a reformed master, figuring out a better system in which worker and master engage in greater human-to-human interaction and as a result, gain a more personal understanding of each others' roles and the value of these roles. Thornton and Margaret finally reconcile and decide to marry, symbolizing Gaskell's vision of a union between the ruthlessly capitalistic, industrial north and the more humanistic but somewhat stagnant south.
CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Gaskell's vision of a marriage between north and south crystallized by the marriage of John Thornton and Margaret Hale signals an acceptance of industrial power of machines as key to progress while also suggesting the need for human-to-human interaction between different classes in order for progress to work properly. Margaret's ability to find "human interest" and to connect people of different backgrounds and ideologies, whether Mr. Hale and Mr. Higgins, or Mr. Higgins and the Boucher's, is a corrective to Thornton's de-humanizing laissez-faire which sees his hired workers as merely "hands" (and even if he acknowledges their personhood, he wants nothing to do with that part of their existence). In turn, Thornton's powerful work ethic and faith in capitalism as a way of realizing greater heights of human productivity than ever-to-be imagined before is a corrective to Margaret's complacency in the stagnant, agricultural economy of the south. Though rich and poor might interact on a more personal, and less hostile relation in the south, hard subsistence remains a reality for large amount of poor southerners. The agricultural economy lacks projects backed by capital to carry society beyond this rather feudal state of relations between those who own land by birth and those who work on it in order to survive.
The title, North and South, however, was not Gaskell's original title: Dickens suggested it. Gaskell's title was Margaret Hale. While Dickens's title is useful insofar as it really pulls out the larger allegorical significances of Mr. Thornton and Margaret's marriage with respect to class and historical import, Gaskell's original title tilts the balance of this marriage in favor of Margaret's importance in the marriage. After all, Margaret ends up doing more than just helping to soften and humanize Thornton's capitalism; she also provides the capital for him to rebuild after suffering significant financial losses. In this sense, the "south" bears the greater burden, since not only does it correct the ideologies of a purely dehumanizing capitalist machine, but also pumps money into it so that it might continue to do the positive work of progress. Thinking of North and South as a story of an individual, too, underscores the importance of what an individual (and even more importantly, a woman) can do to contribute to wider workings of social progress.
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