The Little Professor

Constance

At this point, opening a new novel by Patrick McGrath involves a reassuring dose of familiarity: whatever happens (murder! psychoanalysis! body horror!) and wherever it happens (asylums! old houses! New York!), there will be a reliably unreliable narrator on hand, whose voice will just as reliably mutate from rational to delusional by the plot's conclusion.  Turning the narrator inside-out, as it were, is one of McGrath's hallmarks.  In Constance, McGrath ups the ante somewhat by featuring two unreliable narrators, our title character and her much older husband, English academic Sidney Klein.  McGrath dissects Constance's and Sidney's increasingly toxic marriage, but he shrouds the corpse of this relationship with meta-Gothic trappings.  Constance does not so much exist in Gothic as she self-consciously makes it, and therein lies much of her emotional trauma.

In some ways, this novel is classic Joyce Carol Oates territory.  Constance, an editor, meets the already twice-divorced Sidney at a party, and he is immediately taken by her strangeness.  Alas, much of Constance's strangeness has to do with her convoluted family relationships: after her English mother's early death, Constance was forced to raise her now-drunken sister Iris (whom she both loves and dislikes) and, worse still, put up with her cold father (whom, she is convinced, loathes her).  Under the circumstances, the nature of her attraction to the also-English Sidney, decades her senior, is somewhat questionable.  Matters do not improve when her dying father drops the emotional equivalent of a nuclear warhead midway through the book, leaving Constance to spend the rest of the novel attempting to reconstruct her fractured identity.  Meanwhile, the reader will be left counting the suicides.  

Like many McGrath narrators, Constance and Sidney seek to impose order on their chaotic psyches by carefully framing one story after another.  Both characters repeatedly commit sins of omission, either with each other or, occasionally, the reader: Sidney apparently never enlightens Constance about his first marriage, while the reader hears about Constance's affair with a seedy piano player (a.k.a. her sister's boyfriend) from Sidney before Constance gets around to mentioning it.  Nor, between Sidney's narrative, Constance's account to her sister, and Constance's address to the reader do we ever learn the full truth about the affair (how did Constance feel about Eddie? How many times did they have sex? And was she raped?).  We see Constance's day job crop up in her careful calibration of what story to tell Sidney, what to tell her sister. 

But there's another level of framing as well, in the overt literary and pop psychology references.  Constance's and Iris' mother Harriet has an affair with the gardener that is suspiciously like Lady Chatterley's Lover redux.  Moreover, Constance, who seems on nodding acquaintance with Freud, explains to Sidney that she married him because "[h]er father never gave her what she needed [...] and she'd always felt it was her fault"; in fact, "it was a repetition compulsion complex" (loc. 877).   Given the emergence of therapy culture that lurks in the novel's background--"unlike most of the population of New York City she wouldn't see a psychiatrist" (loc. 882)--it's perhaps no surprise that Constance imagines herself in an increasingly literal family romance, in which she is the disfavored child who turns out to be not "one of the family" at all.  By contrast, Sidney, at work on a great white whale called The Conservative Heart, brings a kind of chilly critical analysis to every move except his own; Constance tells us early on that "he had no real interest in who I was, only in how I conformed to the image he'd constructed in his mind" (loc. 42), and her instinctive sense of his controlling impulses are confirmed in the chapters from his POV. Sidney glumly contemplates a New York City that seems to suffer from "entropic dissolution" (loc. 1679), a physical and spiritual collapse hinting at the aimlessness and formlessness that Sidney most fears.  Sidney insists on shaping both stories and people, not least of all his wives--who then, of course, divorce him.   Even at the end, he has only a glimpse of his partial "responsibility" before running back to his own certainties: "No, I was in the right here.  Surely" (loc. 2766).  His best friend notes his "inability to tolerate criticism" (loc. 749), and Sidney is least of all capable of critiquing "my impulse to protect and nourish her" (loc. 775)--to be, as it turns out, a husband who is also sometimes a stringent father-figure.  

This multiplicity of fathers--the loathed father (who is not one), the long-dead real father, and the husband-father--taps into one of traditional Gothic's prize tropes, the bad/evil/neglectful/absent patriarch.  In fact, it taps into the trope so blatantly that the reader soon becomes aware of how openly Constance's narration evokes its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ancestry.  Figurative "ghosts" abound, from the moment when Constance admits that "I felt like a ghost" in Sidney's apartment (loc. 53).   Constance herself will be the last of the Schuylers by the time the novel is over, a famously Gothic predicament and an unsurprising one, given the family's oddness quotient.  Her family home in the Hudson Valley is Ravenswood (a reference to The Bride of Lammermoor), and the decor is so screamingly Gothic as to be almost comical, tattered and crumbling, "dripping damp," and, of course, tenanted by a "monster" (loc. 944)--a real "Gothic horror house," in fact (loc. 974).  Even the "ghastly ironic symmetry" (loc. 2416) of Constance being invited to kill her not-father, the man who (maybe) killed her real father, itself invokes the inevitability of Gothic repetition.  The atmosphere of sexual secrecy, betrayal, and possibly murder permeates everything. 

That Constance's mind goes so naturally to the least subtle aspects of an unsubtle genre points, I think, to her yearning for safety--a yearning she shares with the intellectually congested Sidney.  That's not as bizarre as it sounds.  In my Gothic course, we've been joking all semester about the dangers of skepticism: spend too long disbelieving in Gothic horrors, and you're (unpleasantly) dead! But for Constance, the Gothic is a pat analogy, an easy explanation.  In Constance's mind, things once perceived tend to be all too clear.  "Then I wondered why he'd been such a vindictive man," thinks Constance of her father, concluding, "it was obvious, it was because I was the living embodiment of my mother's infidelity, of her sin" (loc. 1075); and again, insisting that "Daddy" was responsible for her real father's death, she wonders, "Why couldn't Sidney grasp the obvious here? Daddy was responsible" (loc. 1390).  Fleeing to the obvious, Constance evades complexities.  In that sense, the creaky trappings of costume Gothic mark another evasion, in which the world can be divided up into black and white, monsters and innocent maidens, and Constance herself can safely identify as a victim--even when she is arguably hard at work at sabotaging her marriage (not that Sidney doesn't lend a hand there).  In that sense, Constance finds ambiguity as terrifying as Sidney does.  And this makes it difficult to read Constance's flat declarative statement at the end of the novel--"And you will never do him harm" (loc. 2904)--as anything but a sign of yet further danger, an unstated threat lurking beneath one more attempt at order and control. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Richard Marsh, The Joss: A Reversion (Valancourt, 2007).  Short Gothic novel, first published in 1901, illustrating yet again why moving into decaying property is a bad idea.  (Amazon)
• Jonathan Hess, Maurice Samuels, and Nadia Valman, eds., Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature: An Anthology (Stanford, 2013).  A new collection of British and European short fiction, including works by Grace Aguilar, Eugenie Foa, Leopold Kompert, Amy Levy, and Israel Zangwill, among several others.  (Amazon)

Finalized Cover Image

This is what the cover of Book Two will look like:

At one point, the "page" was nailed to a door--a nice Luther in-joke--but the designers ultimately felt that the effect was too busy.

Book Two, now on Amazon

Book Two (officially known as Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820-1900) is now available for preorder on Amazon.  It's scheduled for release on Nov. 30, 2013. You know you want it, right? It's even affordable!

This (Last Two) Weeks' (Slightly Belated) Acquisitions

(Not that much got acquired...)

• Anne Hebert, Kamouraska (A List, 2013).  In nineteenth-century Quebec, a young woman's love life becomes...complicated.  (Lift Bridge)
• Gail Turley Houston, Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God (Ohio, 2013).  Analyzes how women writers imagined "goddess" figures (ranging from the Virgin Mary to Greek goddesses) in order to advance social reform.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)

Esther: A Tale of Modern Jewish Burgher Life

It's been a while since I've discussed Jewish conversion novels.  Charlotte Elizabeth Stern's Esther: A Tale of Modern Jewish Burgher Life (1880), while mostly adhering to the genre's conventions, still has some points of interest.  Although Stern was not herself a convert from Judaism--her father was the psalmodist Charles Henry Purday--her husband, Henry Aaron Stern, was a converted German Jew and active overseas missionary, best known at the time for his work among the Beta Israel (or "Falashas," a slur).  Although Charlotte died in 1874, it appears that her family must have arranged for her two books, Eliezer (1877) and Esther, to be published posthumously.

Unusually for a conversion novel, Esther is not just philosemitic, but Hebrew Christian, with the main character proudly retaining her Jewish identity even after she becomes a Protestant (a Lutheran, to be precise).  Although the seeds of such an approach lie in Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Judah's Lion, in which the protagonist continues to understand himself as "Jewish," most conversion novels require their characters to fully embed themselves within their new Christian community, casting off their residual allegiance to Judaism as either a faith community or an ethnic group. Moreover, nearly half the novel is given over to mostly non-judgmental accounts of Jewish holidays, prayers, and ritual observances, suggesting that Stern understood the novel as a kind of introduction to Orthodox Judaism for Christian readers--although disapproval does eventually creep in, especially when it comes to gender and legalism. And, intriguingly, while Stern does trot out the requisite Biblical quotations, the novel relies heavily on epigraphs from and allusions to such good evangelicals (ahem) as Lord Byron and George Eliot; in effect, the novel both insists that evangelicals can read and appreciate authors conventionally deemed problematic (that they have "taste," in other words), and that secular literature can be successfully appropriated for traditional Christian ends. 

When the novel isn't explaining Judaism, it does manage to have a plot.  The action mostly takes place in Germany against the background of the Franco-Prussian War; its Jewish characters, despite comprising a distinct community, nevertheless associate regularly with their Christian neighbors, assert their "patriotism," and refer to Germany as "the Fatherland" (116).  Stern thus plays down accusations of eternal Jewish strangeness or otherness: these Jews serve as army officers and see no conflicts between Jewish and German identities.      Esther, our heroine, is a beautiful blonde Jew whose "ideal of life is an intellectual one" (43)--aspirations that signal her coming dissatisfaction with Jewish ritual.  Although Esther disdains the growing professionalism of Anglo-American women (42), she also manifests some impatience with her sister Thekla's belief that women should confine themselves to "needlework and pretty nick-nacks" (42).  This discrepancy between the two ultimately leads into a standard Christian critique of Judaism and female subjectivity: the female Jew, not required to engage in most formal religious observances, is mentally and spiritually subjugated by a patriarchy run rampant.  The more thoughtful Esther, despite her "good works," soon becomes "dissatisfied" (139) with Judaism, which the novel more and more explicitly aligns with a formalism disconnected from the heart.  (As is so often the case, anti-Jewish rhetoric overlaps with anti-Catholic rhetoric here.)  To make matters worse, her aristocratic lover, Colonel Rudolph von Girsperg (product of a mixed marriage), eventually declares that rabbinical Judaism is nothing more than "meaningless ritualistic forms" and "senseless fables and traditions" (118)--thereby heralding his incipient conversion, thanks to the efforts of his English friend, Col. Fraser. 

The narrative thus resorts to the evangelical conversion genre's regular standbys: the critique of ritual as antithetical to heartfelt faith or love, and the equally common critique of traditions interposing between the believer and the Bible.  "I am unhappy," Esther tells a Lutheran pastor (166): ritual repetition, far from being a mode of spiritual discipline and meditation, merely leaves the practitioner without any authentic outlet for emotion.¹  Faced with a series of increasingly painful hardships, beginning with Rudolph's apparent death in battle (spoiler: no), Esther undergoes a regular Pilgrim's Progress (highlighted by, well, an allusion to the Pilgrim's Progress) that tests her allegiance to her newfound faith.  Here, Stern trots out a number of the major Jewish conversion novel tropes, most importantly the abusive family: her parents conceal the converted Rudolph's letters from here, attempt to arrange a marriage for her with a man she barely knows, and then subject her to emotional abuse and, ultimately, rejection once her conversion becomes clear.  The novel thus equates Jewish ritual practice with the emptiness of Jewish family feeling, which makes itself painfully clear at any sign of deviation from the norm; apparently loving families morph into psychologically (and, in other novels, physically) brutal enclaves.  Of course, as one might expect, when Esther reaches her lowest point, so starved and demoralized to be unrecognizable, she is found again in an English church by the undead (OK, not dead) Rudolph, who promptly marries her.  Happily ever after!

Interestingly enough, it is in England that the novel locates outright antisemitism.  (Col. Fraser's victim-blaming for Jewish persecution does not, one must note, apparently count as antisemitism in the novel's estimation.)  After Esther's family rejects her, the narrative suddenly detours into a governess novel, complete with shallow and materialistic parents--parents who also sneer at the Jews who have insinuated themselves into all the walks of genteel and professional life.  "A Jew Prime Minister, and a Jew Master of the Rolls!" (191) complains the master of the house.  The apparently unremarkable acculturation (albeit not outright assimilation) of German Jews stands in stark contrast to this overt prejudice; it is such bigotry, the novel hints, that produces Jewish "otherness," not Jewish clannishness or tribalism.  In context, this attack on English prejudice (and, elsewhere, how the English treat the poor in general) up-ends more cheery Protestant and even Jewish assessments of England as a safe haven for oppressed Jews.  A German Jew travels to England, only to find that "Jew" erases all other potential forms of identification, and that to be a Jew is, by definition, to be permanently strange.  One wonders if Stern's German-born husband had had something to say.      

¹ For more on the role of "form" in Victorian spirituality, see Kirstie Blair's recent Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Poetics (OUP, 2012). 

[Edited 5/3 to get rid of a chronology error.]

Scattered Musings, post-conference edition

• There was radio silence this week because of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association conference, from which I have just returned.  It's one of those lovely small conferences where people are friendly and you can rely on having an audience for your talk (as opposed to three people and/or the rest of the panel).  There were a number of stimulating papers; I particularly appreciated some new ideas for teaching from the digital humanities panel.  My own contribution developed from my own baby white whale, Robert Elsmere, and its habit of doing strange things with quotations (Biblical prooftexting, in particular).  As is so often the case, I wound up becoming more sympathetic to Mrs. Ward's habit of mangling quotations every which way once I started writing about the practice, in part because the deliberate misquotations (e.g., the "quotation" from Obermann that is actually from two paragraphs fifty pages apart...) look, on closer examination, like they're making a statement about the rightful liberties an author can take with a text.  That being said, with my editor's hat on, the misquotations still make me want to go all Captain Ahab.
• Strictly speaking, I was lucky to get to the conference, as many other attendees had positively Gothic accounts of being trapped for hours (or days) in gloomy airports.  Ah, midwestern weather, how we all love you.  (Er, no.)  I was less impressed by winding up with a cab back to the airport that smelled like it had been drenched in urine; I tried to distract myself from the olfactory situation by imagining all the ways that the car could have acquired that aroma without, well, having been literally drenched in the substance in question. 
• Speaking of Gothic, I used my travel time to catch up on some horror anthologies.  I don't know if it's age, temperament, taste, or a combination of the two, but even though the stories I was reading were all technically quite fine, I didn't find any of them...horrific.  Not a chill was to be had.  And yet, there are a number of Victorian/Edwardian tales that still spook me: The Turn of the Screw, for example, or "The Room in the Tower."  Perhaps because these stories focus on the tension, the waiting, more than explicit gore?
• I also finally (finally!) managed to finish Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers.  I'm not sure of the novel's place in the historical subgenre of "fictional biographies/autobiographies of mediocrities whose lives embody the era's major cultural and political transformations" (that's a rather clunky name for the subgenre, I must say)--think Any Human Heart, or Liza's Century, or The Stone Diaries, or My Heart Laid Bare.  At the end of the novel, the sentimental novelist's sister, Hortense, a nearly-forgotten sculptor, contemplates her work and that of her siblings (a third, long dead, was a successful comic), and concludes, "'I don't suppose any of us was really bad.  We meant well, anyway'" (653).  Meant as self-exculpation, this assessment also damns what the family represents for the twentieth century--one long aesthetic lapse, momentarily celebrated but then thrown aside as rubbish.  Their success was the temporary triumph of the disposable, of the world as celebrated by Hollywood (for which Hortense's ex-husband wrote musical scores).  They're popular.  There's not much left in the way of transcendence in this novel, as the parallel rise to success of the also popular Carlo Campanati, eventually Pope Gregory, implies: his rise to ecclesiastical power is one long theological error, the "miraculous cure" that promises his sainthood in fact enabling a much greater horror. 
• The new iPad keyboard held up for note-taking.  Besides needing to use the function key to enable punctuation marks like the colon and semi-colon, I'm also still irritated by the ease with which one is likely to hit "enter" instead of the apostrophe.  Overall, though, the keyboard works well enough that I'd be happy to tote the iPad around for conferences or for light note-taking in libraries; I don't think I'd enjoy using it to do lengthy transcriptions. 

Scattered Musings

• Speaking as someone "on the ground," as it were, I found myself vaguely bemused by this tumblr quarrel.  As an example of "Christian privilege," "[y]ou don’t have to be familiar with another faith’s scripture in order to 'get' the allusions and references in the literature taught in high school English classes" sounds good, I suppose, were it not that one's Christian students (even at the college level) are very likely incapable of recognizing most allusions to the N.T. Aside from a very tiny minority, most of my Christian students have the same grasp of N.T. narratives/concepts/quotations as do my non-practicing and non-Christian students--that is, they know what's accessible via popular media.  (I've yet to have a student who couldn't recognize a Christ allegory at twenty paces.)   And they are also unlikely to recognize anything beyond the basics, if that, in terms of liturgy (in whatever denomination), iconography, etc.   From shop talk I've heard over the years, this is as much an issue at Christian colleges, whether Catholic or Protestant, as it is at secular institutions.  In other words, the instructor has to go into the room assuming that the Scriptural references will be "unfamiliar" to everybody; it's why I have the "you know, if you're an English major, you're going to have to read the Bible [insert discussion of different relevant translations here]" lecture in my regular repertoire, right alongside "seriously, there's no escaping Paradise Lost," "you'll have to reconcile yourself to reading Shakespeare," and "yup, get yourself a copy of The Pilgrim's Progress."
• Which is another way of saying that there's no necessary contradiction between emerging from a culture and being, in many ways, foreign to it.  It's why I argued many years ago that one of the common objections to such-and-such "studies" programs--the argument from narcissism--didn't make much sense. 
• I did this kind of assignment once as an option (which few students took), and haven't repeated it, in large part because I'm dubious about the ethics of siccing random students on Wikipedia.  Granted, the results might not be any worse than the current Victorian literature page, but still.  I think asking students to investigate and write about Wikipedia is valuable,  but having them mess about with the site unsupervised is problematic (shouldn't students be comfortable citing sources before they contribute to a site which demands citations at the drop of a hat?).
• I don't usually have to "guess" if my students have done the reading or not.  It's apparent within the first five seconds of asking a question.  Even in an online setting, surely dead air on the discussion boards would make this clear? More to the point: college students are usually adults.  It's up to them if they want to do the reading, because that's the freedom of choice (and the choice of consequences) that goes along with being an adult.  At a certain point, students have to motivate themselves to do the work, just as they may have to actively decide to be interested in a subject that doesn't grab them from the get-go.  (And as the article goes on to point out, the system can be fiddled with mind-blowing ease.)
• On a lighter note, I've been experimenting with this new iPad keyboard case (which I managed to snag at half price on Amazon).  So far, pretty good: the keys are comfortably spaced; the feel is comparable to a decent netbook; and the construction is solid.  The only thing I dislike right now is that some of the common punctuation marks are controlled by function keys (perhaps this is designed to drive the semi-colon to extinction?). 

To dream the impossible dream (of sequencing)

This past week or so, I've been teaching poems like Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" and E. B. Browning's "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," where the apparent lockstep regularity of the poem's form gives way once you start analyzing the meter.  (Or, as I said, "the meter is banging against the frame of the rhyme scheme.") At times like this, I always find myself dreaming of that nice utopian day in which all of our students knew something about scansion--which, after all, not everyone teaches in our intro to lit analysis course.  Wouldn't it be nice if you could just walk into the room and say, "Everyone, what did you think of all those anapests?"  Ah, the joys of predictability, in which all students learn the same skills at the beginning of their academic careers!

Of course, the dream falls apart just as quickly.  Our 200-level courses are enrolling more and more non-majors, and it's a bit much to expect physicists and sociologists to walk into the room prepared to recognize an iamb.  More to the point, the ability to scan a poem is, as a professor of mine once said about cricket, "use it or lose it" knowledge.  Even students who I know have been exposed to the basics don't necessarily remember them a year on, not unless they've taken other poetry-heavy courses (e.g., Shakespeare or Milton).  It's rather like the fantasy/fallacy of freshman composition: you cannot "teach students to write" in a single semester; you can only give them the basic toolkit, and the spiffier tools must be acquired elsewhere.  Nothing sticks unless it's consistently reinforced in the department and, sometimes, across the campus. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Francis Lathom, The One-Pound Note and Other Tales, ed. Max Fincher (Valancourt, 2013).  Reprint of three novellas first published in 1820.  Some more of the elusive Lathom's work here.  (Amazon)
• Bram Stoker, Lady Athlyne (Valancourt, 2007).  Reprint of Stoker's 1908 novel about a man who falls in love with the woman who is pretending to be his wife (confused yet?).  (Amazon)
• Harry Karlinsky, The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin (1857-1879) (Insomniac, 2010).  A faux biography of a shortlived, possibly insane Victorian figure who is/is not kin to the more familiar Darwin.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Robert Edric, The Book of the Heathen: A Novel of the Congo (St. Martin's, 2002).  In the late-19th c. Congo, a man prepares to go on trial for murder.  What happened? (Amazon [secondhand])