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Book review: Victorian Love Stories

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Victorian Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology edited by Kate Flint. Highly recommended.

Coincidentally, I happened to read this collection of Victorian short stories focused on love relationships concurrently with a book of Victorian erotic short stories and George Eliot’s Middlemarch(set earlier in the 19th century). Although there are occasional hints of the erotic or sexual in many of the love stories, most of them are about love and romance disconnected from the physical — love with all the proprieties. It’s almost as if the Victorian erotica fills in the missing pieces in the love stories that would be private and not observable (those things the characters truly think and feel but which is unacceptable to reveal or acknowledge in public, along with the erotic).

The love stories are, for the most part, about acceptable if not always successful relationships, whereas the erotica is largely about questionable or illicit relationships. Middlemarch made an interesting companion, since at least one of the key relationships, Dorothea and Causabon, appear to experience neither love nor Eros. In the end, both the love stories and the erotica may seem unbalanced because each seems incomplete — as though one can have love or sex, but not both. Is the balance as difficult to achieve in life as it is in literature?

Flint’s collection is outstanding in its scope, including stories by authors who are not well known to today’s average reader as well as stories by such authors as Anthony Trollope, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, and Oscar Wilde. The stories include young love, middle-aged love (a welcome change from today’s focus on youth), deception, fantasy, fairy tale, class issues, religious differences, urban and rural life, changing mores, rejection and pain, and the proper and improper. There is even a touch of silliness in W. S. Gilbert’s “An Elixir of Love” and a surprise ending in Ellen T. Fowler’s “An Old Wife’s Tale.”

The settings range from urban London to rural villages; from rough coastal areas (Anthony Trollope’s “Malachi’s Cove”) to mythical locales ( Christiana Rossetti’s “Hero,” Laurence Housman’s “The Story of the Herons”); from hints of the supernatural (Wilkie’s “The Captain’s Last Love” and Amelia B. Edwards’ “Salome”) to other worlds (Olive Schreiner’s “In a Far-Off World”); from the urban (A. St. John Adcock’s “Bob Harris’s Deputy”) to the bucolic (James’ “A Day of Days”); from the familiar (stories set in the United Kingdom) to the exotic (Ernest Dowson’s “The Statute of Limitations,” Kipling’s “Georgie Porgie,” Flora Annie Steel’s “Uma Himavutee”). The one thing all the stories have in common is love — happy love, unrequited love, frustrated love, deceptive love, miserable love, tragic love — love and what passes for love in its complex facets.

Despite the subject matter, there is little that is sickly sweet in this collection. Love is not always touching or uplifting; sometimes it is deeply bitter. Most of the stories are memorable; some are unforgettable (Lucy Clifford’s “The End of Her Journey,” Hubert Crackenthorpe’s “A Conflict of Egoisms”). No matter how you feel about love, you are sure to find a beautifully written story here that will resonate with your experiences.

16 June 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life

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Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life by Elizabeth Gaskell. Edited with an introduction and notes by Shirley Foster. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. 480 pages.

A tale of Manchester working life set in the 1830s, Mary Barton begins as bucolically as any gritty urban novel can. The Bartons, who are expecting an addition to the family, meet the Wilsons, who are carrying their infant twins, at Green Heys Fields. The charm of these low, flat, treeless tracts lies in their rural contrast to “the busy, bustling manufacturing town [he] left but half an hour ago.” The couples adjourn to the Barton home for tea, where Gaskell lovingly describes every modest luxury such working folk can manage — the bright green japanned tea tray with its scarlet lovers, the cupboard of crockery and glass of which Mrs. Barton is so proud, and the hodgepodge of furniture (“sure sign of good times among the mills”). In honor of their guests, the Bartons send young Mary out for fresh eggs (“one a-piece, that will be five pence”), milk, bread, and Cumberland ham.

Thus Mary Barton commences with a self-conscious air of cautious prosperity, but underneath the pleasure of the occasion are hints of despair to come — Mrs. Barton’s distress over the disappearance of her sister, and the Wilsons’ “little, feeble twins, inheriting the frail appearance of their mother.” In chapters I and II, Gaskell sets up the end of abundance and joy for the Bartons and the beginning of misery for their entire class in the mill city of Manchester.

Mary Barton is a novel of contrasts. While the Bartons take homely pride in their furniture and wares, the Carsons live in a “good house . . . furnished with disregard to expense . . . [with] much taste shown, and many articles chosen for their beauty and elegance.” As Carson’s former employee, Ben Davenport, lies dying in a filthy basement in the company of his wife and children, who are “too young to work, but not too young to be cold and hungry,” Carson’s youngest daughter Amy tells her brother and father that she “can’t live without flowers and scents” and that “life was not worth having without flowers.” They can’t live without food and shelter, and she thinks she can’t live without luxuries. Perhaps the most terrible contrast is between the “listless, sleepy” Carson sisters and the tragedy that interrupts their idle chatter.

The contrast and conflict between the rich and the poor, the men and the masters, is not conventionally based on envy or even class; Carson was once no better and no richer than anyone else. The men don’t aspire to wealth, at least for now. They want to feed their families and perhaps to enjoy the simple comforts the Bartons once shared with the Wilsons. What keeps masters and men apart is not class or money, but a more fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge the other’s humanity. Mr. Carson can’t be bothered to recall who Ben Davenport is, other than one of the many faceless men who worked for him for many years, or to give Wilson more than a useless outpatient order. Instead of approaching the masters, the men, who are powerless as individuals, join groups and send delegates like John Barton to London and Glasgow to try to gain government support for their cause. On their own, they fail.

Neither side is willing to break the communication barrier. Ignoring one of their number who wisely notes, “I don’t see how our interests can be separated,” the masters choose to hide the conundrum they face from the men, who are described as “cruel brutes . . . more like wild beasts than human beings.” Even as the omniscient narrator shows the just causes for both groups’ anger toward one another and tries to avoid demonstrating a preference, she can’t resist retorting parenthetically, “Well, who might have made them [the men] different?” It takes a murder and a near miscarriage of justice merely to open the door to redemption for the man in each side’s leading role.

Mary becomes the fulcrum of the characters and plot, connecting the Bartons to the Carsons, the unforgiving John to the repentant Esther, the worldly men and the more spiritually minded women. Through positive and negative models like Alice, Job, Margaret, Esther, Mrs. Wilson, and Sally, and through her true and patient if frustrated lover, Mary avoids Esther’s fate and is transformed from a heedless young girl into a courageous woman who is able to withstand the pull of her divided loyalties.

Confronted with the undeniable humanity of John Barton and the relentlessness of his unfamiliar poverty, Mr. Carson finally recognizes the need for change. As guardian of the old institutions, however, he struggles with his ambivalence toward taking action. Meanwhile, Mary Barton simply leaves the dead and the past behind to embrace an entirely different kind of future in a new country.

Mary Barton lacks some of the psychological depth and nuances that make Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters more interesting and engaging; here, the characters behave consistently and predictably. Despite the ease of its characterizations and assumptions, though, Mary Barton is a surprisingly stark, unvarnished look at the poorer, seamier side of urban industrial life. Gaskell accomplishes what the masters and men have failed to do — she recognizes the humanity in each of them and hints at its potential if only it is discovered and embraced.

16 September 2009
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

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: Cranford

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Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. Edited by Elizabeth Porges Watson. New introduction and notes by Charlotte Mitchell. ISBN 0-19-283209-3. Recommended.

Not a novel, not an anthology of short stories, Cranford is perhaps best described as a cohesive series of vignettes. Recounted by a young woman of about 30 from the city of Drumble [Manchester], these stories depict family, friendship, and love lost and found in a village dominated by poor but genteel spinsters and widows. “. . . all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women.” Small, rural, and elitist in its way, Cranford is a place out of time, where faded fashions and proprieties still matter.

Gaskell begins Cranford with a series of descriptive statements. Some are accurate, while others prove to be ironic. For example, “Although the ladies of Cranford know all each other’s proceedings, they are exceedingly indifferent to each other’s opinions.” While discovering Cranford and the Amazons who possess it, we also learn the dry perspective and voice of the narrator, who clearly loves the village while gently highlighting the foibles of its female inhabitants. “But I will answer for it, the last gigot, the last tight and scanty petticoat in wear in England, was seen in Cranford — and seen without a smile.”

Like Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, Cranford is focused on gender roles and the different lives of women and men. The sexes share many characteristics; Captain Brown and Peter Jenkyns display the thoughtful, neighborly solicitude associated with women (with Peter going so far as to don a woman’s dress), while Miss Jenkyns (the woman Peter impersonates) exhibits a manly will and resolution. It is the opportunities they have and the way in which they live that separates the sexes. Captain Brown, Peter, and Signor Brunoni have traveled and seen some of the world, and have even influenced it, while Miss Jenkyns, Miss Matty, Miss Price, the narrator, and their friends are constrained by their gender, gentility, and social code to hearth and home. Here, they perform their small household tasks, including ensuring that their maidservants are not disturbed or distracted by “followers,” or interested young men. The social code that prevents any of them from working in “trade” also determines the hours that can be spent outside the home. “Then there were rules and regulations for visiting and calls . . . ‘from twelve to three are our calling-hours.'”

In such a small, interconnected village, everything that happens is noteworthy, and every decision is important if the occasionally cruel social order is to be maintained. “The whole town knew and kindly regarded Miss Betty Barker’s Alderney,” whose fall into a lime-pit warrants Captain Brown’s advice, “Get her a flannel waistcoat and flannel drawers . . .,” so the narrator can ask the reader incredulously, “Do you ever seen cows dressed in grey flannel in London?” Miss Matty’s decision not to marry against her family’s wishes keeps the peace at great personal cost, and her wistful decision to allow Martha to have a follower recompenses her later when the outside world intrudes into her realm with its ugly realities — one of the many signs that Cranford must and will change. When Lady Glenmire renounces her title and takes the name of Mrs. Hoggins upon her remarriage, Cranford reels with shock and dismay, and it takes Peter Jenkyns, and his broader perspective from India, to reconcile the village and its de facto leader, Mrs. Jamieson, with the new ways.

The narrator, who divides her time between her father in the progressive world of Drumble and the slowly and reluctantly changing Cranford, finds herself under the village’s influence. As an observer, she describes the complex set of rules that govern Cranford society and the social slights they necessitate, not without a sense of regret. She is aware of the absurdity of Cranford society’s beliefs and behavior combined with expediency, such as the occasion of Miss Betty Barker’s party for the Cranford elite. “‘Oh, gentility!’ thought I, ‘can you endure this last shock?'” when “all sorts of good things for supper” appear. “. . . we thought it better to submit graciously, even at the cost of our gentility — which never ate suppers in general — but which, like most non-supper-eaters, was particularly hungry on all special occasions.” More seriously, she pities Miss Matty and her lost love and life, and like her other well-meaning friends determines that she shall be happy.

With the arrival of Signor Brunoni and the ensuing panic over the perceived crime wave that seems to hit Cranford, the narrator loses some of her wryness and seems to become nearly as frightened by the rumors of strangers and robberies as her elderly friends. It is the new outsider, Lady Glenmire, who “never had heard of any actual robberies; except that two little boys had stolen some apples from Farmer Benson’s orchard and that some eggs had been missed on a market-day off Widow Hayward’s stall.” Even while caught up in the panic, however, “I could not help being amused at Jenny’s position . . ..” When she speaks of Jenny’s ghost, the narrator says, “. . . for there was no knowing how near the ghostly head and ears might be . . ..”

Through the narrator, who seems to represent Gaskell’s own perspective, Cranford pokes gentle fun at a time and place that had already become a fairy tale-like setting, where goodness outdoes pettiness, justice prevails over setbacks and hardships, and even the prodigal son (or prince) can return to set things right. In Cranford, Gaskell reminds the reader of a recent past that is both amusing and moving, a time to look upon fondly but without regret for the changes that Peter and the marriage of Lady Glenmire/Mrs. Hoggins bring about. The one constant in life is change, and inCranford change is at least as much for the better as for the worse.

29 December 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Wives and Daughters: An Every-Day Story

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Wives and Daughters: An Every-Day Story by Elizabeth Gaskell. Introduction and notes by Pam Morris. Highly recommended.

With its fairy-tale beginning (“In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house . . .”), the subtitle of Wives and Daughters is gently ironic. While the basic plot is standard — boy and girl meet and overcome many obstacles, including themselves — Gaskell’s tale is as much about the rapidly changing Victorian world as about Molly Gibson and her provincial village of Hollingford.

Set before the 1832 Reform Bill, Wives and Daughters consciously brings together England’s aristocratic past, represented by Squire Hamley and the upstart earl and countess of Cumnor Towers, and the future, represented by Molly Gibson and Squire Hamley’s sons, especially Roger. The elder son, Osborne, puts his own interests and more modern sensibilities above those of his father, while Roger envisions a future of science, exploration, and expansionism. To Mrs. Gibson, who marries to avoid having to work and dependence on the aristocracy, Osborne offers her daughter an entrée into at least the landed gentry, whereas Roger is merely a second son demeaning himself by dabbling in the sciences. Although renowned in London for his travels and discoveries, Roger becomes worthy of her notice only when he is taken into the inner circle of Lord Hollingford and the Towers as a result of his personal achievements.

While the visible action takes place within the small circle of Hollingford, Cumnor Towers, and Hamley Hall, Gaskell encompasses the widening world of rural England. Cynthia attends school in France while the Hamleys are off to Cambridge. The Hamley home is filled with relics from India, while Lady Harriet advises the Miss Brownings on how to obtain the best-priced Indian tea. Cynthia returns from her jaunts to London fashionably dressed and with hints of admirers, while Roger comes back from Africa browned, bearded, and mature in aspect and mien. Even villagers like Miss Hornblower feel the pull of the larger world and the new technology. As Mr. Gibson tells Molly, ” . . . if these newfangled railways spread, as they say they will, we shall all be spinning about the world; ‘sitting on tea-kettles,’ as Phoebe Browning calls it.”

The spheres of the sexes are vastly different. Clare Kirkpatrick thinks “how pleasant it would be to have a husband once more; some one who would work while she sat at her elegant ease in a prettily-furnished drawing-room.” Even as Mr. Gibson thwarts the advances of Molly’s first suitor, he tries to keep his “little goosey” unprepared for anything but life under the protection of a man, either father or husband. He advises her governess, “Don’t teach Molly too much: she must sew, and read, and write, and do her sums; but I want to keep her a child, and if I find more learning desirable for her, I’ll see about giving it to her myself.” As men of science, he and Roger believe themselves to be dispassionate and rational, yet Molly senses their obvious mistakes before they do and that they are more deeply affected than they appear to be. Gaskell’s characters, however, do not follow stereotypes. Lord Cumnor, a garrulous gossip, and Squire Hamley, an openly emotional man, are “womanly” in their ways, while Lady Cumnor and her daughter, Lady Harriet, are models of independence and detachment. Rather than assert her own independence and risk upsetting her excitable, patriarchal husband, Mrs. Hamley wastes away, ironically depriving her husband of her management of his emotions and their expression.

Molly is raised to suppress her feelings. As Mrs. Gibson’s values clash with those of Mr. Gibson and Molly, he is able to ride off and immerse himself in his work, while Molly can only swallow her emotions or, as a last resort, hide them in solitude. There is hope, however, that Molly can avoid the life for which Mr. Gibson is preparing her, that of an obedient wife. Her life as companion to Mrs. Hamley shows her impressionable mind the folly of pride and the lasting harm it causes as it separates Mr. Hamley and his elder son. Her natural curiosity and intelligence, consciously discouraged by Mr. Gibson, are encouraged by Roger Hamley, who bridges the ancient Hamley past and the future of science and discovery. This future will be built on achievements, not family name, which makes young Osborne’s parentage significant only to traditionalists like the squire and Mrs. Gibson. Their vision of the possibilities never extends beyond their own desires and concerns.

In Wives and Daughters, Gaskell addresses myriad issues important to her and her contemporaries — medicine, science, marriage, the family, gender roles, monetary wealth and land wealth, rural mores, the perception of English heritage and strength and French decadence, exploration, and change. Her characters are so richly drawn that the reader begins to anticipate Mrs. Gibson’s “infinite nothings” and Mr. Gibson’s searing irony. Gaskell imbues some of them with an enticing air of unsolved mystery. What are Mr. Gibson’s origins? Who was Jeanie, his first love, and why did he not marry her? How does that and his other early relationships influence his behavior toward Molly? Why, at age 28, does Lady Harriet refuse a good match and seemingly scorn romance? Gaskell does not judge her characters — even Mrs. Gibson has redeeming qualities — nor does she reveal all their secrets. Wives and Daughters is an enlightening, captivating, and, despite its unfinished state, satisfying look at Victorian life and society, the influence of which is still felt.

30 September 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre

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The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. Edited with an introduction and notes by Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick. Highly recommended.

With the shift from agriculture to industry and advancements in technology and scientific understanding, the 19th century was one of rapid change. This collection of horror stories, anchored by John Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” reflects the popular tastes and issues of the the times.

A sense of vice, moral ambiguity, and lawlessness pervades many of the stories. Polidori’s vampyre does not simply drain blood and life in the literal sense; he tempts the innocent, further corrupts those who are debauched, and supports the sinner financially whenever he can. He is known for his social and emotional vampirism because even the most rational members of mainstream society can witness these evident depravities.

Criminals, living and supernatural, appear in stories such as “Sir Guy Eveling’s Dream,” “Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman,” “The Victim,” and “Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess.” A contemporary fascination with madness manifests itself in “Monos and Daimonos,” “The Red Man,” “The Curse,” and “The Bride of Lindorf.” The interest in medicine and medical research, exploited in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, appear here in “The Victim,” “Post-Mortem Recollections of a Medical Lecturer,” and, less successfully, “Some Terrible Letters from Scotland.” “Life in Death” touches upon one of Frankenstein‘s themes: man’s imperfect and arrogant attempts to mimic or best God and nature.

The most horrifying of these stories rely strongly on either realism or fantasy. “Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman,” based on an actual event, takes the reader into the inner circle of a criminal brotherhood for whom brutality mocks and replaces morality and spirituality. William Carleton’s description of the group’s meeting and the atrocities it subsequently commits resonates of a satanic mass and hell itself, complete with a ring of fire. In “The Victim,” coincidences are stretched, but the murder of people for medical research specimens was headline news fresh in the minds of readers.

On the other side, “Monos and Daimonos” is written in a dark fairy-tale style, narrated by a giant rejected by society, yet unable to shake his sociable tormentor. The supernatural tale of “The Master of Logan” is wonderfully spun, with the forces of good and evil engaging in near-comic repartee and an exchange of witty compliments before the unmasking. “The Red Man” may be the most disturbing of the tales, as it blends recent history (the French Revolution) with medieval horrors, and tortures.

Some stories, like “The Bride of Lindorf” and “Passages in the Secret History of an Irish Countess,” are weak because the short story format seems to rush and constrain the narrative. The novel form of Uncle Silas allowed LeFanu to explore themes such as murder, religion, alcoholism, drug abuse, sexuality, and incest while developing a greater sense of the Gothic mystery, atmosphere, and shadows surrounding the title character and the terror of the heroine’s helpless situation. For example, the shady French maid of “Countess” is replaced in the novel by the sadistic and depraved Madame de la Rougierre, a memorable accomplice.

The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre is a fascinating and varied collection of stories published in the UK in the early 1800s. For today’s reader, the language and style may present an obstacle to enjoyment and even understanding. To me, however, the writing creates a sense of time and place that enhances the richness and even the timelessness of these tales, best read late at night by candlelight.

26 August 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: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. Edited by Herbert Rosengarten with an introduction by Margaret Smith. Highly recommended.

The elaborate Victorian prose style of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall does not obscure a story that is recognizably modern—that of an idealistic young woman who wants to save her brutish, alcoholic husband from himself.

Reviled for its “morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal,” The Tenant of Wildfell Hall continues the theme Brontë began in Agnes Grey—that nurture’s role in shaping in a person’s character and future is more important than parents and other authority figures realize or take responsibility for. As Helen says of Arthur, she wants “to do my utmost to . . . make him what he would have been if he had not, from the beginning, had a bad, selfish, miserly father . . . and a foolish mother who indulged him to the top of his bent . . . doing her utmost to encourage those germs of folly and vice it was her duty to suppress.”

Helen’s background is also revealing. Raised by her uncle and aunt, she exemplifies the modern concept of the adult child of an alcoholic—self-righteous and controlling. Knowing that Arthur is flawed, she marries him with the objective of changing him and saving him for God. It can be speculated that Arthur, intrigued by Helen’s youth, beauty, passion, and apparent demureness, envisions making her a more worldly woman. Neither knows the other beyond the surface, and each seems to want to transform the other into his or her own image. This is not the basis for a happy or durable union, as Helen learns.

Failing to control the father, Helen turns her attentions to her son. Quite rightly, she is horrified when Arthur makes his son a pawn in their marital battle, teaching him the manly Victorian arts of sport and predation, love of drinking and carousing, camaraderie without friendship, and disrespect for and the subjugation of women. Even Brontë seemed to be aware that Helen’s approach is also disturbing in its own way, for the child-rearing debate between Helen and her new neighbors is the basis for an entire chapter before we learn her history. While many of Brontë’s contemporaries would have agreed with the vicar’s argument that experience builds character, Helen slowly reveals how experience of the wrong kind without a moderating influence can destroy character.

The structure of the novel is undoubtedly awkward; it is unlikely that anyone would share such intimate details and thoughts as well as another person’s entire personal journal with even the dearest friend without a compelling reason. Gilbert, who is introduced, perhaps symbolically, as a hunter of predators (hawks), disappears from the story as he reads Helen’s tale. This diminishes him, relegating him to Helen’s redemption and reward. On occasion, for example, in “Domestic Scenes,” Brontë’s tense changes and irregularities make Helen’s journal lose its currency and distract the reader with lapses into a novel-like tone.

The structure does, however, allow the reader (and Gilbert) to meet the reclusive, protective, guarded, almost-grim Helen before we find out about the life that has shaped her and her inflexible opinions. The revelation of her character, and the strength she has to flout convention when her conscience and sense of duty require it, helps to complete Gilbert’s growth from sarcastic village wit to the kind of mature man more worthy of her.

Brontë’s stated purpose was “to tell the truth, for the truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it . . . Let it not be imagined, however, that I consider myself competent to reform the errors and abuses of society, but only that I would fain contribute my humble quota towards so good an aim . . . .” Helen’s story, like that of Agnes, reveals the uglier aspects of Victorian family life, usually idealized, that resulted when women had few rights, men abused theirs, parents did not take responsibility for instilling healthy values (such as respect for life) in their children, and divorce was out of the reach of most. Beyond the impressive gates and parks, within the stately estates, behind the closed doors, lurked family and social problems that could not be hidden or denied away. Helen’s story was disturbing not because of her depiction of Arthur’s demeaning, childish, and amoral behavior, but because she exposes the falseness of the idyllic family life her society held dear and because she is willing to abandon what society considers her duty to her marriage to perform her real duty to herself and her son.

Anne Brontë’s work has been compared unfavorably to that of her sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Yet its psychological insights, including the very coarseness and brutality of which contemporary critics complained, make up for Brontë’s lack of literary finesse. Her portrayal of Arthur, the fun-loving, amoral, pettish, selfish hedonist, and his boorish social circle resonates today. Despite his country gentleman status and his debt-supported wealth, Arthur is recognizable in all times and classes. Helen, too, is familiar as the long-suffering wife who finally takes action when her child is threatened.

Although much has changed since Brontë’s time, her characterizations and insights on family life hold true today, making The Tenant of Wildfell Hall a classic in its own right.

Sunday, 15 July 2007.
© 2007 by Diane L. Schirf.

Book review: Under the Greenwood Tree

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Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy and edited and with an introduction and notes by Simon Gatrell. Highly recommended.

In Under the Greenwood Tree, Thomas Hardy combines many of the elements that would define his career as a novelist — colorful common folk and their equally colorful language, an ironic narrator, an unflinching perspective on changing times, and the marvelous “Wessex” countryside. All that is missing is a plot, the lack of which contributes to the uncharacteristic happy ending.

Under the Greenwood Tree addresses two related matters: the fate of the Mellstock choir and of the charming new schoolmistress. Although the members of the choir acknowledge that their way is becoming an anachronism, they see that it is not only the inevitability of change that is pushing them aside. Both Farmer Shiner and the vicar show a strong interest in schoolmistress Fancy Day, who happens to have musical ability. By eliminating the choir and installing Miss Day at Farmer Shiner’s behest, the vicar believes he will achieve two objectives: modernizing a parish that has no desire to be modernized and impressing a woman who does wish to be wooed.

At the same time, the sight of Fancy at the window with her hair undone in the wee hours of Christmas morning is enough to win the heart of young choir member Dick Dewy, who devotes his energy to attracting Fanny’s notice and attention. While he is more educated than his father and the other members of the choir, he seems to represent honest labor, sincerity, and singlemindedness, while his rivals the vicar and the farmer, represent culture and money, respectively. Fancy is educated and cultured, while her father is revealed to have some money. The question is not about her choice but about whether it is the right one — a question that cannot be answered by the end of the novel.

Fancy’s response to the vicar shows some ambivalence about her commitment. At times, the parish’s long-standing couples reveal their own sense of fate about their spouses and marriages. Mrs. Penny tells the tranter’s Christmas gathering, ” . . . and lo and behold the coming man came: Penny asked me if I’d go snacks with him and afore I knew what I was about a’most, the thing was done.” Later she tells Fancy to reassure herself with the thought, “’tis to be, and here goes!” She adds that “‘Twill carry a body through it all from wedding to churching if you only let it out with spirit enough.” When Dick’s father says to his wife, “You be a well-enough woman, Ann,” then, “Mrs. Dewy put her mouth in the form of a smile and put it back again without smiling.” An impressive subtext underlies these couples’ anecdotes, exchanges, and expressions, with the narrator’s — and reader’s — knowledge that they were once in the same position as Dick and Fancy.

In his introduction, Simon Gatrell writes that “the heart of the novel is the right way to do things.” Eliminating the tradition of the choir to impress a woman may not be the right way, but the members concede the vicar’s right to do so. Their attempt, not altogether unsuccessful, to negotiate the timing of the change both affirms his right and preserves their dignity. It also allows the vicar to “win” without forcing the choir to “lose.” As Reuben Dewy says, “Everybody must be managed” — including both vicar and choir, and both Dick and Fancy.

Under the Greenwood Tree is organized by seasons (“Part the First — Winter,” “Part the Second — Spring,” and so on), which reflects the cycle of life that Hardy portrays. Dick is not the first man to fall in love with a pretty face. (“A very good pink face, as far as that do go. Still, only a face, when all is said and done,” according to the choir’s erudite Mr. Spinks.) Fanny is not the first woman to be tempted by appeals to her vanity and her social and cultural refinement. The elder Dewys, the Pennys, and the other mature couples seem to regard Dick and Fancy with a wryness born of their own distant courting experience and their ensuing lives together. Even Fancy, who wants to be stylish and modern, gives in and honors the old cycle when, after some resistance, she agrees to follow the traditions, saying, “Respectable people don’t nowadays. . . . Still, since poor mother did, I will.” No one knows what their future will be, but Mrs. Penny observes, “Well, ‘tis humps and hollers with the best of us, but still and for all that Dick and Fancy stand as fair a chance of having a bit of sunsheen as any married people in the land.” Had Hardy written Under the Greenwood Tree in the same spirit as Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure, perhaps Mrs. Penny’s prediction would have proven tragically wrong.

Under the Greenwood Tree was written by a Thomas Hardy who had not reached maturity as a writer, but he reveals the insights and the verbal beauty that would mark his place among the great Victorian writers. Phrases such as, “. . . if Fancy’s lips had been real cherries, probably Dick’s would have appeared deeply stained,” “. . . your mother’s charms was more in the manner than the material,” and “I’ve walked the path once in my life and know the country, neighbors; and Dick’s a lost man!” remind the reader that Hardy’s true love as a writer would be poetry, not prose. Like his other novels, Under the Greenwood Tree reveals the poetry, comic, ironic, or tragic, in everyday life.

29 March 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Agnes Grey

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Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë with a memoir of her sisters by Charlotte Brontë and an introduction by Angeline Goreau. Recommended.

The youngest of the three literary Brontë sisters, Anne was the first to die, within only two years of the publication of Agnes Grey and one year of the publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. In this edition, Angeline Goreau’s introduction offers valuable insights into the relationships among the Brontë siblings, Anne’s personality without the distortion of Charlotte’s lens, and the conditions prevalent in Victorian England that inspired the writing of Agnes Grey.

For her first novel, Brontë chose to write about the social topic she knew best — life as an underpaid, unempowered, unappreciated governess. Her story, which begins, “All true histories contain instruction,” closely parallels her own experience as governess to two families of overindulged, undisciplined, disrespectful children. She “candidly lay[s] before the public what I would not disclose to the most intimate friend.”

At times, Agnes Grey is hard to read, not because of the Victorian language and conventions, but because Brontë’s unadorned, dispassionate writing style coolly conveys the monstrosity and heartlessness of the children for whom she has responsibility without power and of their distantly doting parents. When the cruel, sadistic Tom Bloomfield, age 7, tries to torture and kill a nest of baby birds and Agnes intervenes, spoiling his “fun,” his mother coldly tells her, “You seem to have forgotten that the creatures were all created for our convenience . . . I think a child’s amusement is scarcely to be weighed against the welfare of a soulless brute.” Through her portrayal of Tom, Brontë makes it clear who in her opinion is the “soulless brute” and how he came to become one. Meanwhile, Tom, his sister Mary Ann, and their parents foil Agnes’s every attempt to perform her duties, including the teaching of morals.

Agnes’s next family, the Murrays, are somewhat tolerable by comparison, although she is expected to, in her words, “study and strive to amuse and oblige, instruct, refine, and polish, with the least possible exertion on their part, and no exercise of authority on mine.” In the Murray household, Agnes is subjected to a form of social snobbery and disdain from which her background, manners, and education do not exempt her. All that matters to the wealthy and privileged Murrays is that she is the hired help, to be controlled, ignored, bullied, or snubbed at their whim.

Agnes becomes a governess against her family’s wishes so that she can help them out of their financial straits. When her illusions about molding the minds, hearts, and souls of her charges are taught away in chapters titled, “First Lessons in the Art of Instruction” and “A Few More Lessons,” Agnes does not continue her ignominious career out of economic necessity; in fact, her family refuses to accept her financial assistance. She continues to work from a sense of pride; she does not want to admit to her family, and perhaps to herself, the personal and emotional cost of her own “instruction.”

Given Brontë’s purpose in writing Agnes Grey, there are some difficulties with the novel. First, Agnes’s distress is primarily emotional, yet surely the masses of underpaid governesses suffered from poverty and from the hopelessness of escaping it. As Goreau notes, there were so many single women vying for governess positions that the employers could pay these vulnerable women next to nothing in wages, even taking deductions for laundry. Charlotte Brontë herself was paid 20 pounds per year at her final post, with 4 pounds deducted for washing. This deprivation, and the lifelong sense of despair that must have come with it, is not evident in Agnes Grey.

The novel also becomes sidetracked from its purpose when Agnes develops an interest in the new curate, Edward Weston. Toward the end, Agnes Grey is transformed from a novel about governesses and Victorian family life into a weak, undramatic love story that is too drawn out. The Anne Brontë who hid her feelings from the domineering Charlotte does not reveal them even through Agnes. While Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights seethe with the drama and passion of unhealthy relationships, Agnes Grey plods through the development of an uninspired one.

The strength of Agnes Grey lies in its characterizations of Victorian country society and the people who inhabit it. Their materialism, which reaches its apex here in the unhappily married Rosalie Murray; their wanton wastefulness; their view of nature as subservient to the whims of man; and their hypocrisy and recasting of God into man’s image are the easily recognized precursors to many 20th-century attitudes. Despite its faults and facile ending, Agnes Grey is a tiny but honest glimpse into the Victorian world that preceded ours. Angelina Goreau’s informative introduction, with its generous helping of quotations, makes this edition especially worthwhile.

31 December 2006
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf