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Book review: Cousin Phillis

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Cousin Phillis by Elizabeth Gaskell. London: Hesperus Press, 2007. 144 pages.

Like Cranford and Wives and Daughters, Cousin Phillis is a variation on the themes that seemed to have preoccupied Elizabeth Gaskell: the changes wrought by mechanization and the different spheres in which men and women live and operate.

When the narrator, then 19, meets Phillis, her physical world is small, contained, and regular, predictably following the seasons as agricultural life does. Her intellectual life, however, is vast. She is comfortable with Latin and the principles of mechanics; she attempts to read Dante in Italian. As Jenny Uglow notes in the foreword, “. . . she does not crave ‘independence,’ but connection . . . She yearns to use her mind and give her heart.” She wants to be a woman.

By contrast, the men around her are reshaping the world with their thought, their inventions, their ambition, and their work. Even the narrator, who admittedly lacks his father’s inventive genius and Holdsworth’s drive, is doing more than Phillis ever could simply by serving as Holdsworth’s assistant.

With her flourishing intellectual curiosity and her growing sexual awareness, it’s natural for Phillis to discard the pinafore that represents the restrictions placed on the Victorian woman-child and to desire a man whose tastes, abilities, and drive seem to parallel her own. The result is not surprising. As a woman, her opportunities are limited, while those of the man stretch across two continents and grow greater with each rail laid. It’s clear who is destined to be disappointed.

As with the other novels, Gaskell captures a world within her own memory that in many ways had already ceased to exist. The narrator, older and married now, recalls in vivid detail an experience colored by the passage of time and by the changes that have transpired. The bogs, “all over with myrtle and soft moss,” could not fail to be altered irrevocably by the railway line, nor could the Hope Farm, with its cozy “house place” and “the clock on the house-stairs perpetually clicking out the passage of the moments.” Phillis’s father learns that she cannot be kept in a pinafore and all that it represents, and the narrator “feared that she would never be what she had been before.” No one is.

The narrator leaves us with enticing mysteries. What has prompted him to write about Phillis? What has happened? What does he want to accomplish by telling her story now? What is he trying to recapture? What happened to Phillis? What happened to the Hope Farm and its way of life that he so beautifully recalls and the tenor of which is so effectually altered by events?

Cousin Phillis is a tiny treasure — always evocative, never overwrought. We see Phillis and her natural evolution from child to woman with the narrator’s wisdom of maturity and the clarifying, yet softening filters of time. The narrator — and Gaskell — leave Phillis trapped in time, changed, newly aware of the broadness of her desires and of the obstacles she faces, and determined to “go back to the peace of the old days” — a hope that is nearly impossible to achieve. There is no going back, as Phillis must surely know.

27 April 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: St. Mawr and The Man Who Died

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St. Mawr and The Man Who Died. By D. H. Lawrence. New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1959. 212 pages.

Not truly novels, St. Mawr and The Man Who Died seem to be experimental works in which D. H. Lawrence continues to explore the themes found throughout his longer fiction — the emasculation and dehumanization of men, the power and inscrutability of nature, the cynicism of post-war England, the difficulties in relationships and sex, and the potential of reinvention and resurrection.

Young Lou Witt, married, dispirited, weary, and bored, finds in the stallion St. Mawr the vitality the men around her lack. Although “some inscrutable bond held them together . . . a strange vibration of the nerves rather than of the blood,” Lou’s marriage to Rico enervates her. The relationship soon becomes Platonic, “a marriage, but without sex.” The vital animal element of marriage “was shattering and exhausting, they shrank from it.”

When Lou touches St. Mawr, she finds him “[s]o slippery with vivid, hot life!” His “alive, alert intensity” fires her emotions, which she realizes had died in the post-war era of facile friendships and fun. St. Mawr “seemed to look at her out of another world.”

With her purchase of the stallion, Lou’s perspective alters; “she could not believe the world she lived in.” Although unreachable and unknowable, St. Mawr is more real to her than her husband, his friends, and even his apparent new love interest. For Lou, “all the people she knew, seemed so entirely contained within their cardboard, let’s-be-happy world.” Rico becomes almost a caricature of a man, imitating his father’s officiousness and righteous indignation without feeling them. Lawrence describes Rico’s meticulous attention to his appearance in detail: “. . . he dressed himself most carefully in white riding-breeches and a shirt of purple silk crepe, with a flowing black tie spotted red like a ladybird, and black riding-boots.” While Rico is decorative and transparent, St. Mawr is vital and mysterious.

Lawrence uses long swathes of St. Mawr to philosophize, often directly or through the Welsh groom, Lewis, who says, “But a man’s mind is always full of things.” St. Mawr has no plot, and the stallion himself disappears from the narrative before Lou decides to “escape achievement” in the desert of New Mexico.

In New Mexico, Lawrence finds the “wild tussle” of life, which is missing from the long-civilized England, where everything is fenced in and where “the labourers could no longer afford even a glass of beer in the evenings, since the Glorious War.” The displaced New England housewife who precedes Lou, seeing beauty in the desert first, then struggle, may represent Lawrence’s own perspective and evolution during his stay there.

The Man Who Died begins with a peasant’s acquisition of a cock — perhaps the one that crows three times before Peter realizes his three denials of Christ. Like the cock, the man who died (or, more accurately, didn’t die and therefore didn’t rise again) is tied “body, soul, and spirit” by “that string,” his commitment to mankind to die and to be resurrected. “The doom of death was a shadow compared to the raging destiny of life, the determined surge of life.”

Having survived his promised destiny, the man who died again renounces his godhood to become a man, this time permanently and with no agenda. His near death drives him to seek life, but not the “greed of giving” or the “little, greedy life of the body . . . he knew that virginity is a form of greed . . . he had risen for the woman, or women, who knew the greater life of the body, not greedy to give, not greedy to take . . .”

In his new situation, “the presence of people made him lonely.” He believes he has fulfilled his mission and is beyond it: “My way is my own alone . . . I am alone within my own skin, which is the walls of all my domain.”

Also alone is the virgin priestess of the temple of Isis, patiently awaiting the return of Osiris. Like Lou and many other female characters in Lawrence, she senses the superficial sexual appeal of men, but even to the great Anthony, “the very flower of her womb was cool, was almost cold, like a bud in the shadow of frost, for all the flooding of his sunshine.” An old philosopher tells her, “Rare women wait for the re-born man” and that the lotus responds to “one of these rare, invisible suns that have been killed and shine no more,” dismissing Anthony as one of the “golden brief day-suns of show.”

The consummation of the relationship between the virgin god and the virgin priestess, in a temple surrounded outside by suspicious, vindictive slaves, is beautiful and moving. “It was the deep, interfolded warmth, warmth living and penetrable, the woman, the heart of the rose!” Instead of being a mere part of the “little life of the body,” sex (and procreation) becomes a deeply spiritual experience, “the marvellous piercing transcendence of desire.”

In both St. Mawr and The Man Who Died, Lawrence is rarely subtle or restrained, covering pages with repetitious expositions of his favorite themes, sometimes reveling too much in the variety of expression. In spite of their flaws, both works are inventive, imaginative, and stirring. For anyone who is familiar with Lawrence primarily though his more well-known novels and stories, these two works are worth a read.

9 March 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Fox

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The Fox by D. H. Lawrence. Recommended.

One of D. H. Lawrence’s fable-like tales addressing gender roles and relationships, The Fox is developed based on the symbol of a female-centric farm beset by a “demon,” a marauding male fox. Owned and run by two women, the “small, thin, delicate thing,” Banford, and “the man about the place,” March, the farm is remarkably unproductive. One independent-minded heifer refuses to stay put, and the women, afraid of birth and responsibility, sell the pregnant cow before she can produce a calf. Because “Banford and March disbelieved in living for work alone,” it is clear that their farming venture, the nature of which requires commitment and hard work, is fated to fail.

Into this setting, where “fowls did not flourish,” comes a fox, a symbolic male, that carries off not only the hens, but March’s consciousness. As a male intruder in this female world, “he knew her.” The imagery is deliberately sexual; “her soul failed her,” and, too mesmerized to fire her gun, “she saw his white buttocks twinkle.” Having encountered the male, she determines to hunt him down. “She was possessed by him.”

Months later, March again threatens to shoot the real fox, a young man who comes to the farm from the outside world of men and war. As with the fox, the other male, “March stared at him spellbound.” Again, the symbolism is not meant to be subtle; Lawrence writes, ” . . . the boy was to her the fox, and she could not see him otherwise” and “she need not go after him any more.”

The fox and the man change March, who in the man’s presence becomes “pale and wan,” anxious not to be seen, “a shadow in the shadow” — almost like a fox herself. Throughout the novel, the man, Henry, has the same effacing effect on her. She is no longer the “man” of the farm, but a shrinking, passive, mesmerized female, speaking in a “plangent, laconic voice” when the real man is around. In her dreams, the fox and the man are powerful sexual images that take away her ability to articulate; the fox “whisked his brush across her face, and it seemed this brush was on fire, for it seared and burned her mouth with a great pain . . . [She] lay trembling as if she were really seared.”

As the story continues and Henry and Banford vie for March’s attention and loyalty, it is easy to see Banford and March as a lesbian couple, incomplete in the way the French writer Colette viewed such relationships. Henry, the man, carries the gun, hunts, and watches; he is “most free when he was quite alone.” With Henry’s arrival, Banford becomes more stereotypically female, strong-willed but physically weak, querulous, and manipulative. March is in the middle, the man to one, the woman to the other. Banford says of Henry, “He’s a boy like you are.” March is always indistinct to the soft-spoken, courteous Henry, who wishes to dominate her and to bring her into focus. When Henry kills the fox, March dreams of burying Banford wrapped in the fox skin — a thought that leaves her with “tears streaming down her face.” She does not want to let go of either woman or man, or the feminine or masculine in herself.

Events and choices leave March with “nothingness at last”; having hunted for the fox and reached for happiness, she is left with a “realisation of emptiness” that can be resolved only by being “alone with him at her side.” To be female is to sleep, a form of death, while to be male is to keep awake, know, consider, judge, and decide. In The Fox, as in other Lawrence novels, the man-woman relationship is one of strain between masculine values of dominance and possession and feminine desire to “stay awake” and for autonomy and self-determination.

Unpolished, repetitive, obvious in its imagery, and blunt about its messages, The Fox is flawed and pales beside Sons and Lovers and Women in Love. As a short study of the ideas surrounding gender, roles, and relationships that predominate in Lawrence’s fiction, The Fox is worth the attention of both Lawrence student and aficionado.

8 December 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Lois the Witch

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Lois the Witch by Elizabeth Gaskell. Foreword by Jenny Uglow. Highly recommended.

The well-educated wife of a Unitarian minister in Victorian Manchester, Elizabeth Gaskell must have understood the dangers of misused Christianity and religious intolerance in a closed community. In Lois the Witch, uncertainty surrounds Salem — deep forests, wild animals, and Indians who are thought to be savage pawns of Satan. In the midst of that untamed wilderness is a town full of people trying to be what they believe to be godly, each of whom lives in fear that he or she may not be among the chosen, the predestined of God.

Into this repressed, volatile setting arrives Lois Barclay, a young, attractive, pious English Anglican whose parents have died and who has come to live with her Puritan uncle and his family. Lois is different from her new family in every way. While she is warm, affectionate, empathetic, and genuinely and effortlessly godly, she soon discovers that her aunt is cold and proud (“Godly Mr Cotton Mather hath said that even he might learn of me; and I would advise thee rather to humble thyself”). Her older daughter, misnamed Faith, for she is agnostic, is both obsessive and unexpressive, and her younger daughter, misnamed Prudence, is sadistic and vicious. More disturbingly, her son, in his early twenties and unmarried, sees visions and hears voices, and not surprisingly, focuses his long-repressed sexuality on the gentle, attractive newcomer.

Haplessly, Lois becomes the focal point for this family’s frustrations, fears, desires, jealousies, and, finally, hatred. She, like many of the “witches,” is a victim of being different in a conformist society that is both filled with unfulfilled desires and afraid of the unknown.

In Gaskell’s Salem, selfishness is rife. Lois’s uncle “cried like a child, rather at his own loss of a sister whom he had not seen for more than twenty years, than at that of the orphan’s [sic] standing before him, trying hard not to cry . . .” The son, Manasseh, is interested only in his own visions and “his own sick soul,” while Prudence “only seemed excited to greater mischief” by the attention generated by her cruelties. This selfishness seems to be the natural result of a belief system in which the fate of one’s soul is painfully uncertain and in which one is surrounded by evil. Selfishness and a desperate sense of self-preservation help to explain the moral blindness and the inability to look objectively within as the accusations start to flow and are willingly, almost eagerly, accepted as fact.

Sexual repression leads to fascination with the very subject. When Lois goes to the common pasture (on the edge of the forest where evil dwells), her thought is of a story in which a double-headed snake, “in the service of the Indian wizards,” lures white maidens “to seek out some Indian man, and must beg to be taken into his wigwam, abjuring faith and race forever.” To the white maidens of Gaskell’s Salem, such tales hold terror and promise.

In the 86 pages of Lois the Witch, Gaskell succinctly sets the stage, defines the characters and the critical relationships, and shows how every innocent act and word are used against the bewildered Lois, whose fear is that she will have to share her cell with a real witch — because she too succumbs to the general paranoia. Selfish to the end, her aunt “summoned her to meet her at the judgement-seat, and answer for this deadly injury done to both souls and bodies of those who had taken her in, and received her when she came to them an orphan and a stranger.” Ironically, it is the selfless Lois, who left England so she would not be the cause of a quarrel between her lover and his wealthy father, who, like Christ, pays the price for the sins of others.

Gaskell has taken a complex sociological matter, the Salem witch trials, and humanized it. This is a tiny gem of a story that leaves a deep impression.

29 July 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Tales of New York

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Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Tales of New York by Stephen Crane. Edited with an introduction by Larzer Ziff with the assistance of Theo Davis. Recommended.

If Edith Wharton captures the snobbery, superficiality, hypocrisy, materialism, and coldness of New York City’s turn-of-the-century elite, Stephen Crane reveals the toughness, callousness, brutality, and violence of New York’s working class. Ironically, Wharton’s Lily Bart and Crane’s Maggie Johnson, both romantics moving in anti-romantic spheres, share a similar fate — abandoned by their respective societies.

Unlike Wharton, Crane wrote from a primarily journalistic, dispassionate point of view. The settings, the situations, the speech, and the similes reveal the underbelly of life among the working poor. Maggie opens with “a very little boy,” her brother Jim, serving as “champion” of Rum Alley, an aptly named area where life is centered on working, drinking, and fighting.

Maggie and Jim’s father can’t keep him from fighting because that’s all the boy knows, and the torn clothes that his drunken mother bemoans cannot compare to the furniture and crockery damage that occur during their violent marital spats. The father, a drunken brute like his wife, does not understand the irony of his demand when he says, “. . . Yer allus pounding ‘im . . . I can’t get no rest ’cause yer allus poundin’ a kid. Let up, d’yeh hear? Don’t be allus poundin’ a kid.” The infuriated mother responds with increased savagery. “At last she tossed him to a corner where he limply lay cursing and weeping.” Jim, Maggie, and even the baby Tommie seem to be as disposable as the rest of the household goods.

Life in the city is lived outwardly, and the strong do not question themselves. While “Jimmie had an idea it wasn’t common courtesy for a friend to come to one’s home and ruin one’s sister,” his contemplations of his own actions toward women are cut off by self-absolution before such introspection can lead to self-incrimination. Later, Pete will share this attitude when Maggie attempts, in his mind, “to give him some responsibility in a matter that did not concern him.”

Maggie and Jimmie’s parents represent an extreme. Everyone knows their family’s business, from the residents who share their tenement with its “gruesome doorway” to the group of urchins who waylay the mother as she is ejected from a saloon for “disturbance.” The Johnsons’ troubles delight the neighbors; the old woman downstairs tells Jim that “deh funnies’ t’ing I ever saw” was Maggie “a-cryin’ as if her heart would break, she was. It was deh funnies’ t’ing I ever saw.”

In the midst of this squalor, Maggie does have an inner life. Combined with her romanticism and naïveté, it convinces her that Pete is the height of urbane sophistication as he bullies waiters, telling them to “git off deh eart’.” Interestingly, as she toils over “eternal collars and cuffs,” Maggie has a daydream that foreshadows Pete’s final chapter in the novel; she imagines him with a half dozen women “and thought he must lean dangerously toward an indefinite one, whom she pictured with great charms of person, but with an altogether contemptible disposition.”

In Maggie’s final appearance, Crane does not use her name, which perhaps answers her question from the preceding chapter: “Who?” She begins her anonymous journey near a theater district, where the affluent emerge from “a place of forgetfulness.” Her wanderings on this one night reflect her life over the previous several months, as she leaves behind the bright light and glamor on a trail of rejection that leads ever downward, until she meets a wreck of a human, who follows “the girl of the crimson legions.” No longer Maggie, she represents those whose naïveté, hopes, and foolish romantic dreams are crushed by the code of toughness that Jimmie fights for at the beginning and the hypocrisy that her lamenting mother exhibits at her fall.

These stories can be hard to read, partly because most of the relationships seem detached or distant at best and bitterly heartless at worst. Maggie’s father talks about pounding “a kid” as though they are not his own and have nothing to do with him. Pete is “stuck” on Maggie’s shape only until she gets in the way of greater desires. George of George’s Mother is happiest when he has made his old mother miserable. At the same time his “friends,” whose habits and exhortations have led to his downfall, abandon him, just as he turned on his mother.

Love is a rare visitor to Crane’s pages, apparent mostly in the maternal indulgences of George’s Mother and the rediscovered affection of Mr. and Mrs. Binks in “Mr. Binks’ Day Off.” It is only in the countryside of New Jersey that the battling Binkses find a moment in which to express genuine affection: “Mrs. Binks had stolen forth her arm and linked it with his. Her head leaned softly against his shoulder.”

Notably, the other loving relationship, between a child and “A Dark-Brown Dog,” is marked by the brutality of the one and the submissiveness of the other. Their friendship begins when “the child lifted his hand and struck the dog a blow upon the head”; the dog “sank down in despair at the child’s feet.” In the world both know, the more powerful must domineer, and the weaker must submit. Living by this simple rule, however, does not guarantee survival.

Crane self-published Maggie, and it is sometimes clear that his work could have benefited from an editor’s counsel. For example, similes such as, “The little boy ran to the halls, shrieking like a monk in an earthquake,” are ineffective and draw too much attention to themselves. Yet these stories are an amazing accomplishment of observation and writing that make Crane’s premature death at age 28 even more tragic.

30 January 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf