What I Read in February 2011

P. G. Wodehouse, The Jeeves Collection. Wodehouse and Jeeves and Bertie Wooster are great fun. This collection on my Kindle includes My Man Jeeves, Extricating Young Gussie and Right Ho, Jeeves! Great vacation reading and a total vacation from all matters serious.

Rose Macaulay, The Lee Shore. An early (1912) novel in which a weak young man has a series of mostly self-imposed disasters and ends up on “the lee shore.” Not as good as the other Macaulay’s I have read, mostly because the central character is such a disappointment.

I have posted on several books this month. Doesn’t look like much, but vacation’s over and I am engaged in several reading projects to be reported soon.

John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women

Henry James, What Maisie Knew

Henrick Ibsen, A Doll’s House

Ibsen’s Doll House

I begin by thinking that punctuation matters. A “dollhouse” is a plaything, a way to help little girls fantasize about the perfect home they will have some day. The “doll’s house” in Ibsen’s play is a real house in which a doll lives now, and the doll is Nora, the perfect self-sacrificing wife. This wife is less than a real, grown-up person, as the descriptive language used by both Nora and her husband Torvald makes clear. She is a little squirrel, a skylark, and irresponsible bird.

My little bird that fritters is so very fragile, but she does waste an awful lot of money.

Nora plays this role with an eye to the future:

I mean, of course, a time will come when Torwald is not so devoted to me, not quite so happy when I dance for him, and dress for him, and play with him. It might be useful then to have something up my sleeve….

Nora conceals her real actions while denying responsibility for what she does. She is privileged, like a spoiled child. After she forges her father’s name on a contract, this is her defense:

A daughter can’t protect her old, dying father? A wife can’t help save her husband’s life? I don’t know the law very well, but I’m sure it must say somewhere that this is allowed.

Nora is not, however, the only doll in the house. While she plays her role, Torvald also plays his. Torvald, who could not face the reality of his own past illness, nevertheless believes he can protect them both.

Whatever happens, when a real crisis comes, you’ll see, I have strength and courage for both of us. You’ll see that I’m man enough to deal with everything myself.

But of course he isn’t. When he learns of his wife’s forgery, he thinks only of himself.

Now you’ve ruined my happiness. You’ve thrown away my whole future…. I will have to sink, I’m going under because of you. woman.

Husband and wife have been dolls in a house of mutual illusions, illusions about each other and about themselves. It was Nora’s friend Mrs. Linde who diagnosed their problem:

All this secrecy, this unhappiness, has to end. Two two of them must be honest together. No more excuses, and no more evasions.

When there are no more evasions, Nora recognizes that “I’ve been your doll-wife” and she leaves the house.

So, punctuation matters, but I would revise a doll’s house to a dolls‘ house. Nora’s acceptance of her role as the doll-wife, the little bird, allowed both of them to live as social manikins with no human relationship to each other.

Henry James, What Maisie Knew

The child of bitterly divorced parents who use her as a weapon and view her as a burden, Maisie learns early to “know” as little as possible.

Everything had something behind it: life was like a long, long corridor with rows of closed doors. She had learned that at these doors it was wise not to knock–this seemed to produce from within such sounds of derision.

The sounds of derision come from laughing adults, mocking the innocent concepts of a very young child. As Maisie grows and develops — and understands? — we never know “what Maisie knew” because she becomes so adept at implication and indirection. That is James’ gift also and at times, for me at least, it becomes tiresome, as he fences and hints.

As she was condemned to know more and more, how could it logically stop before she should know Most? It came to her in fact as they sat there on the sands that she was distinctly on the road to know Everything. She had not had governesses for nothing: what in the world had she ever done but learn and learn and learn? She looked at the pink sky with a placid foreboding that she soon should have learnt All.

No, we don’t find out exactly what is the Most and the Everything and the All referred to. Presumably the fact that the adults have various sexual relationships — her mother with the man who becomes her stepfather, then her mother with other men, then her stepfather with other women, including her stepmother (don’t ask!). And that is just one side of the divided family. These pairings take place on all sides of the growing girl but no one confronts any issue directly. Immorality is spoken of, but never defined.

The real immorality lies in the rejection by the parents of Maisie’s affection for them. She seeks it elsewhere, from her stepparents and even from more casual connections like “the captain,” with whom she chats longingly in the park, while her mother and stepfather argue in the background. James emphasizes this yearning for closeness with constant references to the adults caressing Maisie, kissing her, hugging her to their bosoms, taking her on their knees. It made me uncomfortable at times, as I believe James intended. That is as close as he comes to letting us know what Maisie knew.

The Subjection of Women

I was led to John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), written with the assistance/inspiration of Harriet Taylor, by on-going commentary at A Year of Feminist Classics. This picture from Wikipedia is dated 1835 and the need at that time for long exposures for photographs makes them look unduly grim. The important message of this picture is that the two are together and that Mill credited Harriet Taylor with full partnership in the development of the ideas put forth in The Subjection of Women.

All too often, when men write about women, they assume the right to define and prescribe. Freud addressed his famous question “what does woman want?” to other men. Wollstonecraft pleaded that women would be “better” if they were only treated differently. Mill knows that what women want and what women are, good or bad, are irrelevant. He writes from a liberal view which assumes the men and women have equal rights, whatever their natures.  He states the proposition clearly:

That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.

He recognizes that the legal position of women in England at that time reflects a codification of long-standing arrangements:

Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing between individuals. They convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right, give it the sanction of society, and principally aim at the substitution of public and organized means of asserting and protecting these rights, instead of the irregular and lawless conflict of physical strength.

The structure of his essay is this:

• Chapter 1 – an explanation of liberal principles
• Chapter 2 – the situation of married women
• Chapter 3 – equal opportunities for women, especially in employment
• Chapter 4 – social benefits from recognition of equal rights

I was particularly impressed by Chapter 2, where he describes the social and legal status of married women. Women had no separate legal existence and no rights to property. Not until an act of Parliament in 1882 did a married women in Britain gain the right to the fruits of her own labor.

The situation was the equivalent of chattel slavery (except a man could not sell his wife, only abuse her), a fact that was recognized in the United States, where the abolition movement and the women’s suffrage movement evolved together. Just as in the worst Jim Crow period of segregation, the legal system recognized the worst and least-qualified man as legally superior to every woman. A man who had no other status in the society was at least entitled to control his wife’s property and actions.

Marriage is not an institution designed for a select few. Men are not required, as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony, to prove by testimonials that they are fit to be trusted with the exercise of absolute power.

Inherent conflict was built into every marriage:

Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite.

Without power and with no rights to assert, women must prevail by the very harem techniques that Wollstonecraft identified in her Vindication of the Rights of Women. It is over 50 years later, but the problem continues.

During the Civil Rights struggle in the United States, many of us became aware that the oppressor was as entrapped in the system as the oppressed. To enforce privilege of one group over another — whether based on race or gender — demeans the humanity of both. Mill sees benefits for both sexes when equal rights are recognized.

And it is true that servitude, except when it actually brutalizes, though corrupting to both, is less so to the slaves than to the slave-masters. It is wholesomer for the moral nature to be restrained, even by arbitrary power, than to be allowed to exercise arbitrary power without restraint.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

The House of the Seven Gables is a novel — or a “romance” as Hawthorne calls it — about a house and the people who lived in it. The house represents injustice and decay.

It lets in the wind and rain, and the snow, too, in the garret and upper chambers, in winter-time, but it never lets in the sunshine.

The very furniture participates in the drama.

She was the more inclined to devotion from the grim aspect of the chamber and its furniture, especially the tall, stiff chairs; one of which stood close by her bedside, and looked as if some old-fashioned personage had been sitting there all night, and had vanished only just in season to escape discovery.

Hawthorne relates generations of bitterness to the original horrors of the Salem witch trials, compounded with later injustices, like the imprisonment of the innocent brother of the house’s last inhabitant, Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon. Since I have been concurrently reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, I find it natural to examine Hepzibah from a feminist perspective.

Like the women Wollstonecraft described 150 years earlier, Hepzibah is the victim of her misguided education, the expectation that she should be as useless as possible:

A lady—who had fed herself from childhood with the shadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was that a lady’s hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for bread,—this born lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain to step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank. Poverty, treading closely at her heels for a lifetime, has come up with her at last. She must earn her own food, or starve!

Hawthorne contrasts her with the cheerful country cousin whose life has been made up of daily practical tasks and a minimum of fantasy. Hepzibah lives secluded and reluctant to go out of the gloomy house into the light. She is ashamed of her poverty and unmarried state. Still, Hepzibah has not been bred out of her good heart and willingness to do what she can to help her brother, a brother who finds her so unattractive he does not like to look at her.

It was Hepzibah’s misfortune,– not Clifford’s fault. How could he, — so yellow as she was, so wrinkled, so sad of mien, with the odd uncouthness of a turban on her head, and that most perverse of scowls contorting her brow.–how could he love to gaze at her?

Clifford loves the beautiful, but it is a shallow love. He is unable to appreciate beauty in action if it is not accompanied by beauty of form. Hepzibah’s life has been cruelly limited both by the shades of the past and the prejudices of the present. Although the lives of the other characters are also defined by past and present, Hawthorne sees clearly that Hepzibah’s sufferings are different from those of Clifford and the male ancestors and reflect her status as a woman.

Huxley and Macaulay – male and female created he them

Here are two novels, both published in 1921 by competent writers, popular in their day. Both are set in the upper-middle and leisure classes in the early 1920s in England. A few people work at prestigious occupations (portrait artist, member of Parliament) but work is not a central concern. No female character ever enters the kitchen; instead, they ring for tea. They all have plenty of time to sit around and talk about everything — but the “everything” in the two books is very different.

Crome Yellow is Aldous Huxley’s first published novel. He is a bright young man of 27 and he has a lot to say. He says it by bringing a variety of characters together during a summer visit to Crome, a country house. Don’t look for much plot, just listen to the conversation.

I am not sure I understand these comments, but they sound as if they may have deep meaning.

I make up a little story about beauty and pretend that it has something to do with truth and goodness. I have to say that art is the process by which one reconstructs the divine reality out of chaos. Pleasure is one of the mystical roads to union with the infinite—the ecstasies of drinking, dancing, love-making. As for women, I am perpetually assuring myself that they’re the broad highway to divinity. And to think that I’m only just beginning to see through the silliness of the whole thing!

More solidly, here is an architectural view:

That the hovels of the peasantry should look as though they had grown out of the earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right, no doubt, and suitable. But the house of an intelligent, civilised, and sophisticated man should never seem to have sprouted from the clods. It should rather be an expression of his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddish life.

When women get together they talk about sex, sort of.

I hope we are agreed that knowledge is desirable and that ignorance is undesirable.” Obedient as one of those complaisant disciples from whom Socrates could get whatever answer he chose, Anne gave her assent to this proposition. “And we are equally agreed, I hope, that marriage is what it is.” “It is.” “Good!” said Mary. “And repressions being what they are…” “Exactly.” “There would therefore seem to be only one conclusion.” “But I knew that,” Anne exclaimed, “before you began.” “Yes, but now it’s been proved,” said Mary. “One must do things logically. The question is now…”

I love this stuff. Somewhere is this plum cake of a book, you too can find something to love.

In Dangerous Ages, the writer Rose Macaulay, who is 40, gives us four generations of a family: a mother (43), a daughter (20) a grandmother (63) and a great grandmother (83). Huxley, the young man focuses on ideas. Macaulay, a half-generation older, see mostly problems.

At 43, the mother fears she is going to be put on the shelf.

A well-off woman of forty-three with everything made comfortable for her and her brain gone to pot and her work in the world done. I want something to bite my teeth into–some solid, permanent job–and I get nothing but sweetmeats, and people point at Kay and Gerda and say ‘That’s your work, and it’s over.’

Her mother has already arrived there:

She could talk only of far-off things, and theories about conduct and life which sounded all right at first but were exposed after two minutes as not having behind them the background of any knowledge or any brain. That hadn’t mattered when she was a girl; men would often rather they hadn’t. But at sixty-three you have nothing…. The bitter emptiness of sixty-three turned her sick with frustration.

Only the great grandmother is serene:

I’m too old to make plans, dear. I can only look on at the world. I’ve looked at the world now for many, many years, and I’ve learnt that only great wisdom and great love can change people’s decisions as to their way of life, or turn them from evil courses.

Macaulay does not ignore Huxley’s concerns about art and love and all of that but she attributes those concerns to the 20-year-old daughter. We can skip lightly over that young person’s social and artistic aspirations, especially because some day she will be 43 and then 63 and, finally, 83.

The tedium of life, with no more to do in it–why couldn’t it end? The lights were out, the flowers were dead–and yet the unhappy actors had to stay and stay and stay, idling on the empty, darkened stage.

Crome Yellow is a young man’s book. Huxley is confident, he knows a lot and he thinks a lot and, further, he is sure that you want to hear all about it. He is not worried about the Dangerous Ages to come because he is in control. Macaulay, approaching her own middle age, has written a woman’s book. She has struggled against her assigned role all her life and she knows how difficult it is to be heard. You will be glad to learn that Rose Macaulay survived to write many more books, including The Towers of Trebizond when she was only 75.

Reading: Three Centuries of Opinions

Over the centuries (!) everyone has had an opinion about reading and what to read. In the 18th century, Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792) wanted you to protect your daughters from novels.

Yet, when I exclaim against novels, I mean when contrasted with those works which exercise the understanding and regulate the imagination. For any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement, and obtain a little strength by the slight exertion of its thinking powers; besides, even the production that are only addressed to the imagination, raise the reader a little above the gross gratification of appetites, to which the mind has not given a shade of delicacy.

I’m not sure that my mind has been given “a shade of delicacy” by years of novel reading, but at least she concedes that reading novels is better than not reading anything at all.

In the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne (The House of the Seven Gables. 1851) compares the characteristics of the novel and the romance.

The latter form of composition [a novel] is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience.The former [the romance] …has fairly a right to present the truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.

A romance, under this definition would encompass medieval fantasies with dragons, vampire books, Harry Potter and a lot more.

In the 20th century, Aldous Huxley employs different characters in Crome Yellow (1921) to express contrary opinions about reading. Huxley was 27 and this was his first novel. It suffers from too much talk and too little action, as if the brilliant Huxley just couldn’t wait to say it all, to express both sides of every question. Mr. Scogan, a cynical man in middle life, says of reading:

One comes to the great masterpieces of the past, expecting some miraculous illumination, and one finds, on opening them, only darkness and dust and a faint smell of decay. After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one’s mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.

Mr. Wimbush, the history-obsessed aristocrat, has another view:

The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of it intolerable tedium. At present people in search of pleasure naturally tend to congregate in large herds and to make a noise; in future their natural tendency will be to seek solitude and quiet. The proper study of mankind is books.

To complete this survey, I need to find a suitable 21st century opinion. In order to find one, I intend to keep on reading.

What I Read in January 2011

Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. I have also posted about Mark Twain’ s Autobiography. My comments are not about the current best seller, but about an earlier edition of some of the same material.

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor. The Penguin Classics edition excerpts from the original 4 volumes, 2000-pages. I am working my way through it, volume by volume. Volume 2 depicts the various occupations we glimpse in Dickens and the other Victorian novelists: chimney sweep, mudlark, dustman, crossing sweeper. Volume 3 is devoted to street entertainers and the unemployed and homeless.

Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed. A long classic Italian historical novel, undertaken by my Ex Libris book group. Good, but not overwhelmingly so.

Mary, Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. I read this as part of the Feminist Classics challenge. They/we have now moved on to John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, with more great classics to come.

I was able to do some much-appreciated reading during a winter vacation.

These two novels, published in the same year make an interesting contrast.
Rose Macaulay, Dangerous Ages
Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

Ivan Turgenev, Torrents of Spring

Nathanial Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

Michel de Montaigne, Letters and Essays