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?