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LITERATURE

EXPRESSIONS LITERATURE

Jane Eyre

Expressions // ‘God’s Own Lambs’: The Evangelical Child in Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë wrote in a letter to W.S. Williams that Jane Eyre ‘has no learning, no research’, and ‘discusses no subject of public interest.’[1]  Although it is true that Charlotte did not set out to write Jane Eyre with the same didactic impulses which compelled her sister to write The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in her representation of the evangelical institution of Lowood – a thinly disguised Cowan Bridge School as Charlotte’s biographer Elizabeth Gaskell later confirmed – and in the ensuing debate in the press as to the extent of its accuracy, there can be, as Glen states, no doubting the ‘public interest’ of her chosen subject matter.[2]

The harsh, rigorous discipline to which children were subjected at such ‘evangelical, charitable establishments’[3] as Lowood has at its core a firmly-held belief in man’s inherently sinful nature, and the absolute authority of the parent and the teacher to ‘subdue the desires of the flesh’, ‘instil humility and obedience’ and, perhaps most significantly, prepare the child for salvation.[4]  To evangelical Christians like Reverend Carus Wilson, upon whom Mr Brocklehurst is purportedly based, the child, however inexperienced, is no less sinful than any adult. Continue Reading

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EXPRESSIONS LITERATURE

The Yellow Wall-Paper

Expressions // The Female Liver: Gender and Mental Health in The Yellow Wall-Paper

‘The clearness and strength of the brain of the woman prove continually the injustice of the clamorous contempt long poured upon what was scornfully called “the female mind”. There is no female mind. The Brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.’

– Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics

When I decided I wanted to start a blog to fill the book-shaped void left in my life when I finished my degree, my initial plan of action was rather hamstrung by the question of what I might title it. Such was my indecision that I eventually had a list of subjects I wanted to explore, a notebook full of articles I’d already drafted, and nowhere to publish any of these ideas.

Before I settled on “The Spirit of the Page”, a reference to Hazlitt’s 1825 collection of essays, The Spirit of the Age, my preferred contender was  “The Female Liver”, a nod to the Charlotte Perkins Gilman quotation above, and by extension the implicit assertion of my own feminist principles (at this point I need hardly explain the thrust of her argument).

Particularly astute, I thought, was the double meaning of “liver”:  this was also a declaration that I, a female(!) am living, therefore a live-er, and here was a space in which I could record the evidence of that fact (the evidence being my ideas, obviously).  Eyeroll.

I decided, quite rightly, I think, that this logic was more than a little convoluted, and that the meaning behind the name was vague enough without a circumlocutory explanation not unlike the one I’m attempting to provide now. Rather than the suggestion of female experience I was convinced it conveyed, it instead conjured images of the actual organ, that genderless liver.  I’d like to think my focus on women-centric writing is still obvious enough without having to expressly mention the word “female” atop anything I publish here, but I’d still like to explore the text that prompted my interest in Gilman in the first place.  So, in honour of the name that wasn’t, here is a long overdue articulation of my thoughts about the rest cure, gender, and mental health in Gilman’s short story ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’. 

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EXPRESSIONS LITERATURE

Harry Potter

Expressions // Floriography + Harry Potter

‘Be like the lily graceful; delicate
As the long-lived Petunia, so meek’

 // The Poetry of Observation part Second and other Poems by William Asbury

I was originally inspired to write about this subject after reading a piece on the Pottermore website (now Wizarding World) entitled, “Lily, Petunia and the language of flowers.” I found it such a fascinating new way of looking at Lily and Petunia but also, as I discovered in that piece, the subtext of Snape’s humiliating interrogation of Harry in his first potions lesson. Being a firm believer in the fact that very little JK Rowling writes is merely a happy accident, as well as something of a research addict and compulsive over-analyser, I wasn’t quite content to walk away from the subject having only skimmed the surface, so I decided to go a little bit further in order to examine the sources from which we might derive the meanings attached to that now iconic exchange.

The 1800s saw a proliferation of ‘floriography’ books in the UK and the US; hundreds of these floral dictionaries were published with the aim of guiding prospective bouquet senders toward the most suitable blooms for their intended recipients. These books took on a number of forms. Some were anthologies of floral-themed poetry with accompanying glossaries, others were more concerned with the history of the flower, its introduction to Europe, or its place in ancient Greek mythology, and others, still, were simply dictionaries, alphabetical lists of flowers with concise, often simply one-word definitions: basil – hatred, cabbage – profit, coves – dignity, etc.

Given the number of different books published, then, I wasn’t exactly surprised to find that a quick scan through six or seven of these volumes betrayed a slight lack of consistency where certain flowers were concerned. But, where a broad consensus cannot be reached, I’d like to think we’re afforded even greater scope to contrast and even connect these definitions in the context of Rowling’s series. Flowers are, after all, ‘the representatives of all times and of all nations; the pledges of all feelings.’[1]

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IMPRESSIONS LITERATURE

The Story of a Modern Woman

The Story of a Modern Woman

Impressions // The Story of a Modern Woman by Ella Hepworth Dixon

‘All we modern women mean to help each other now.’

If I were rich enough to buy a million copies of this book and devote the rest of my life to leaving them scattered across tube station platforms, park benches and shopping centres à la Emma Watson, I would.  Dixon’s text has, for reasons that utterly elude me, spent the best part of the past century out of mainstream print and has been republished only relatively recently, in this fantastic Broadview edition, which contains a thorough grounding in the context of the ‘New Woman’ phenomenon by way of Steve Farmer’s brilliant introduction, as well as a collection of reviews and essays from contemporary publications at the close.  My first encounter with this novel actually took place a couple of years ago as part of a postgraduate class focusing on the Victorian Bildungsroman.   There’s such scant information about Ella Hepworth Dixon available on the internet that it’s hardly a stretch to say that had it not been included on that particular module’s syllabus I would probably still be totally ignorant of her life and work, particularly as a student whose research interests have, up until now, tended towards the earlier half of the 19th century, only lightly skimming the ‘Woman Question’ debates that sprang up towards the later half.

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EXPRESSIONS LITERATURE

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Expressions // ‘An Unpalatable Truth’: Moral Nurture and Individual Responsibility in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

The eponymous tenant of Anne Brontë’s second and final novel is the mysterious widow Helen Graham. She arrives at the hitherto uninhabited Wildfell Hall with just her young son, a servant and a view to earning a living through her art. Naturally reticent and wary of forming any real attachments to the inhabitants of the neighbouring village of Linden-Car, the mysterious Helen soon becomes the subject of unfavourable local gossip.  Gilbert Markham, who lives in the village with his mother and siblings, is initially rather taken with her, but in the face of village speculation and Helen’s own evasiveness, grows increasingly suspicious of her personal history. Only when narrative control is handed over to Helen in the form of her diary entries does Gilbert (and by extension, the reader) learn that she is not a widow at all; she has run away from her abusive husband, Arthur Huntingdon. 

Critics have long pointed out the parallels between Huntingdon and the Brontës’ ill-fated brother Branwell. While he very probably served as inspiration, it’s been suggested more recently that Anne’s novel was born out of disapproval of her sister’s work, rather than (or at least, in addition to) the spectacle of her brother’s rapid decline.  Smith, for example, describes Tenant as ‘a sharp commentary… on Wuthering Heights’,[1] and Liddell agrees: the novel, ‘in which conscience triumphs, is in some sort an answer to the triumph of passion in Wuthering Heights.’[2]  Nevertheless, Anne’s novel was poorly received by contemporary critics. Among those critics was her sister, Charlotte, who wrote in a letter to W.S. Williams that ‘it hardly appears to me desirable to preserve.’[3]  Although the book’s instructive emphasis is certainly evident to the modern reader, the moral of Anne’s story was apparently lost on many 19th century reviewers who wrote primarily of the book’s ‘revolting scenes’ and took issue with its ‘inconceivably coarse language.’[4]  Otherwise, that moral was counteracted altogether by the author’s ‘morbid love of the coarse’.[5]  Consequently, Anne’s novel was considered highly unsuitable for its intended demographic of young women. Continue Reading

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IMPRESSIONS LITERATURE

The Children Who Lived in a Barn

Impressions // The Children Who Lived in A Barn by Eleanor Graham

As far as literary tropes go, sudden and extended parental absenteeism would appear to be the go-to plot device for writers of children’s fiction.  There are few bolder ways to precipitate the drama of your story than, at the outset, offing the grown-ups for the duration of the narrative. After all, in what other context would the Dunnet children possibly be forced to live in the eponymous barn; in what context would they need to scrabble around trying to render said barn presentable to the dreaded “DV” (that’s District Visitor to you and me); in what other context would the children even consider entertaining the brazen, proverb-spewing tramp, Solomon in their home; when else would we ever get to accompany Sue in her efforts to fathom the intricacies of that infamous hay box?

In kinder examples such as this, the parents are merely pushed to the novel’s periphery, and perhaps we are occasionally reminded of their existence via written correspondence, but in other harsher tales, parents are killed off altogether.  As it is, the protagonists in these stories suddenly find themselves with little to no moral guidance, minimal financial support, and, more often than not, the additional obstacle of the fact that their remaining relatives or substitute parents just so happen to be utterly contemptible. The world into which these newly bereaved or abandoned children are suddenly thrust is not merely the unforgiving place most of us now know it to be, but one compounded by the expectation of their instant adaption to the very adult world of labour, homemaking and money managing which, in less tragic circumstances, they would never be forced to navigate independently.

There’s such a multitude of these stories that you’d be forgiven for thinking this particular opener was a prerequisite for any children’s or bildungsroman text: Great Expectations opens with the young and illiterate Pip standing in the village churchyard trying to make sense of his parents’ headstones, before a brief meditation on just how abominably his elder sister Mrs. Joe, as their inadequate replacement, has been to him in the intervening years. Jane Eyre opens with young Jane, whose parents died of typhus years earlier, in the company of her three spoiled cousins and under the care of her abusive Aunt Reed.  The opening of The Story of a Modern Woman deals with the death of young Mary Earle’s father and its repercussions on the household she is now compelled to maintain.  Harry Potter opens with an orphaned baby being set at the doorstep of his aunt and uncle, ahead of eleven long years of cruelty at the hands of his reluctant guardians. In The Secret Garden, the orphaned Mary Lennox moves from India, where her parents died from cholera, to Yorkshire, to live in the house of her reclusive uncle, whom she has never met. What all of these stories share, besides that obvious plot point, is the fact that in every one, these adverse circumstances are exacerbated; magnified by the fact that there is no friendly, familial voice to offer comfort or instruction.  

What sets Eleanor Graham’s The Children Who Lived in a Barn apart from the other examples I’ve listed is just how clumsily this device is implemented.   The story opens with a perfect picture of nuclear family cohesion, but in a turn of events worthy of a Neighbours story line, the children find themselves abandoned and left to fend for themselves. About three pages in, a letter arrives detailing the mysterious, undisclosed illness of a relative in Europe, and at once, the mother and father are away, having made no arrangements for the care of their five children (whose ages, by the way, range between five and thirteen). Such is the father’s agitation that he can’t even bring himself to finish his sentence before sprinting off to catch his bus.

What follows, Graham surely hoped, is a lesson in household efficiency, self-sufficiency, and the value (and limitations) of community.  Unfortunately, these lessons are learned primarily by Sue, who by virtue of being both a girl, and the oldest of the children (though we are often reminded that Bob is very close behind), becomes the person from whom the most is demanded by her siblings.

At once, the children become a replica of the family structure we see presented at the very opening of the story.  Sue, who now seems to be responsible for literally everything, takes on the role of harassed home maker or domestic slave (delete as applicable), while the twins gad about stupidly, making everything twice as difficult as it needs to be.  Alice mopes about being generally pathetic and unmemorable, and then there’s Bob, who, despite his boundless sense of entitlement and authority, somehow manages to escape the charge of bossiness that I’m sure has been frequently laid upon Sue over the years. 

As a “grown up” reader, I had a problem with virtually every aspect of this story’s execution, from the sheer ridiculousness and implausibility of their parents’ exit to the dullness of the ensuing action which seems so focused on such prosaic activities as book keeping, cleaning, cooking etc., that it’s difficult to circumvent the clearly instructive overtones of the story.   Such didacticism now seems more or less obsolete, or at least far less urgent:  children in the 21st century are hardly likely to share the same concerns as the Dunnets, barn or no barn.  Graham wrote her story in 1938, a year before it was decided that the compulsory school leaving age ought to be raised to 15 (and several years before it was finally implemented), which means that Sue, at the ripe old age of 13, had virtually reached the end of her childhood anyway, and with this in mind, it seems less ridiculous that she should occupy herself with what modern readers would consider the sole concern of adults.

I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that within a year of the book’s publication, Neville Chamberlain would announce the country’s formal declaration of war on Germany.  With this in mind, the frugality necessarily exercised by a group of children without a reliable means of income and no idea when their parents would finally return becomes analogous to the self-sufficiency and resilience considered necessary to a nation’s survival and morale in a state of war.  Sue’s efforts to maintain the household and the decency of her siblings are echoed in the plethora of propaganda posters targeted at those British subjects who remained on the home front, in which that same frugality is expounded as a matter of national emergency.  Given Britain’s intensifying relationship with Germany during the 1930s, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that Graham at least took this looming threat into consideration while writing her story.

Interesting though these parallels may be, none of it goes any way toward explaining my own attachment to the story as a child. Really, it’s not all that complicated. As adults, we can return to classics like Home Alone and laugh at the absurdities of Kevin’s abandonment, but as children, it’s pure fun; a glimpse into a world temporarily free from the seemingly arbitrary rules and restrictions imposed by one’s parents in which a child can eat whatever and whenever he likes, watch whatever he likes, and do what he wants, however dangerous, with no risk of being disciplined. It’s the ultimate childhood fantasy, and a theme that I imagine will forever endure in children’s literature, but in most instances, the lessons learned tend to be the same: it’s fun until the novelty wears off, and then it becomes a little dull, a little lonely, and a lot like work.

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IMPRESSIONS LITERATURE

Why be likeable when you can be Emily Brontë?

I make a point of reading Wuthering Heights once a year, usually around January or February when the weather is typically as angry as it is in the book, but unlike the Lintons and the Earnshaws, I have the privilege of enjoying their story from a safe distance, a time and place far removed from the unforgiving landscape in which their narratives unfold, away from the ubiquitous violence under which they are virtually all doomed to suffer.  If I’d ever managed to forget this little tradition, I’d no doubt be helpfully reminded of it by the articles that tend to surface at least every few months announcing a new adaptation, a new biography, the opening of some art installation with (sometimes rather tenuous) links to the novel, or perhaps some fashionable new pathologization of Emily’s social behaviour etc. etc. Recently, however, I came across this article in The Guardian, a sort of revisionist piece seemingly propelled by a bizarre, unwarranted nastiness towards Emily and, apparently, a desire to temper any enthusiasm surrounding the events being held to mark her 200th birthday. Judging by its headline, you’d be forgiven for assuming the article might actually be about ‘the strange cult of Emily Brontë’ (whatever that may be), but it really just seems to be a lengthy articulation of the writer’s distaste for both author and novel.

Within the first two paragraphs I’d already detected notes of that rather obnoxious trope of ‘I’m not like other girls’, right down to the sneering observation that ‘nearly all the activities mentioned in connection with the forthcoming anniversary […] involve women as makers, demonstrators, celebrators and educators’ and that ‘nearly all Emily Brontë’s biographers and scholars over the past century have been women.’ I’m not entirely sure what purpose this statement is supposed to serve, other than to set herself apart from the inexplicable mass of misguided women who count themselves as fans of Emily’s work.

I suppose I should probably say that, of course, it’s fine not to like this book. It’s fine not to like any book. But this article is evidently more preoccupied with what the writer considers Emily’s failings as a person, rather than any failings in her novel (her poetry is not mentioned).  Beyond a dubious summary of the novel’s plot and a rather spectacular misreading of the scene in which Heathcliff hangs Isabella’s springer spaniel with a handkerchief (which she impressively manages to characterise as ‘sexy foreplay’?!), there’s not a great deal to glean from the piece about why the writer deems Wuthering Heights little more than a ‘screechy melodrama’ and ‘a hot mess’.  Instead, we are treated to testimony from Emily’s former pupils, who ‘disliked her from the first’, which is a hilariously desperate supporting argument because I  can think of at least three teachers I’d like to go back and tell how much they made me hate a certain subject or made me feel small and stupid as a child. None of this, though, would have had any bearing on the quality of their art, were they to ever produce any.

It is a strange thing when a woman becomes so culturally significant as any of the three Brontë sisters. She is often derided for having a large female following (see, for example, the way the odious Woody Allen condescendingly describes Sylvia Plath’s appeal to ‘the college-girl mentality’ in Annie Hall), and she is undoubtedly held to a much higher standard. I find it difficult to imagine this sort of criticism being levelled at male authors whose transgressions are objectively far more severe than Emily’s shocking decision to arrange music lessons around her own schedule. Where is the excessive column space devoted to Dickens’ abhorrent treatment of his wife? Or what about F. Scott Fitzgerald, who plundered his wife Zelda’s journals and letters for his own literary material, but was furious to find that she’d attempted to do the same? What about serial philanderer Ernest Hemingway, or the appalling Norman Mailer, who literally stabbed his wife?  I am not arguing that these critiques don’t exist; they are there if you look for them. But not only are they in shorter supply, they are also invariably accompanied by the disclaimer in which the importance of ‘separating the art from the artist’ is clearly articulated, a privilege Emily, ‘the patron saint of difficult women’, has not been afforded in this piece.

Ultimately, the point of the article is to illustrate Emily’s ‘raging unlikeability’.  ‘Were we to meet [Emily],’ she decides, ‘we would not like her’. This is quite the assertion, since nobody could ever truly know this, but more importantly, who cares? Given that the article concludes with a somewhat reluctant admission that, yes, Emily did achieve something incredible in Wuthering Heights, and as such, deserves to be admired for it, it seems as though the writer isn’t entirely committed to her own argument either.  Being amiable or approachable has never been a pre-requisite for the occupation of a space in our cultural/literary heritage,  and so perhaps it’s not all that useful to start disparaging literary figures for having the gall to devote their time to private study or for, God forbid, preferring the company of animals to that of people.

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EXPRESSIONS LITERATURE

Sense and Sensibility

Expressions // Illness in Sense and Sensibility

There’s nothing quite like the coming of spring (FINALLY) to rejuvenate what’s been for me a pretty stagnant and uncreative few months (one day I’ll stop beginning every post with ‘IT’S BEEN AGES, YOU GUYS’), and there’s nothing quite like the common cold to inspire the kind of bemusement I feel every time a (usually female) character in a novel becomes inexplicably, dangerously ill after walking around in the rain and returning home with the sniffles.  Since my Sunday has kindly afforded me both of these ‘gifts’, I figured, what better time to spend a few hours wondering what the heck is wrong with Marianne in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility?

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IMPRESSIONS LITERATURE

The Woman Who Fooled The World

Impressions  //  Illness, Wellness & The Woman Who Fooled the World

It’s been another long, long break since writing anything for this space, and when I eventually decided I wanted to talk about Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano’s The Woman Who Fooled the World, I wasn’t wholly convinced that it’d be the most appropriate piece for the beginning of a new year. After all, the story of Belle Gibson’s cancer con is not exactly awash with the kind of positivity people are often grappling for as one year ends and another begins. But then I thought some more, particularly about the kind of resolutions people make around this time – to be healthier, fitter, stronger, kinder, more confident, more ‘at peace’ – and I realised that, really, there’s hardly a more appropriate time to discuss Gibson’s story since at one point all these ‘goals’ together formed the very backbone of her constructed persona.  What’s more, Gibson’s apparent ability to both preach and practice each of them so flawlessly (and so photogenically) was the very reason she was, for that short time, considered so extraordinary. Continue Reading

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IMPRESSIONS LITERATURE

Anne of Green Gables

Impressions // Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

‘isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?’

It’s been quite a while since I last wrote anything here, but I couldn’t think of a more wonderful book to review for my return post. It’s been a relatively difficult few weeks for me, and it wasn’t too long before I realised that I needed to step back from everything I was doing and re-evaluate a few things. After a few days of dragging my feet, feeling sorry for myself, and not reading very much at all, I borrowed my grandmother’s copy of Anne of Green Gables in the hope of cheering myself up with a book. My aim here was to pick something that would hopefully prove more light-hearted and uplifting than The Handmaid’s Tale, which, admittedly, is a pretty low bar for a jolly read.

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