Thanksgiving Wife: A Medley

How about a weekend of gratitude? On Thanksgiving morning, I was particularly grateful for the rising temperatures in Seattle: the snow was melting, from my windows I could see that more bodies were circulating on foot or in car, and going outside to empty the very full compost bin began to sound like a remote possibility again.

I was also grateful for the Macy’s Day Parade which kept me cheery company while I graded a batch of essays on the evils of the global food system and the glories of Fair Trade. My favorite thing about this parade (apart from a glimpse of gigantor floating Kermit the Frog) is the series of unmitigated indignities the parade people put musical artists through—for instance, say, making Kanye West rap while situated atop of a huge red apple or India Arie sing next to a dancing Dora the Explorer.

I was grateful I had the foresight to reduce five heads of cauliflower to roasted goodness one day in advance of their transformation into soup.

My other Thanksgiving hosting duties included Boursin smashed potatoes, appetizers, and setting the table. This year I selected my parents’ wedding set of Noritake Marguerite to use at dinner, supplemented by the old faithful green daisy chain Cornelle which I also inherited when my parents down-sized residence.
I needed a plate medley this year, as I hosted 14 guests. Well to be more accurate, there were 13 eaters; I always set one extra place at my Thanksgiving table to honor and represent those loved ones who are absent. This year, I remember with gratitude and love my maternal grandmother who passed away in February. I seated her in that extra seat; and I know that several of my guests were imagining their own recently lost loved ones as occupying that empty seat as well.

The day after Thanksgiving, in spite of the enormous amounts of leftovers in the fridge, I was craving French toast. We had no real bread in the house other than Thanksgiving dinner's sliced baguette, so I improvised.
The batter consisted of two eggs, a couple tablespoons of 1% milk, a couple dashes of vanilla, and some pumpkin pie spice. That is probably 1/3 of one baguette there, which was just the right amount for two hungry breakfast eaters.
I caramelized a banana to top off the French toast. Caramelizing bananas is a simple process: you place sliced bananas in a small frying pan, pour a bunch of maple syrup on top, and simmer over medium heat while your French toast is cooking.
I am grateful to Katie Lee Joel’s The Comfort Table for this decadent French toast or pancake topping idea.

I was then very grateful for breakfast.

Well Now I Know *That's* Possible

This is me, in bed, marking student papers. It's difficult to tell if the sun is setting or rising. On the other hand, it is evident that my work has turned me into a no-life zombie. This week mea culpa was scheduling all three writing courses to turn in first drafts of their 5-page essay assignments on Monday. Mea maxima culpa, however, was scheduling writing conferences with students from all three classes for Wednesday through Friday. It has been a relatively mind-numbing experience to read and comment coherently on 20 (generally incoherent) papers per day and then to meet with the students who committed these works of art and try to genially talk them into their various tailored revision plans.

I am surviving. Though I confess that I might skip my daily Visine and hair-straightening routine tomorrow morning and wear my purple pajamas in to work just to scare my students. And now I can proudly say that I know even more intimately the powers of stubborn fortitude and assiduous stupidity (er, stupid assiduity?) of that mysterious creature the writing adjunct. My main concern is this: is it weird, or somehow creepy, to grade papers in bed?

First Week of Classes

This here is one of the classrooms I teach in this quarter. It's currently empty, but four times a week, it is full of sophomore college students learning to write (we hope). This Fall, I will be teaching three classes at two universities five days a week, sometimes twice a day. It could be so much worse. I could be adjuncting at more than two schools, or I could be working my rear off without all the awesome and necessary benefits that one of my current jobs provides.

Being "off the tenure track" (for now, knock wood) makes me interested in organizations like the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW). The title of CAW's "issue brief" has odd liturgical echoes: "One Faculty Serving All Students." Nevertheless, the document contains important points like

All faculty members need to receive compensation and institutional support and recognition commensurate with their status as professionals.

and

All long-term faculty members need to be fully enfranchised to participate in the work and life of the department and institution.

Hmmm. Yes, I think I can get behind these statements. I have been contingent labor for universities in my metropolis for three years (I'm just beginning my fourth). I have been invited to only one faculty meeting. Some terms, I have to ask those among my friends whom I, Professor Pinocchio, like to call "real professors" (e.g. they have proven worthy of tenure-track appointments at the local research university) to check books out from their institution's amazing library for me, so that I can pursue my research--the very research I need to be doing to stay competitive on the job market. Enfranchisement, fair and dependable compensation, full participation and recognition are a few of the things we dream of.

But I did not begin this blog entry to rant; I love one of the courses I designed for this term. It takes up themes of food literacy and social justice and involves readings by Raj Patel, John Robbins, Michael Pollan, J. A. Brillat-Savarin, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Stephanie Black's stunning documentary Life and Debt. More ins-and-outs of the course in future posts, unless I'm too busy cooking, commenting on student papers, and sending off job applications for the tenure-track position I long for.

Peanut Allergy Kills Marriage Dead

Spoiler Alert!
The New York Times review of Adam Ross’s debut novel Mr. Peanut garnered my interest immediately. I was one of the fortunate firsts to reserve the Seattle Public Library’s brand new copy, and now I’ve finished reading it. The book seems to be an answer to my query about literary representations or challenges to the institution of marriage in contemporary American literature.

When I first began reading Ross’s novel, I thought the prose was dazzling, in spite of the fact that Mr. Peanut’s take on marriage is so twisted that I kept flipping to the back flap of the book jacket to re-assess the author bio-blurb which affirms that Ross is married. In a moment of readerly faux pas, I wondered if the book’s rendition of marriage represents in any way Ross’s own marital experience. All the husbands in the book fantasize, at some point, about murdering their wives… when the husbands are not off philandering, that is. All the wives in the book feel invisible and ignored and taken for granted. Now that I think about it, this is a pretty conventional take on marriage. Is this how far we’ve progressed in how we imagine traditional marriage? Adultery and unhappy housewives?

The form of the novel gestures at postmodern cleverness, but doesn’t quite achieve it. Still, I quite admire the efforts here. The plot folds in on itself like the Mobius strip that is so thematic. It begins as a conventional detective story with split frames: flashbacks to David and Alice’s marriage interspersed with police interrogation of David following Alice’s death. David is a video game designer; the plot flirts dangerously with the concept of the avatar, likening this alter-ego to the Escher tessellation of the white man and the black gnome. But David is also struggling to write a novel, a plot device—more of a gimmick actually—that feels inauthentic, even though, by the end, we learn that it is the very device that structures the entire novel. Resulting passages about the difficulty of writing through the long middle of the story, or overcoming writers’ block, or ignoring the interruptions of communal living, sound like Ross himself reflecting on the difficulty of finishing Mr. Peanut. Adam Ross and his alter-ego David Pepin could consult any women novelist, journalist or academic to learn how to finish a book despite constant interruptions by spouse, children, household management, and full- or part-time job.

And that brings me to one of my main critiques of the novel. The experience of marriage represented in the book is entirely that of the husband. Ross seems quite capable of creating fairly sensitive interiority for his male characters, but not for his female characters. If I had a nickel for every time one of the wives did or said something that was, from the narrator’s perspective, mysterious, cruel, impenetrable (yes, pun) or inscrutable… Like all the husbands in the book, the author is incapable of (and uninterested in?) unpacking female psychology. Meanwhile, the husbands all seem wounded, a little like Mr. Dombey, that jerk. And despite that these husbands are being jerks (they’re all potential wife-killers, remember?), the reader is sickly persuaded to sympathize with them. Why won’t Hastroll’s wife get out of bed? Why is Pepin’s wife so cold? Why does Sheppard’s wife run off to stay at her father’s house? Wives can be so mean.

On top of being husband-centric, the book is relentlessly heternormative. Not a single queer in the story. And it portrays marriage as an inevitability. As the Film Studies professor character announces to his undergraduate class, "'we're all criminals anyway, aren't we? You aren't yet, of course, because you're young and unmarried, whereas I've been married for years and regularly dream of murder!'"We are all either married or not-married-yet. The institution defines us, even in the negative. But isn’t fiction for imagining things that are not necessarily real yet? And by imagining them, and circulating these fictions and thereby transforming the readers’ perceptions and beliefs, doesn’t fiction help change how things are? Adam Ross, you’ve let me down. But maybe my expectations of realist/domestic novels are too high to begin with. (Ok, speculative fiction, I'll give you another chance.) While this book confirms for me that heterosexual marital failure remains standard literary fare, I want to further explore contemporary American fictions of marriage: where are the literary challenges to the legal institution? Where is the great and groundbreaking Gay Marriage Novel, for example?

More than anything, the book expresses the sadness and absurdity that marriage entails--surely this depiction signifies the imminent demise of the institution? The book re-kills the fantasy of the soul mate. Towards the end of the book, it occurs to the main character "that you could be married to any number of people, that you were simply trading on what you were willing to give and take, on whatever good came with the bad. And it was also a sad truth that you might not be equipped for certain kinds of ease or happiness." This cannot be a revelation to most of us.

In closing, it's getting towards bedtime, and I identified with this particular example of dazzling prose:

Hannah needed her sleep--eight solid hours--and she protected it fiercely, was in a bad, bad way if it was interfered with; if she stayed up too late the deprivation wrote a check that irritability cashed the next day.

Home-stay Non Tian

Here is a tian.
A tian is a layered casserole.
Wait, maybe it's not: my tian does not look like this tian at all.
It turns out a tian is more gratin than casserole.
According to Larousse Gastronomique, a tian is an earthenware, ovenproof dish from Provence used to prepare all kinds of gratin dishes, which are also called tian.

I made this non tian while living at someone else's house, taking care of their pets and garden. These lovely absent people happened to have a cookbook I've been drooling over, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. My tian is a rough approximation of a recipe in Bittman's Bible, using ingredients I happened already to have: an enormous eggplant, a couple small zucchini, a can of plum tomatoes, lots of garlic, and a juicy local sweet onion... plus fresh thyme and oregano from the home-stay yard.

After salting the slices of eggplant for a long time (to sweat out the bitter juices), I assembled the layers.

I added more layers.

I baked it in a 350-degree oven for about 45 minutes. Twice, I interrupted the tian's slow-slow cooking to press the layers down in the pan. I completed the meal with pesto pasta.


There was a small dog staring at me while I ate, and a poison dart frog absolutely ignoring me. (I failed to photograph the cat, two ducks and two chickens). I did not share my meal with them. The dog might have liked it, but the frog is on a strict wingless fruit fly diet.

Keats much?

I’ve been a fan of Jane Campion’s work since The Piano hit the scene in 1993, when I was in college for the first time. Friends who knew me well insisted that I view that film; I think they wanted to see my reaction to the mixture of violence against a woman and her emergent sexuality. Campion’s Holy Smoke (1999), another favorite of mine, contained all sorts of psychological violence, that perpetrated against the character known as "Post-colonial India” through cultural appropriation, and that between the characters of the two main players, Harvey Keitel and Kate Winslet. The only apparent violence in Bright Star seems to be the bizarre collars the heroine pleats for herself and wears to the military balls. In the opening credits, the filmography gives the pushing of a needle through thread an exquisite erotic tension. Overall, it’s pretty, but not achingly so. And slow. Still, eventually, like their love, it is absorbing.

An hour into the film, the butterfly scene beautifully captures what it might have been like as a genteel lady in the Regency period. John is in London and he writes Fanny a short love letter. Fanny responds, “I’ve begun a butterfly farm in my bedroom in honor of us.” Imagine: one minute you’re flying in a field, and then you’re stunned, and suddenly you wake up to discover yourself in a glass jar covered with cheese cloth tied over where the lid should be. Let out to fly around the bedroom, the butterflies are beautiful and panicked, and they stick to the ladies’ décolletage, when they do alight on anything in that shuttered, motionless, stifling bedroom. The scene ends with Fanny crouched on the floor, weeping, a cat chasing the fading butterflies. And finally, they expire en masse. Disembodied hands are seen sweeping their carcasses into a dustpan, and the glass jars are carted downstairs again, restored to the kitchen where they belong.

A little hagiography and the sonnet after which the film is named.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

Rider Haggard the Divorce Lawyer?

While reading for the bar in England in the early 1880s, H. Rider Haggard started writing novels (imitating one of his brothers who'd done the same as family entertainment). He published Dawn (1884) and The Witch's Head (1885), made a total of £50 on the both of them (historian Thomas Pocock dismisses these early Haggardian domestic fictions as "potboilers"), and upon these financial failures, returned perhaps more eagerly to the study of the law. Prior to hitting the scene as "King Romance" with the publication of King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887), Haggard was preparing for a career in the newly consolidated Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court. During this period, he also did some reporting on probate and divorce cases. He mentions a "celebrated" divorce case in his 1882 history Cetywayo & His White Neighbor. The Probate and Divorce Courts also figure in Beatrice and more prominently in Mr. Meeson's Will. For this Vic-geek, it's an interesting mental parlor game to imagine Haggard as a divorce lawyer. Make it anachronistic, and have Haggard help George Henry Lewes divorce his wife and make an honest woman of George Eliot! The biographers all claim he was preoccupied with his first love, "Lily," that he may have had an (emotional?) affair with an Agnes Someone, and that he was rather dissatisfied with his wife Louie--the mother of, among other children, daughters Lilias and Agnes... ahem. I wonder if Haggard was as preoccupied with divorce as he was with disinheritance (a common theme in his domestic fictions)?

In other news, I found this amusingly acrid review by Harold Collins of Peter Ellis' 1980 biography of Haggard in Research in African Literatures. Collins is charmingly obnoxious on how Ellis reinvents much of what Morton Norton Cohen had to say in his 1961 bio. Then Collins gives us this pronouncement on the eternally debated question of Haggard's literary immortality (involving Haggard's alleged choice of popularity over artistry, pace Cohen):

Some recent rereading of Haggard suggests that it would not be too severe to conceive of Haggard as a TV scriptwriter before his time--fertile in imagination, able to pop out piquant situations at will but unable or unwilling to get rid of inconsistencies, implausibilities, incongruities, vulgarities, and other such literary dross. Read, for instance, the scene in Nada the Lily, in which the drugged baby hidden in the witch doctor's medicine bag is almost discovered by its bloodthirsty father who wants it killed. It's vrai Haggard.

Er, Rider Haggard as scriptwriter for Lost? Dexter? Weeds? Yeah, I can see it.

file under: Posts I'm In Love With

When I moved into current residence, dozens of boxes of books came with me. Because I did not think I would live here that long, I left many boxes unopened in the basement. Books In Basement have undergone a dark life parallel to and completely divorced from Books Above Ground: they've survived flooding, rat infestation, and the twin plagues of negligence and inadequate sorting. Consequently, Books In Basement have come to resent me, and especially have come to loathe Books Above Ground. BIB and BAG can hardly coexist on the same dining room table without hurling insults back and forth. Periodically, I have to go down into the basement to locate a particular book. This entails heaving boxes around, sneezing, and lots swearing. Last week it was Dombey and Son. Success! Once I finish reading it, integrating Dombey and Son into the gated community where Books Above Ground are shelved will be challenging. Shelving real estate Above Ground is already over-crowded. And, as this post by the little professor reveals, neglected books grow recalcitrant. They're impossible to live with, but it's impossible to live without them.

Cranford read-along: chapters 9-16

Here we have Prada's take on the green turban, circa 2007. It's kind of pretty in a Grey Gardens sort of crazy. In Gaskell's Cranford, Miss Matty asks the narrator to find her a sea-green turban in town, and she is quite disappointed when the narrator fails to deliver one.

I have finished re-reading Cranford for the read-along at A Literary Odyssey, and I'm re-charmed by it, though rather hard-pressed to analyze it. One thing has occurred to me, and this won't be surprising to anyone who's read the rest of my blog: where is the marriage plot? Apart from other formal discrepancies, Cranford cannot be deemed a domestic novel in part due to the striking absence of a sustained representation of courtship brought to completion. The most likely candidate for such a plot would be Mary Smith, the narrator, an eligible young woman of agreeable background and surprising mobility (she "vibrates" between the nearby manufacturing town of Drumble and the backwater that is Cranford). Is Mary destined to be a spinster?

During my convalescence, apart from starting various sewing projects, I've been reading Kelly Hager's new book, Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition. Hager quite persuasively argues that the "rise of the novel" (cf. Ian Watt) was characterized as much by failed-marriage narratives as by courtship narratives. I love her argument because it's terribly true: so many many Victorian novels represent horrible marriages and seem to argue in favor of legal separation or divorce, the right of wives to own property, the right of mothers to have legal custody over their young children should they achieve a separation from the father, and so on. Hager provides a thorough, though succinct, summary of such novels in the first chapter of her book before diving into half a dozen Dickens novels as her particular case study. Reading this concurrently has re-focused my attention on marriage--or the lack thereof--in Cranford.

All we get in Gaskell's little novella is a sustained and amusing suspicion expressed about marriage by the old spinsters and bachelors of Cranford, punctuated by two of the happiest unions imaginable achieved by some unlikely figures. Behold the evidence:

1. Miss Matty and Mr Holbrook's sadly aborted courtship (the humble yeoman is deemed unsuitable for the supposedly higher-born Miss Matty by her father and elder sister).
2. Mrs. Jamieson is more distraught at the death of her dog Carlo than she was when her husband passed: "indeed, Miss Pole said, that as the Honourable Mr. Jamieson drank a good deal, and occasioned her much uneasiness, it was possible that Carlo's death might be the greater affliction" (144).
3. Mr. Hayter, the rector, fears matrimony. At a public event, he is seen "guarded by troops of his own sex from any approach of the many Cranford spinsters." Mary explains, "He was an old bachelor, but as afraid of matrimonial reports getting abroad about him as any girl of eighteen" (136).
4. Miss Pole congratulates Miss Matty "that so far they had escaped marriage" (156).
5. The genteel (i.e. penniless) widow Lady Glenmire marries beneath her station--marries Mr. Hoggins the surgeon. Miss Pole waxes acidic about the mésalliance: "She has married for an establishment, that's it. I suppose she takes the surgery with it" (167). We are not privy to the details of the courtship. The ladies of Cranford do not choose "to sanction the marriage by congratulating either of the parties" until they know if the union is to be approved by touchy Mrs. Jamieson (169).
6. Finally, the best example of marriage in the book, one engineered among/by the servants in order to "save" Miss Matty from destitution. When Miss Matty loses most of her annual income--and thus her ability to pay rent--in a failed joint-stock situation, her faithful servant Martha officially introduces her beau, Jem: "'please, ma'am, he wants to marry me off-hand. And please, ma'am, we want to take a lodger--just one quiet lodger to make our two ends meet'" (188). Jem makes the near-fatal mistake of audibly hestitating:

'It's that you've taken me all on a sudden, and I didn't think for to get married so soon--and such quick work does flabbergast a man. It's not that I'm against it, ma'am ... only Martha has such quick ways with her, when once she takes a thing into her head; and marriage, ma'am--marriage nails a man, as one may say. I daresay I shan't mind it after it's once over.' (188)

Miss Matty proceeds to remind the two lower-class lovebirds that "marriage is a very solemn thing" while Jem reiterates that "a man likes to have breathing-time" and that he's "a bit fluttered by being pushed straight a-head into matrimony" (189). It would be understatement to say that the arrangement of her own marriage by a female servant in order to save her boss from homelessness is a rather topsy-turvy event for a Victorian story. But Gaskell's overall tone of irony and levity throughout Cranford indicate that this is not any serious intervention into the sacred institution. We are left with the image of Mary and Miss Matty talking late into the night about "the chances and dangers of matrimony" (190). I wish we could hear exactly what they said, but Gaskell--whose other novels mostly do incorporate happy courtship plots--seems to lack imagination when it comes to this subject.

Note: my edition of Cranford dates from 1905 (I think), published in New York by Grosset & Dunlap, and contains illustrations after H. Thomson.

Cranford read-along: chapters 1-8

I am a few days late with my contribution to the Cranford read-along (hosted by Allie at A Literary Odyssey, due to having a surgery last week and complications therefrom. Well, here I am. But before I give my impressions, I give a little warning: I first read Cranford in graduate school. While I remember thinking the book sort of charming at the time, I also remember thinking it insignificant. My re-reading of the book this month is cranky and frustrated and dismissive. Cranford is just a batch of delightful sketches of a time-gone-by. Maybe it's the medication I'm on, which leaves me with little patience for anything other than a marathon of Weeds re-runs, but right now I feel pretty fiercely that Gaskell's other books are superior and far more engrossing in content.


One thing that frustrates me about Cranford is its relentless tone of irony. All descriptions of the feminine inhabitants of the town are colored by it, and this has the effect of gentle mockery. (If the source of the irony is the narrator—a member of the younger generation who is not just an outsider, but also a townsperson—then the effect is that of youth/the urbane patronizingly if affectionately mocking old age/the provincial.) In spite of the fact that Cranford's old ladies are likened to Amazons in the opening paragraph, or that it is the women who appear to hold all the power in the town, or that feminine community is upheld as an ideal, a reader would have to do a lot of fancy work to interpret the rambling stories as illustrations of the empowerment of women in the absence of men. No, the stories seem to insist that men are more rational, less ridiculous. Examples include the loveable Captain Brown with his "excellent masculine common sense" or the sensible, unpretentious Mr. Thomas Holbrook, yeoman.

The chapter I like best, of 1-8, is chapter 5, "Old Letters," a poignant description of Miss Matty re-reading old letters before burning them. The narrator describes the letters' content and the writers' varying styles, but the most compelling part of the chapter for me is the physical description of the letters themselves:

The Rector's letters, and those of his wife and mother-in-law, had all been tolerably short and pithy, written in a straight hand, with the lines very close together. Sometimes the whole letter was contained on a mere scrap of paper. The paper was very yellow, and the ink very brown; some of the sheets were (as Miss Matty made me observe) the old original post, with the stamp [a watermark] in the corner, representing a post-boy riding for life and twanging his horn. The letters of Mrs. Jenkyns and her mother were fastened with a great round red wafer … The rector sealed his epistles with an immense coat of arms, and showed by the care with which he had performed this ceremony, that he expected they should be cut open, not broken by any thoughtless or impatient hand.

The passages continues, describing Miss Jenkyns’s letters as crossed, a common, economic epistolary practice with the effect of saving paper (and thus postage).

Fragile and ephemeral, letters have a short life-span, like mayflies and all the members of the Ephemeridae family. Ephemera has become a popular focus for Victorian scholars over the past couple decades, and I imagine that Gaskell’s works are a treasure-trove of descriptive data to Victorian Material Culture scholars, some of whom have recently focused their attention to salvaging, collecting, and theorizing about printed ephemera—transitory objects like letters, periodicals, posters, maps, pamphlets, and even cheap yellow-back novels. Letters are not meant to last forever, of course, but something in me cringes when Miss Matty throws her parents’ love letters into the fire.

'We must burn them, I think,' said Miss Matty, looking doubtfully at me. 'No one will care for them when I am gone.' And one by one she dropped them into the middle of the fire; watching each blaze up, die out, and rise away, in faint, white, ghostly semblance, up the chimney, before she gave another to the same fate.

This description shows nostalgia being conquered, however painfully. The act of burning the letters might be destructive, but it is also progressive. Old letters provide an intimate record of pasts that are both private (anachronistically) and public (when read by living successors of the original senders and recipients). Letters are cultural artifacts, evidence of "olden times," its politics, economics, religious and domestic ways. Gaskell captures the ghostly nature of ephemera, how it both symbolizes the past and heralds modernity.

IM Conversation with Little Sister

7:05 PM Krista: HI

7:14 PM me:
hi
what are you reading?

7:15 PM Krista:
nothing!
right now im not reading anything
why?

7:30 PM me:
aren't you supposed to be reading?
go read!

7:41 PM Krista:
well i am in the summer
im gonna try and start on thursday while in study hall
i need to get a head start so i can have some fun in the summer and have sleepovers
becuase mom wont let me have any fun

7:47 PM me:
dude, reading IS fun.

7:48 PM Krista:
dudet, not when its an old book back in the old in times


*er, something tells me she doesn't understand what I do for a living*

Happy Birthday Mrs. Gaskell

200 years ago, on September 29, 1810, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was born. This year is her bi-centennial. If I lived in England I would likely be attending events associated with the Gaskell Bi-Centennial Celebration 2010. Even the English Unitarians are contributing to the Gaskell worship. One wonders what opportunities for public Gaskell appreciation exist for American devotees. One thinks one should make more such opportunities in one’s corner of America… At least I can participate on some online read-alongs, such as the one for Cranford in June hosted by A Literary Odyssey.

The Cranford read-along happens to be perfectly timed, for me, since I’m just about through with Ruth. When I set out to read all of Gaskell’s novels this year, I had no idea it was a commemorative occasion. (For a Victorianist, I am rather thick-headed.) In the fall of 2009, a colleague and I had decided to start a *non-academic* book club, to remind ourselves that it was possible to read for pleasure. We decided to read Wives and Daughters first; the reward would be watching the BBC adaptation of the novel, which I had recently garnered from the Amazon Free Shelf (source of all BBC DVD goodness in my life). The rules of the book club were: no analytical discussion of the sort one hears at conferences or in graduate seminars, no close reading, no “how would you teach this?” Rather, we gave ourselves permission to identify with the characters, to simply love Mrs. Gaskell’s complicated heroines—even the dull ones—and, because we’re American, of course, to dream about England. Needless to say, perhaps, thanks to our professional training, we were unable to adhere to these strict standards of pleasure. Our conversations quickly spiraled into close readings of passages and questions of contextualization. I think we even had a brief argument over the presence of domestic violence in the Hamley's marriage. The book club dissolved, or maybe it was absorbed into our academic obligations. As I've continued my reading, I have become eager to develop a course focusing on Gaskell's novels.

My colleague did not, to my knowledge, finish the novel. I finished it, skipped the movie, and went on to read North and South and Mary Barton. And now I’m almost finished reading Ruth (1853), Gaskell’s story of the redeption of a “fallen woman.” Overall, I find Ruth to be a bit too sentimental for my taste. Also, Ruth is portrayed as too young and naïve to have understood the consequences of her seduction, and so morally upright ever after as to seem rather unrepresentative of her type. Gaskell painted a more tragic fallen woman figure in Mary Barton, in which Aunt Esther, who has fallen so far as to have become an alcoholic prostitute, resists her niece’s invitation to redeem herself. The more of Gaskell I read, the more interested I grow in her variegated notion of feminine power. Her narrators, and some of her heroines, are preoccupied with it. More on that later, I suppose.

Freedom to Marry Week 2010

I just learned that it's Freedom to Marry week. The Freedom to Marry organization is Evan Wolfson's brainchild. Wolfson wrote Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry. (Guess what that's about? Go on, guess!) I admit that I never got all the way through Wolfson's book, because Wendy Brown's States of Injury had an influence on me in graduate school. If I remember correctly (and my memory is always in question, plus I may not have finished that book either... I prefer a scattershot reading practice), Brown asks us to consider whether appealing to the state is the best way to change things--whether appealing for equal rights will truly effect equality? She criticizes the liberal emphasis on granting rights through laws: when rights are granted, the state is empowered to protect rights and citizens are disempowered through a greater dependency on the state. Wolfson and his organization approach the same-sex marriage issue from the "equal rights" perspective, arguing that the way marriage is currently legislated, it excludes "gays" from full citizenship. (For the record, I take umbrage with Wolfson's insistent use of the term "gay." Same-sex is both alliterative and less exclusive sounding.) Like Brown, and unlike Wolfson, then, I'm not so sure arguing in favor of granting same-sex couples equal rights in marriage is going to make the institution any more just or accessible.

I am sympathetic to Wolfson et al.'s work toward achieving the "right to marry," but I am concerned about those individuals who do not or cannot marry (this is not a question of choosing not to marry--if one believes as I do that individual choice is so already circumscribed as to have a mythic quality). Marriage remains a privileged status: when someone says "my husband" or "my wife," that someone receives different treatment, typically more respect, than if someone admits to being unmarried or divorced. That privilege--as much economic as social--is enshrined in law. Marriage law creates a caste system. I'm currently of pariah status (if anyone was wondering).

I have been reading and re-reading (OK, memorizing) Mary Shanley's Just Marriage, a thrilling example of how difficult dialogues transform people. I'm not sure why Shanley gets the main byline; the book is co-authored by some of the coolest minds re-imagining (or dismantling) marriage today: Nancy Cott, Amitai Etzioni, Martha Fineman, Wendy Brown, Drucilla Cornell, and I could go on. Shanley starts off with an essay in which she argues that civil marriage should be re-fashioned to be a more just and accessible institution. Marriage, she claims, should be retained because it has civic value. Marriage is a "special bond deserving of public status"; a married couple is "something more than its separate members" (6). She initially rejects the contractualist position (which favors abolishing marriage as a legal status in favor of an alternative like civil unions-for-all, or state-sanctioned care-giver relationships--c.f. Martha Fineman's position in The Autonomy Myth). Shanley writes:

Despite [its] dismal history, the notion that marriage creates an entity that is not reducible to the individual spouses captures a truth about significant human relationships and could be used to reshape social and economic institutions in desirable ways. This understanding of the marriage relationship could be used in the future not to subordinate women but to press for marriage partners' rights to social and economic supports that sustain family relationships and enable spouses to provide care for one another...
Marriage as a status suggests, as the contract model does not, the role of committed relationships in shaping the self. The promise to love someone else, in a marriage or in a friendship or in a community, binds a person to act in ways that will fulfill that obligation. A contract also does not express the notion of unconditional commitment, either to the other person or to the relationship. Contract in lieu of marriage rests upon a notion of quid pro quo, in which each party offers something and agrees on the terms of an exchange as a rational bargainer. But the marriage commitment is unpredictable and open ended, and the obligations it gives rise to cannot be fully stated in advance. What love attuned to the well-being of another may require is by its nature unpredictable. (27-28)

What makes this little book thrilling is that fourteen folks contribute their critical response to Shanley's position. At the end one finds a short and heartening rejoinder by Shanley, in which she states that she has changed her thinking on the matter: civil unions win! You'll have to read the book to find out why. Go on, let yourself be transformed.

What Good is Mirage?

England experienced what I’ve referred to as a “crisis of marriage” starting around the mid-eighteenth century with Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, which was supposed to eliminate marital indeterminacy. That is, the 1753 legislation was supposed to help folks determine whether a marriage was legal and above-board. Given the vast range of marriage customs (broomstick wedding, anyone?) and conflicting laws (between Church and State, between England and Scotland, etc.) people weren't always certain if they were married or not. As it happened, the so-called 1753 Law of Clandestine Marriage was not that difficult to get around, as anecdotes, court cases, and novels subsequently proved. And instead of making marriage intelligible to its practitioners, the law only placed another in a series of mystifying veils over the institution, which grew more and more confused and vexing to its practitioners in the British Isles and throughout the British Empire over the next 150 years. Marriage was particularly susceptible to reforms in the Victorian Era, the “age of progress,” and these reforms were frequently described, demanded, and denounced in Victorian novels, poems, and stories.

We’re hearing echoes of the Victorian crisis of marriage in America today. We’re no longer certain what the point of the institution is, according to Robin West, a legal scholar whose work has been important in the Law and Literature movement as well. West writes that the question haunting us (U.S.) today is something like “What good is marriage?”

We—meaning all of us—need to contemplate this question, not only because it is an interesting one, but also because lawmakers will likely take steps over the next half century to change the legal contours of marriage. We need to raise the question regarding the good of marriage not only to deepen understanding. If we can go some ways toward answering the question, it will help guide deliberation on whether, and if, and how, we change it (Marriage, Sexuality, and Gender, 2007, p. 21).

She’s writing from the perspective of Law, and I’m frankly not sure who her audience is here. The book is a thorough description of three different stances folks take on marriage today: defending it, arguing to abolish it, and arguing to fix or redefine it. West herself takes the modest, moderate position that civil union law should be expanded as a socially legitimate alternative to marriage. But I digress: my goal here is not to review her important book, so much as to wonder aloud whether anyone is now writing fiction that criticizes today’s marriage laws? Are there novels that represent same-sex marriages? Are there stories that promote or criticize alternatives to marriage? Are American authors even interested in marriage anymore? It seems to me that the big names in twentieth-century U.S. fiction, Updike et al., were all-too preoccupied with adultery. Have they moved on to engage other issues around marriage, especially as the institution comes under increased strain?