Greta Gerwig's Little Women

I saw the latest Little Women last week and fell in love with it, but was not going to blog about it until I read it criticized for its use of flashbacks. I suppose the film will stand or fall on one's reaction to Gerwig's technique--and those who dislike it are surely held in respect--but I would like to make a defense, first, of Gerwig's flashbacks, and then of the film's larger vision.

As I child, I was given a copy of Little Women with a garish cover, and by the time I was nine, I had fallen in love with the book, in part with wonder at its strange (to me) sentimentalism. I reread it as an adult--my memory is that Roger and I read it aloud as newlyweds--and I reacted to the book in a  different way than as a child. This time I appreciated the deep drenching sadness and loneliness--the bleak depression--Jo faces as an adult when her family of origin breaks apart. It is all loss for her: Meg marries and leaves to begin her own life, Amy travels with Aunt March to Europe, and the lingeringly ill Beth finally dies. Jo stares into a black abyss of desolate loneliness, full of longing for times past, when she had place and companionship. It is as bleak and realistic a portrait as any of what solitary people, male or female, in real life face as props are pulled away. I began to see this as an adult novel--and I think it is no accident that I have been drawn to figures like Austen and Bonhoeffer who faced similar loss.

This bleakness, however, is left out--if I remember correctly--of all the filmed versions I have seen. These cover the basic plot points and the happy marriages (along with the tear-jerking death of Beth) but elide Jo's internal anguish.

By using a flashback technique, Gerwig is able to incorporate Jo's suffering into the plot. The plot moves back and forth between the losses of the "present day," and the jolly days when the girls were all at home together. We encounter Jo, full of the confidence of youth and still surrounded by family, able to tell Laurie the truth: that she can't love him the way he wants. Later, with Beth dead and the house empty of sisters and laughter, Jo is broken, and marriage with Laurie, even if she doesn't love him, seems better than the heartbreaking, soul-killing alternative of loneliness, as she tells her mother. She puts a letter to Laurie, soon to return from Europe, in the knothole of a tree, telling him she will marry him--only to have to retrieve when he returns with Amy as his bride.  This loneliness is central to the story Gerwig has to tell.

Gerwig is also able to avoid what I call the Hamlet problem through the flashbacks--in staging a story so iconic and well known, that has been "done" so many times, how do you avoid going through the predictable paces that cover the familiar episode set-pieces in a stale and predictable way? How do you keep it fresh? Flashbacks are Gerwig's answer--and I felt she handled them expertly.

On a deeper and broader level, I appreciated the humane vision that animated the film. It was beautiful in terms of costumes and settings, but also in terms of articulating generous and compassionate values. I loved, for example, the moment when Jo is urging Meg, more than half seriously, to run away with her rather than marry John Brooke. Meg says to her sister that they are different. The freedom and career Jo centrally hungers for is not the same as the love and domesticity Meg craves. Meg wants what she wants with the same fervor as Jo, and she tells her sister that both goals are worthy. One goal is not better than the other. One goal doesn't have to win, shriveling the other. One sister doesn't have to sacrifice her dreams for the other. The dreams can both coexist and both be good. I have never heard a better or a gentler rejoinder to the "Mommy Wars." Or a better rejoinder to triumphalism and hierarchy: Meg tells us we can all live and pursue our paths side by side and equally, and the world is richer for it. Meg is unthreatened by Jo's ambitions--and in the end Jo is unthreatened by Meg's. This is a world--fantasia though it might be at the present moment--that I would love to live in.

Gerwig also shows the four sisters as markedly different people and illustrates that all forms of being are acceptable. No one is judged. Meg wants husband and family: that is good and worthy. Jo is ambitious to become a published writer: ambition is good and worthy. Beth is a creative soul who wants to pursue the music she loves without any ambition to perform publicly or make a name for herself: that is good and worthy. Amy--an enormously well realized character in this film--wants material well-being because she knows what poverty and worry is: that is good and worthy. All of these woman achieve their goals--and all do so without selling their souls. They all love each other: whatever each one is is fine, and they don't have to be the same.

In this light, I loved Gerwig's handling of Professor Bhaer--made a young and attractive German counterpart to Laurie (though much poorer). Since I find the Professor Bhaer of the novel an overbearing, patriarchal jerk who takes it on himself to (very gently of course) to show Jo the folly of her ways as if she is silly child--judging her and finding her wanting--I derived intense satisfaction when Gerwig's Jo let's him have it with no holds barred. You go girl, as they say. And in Bhaer's (Frederick in the movie) defense, he did mean well--and Jo ultimately takes his advice.

Gerwig follows the plot of the 1994 movie in merging Jo the character with Alcott the author, and in the end, this Jo too pens Little Women--and the marriage with Bhaer is depicted as existing only in the fantasyland of literature. Gerwig's Jo stays, like Alcott, stubbornly single, showing the single path as another viable option for a woman.

The movie has been criticized for excising the Christian theme that structures events in the novel around Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a book each girl receives early on as her sole Christmas gift. I noticed that and saw it as a reworking or even distortion of the book, but in today's political climate, with so much of evangelical Christianity prostrated to violent authoritarianism, Gerwig at least has avoided muddying her message or being co-opted into something she is not.

Men are peripheral in this novel, despite Meg's love of John, and Laurie's important part in the girls' lives. The women live their lives on their own terms, pursuing their own dreams. It was quite refreshing to me, coming after so many films that still--even in the second decade of the twenty-first century--exalt the great man surrounded by female handmaids ready to sacrifice their being for him and put up with his rages, moods, and betrayals--Phantom Threads jumps to mind--there are so many others, and we are prompted to receive them as great cinema, repugnant as they are. Some men may not like this movie, as no woman is ever a handmaiden--not even Meg to John. But it is a movie men can learn from. If our grand leader could understand its compassionate core, the world would be a different place.

Finally, it is the compassionate core that matters. The folding in of pain and suffering that Gerwig is able to achieve through her flashback technique is integral to not sentimentalizing her vision. This is a work of sentiment, but it is not sentimental in a false way that erases pain: Jo, for example, cries in anguish after she sells her hair.

There is so much more to say--and the film is not without its minor flaws and rubs but this is a defense--and I will end here. The costumes, settings, beauty, and female energy animating the movie are breathtaking. The compassion and affirmation of woman, of equality, of space for different kinds of lives to coexist without rancor or violence, should receive our strongest support as a vision of a world where we can all have life, fulfillment and hope without having to tear each other down.

I have not yet read a review, blog, or interview about this movie, though I am aware Amy's character has been praised and that the film has been overlooked for awards. Perhaps now that I have written about it from my own heart I will look at what others--including Gerwig--have to say. 

Bride of Northanger, part I

I am reading Diana Birchall's The Bride of Northanger, a sequel to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.

I am a little more than a third of the way through the book as I write. It picks up as Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland marry and begin life together. If Austen poked fun at Catherine's Gothic pretensions and desire to bring the frisson of Gothic literature into a real abbey that is all too modern and prosaic to be romantic and frightening, this novel turns that trope entirely on its head.

Catherine and Henry now begin to experience some Gothic horror. Not only does Henry reveal a curse that says wives of the eldest Tilney son are fated to suffer misfortune (fortunately for Catherine, Henry has an older brother!), Catherine and Henry find a note stuck to a knife thrust into the door of their room while visiting Northanger Abbey. The note warns Catherine away from the abbey and tells her never to return. The knife is an open threat of violence. This is in addition to new china sent by General Tilney to their home that seems to have the word "maledict" written in tiny script amid the scrolling leaves of the china pattern.

The Gothic touches keep the pages turning, and more importantly, tap into archetypes from girls' literature that are deeply satisfying: secret curses, poison pen letters, even a (seeming) ghost. This is the stuff of Nancy Drew and other classic mystery novels (which I rate very highly), and it is delightful to see these elements transferred to an adult novel.

Another apt--and important--touch is General Tilney's  love of fine china. It allows for the introduction of sensuous elements into the book, but also advances the plot, especially when the general shows off his Medici goblet made of cobalt blue glass flecked with gold--a goblet that will shatter if any poison is poured into it. Needless to say, without giving anything away (and I do not yet know what will happen), the goblet does shatter, the general perhaps poisoned .... Add to that Catherine's sighting of the mysterious and ghostly Grey Lady and the plot has thickened greatly.

I look forward to seeing how the plot unfolds--and plan to post again when I have finished the book. I would recommend it thus far as a fine, old-fashioned, and entertaining read.

In the interests of full disclosure, Diana has been a cyber-companion with whom I have shared the Austen passion for more than a decade. 

Neptune's seashore, Emma, and A Midsummer Night's Dream

Part of the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream involves the quarrel between Titania, Queen of the fairies, and Oberon, King of the Fairies, over a changeling child. The little boy is the son of Titania's close friend. Titania has promised the mother, a mortal woman, that should anything happen to her, she would adopt her son. The woman dies, and Titania duly adopts the little boy.

Fairies tend to Titania's changeling

However, Oberon wants the boy for his own entourage. Thus, he and Titania quarrel bitterly, upsetting the weather for humans. Oberon likes to have his own way, and it is clear he is a powerful figure who is not used to being thwarted. Therefore, Titania goes to some effort to try to describe why it is so important to her to keep the child. This includes a lovely description of the two friends laughing and bathing on a seashore of Neptune, watching the sails of the ships swell out like pregnant women, an allusion to the friend's pregnancy:

Full often hath she gossiped by my side,And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands,Marking th' embarkèd traders on the flood,When we have laughed to see the sails conceiveAnd grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;Which she, with pretty and with swimming gaitFollowing—her womb then rich with my young squire—Would imitate, and sail upon the landTo fetch me trifles and return again

We must imagine the sea off scene in this imaginative  image of Neptune

I love to think about this scene, and the two women enjoying the pleasures of a seashore together. But only recently did I connect this vignette to Austen's Emma.

It's no mystery that A Midsummer Night's Dream is a source for Emma. For example, Emma quotes directly from the play when she says the path of true love never did run smooth. In fact, looking back at that passage in the play, as Emma's quoting it might direct us to do, we can see that the rest of what Lysander says does speak to the novel's plot, such as one “too high” connected with one “too low” (Frank and Jane/ Elton and Harriet) as well as the problem of age differences (Emma and Mr. Knightley)—and if we go on, a melancholic possible framing for the novel in the proposal that love is momentary and “swift as a shadow.” (For more on A Midsummer Night's Dream as a source for Emma, one need only go to Jocelyn Harris' Jane Austen's Art of Memory.)

What struck me in thinking about the two women on Neptune in Midsummer in the context of Emma is Harriet's guessing Neptune as an answer to the charade: In response to the line:

And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.

Harriet asks: "Can it be Neptune?"

Emma turns directly and imperiously to what she knows is the conventional answer to the charade: courtship. She quickly pooh-poohs Harriet's answer. However, Austen is not one to put idle chitchat in her novels, and as other critics, such as Colleen Sheehan, have shown, the charade is open to multiple interpretations.

Further, Emma in this very scene quotes "the path of true love" line from Midsummer, a strong hint that the play provides the frame for the scene: a play in which a lovely woman (Titania) reigns alone on Neptune, far from Oberon.

It's difficult to compact a decade or more of thinking and rereading and discussing this novel with others into a blog, but it is evident to me, first, that Austen was experimenting with form in ways that have yet to be fully understood. Second, I find ample evidence for the pregnancy subtext that Arnie Perlstein first proposed. Jane's sudden arrival to her impoverished aunt's home after years away living with wealthy friends, the length of her visit, allusions to her being ill, the illness that leads to her becoming suddenly bedridden and requiring a doctor near the end of the novel, and the surprise revelation of Mrs. Weston's pregnancy utterly out of the blue, ending with the birth of a healthy baby, coincidentally at exactly the same time Jane is bedridden and ill, all support the pregnancy theory. At the same time, all of these events can be plausibly explained by the overt story: Jane is in Highbury as a convenient place to carry on her clandestine romance, she really is sickly and becomes dangerously ill with stress from the situation with Frank, and it makes perfect sense that the newlywed Mrs. Weston would have a child nine to ten months after her wedding.

Yet A Midsummer Night's Dream as an allusive source brings us back to the concept of two realities as central to the novel: the play presents two worlds: the world of Athens, of law, patriarchy, and rationality, and the world of the fairies: natural, fanciful, and enchanted, ruled coequally by a queen and a king, a world of love and delight. Shakespeare even points overtly to the deniability of this fairy world, having Puck state:

If we shadows have offended,Think but this, and all is mended,That you have but slumbered hereWhile these visions did appear.And this weak and idle theme,No more yielding but a dream

Austen, I would argue, offers us an equally deniable fairy world, a far more submerged but not entirely hidden world that we, the reader can only glimpse, because Emma is blind to it.  Austen, in repeatedly referencing Midsummer, points us to her own fairies dancing next to and beneath the overt story.


The word midsummer repeats four times in the novel, and each time it introduces the fairy world of Jane (Fair(y)facts?) and Frank. In all of the other five Austen novels, the word midsummer only appears once, in Sense and Sensibility, though summer is often mentioned throughout the novels.  Three of the four references to midsummer in Emma relate directly to Jane Fairfax. All four point to the "fairy story" shimmering beneath and beside the overt story as told through Emma's eyes. In the first instance, we are pointed to Jane  as central to the fairy story as we learn that she is coming to Highbury. Miss Bates is, significantly,  the central storyteller: 

now the Campbells had promised their daughter to stay at least till Midsummer, and fresh invitations had arrived for her to join them there. According to Miss Bates—it all came from her—Mrs. Dixon had written most pressingly. Would Jane but go, means were to be found, servants sent, friends contrived—no travelling difficulty allowed to exist; but still she had declined it!

In the same chapter as the second mention of midsummer, we learn that Frank Churchill is coming to Highbury. The fairy cast (which includes Mrs. Elton)  is assembled. In the third midsummer reference, the dream aspects of the text start to shimmer very close to the surface. Right after this midsummer reference, Mr. Knightley has his dreamy musing in front of the fireplace in which he recalls Cowper's "Myself creating what I saw" in wondering what is going on between Jane and Frank. This is followed by the meeting in which Frank covers a blunder by pretending it is a dream, with the word dream repeated multiple times, and finally, the mysterious scene with the alphabet letters and the word "blunder," a bookend to the charade. Finally, as the fourth use of midsummer occurs, the liminal, dreamlike strawberry party at Donwell Abbey is beginning.

For a long time, I have pondered references to the sea in Emma. We learn that Emma has never been to the sea, though Jane and Frank have--we learn they were at Weymouth together--as have the John Knightleys.  The sea repeatedly enters the story from afar. Knowing that Austen never met a pun she didn't like, I believed Emma's  lack of travel to the sea was a pun on her clueless inability to see what was going on around her. Now I believe that references to the sea also refers to the fairy world dancing beneath Emma's consciousness, Titania's world of Neptune.

Returning to Neptune in both the charade and Midsummer, the charade may point us centrally to both the fairy world of Jane and Frank and the fairy world of Midsummer and hence to pregnancy. In both cases, a baby  becomes a changeling, dropped on the doorstep by fairies to someone other than his parents. And yet in both cases, we can, as Puck suggest, dismiss all of this as fantasy. 

Cassandra's Persuasion Notation

It was a delight to go to an exhibit at the University of Texas Ransom Center that included early editions of Jane Austen's novels. I was especially thrilled to see Cassandra's copy of Persuasion, open to her marginalia commenting on a passage in the novel. It was hard to get a good photo, as the pencilled writing is faint, but here are two pictures:

Cassandra writes "dear dear Jane!" She then writes "this deserves to be written in letters of gold."

The passage marked is this:

How eloquent could Anne Elliot have been! how eloquent, at least, were her wishes on the side of early warm attachment, and a cheerful confidence in futurity, against that over-anxious caution which seems to insult exertion and distrust Providence! She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.

This is a warm passage, as suggested by the two exclamation points that Austen uses. Cassandra's comment also reflects emotional warmth, and points to the novel's biographical or autobiographical elements. We get so few direct glimpses of Cassandra that this is instructive. 

The exhibit as a whole was interesting, including the copy of the letter in which James Edward Austen-Leigh writes to friend Edward Cheney of suppressing material in the memoir:

In treating of a subject so mixed up with private matters, I have beenchiefly anxious, by no means to offend, and, if possible, to satisfy my ownfamily, & those old personal friends whom, next to my own family, I caremost for.

I am of the school that believes there must undiscovered primary source material pertaining to Austen scattered around--probably hiding in plain sight--waiting to be found. If someone has just found Milton's copy of Shakespeare's plays on a library shelf, what more is there to be discovered in the much more recent Austin world that might shed light on hidden relationships and tensions? If Barchas didn't discover the Cheney letter until 2005, what else have we overlooked?

Just as an added bit of whimsy, I enjoyed this bit of book art in the exhibit:

A quiet year: reads of 2019

In what turned out to be a gentle year of book reading, I primarily read quiet novels, but I also was fortunate to enjoy some non-fiction permeated with passion. It was an odd reading period: I discovered many very good books, but few outstanding books.

I have moved away this year from a "best books" framework to write instead about those that most interested me. Though not a time of many shattering or transformative reads, much of what I encountered was deeply satisfying.

Nonfiction:

Joel Edward Gora: America's Unholy Ghosts: The Racist Roots of Our Faith and Politics
This was the stand-out book of the year for me. Writing with a passion that is too often absent from contemporary nonfiction, Gora traces the deep strain of racism in Locke and Hobbes that has permeated the American consciousness and allowed racism to live alongside notions of freedom and equality. Gora shows how the philosophies of Hobbes and Locke reduced earlier and broader notions of freedom as social justice to the much narrower idea of freedom as property rights. Under Locke and Hobbes social freedom means that everyone else has to keep their hands off other people's property, and both thinkers were, at the very least, nebulous on the idea of other races as human beings with the same rights to autonomy as white males.  With Adam Smith, the other figure Gora covers, the case is more complex. Smith, though often reduced to a distorted stereotype as the "libertarian" who invented the concept of the "invisible hand," was, in fact, pushing back hard against the idea of defining social justice as property rights and, in fact, vehemently advocated for a redistribution of wealth to help the needy, grounding this in moral truth.
    The devil is in the details, and I don't have time to trace out Gora's arguments, but he shows how the ideologies of Locke and Hobbes have come down to us in the present day to create a citizenry that he calls "rational, sentimental, and hard-hearted."  Gora urges us to "rethink and rewrite our relationships and the rules of the game" daring to condemn present-day cruelties as policies that need to be exorcised. 

Eleanor Fitzsimmons: The Lives and Loves of Edith Nesbitt
The last biography of children's author and Fabian Edith Nesbitt before this was written in 2000, 19 years ago, so it was time for a new biography. This one is solid and crammed with details that make Nesbitt's life and times come alive. Nesbitt was a mix of forward thinking socialist and sentimental Victorian, and definitely a person who could never transcend her condescending sense of superiority of her educated middle class over the working class, but she did work to help those "beneath" her. A textbook case of one of Virginia Woolf's female authors who could not rise to greatness because she was so busy churning out prose to pay the bills, Nesbitt was a fount of energy and activity. I have happy memories of various vignettes--Nesbitt walking  in her hallmark Liberty print dresses with no corset (shocking) or selling flowers from her front yard to make ends meet during the hyper-inflation of World War I. I put this book on my list for the sheer enjoyment of reading it.

Helen Prejean: Souls on Fire 

Prejean is famous as the author of Dead Man Walking, and a longtime advocate of abolishing the death penalty. She's also a nun, and this memoir fascinates because she had the astonishing good fortune to bridge a time of immense shift in Roman Catholic Church history. When she started as a young sister in a convent in the late 1950s, the Church still ran as it had for a thousand years, with a debilitating harshness --a few years later, everything changed entirely as the Vatican reforms came through and affirmation, openness, and freedom took on new power. Prejean is fascinating, too, in her own right, not just the writer of a bestselling anti-death penalty book but as a person with the skills and intelligence to rise high (for a woman) in the Church hierarchy. It is seldom that a person straddles change so wholly and can write about it so interestingly

Catherine Meeks and Nibs Stroupe: Passionate for Justice: Ida B. Wells As Prophet for Our Times 

Meeks and Stroupe's book is a biography of Ida Wells, a journalist who tracked down, documented, and wrote compelling against lynching, a black rights activist, and a suffragist who experienced racism at the hands of white feminists in her period. Not only is it instructive to read about her life, but the memoir/dialogues on racism by white southern male Stroupe and black southern woman Meeks are deeply moving.

Hilary Davidson: Dress in the Age of Jane Austen
Davidson's book was another solid read. She discusses fashion in Austen's life and novels through ever more widely radiating circles of society, from fashion's meaning in the home, in the local community, in the nation, and, finally, in a globalized world.  The book is full of beautiful and appropriate illustrations and shows a solid knowledge of Austen's work, both fiction and life writing.

Fiction:

E.M. Forster: Where Angels Fear to Tread
Continuing an E.M. Forster trend, I read and delighted in the 1905 Where Angels Fear to Tread.  A comedy about who should raise an Anglo-Italian infant son, I found it, like Howard's End, and A Room with a View,  a beacon call for  kindness, compassion, and generosity over stifling conformity and judgment.

I have yet to see a filmed version of Where Angels Fear to Tread, but this is a still.

Katherine Burdekin: Swastika Night
A book that has been on my to-read list, Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night, finally floated to the top. Written in 1937 under the pen name Murray Constantine, it's the first novel to depict a world in which the Nazis have won the war. In this case, 700 years into their 1,000 year Reich, women have been debased to near animals, and Hitler has been elevated to a seven-foot tall blond Norse God. This is not a well-written book from a literary standpoint, but an important book for our times-- not only as the first alternative history on World War II (which had not even begun with Burdekin published the novel), but for the way Burdekin understands and parodies the Nazi ethos, especially its deep-seated misogyny. For more on this novel see:  http://janeaustenandotherwriters.blogspot.com/2019/06/swastika-night-violence-orwell-and-style.html and http://janeaustenandotherwriters.blogspot.com/2019/06/swastika-night-violence-orwell-and-style.html

Barbara Pym:  The Sweet Dove Died
 I first learned of Pym in 1982 as a young thing when she was in the first throes of her revival. I heard of her as like Jane Austen, and I quickly added her to my reading list. Only a mere 36 years later-- in 2018-- I read my first Pym novel, Quartet in Autumn, as well as her autobiography.
     This year, I read  three more Pym novels, from Jane and Prudence to Excellent Women to The Sweet Dove Died.  I enjoyed all three for their stories, their wit and pathos, and probably most for their precise evocation of the life of a British woman of a particular class in a particular period of history. One of the beating valves at  he heart of humane literature is an attention the lived details or texture of domestic life. Pym tells us what her characters eat for dinner, how they manage sharing a bathroom with tenants from the floor below, what flowers they arrange in a vase, or when they take a water bottle to bed at night.
   I found The Sweet Dove Died an excellent companion piece to Elizabeth Taylor's The Soul of Kindness. Both novels focus on a narcissistic woman arranging her life to be physically beautiful, as if by donning the right outward garments, they could fill the inner emptiness, but Pym's protagonist, being older and more sexually complicated, has greater pathos and nuance.

Phillip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle
If not world class literature, this is a fine companion piece to Swatiska Night as an alternative history novel in which the Germans and Japanese have won World War II. In this case, they divide the U.S. so that the eastern two thirds is absorbed in the Nazi Reich, the Japanese control the west coast and a small neutral zone running through the Rockies provides a buffer between the two states. Like Swastika Night, it relies on the alternative history concept to carry the story.
    The book provides a good segue into The Man in the High Castle miniseries. Roger and I watched the fourth and final season in late November. Even more recently, I have done what I almost never do, which is to rewatch the series a second time (I am in the midst of season two now, rewatching with Roger), and I am more impressed than ever with it, particularly the drenching sadness that permeates the lives of characters caught in societies designed at every turn to thwart their deepest humanity. Particularly impressive is Juliana Crane, played by Alexa Davalos, a character who perhaps struggles more than any other to retain her humanity in bleak circumstances.
   The miniseries premiered in January, 2015,  a time when nobody was imagining a Trump presidency or the rise of neo-Fascism in the U.S., which makes the series all the more interesting: although firmly against Nazism and other totalitarianisms, its evocations of a genocidal, misogynist, and frozen white 1950s style American society could be a blueprint for what white supremacists want to implement. But on a deeper level, it expresses a sadness that is palpable in real life about the reality of  living in worlds of thwarted possibility.

Juliana, a gentle soul, leads a troubled life in a world where the Nazis won

Elena Ferrante: My Brilliant Friend
In another pairing of book and mini-series, I read Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend as a result of the very fine filmed version which made by 2018 best filmed media list. Ferrante's book moved me deeply as I read it. Like The Man in the High Castle, it reflects the sadness of lives marked by the lack of possibilities. How, both series ask, do we build lives in the few crevices that are left for freedom, love, and creativity?

Reading Little Women.

Two other novels that jump out from the year's reading are Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea, another book I read after 'only' having it on my list for 30-odd years, and Trollope's The Way we Live Now.


Woolf reading:

I continued with my intense study of Woolf this year, reading both novels, primary sources, and secondary sources. Two standouts are as follows:

Leonard Woolf: The Village in the Jungle: This is in many ways a remarkable book about villagers in Sri Lanka which tells the story entirely from their point of view. Woolf, however, in both this book and his other published novel, The Wise Virgins, does a lot of "mansplaining" and convenient arranging about how women feel and think, which I have to imagine helped fuel Virginia's breakthrough to a radically subjective way of novel writing that deliberately does not purport to tell us what to think. It is difficult not to read Night and Day as a companion piece to The Wise Virgins. Both have an overheated romantic quality, and both are ultimately, if well written, failed novels. Woolf's frustrations with formal conventionalities of Night and Day did, however,  help lead her to her stream-of-consciousness break-through, and if the weakest and most disappointing of her novels, it is still a Woolf novel, so replete with strengths. 

Virginia Woolf: The Partigers: This is a fragment and draft of The Years. Despite its limitations, I appreciated Woolf's effort to alternate a chapter of fiction with a chapter of explanatory prose about the feminist core of the fiction. I wish Woolf had not abandoned this experiment.

Cries of anguish in Orwell, Steinbeck, and Flannery O'Connor

In John Steinbeck's  Of Mice and Men, the mentally handicapped Lennie, a migrant farm worker, accidentally kills a young woman. Realizing what has done, he runs away to the natural pool by the Salinas River outside of the ranch.  His best friend George instructed him to do this if he ever got in trouble. At the pool, Lennie hallucinates seeing a giant rabbit who berates him and tells him he will be forever rejected by George for what he has done. In response, the tormented Lennie makes an anguished cry:

"Oh! George-George-George!"

In George Orwell's  1984, Winston falls in love with Julia, and this love helps him regain his humanity. After both are arrested and separated, Winston wakes in the middle of the night in his prison cell, crying out in his sleep:

‘Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!’

In Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man in Hard to Find," the grandmother realizes her son has been killed:

there were two more shots and the grandmother raised her head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water and called, "Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!" as if her heart would break. 

Each of these cris-de-coeur pierces through the pages of the text and directly into the heart of the reader. In writers given to understatement, these anguished exclamations of a single repeated name arrest us. We already know that Julia is the center of Winston's universe and George the center of Lennie's. In her hollow, anguished cry, we learn who the grandmother loves before all others.

In all of these narratives, the situations are dire. Winston and Julia are being tortured by a despotic, sociopathic state, Lennie has committed a murder, and the grandmother is responsible for the death of her son and his family--and is facing her own demise. The cries reveal the rawness of emotion when everything is stripped away but the desire for the absent beloved.

In 1984, explanation follows this raw, anguished utterance:

For a moment he [Winston] had had an overwhelming hallucination of her presence. She had seemed to be not merely with him, but inside him. It was as though she had got into the texture of his skin. In that moment he had loved her far more than he had ever done when they were together and free. Also he knew that somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help.

In Of Mice and Men, as if to relieve an unbearable loneliness and pain, George immediately appears:

George came quietly out the brush and the rabbit scuttled back into Lennie's brain. 

George comforts Lennie--before killing him to save him from a worse fate.

In "A Good Man," the Misfit, the sociopath whose gang is killing the grandmother's family as he speaks, keeps on calmly talking as if the grandmother has not spoken, oblivious to her broken heart.

All three scenes have a hallucinatory quality. In Steinbeck and Orwell it is made explicit, while in O'Connor it is implied when the grandmother mistakes the Misfit for her own son and reaches out to him in love.

It seems striking to me to see this same technique employed by three writers, in works published in a twenty-year period between 1939 and 1958. I tried to remember any other instance of such an anguished call out and could only come up with only two others:

In the first, David hears that his rebellious but beloved son Absalom has been killed. He cries:

O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son! 

This theme has apparently been with me for a long time, as I remember listening over and over to what I believe was Heinrich Schütz's "Fili Mi Absalon" (though in my memory the singing was much more anguished) as a college freshman for a music course and being so moved by David's suffering that I bought a Bible to look up the story. I still have the Bible.

Finally, I thought of another anguished soul in a dire situation:

My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me!

This cry shows that for all his love of his friends, Jesus' first love was God.

I am trying to think of such cry-outs in other pieces of literature. Can you think of any? I can't remember a point in Jane Austen when she breaks her cool demeanor, so admired by Virginia Woolf, to let a direct cry come through, though we feel Elinor's anguish when she thinks Edward has married Lucy and Fanny's as she awaits the letter telling her that Edmund is engaged to Mary. This anguish is no less intense but not given to us in the same form.

Who would we each call out to at the moment of rawest anguish?

Swastika Night, violence, Orwell, and style

I will finish Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night with one last blog that encompasses its attitude on violence, its influence on Orwell, and its writing style.

Burdekin was a pacifist until the start of World War II, when she supported the war because she thought it was vitally imperative to stop the Nazis. As her novel shows, she understood their core, and she despised it.

The novel has three main characters, all men (we remember that women have been reduced to little more than animals). First, Hermann, a typical Nazi, who is very stupid, brainwashed, and violent. Second, Alfred,  who is an English mechanic visiting Germany. He is one of the last true humans on earth, meaning he owns his own soul. Third is a Nazi Knight, von Hess, so high up in the hierarchy he can take risks. He has a special book which contains some of the true story of the earth's pre-Nazi past.  Although admirable characters in the context of the idiocy of the thousand year Reich, both Alfred and von Hess have been brainwashed into believing in woman's inferiority, and von Hess is  comfortable with casual violence, for example, wanting Alfred, while flying an airplane, to simply knock down the  people on the runway, which Alfred refuses to do.

Hermann believes in "the fundamental immutable laws of Hitler Society:"

As a woman is above a worm,
So is a man above a woman.
As a woman is above a worm,
So is a worm above a Christian.

This laughable hierarchy sanctions violence. Not much is going to happen to you (in most cases)  if you take out your aggressions on someone below you. Given that the state also valorizes and applauds violence as the chief attribute of hyper-masculinized manhood, aggressive brutality is common.

Hermann, who has a pathetic and homoerotic attraction to Alfred, is wedded to violence. In a novel in which Burdekin despises Nazism so much she makes it largely infantile and idiotic rather than frightening, she doesn't hold back from depicting graphic violence: this part of the picture is not, to her, ridiculous and needs to be shown.

Infantile Teutonic idiocy that Burdekin despised

For example Hermann gets into trouble when he comes across a fourteen year old, for whom, along with his attachment to Alfred, he has a homo-erotic desire. This boy is an:

angel-faced golden-haired chorister making a determined attempt to rape a well-grown little girl of about twelve. The child had not reached the age of submission and was therefore within her rights in putting up a sturdy resistance. And as Hermann stood for an instant, watching them rolling and tumbling, clawing, kicking and biting, he caught sight of a large red cross on the breast of the little girl’s jacket. So it was a Christian! Hermann’s whole body filled with delicious thundering warming floods of rage. He loathed the boy for being even interested in girls—with his lovely face, his ... immaturity—Hermann was physically jealous; he was shamed ... here was something at last that he could smash and tear and make bleed and utterly destroy  ...Hermann jumped at him again, and with his fists beat him into insensibility. He took special pleasure in spoiling his face. When the boy was lying unconscious at his feet he started to kick him, in the ribs, on the head, anywhere ...

The above accurately captures the Nazi mindset.

Against this, Burdekin makes a plea for non-violence. For instance, von Hess has grown up saturated in a violent culture, but he says the following to Alfred:

And warn them, warn them, Alfred, with all the soul-force you have, against violence. I don’t mean telling them just not to kick physically against the German authority, I mean warn them against accepting violence as a noble, manly thing. We Germans have done that, we have brought force to its highest power, and we have failed to make life good ...

Over and against the mindless hierarchy and cult of masculinity that sanction violence, Burdekin argues for British-style liberalism:

that very tolerance of sincerity in ideas which oneself finds loathsome shows a reserve of spiritual power which I cannot help envying for our people. In these English and Scotch heretics of all ages and in the common men who could not withhold from them all sympathy, England’s real greatness lay. If they can resist, not the physical destruction of their records, for that will be impossible, but the Germanisation of their character, and somehow, in face of all the deception they will suffer, remain themselves, there will be soul-power in Europe after the passing of this dark evil time. 

These are still words for our time.

It seems clear, as others have pointed out, that Orwell must have read and been influenced by Burdekin's novel as he wrote 1984,  which is focused on an English Everyman like Alfred who goes up agains the power of a vicious and violent totalitarian state that robs people of their humanity.  His novel also features a secret book that lays bare the underpinnings of the social order.

Of course, we read 1984 for a reason beyond polemic: it is good literature (I realize, too,  it is sexist--and ageist). In contrast, as far as the quality of writing goes, Burdekin is crude. She is far less interested in style than ideas. I went back to the novel thinking perhaps I was too harsh, perhaps it doesn't read like the draft, but then came across the first line:

THE Knight turned towards the Holy Hitler chapel which in the orientation of this church lay in the western arm of the Swastika, and with the customary loud impressive chords on the organ and a long roll on the sacred drums, the Creed began.

I stumbled over "customary loud impressive chords" but then thought, well, maybe it is not too bad. There's description and some alliteration ... it's not much worse than du Maurier's Rebecca or some of Agatha Christie's mysteries, but it has an even rawer quality, as if the novel itself were the barest skeleton on which she displayed her ideas: the characters are not fleshed out, nor is the story. It has the quality of something filmed on little more than a bare stage. For example, there are pages of sheer dialogue without one mention of someone moving a limb or even having a body. 

Nevertheless, there's also a certain crude power in her stripped-down writing: the ideas don't get buried under story, and there is little ambiguity about her point. 

I am glad I read this novel. Burdekin saw through early to the core horror of fascism--an atavastic, violent pseudo-philosophy. As Thomas Wolfe expressed in You Can't Go Home Again,  a book about his trip to Nazi Germany in 1936, these crude ideologies do not die but merely crawl into caves and crevices to await their time (Camus's observation as well in The Plague)) to reemerge. We are in that time again.  Burdekin, who speaks with incisively for woman's rights, peace, dignity. freedom of thought, and human decency, thus speaks to us today.  

Swastika Night and Women

Katherine Burdekin largely wrote fantasy or speculative fiction. She graduated from Cheltenham Ladies' College. As Martha Vicinus points out in Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, attending that particular boarding school signaled that a young woman ranked high on the class ladder. Tradesman's daughters could not get entrance, no matter how rich. Attending meant something, as going to Eton did. In Burdekin's case, her education served her--and us-- well. 

Cheltenham Ladies' College: Begun in the nineteenth century, it was built in a Gothic style.

Burdekin was highly intelligent and wished to attend Oxford, which by that point had woman's colleges, but her father would not allow it. She married, went to Australia, had  two daughters, and fairly quickly left her husband, moving back to England in 1823. She lived with her sister in Minack Head, Cornwall, until meeting and setting up housekeeping nearby with a female partner in 1926. Great credit goes to scholar Daphne Patai for unearthing Burdekin's identity and doing research on her very private life. 

Katherine Burdekin

Burdekin knew the Woolfs but was not part of their circle. Her politics and theirs, however, were similar. 

Clearly a student of Nazi rhetoric, in a literature more available in the 1930s than now, Burdekin picked up on the ridiculous romanticizing of the Nazi soldier as Teutonic Knight. She also zoomed in on Hitler's claim that his would be a thousand-year reich. In her novel, Germany has achieved partial world domination: the planet is divided between the Nazis and a far-flung Japanese Empire. All of Europe is firmly in Nazi hands.

The story begins 700 years into the thousand-year Reich. Although told from a male point of view, it soon turns to the women. In a parody of Hitler's desire to put females back in the home solely to serve as the breeders of his hyper-masculine soldier elite, Burdekin exaggerates the subjection of Nazi women. The women we encounter in Germany--and who are representative now of women across Europe--are small, ugly, stupid, degenerated, and illiterate. Their heads are shaven, and they are kept herded in barbed-wire camps, a clear allusion to the already flourishing Nazi concentration camps. Women are incessantly taught that their life's purpose is to align their wills with male wills, to obey men, and to have male babies. 

There is no rape, because rape would presuppose a woman having a mind of her own. Instead a woman who is raped must quickly understand that because a man wanted to rape her, she must have wanted the rape as well. After all, his desires are necessarily her desires. All of this is explained with dead-pan seriousness. Male babies are taken from the women at 18 months, before they can have any memories of their mothers, so that they can be brought up in a wholly masculine environment and not be polluted by exposure to the female. This is another exaggeration of Nazi policy.

Soon after the novel opens, women are herded into a Nazi "church," shaped like a swastika, for their monthly indoctrination visit. Hitler is now worshipped as a god, depicted as seven feet tall with golden hair and a golden beard. He is said to have "exploded" from the head of God the Thunderer and so never was in any way polluted by contact with a woman.

This particular edition shows Hitler reimagined as a blond Norse God. As can be seen, Burdekin published under a male pen name.

The woman cry in the church. The men think this arises from fear of being in a male domain, but as we later learn, it comes from an ancestral, barely understood mourning for all they have lost. 

Burdekin says that women are partly responsible for their fate in this new world, because for far too long they made it their goal to align with male desire.  In words that are relevant to today's world, the narrative clearly and cogently summarizes women's problems:

There are two things women have never had which men have had, of a developing and encouraging nature. One is sexual invulnerability and the other is pride in their sex, which is the humblest boy’s birthright. And yet, until they can get back those two things, which they lost when they committed their crime and accepted men’s idea of their inferiority, they can never develop their little remaining spark of self-hood and life.

Further, the text posits that what is missing from women is

 a soulpower which would come from being themselves, from being women. Men would never want to force them [rape them, if women had soulpower]. It would be unthinkable, impossible.

Burdekin is not afraid to imagine a female subjugation in which male society is entirely homosocial and homoerotic, as well as hyper-masculinized. Homosexuality is tolerated, as who can men love, respect, and think beautiful but other men? Woman are far too degraded. They are animals to rape and impregnate.

The book does not do well in terms of language respecting animals, though I can't imagine a person as humane in outlook as Burdekin meaning to denigrate or call down harm on other living creatures. However, her tendency to describe women as little less than beasts, dogs, or livestock tends to rob animals of their dignity.

In a comic touch, the women are told they have to bear more girl babies. They are not told why, but we learn it is because they have so wholly aligned themselves with male desire that they are having far too many male babies for the human race to continue. More women are needed as breeding material. However, the women are so full of self loathing that they simply decide they must have misheard the directive. 

There's little plot to spoil, but  I'd like to go back to Burdekin's analysis of the plight of women. Then in my next blog I will discuss other aspects of the novel, such as violence, its influence on 1984, and its writing style.

Burdekin's women of the Nazi future are almost comically oppressed. But how much is it exaggeration, and how much is it underlying reality, with the veil ripped off, of our times?  Three works of literature happened to run in front of me recently that illustrate Burdekin is not much exaggerating. The first is Bret Harte's "The Luck of the Roaring Camp." In this story's roaring camp, there is but one woman, Cherokee Sal, whose name suggests a mixed race. She is a prostitute who gets pregnant and gives birth to an infant boy. Of her death, we learn this:

Within an hour she had climbed, as it were, that rugged road that led to the stars, and so passed out of Roaring Camp, its sin and shame forever. I do not think that the announcement disturbed them much, except in speculation as to the fate of the child.

"The Luck of the Roaring Camp:" Who needs women when we have men? 

Getting rid of the sole woman--creating an all male environment like that of Burdekin's Nazi empire--eradicates "sin and shame forever" from this camp of vagabonds and thieves! (This eradication is supposedly of sexual sin, but read the words!) Women is the sole problem! Of course, they are not much bothered by her death: was she even human to them? But in this newly liberated all male world, the little boy can flourish from birth without the polluting influence of a woman. Women's insignificance is further emphasized by this: Stumpy and his ass, who feeds the child her milk, are all it takes to raise the child:

 “Me and that ass,” he would say, “has been father and mother to him!"

That quote is particularly striking. We may condemn Burdekin for equating her women to animals, but it is a common trope. An ass can do as well at parenting as a woman. What also strikes me is that I was read this story in elementary school (no doubt in some bowdlerized version) as an amusing piece of folktale Americana. The misogyny was completely lost on me, as on my female teacher--and so it is passed on, like a virus we can't see. (Of course, the child Luck does die--so perhaps they did need a woman?)

The second work is Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, a book my mother gave when I was 12, as she thought I would enjoy it as much as she did. Since I figured out the twist early on, I didn't, but I did imbibe another dose of misogyny, this is form of a woman abasing herself and abandoning her moral compass to wrap herself around and stand by her man. Her husband Max's confession that he is a murderer who shot his first wife, Rebecca, through the heart, does not horrify her, but brings them closer! Why? Because it means she can have his love! He really didn't love Rebecca! And not only does it occur to her that she has only his side of the story, of course told to make himself look like the victim, but she is vigorously in favor of erasing Rebecca's story and truth itself in defense of patriarchy: 

 Rebecca is dead. She can't speak, she can't bear witness.

In a morally coherent world, that might be a problem. But not here. Rebecca annoyed--dared to assert equal power to her husband as well as bodily autonomy--so she deserves to die.  Rather than be concerned that this man--monster??--she has married killed another woman for taunting him about bearing another man's child (think about that--and the murder is justified as commensurate to Rebecca's "evil!")--the new wife wants to cover up the murder:

Nobody saw you that night. You had  gone to bed. They can't prove anything. 

 This woman, as much as any abject shaven headed woman in Swastika Night, has been brainwashed to support a violent patriarchy in which a man is justified in killing an uppity woman--and as his new woman, the wife aligns herself immediately and unquestioningly to defend him, even though he is guilty. I was given this at an impressionable age as a great romance novel.

Finally, for the first time, I read a long short story by Harold Brodkey called "Innocence." A more recent work, it still illustrates the extent to which women have been deformed by a desire to please and serve men. It is told entirely from a male point of view, in first person, and is about a male, a college student, bringing a beautiful young woman to her first orgasm. She has already had sex--she is not virgin territory, but she has never enjoyed sex before. This man therefore has the opportunity to lay claim to dominance over her body by being the first to offer her true sexual satisfaction. He can master her that way. And while we might say it is thoughtful of him to be so concerned about her orgasm, it is clearly in service of his own ego needs. But that is almost beside the point. What is striking is the pathetic abjection and abasement of the woman who comes to his room. At first she says "damn" when she realizes he is naked under his sheet and wants sex, then immediately  and compliantly begins to unbutton her blouse. The narrator says:

I was amazed that she was so docile; and then I saw that is was maybe partly that she didn't want to risk saying no to me--she didn't want me to be hurt and difficult, she didn't want me to explode; she had a kind of hope of making me happy so that I'd then appreciate her and be happy with her and let her know me

Compare the above to Burdekin's quote: What men have and women lack

 is pride in their sex, which is the humblest boy’s birthright. And yet, until they can get back [what] ... they lost when they committed their crime and accepted men’s idea of their inferiority, they can never develop their little remaining spark of self-hood and life.

Burdekin exactly, in Swastika Night, exactly describes the woman Brodkey describes. As with all dystopia, we are in the present moment--or were until very recently.

 Burdekin says that to achieve equality women need to first, learn to love themselves as themselves, fully as women, not as appendages of men or as inferior men or wannabe men or men pleasers. One could argue that in our society, many women (certainly not all), are coming closer to that ideal. #Metoo showed that many women are no longer identifying with the aggressor or making excuses for predatory and unwelcome male behavior. Women are no longer keeping silent or accepting the male overwriting of our experience. This is fueling a backlash, as some men--as with Dr. Ford's allegations about Kavanaugh--take the gloves off and say they don't care. It's stunning that Republican congressmen could both say they believe Dr. Ford, and yet dismiss her testimony as not mattering when it came to a decision about a Supreme Court appointment. One wonders what will happen, as patriarchy is premised on a trade-off--women give up certain rights to men in return for protection. If men are openly abdicating on that protection, why should women relinquish power to them?

This leads to Burdekin's second point. The other attribute women have never had that men do is  "is sexual invulnerability." We are still subject to control through rape and impregnation--and in some parts of the world through genital mutilation.  Prostitution is another component of this vulnerability. Burdekin implies we can get beyond this if we develop our integrity as women. If we come across as and are fully accepted as equals, men won't think of raping and violating us. This may or may not be true, but at this time in history, it seems as if men, losing control of women as they more own their womanhood, may be doubling down on bodily control. This domination is threatened through denial of birth control and abortion laws that have far more to do with controlling women's bodies than caring for infant lives. Whether this is a rearguard action in a lost cause is yet to be seen.

And complicating all this is that in our society and the future Nazi empire, men's bodies are also vulnerable.  But more next time. 

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