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EXPRESSIONS

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 Heather 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 had, 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, 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 FILM

Whistle Down the Wind

Expressions // Reason To Believe: Whistle Down The Wind

The first time I saw Brian Forbes’s Whistle Down the Wind when I was about 14, I briefly entertained the idea that I’d had some ground-breaking epiphany about the film’s religious overtones – something hitherto unaddressed in any criticism, some PhD-worthy proposition about “obscure Biblical parallels”.  I realise now – in fact, I likely realised not long after said “epiphany” – that this wasn’t quite the perceptive take I thought it was, not least because, yes, it has actually been discussed at length in criticism, but also because the film itself goes to great lengths to ensure we’ve grasped its allusions; in short, to render those allusions anything but “obscure”. From reimaginings of Peter’s denial, the Last Supper, and the crucifixion, to the playful interweaving of John Henry Hopkins Jr.’s “We Three Kings” in the score, one need hardly be a theology student to recognise its many glaring references to the New Testament.

Thirty-three years after the film was released, a journalist for The Independent wrote one of a series of ‘Location Hunters’ articles about the enduring popularity of the village of Downham and the surrounding areas in which filming took place.  In his article he describes the film as something of a ‘slightly cringe-making, saccharine juvenile classic’.  I concur that it is indeed a juvenile classic, but given that this is one of my favourite films of all time, I take issue with any accusation of cringe-worthiness.  I agree that it likely treads a very fine line – any film that dares to directly confront the idea of Jesus’s return and feature children in the lead roles must surely risk the charge of sanctimony – but through a combination of exceptional casting, a haunting, poignant score, and brilliant, brooding cinematography, it stops short well short of mawkishness and didacticism, and arrives instead at sheer brilliance. 

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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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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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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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EXPRESSIONS LITERATURE

Paradise Lost

Expressions // Idolatry in Paradise Lost

My first encounter with Milton was not what I’d call a positive one. I had to tackle Paradise Lost in my first year at university and I was completely baffled; it seemed so deliberately impenetrable to me that I almost took it as a personal insult that I was able to glean next to nothing from its pages. Maybe because we were instructed to read only a couple of designated chapters due to the time constraints of the course and the massive amount of literature we had to plough through in one semester, or maybe because I was approaching it for the first time as such an inexperienced student and hadn’t the tools with which to effectively tackle it (if that’s the right word), I left those weeks relieved, hoping I needn’t confront Paradise Lost ever again. Two years later, though, I found myself actively choosing to take an intensive course dealing only with this text. Spurred on by a friend who’d referred to our first classes on it as (rather appropriately), “hell, but in a really good way,” I decided I was ready to try again, hopefully to see what all the fuss was about. This time, I was not disappointed. In particular, I was struck by what seemed to me a very self-aware anxiety about the nature of idolatry, of attempting to express God in art, and the constant need to justify and explain how Milton’s own ‘attempt’ is distinct, and exempt from accusations of idolatrous worship.

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EXPRESSIONS LITERATURE

Jane Eyre // Wide Sargasso Sea

Charlotte Bronte

Expressions // Thoughts on feminism in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea

I was originally going to write a piece about Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel entitled ‘Why Jane Eyre will always be relevant’ but upon reflection decided that such an effort would not exactly be futile, but, well, frankly unnecessary.  That Jane Eyre is still taught to students from KS4 right up to postgraduate level, that it is still pitched to film executives for ever more adaptations, that figures like the brooding Rochester, and ‘plain’ Jane have each entered our collective consciousness, enshrined among the greatest symbols of our literary heritage, that the literature tags of sites like Tumblr and Instagram are utterly saturated with photographs of stylised quotes from Jane’s great ‘I am no bird’ speech, this – all of this – renders completely redundant the task of attempting to account for, or justify the text’s endurance.  The novel can, and will, speak for itself, as it has for generations. Continue Reading

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