Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady

Alan Ramsay, Lady Susan Fox-Strangeways, 1761

By Samuel Richardson, London, Penguin Books, 2004, p. 1533.

Clarissa Harlowe dies of a broken heart after being betrayed by her family and raped by Robert Lovelace, a late Restoration rake.  I first encountered Richardson's book by watching "Masterpiece Theater" on PBS during the 1980s.  (RIP Alistair Cooke)  I learned a lot about 18th-19th century life from that TV series. I remember their depiction of a drugged Clarissa splayed on a bed as a triumphant Lovelace turns away.  This tableau sums up Clarissa's destruction in my mind's eye.  

The virtuous heroine is an heiress pressured by her family to marry a repugnant yet rich neighbor.  The Harlowe's lock Clarissa in her bedroom until she agrees to this proposal.  Clarissa is a dutiful daughter, but her best interests are sacrificed to familial hubris and ambition.  Through reasoned argument and declarations of sincere good will, Lovelace lures Clarissa away from her family.  When his sexual overtures are spurned, Lovelace takes by force what he could not obtain by persuasion. Clarissa exchanges the prison of her parent's home for the trap of a ruthless sadist.

I've read and reread Clarissa so many times because it takes the reader inside the mental world of both Clarissa and Lovelace.  Again, Smiley links this to the new habits of introspection encouraged by the Reformation.  One looks inward to perceive signs of God's grace: correct thoughts and actions are rewarded by an easy conscience and economic prosperity.  In the modern novel, actions and psychology work together to create a character's fate.  Smiley writes, 

"It is not that character is destiny, but that choices are destiny....[Protagonists] reflect constantly upon the consequences of wrong and right choices, in this world and the hereafter.  They do not consider Fate, for example, and so instead of illustrating, let's say, the working of a tragic flaw, they model how to get through  the day or the week....This religion of the middle class, the self-made protagonist, stands in strong contrast to the pattern of aristocratic literature (notably the epic) that preceded it, in which the hero is the dupe of circumstances, and his only choice is the manner in which he meets his fate." 

Clarissa is an epistolary novel--the story is told through a series of letters--and this form, too, heightens the sense of psychological intimacy between protagonists and readers.  Characters explicate actions and detail the thinking behind these choices. Its as if the protagonists are writing to the reader.  For example, Lovelace pens a chilling letter to his best friend telling of Clarissa's rape, "And now, Bedford, I can go no further.  The affair is over.  Clarissa lives.  And I am your humble servant, R., Lovelace."  Reading these words, I felt both complicit in the crime and outraged for Clarissa's sake. There's no authorial voice to guide the reader's emotions.  We live inside the intelligent, furious, and determined minds of Clarissa and Lovelace.

Blonde

Marilyn Monroe by Eve Arnold, 1955

By Joyce Carol Oates, New York: Harper Collins, 2001, p. 738

When I first encountered this novel, I remember telling my partner that this was the finest embodiment of  contemporary gender theory that I had ever encountered.  Joyce Carol Oates is taken with Marilyn Monroe; her most recent novel, Black Dahlia & While Rose, also features Marilyn as a chief protagonist. Marilyn is, obviously, a cultural icon and the outline of her biography is well know.  What makes this lush, beautiful story so special is that Oates reimagines Marilyn's life from the inside.  She explores Marilyn's subjectivity by highlighting the poetic, spiritual, and creative aspects of her personality.  

Oates poignantly captures the presence of working-class shame in Marilyn's family through a preoccupation with sweat.  Maintaining a ladylike appearance hid the crushing experience of painful periods, numerous abortions, and starvation diets.  Perspiring through a dress or staining a dress with menstrual blood also highlights the terror of embodied femininity for Marilyn. Oates draws a devastating portrait of the grotesque in female sexuality.  "Stupid cow" is an epithet thrown at Marilyn on more than one occasion.

Writing on the Salon Web site, Pam Rosenthal wonderfully captures the power of Oates prose:

[“B]londe” is a huge, incantatory, expressionistic work that doubles back on itself to retell stories again and again, building its themes and variations through a seeming infinity of retakes. Description approaches hallucination. The action is told by numerous voices, some singular and famous, some anonymous and plural. Sometimes the narrative voice is breathless, almost gasping — the ghostly Marilyn Monroe voice, oddly formal and well mannered, too high and thin for the body that produced it.

Oroonoko and The Fair Jilt

Kehinde Wiley, Morpheus, 2008, available from: http://www.creativityfuse.com/2011/01/the-striking-portraits-of-kehinde-wiley/morpheus-2008-oil-on-canvas-by-kehinde-wiley/

By Aphra Behn, ed. with an intro. by Paul Salzman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 3-74

Being bored by an author can be an uncomfortable experience.  Its far better to have read Aphra Behn than to be actively engaged in reading her.  Oroonoko is interesting as a historical document for a number of reasons, and I can see why this work makes its way onto many college syllabi.  Behn was a Restoration playwright, and Virginia Woolf named her as the first woman to make her living by her pen.  Oroonoko is the story of an African prince who falls in love with the beautiful Imoinda, and, after a many plot twists, they are sold into slavery and taken to Surinam, an English colony.  Oroonoko is renamed Caesar and Imoinda becomes Clemene.  Oroonoko has many qualities that are putatively attributed to his white overlords: he is intelligent, brave, noble, and a natural leader.  Oroonoko leads a slave revolt and when this is put down, he kills the willing Imoinda rather than have her endure the indignity of further enslavement.  In the last scene of the novella, Oroonoko smokes a pipe while is is beaten, tortured, and killed.

The Fair Jilt is about Miranda, an energetic  femme-fatale, who falls in love with a priest and when he spurns her, falsely accuses him of rape.  While the priest languishes in prison, Miranda convinces first her footman and then her husband to try and kill her sister, Alcidiana.  Yawn.  In both tales, the outlandish plots and lack of psychological insight make for a tedious read.  

I'm not sure how it fits with this blog post, but I felt a jolt of absolute exhilaration when I unearthed the pictures of Kehinde Wiley to illustrate this book.  I was feeling so depressed about not liking Behn, and then Wiley popped up in my browser.  He takes postures and visual motifs from the history of European painting and combines this with contemporary portraits of African-American men.  Yes!  This is what the world would look like if Titian, Hans Holbein, or Ingres came from the San Gabriel Valley in LA.  His work is very romantic, and Wiley's Morpheus makes a very fine Oroonoko.  Wiley's portraits are an externalization of my inner vision or a part of my imaginative life.  No wonder I started to freak out!  

One of my goals with this reading journal is to unwind my responses to art.  I want to explore the distinct pleasures found in books and understand how that's different from looking at art or attending the ballet.  Books prompt a contemplative pleasure in which the images on the page thread back and forth with images in my mind.  Books change my mood, introduce me to new emotions, and deepen the feelings that I already experience.  On the other hand, pictures like Wiley's offer an immediate recognition that leaves behind such joy.  Visual works prompt a visceral reaction (a small explosion of happiness) that sets off a game of matching: I connect the art before me with the paintings, sculptures, and installations that I've studied before. 

The Makioka Sisters

Hashimoto Chikanobu, Ladies in Waiting of the Chiyoda Castle: Sword Practice and Puppet Kyogen, 1895, Met Museum

By Junichiro Tanizaki, trans., Edward G. Seidensticker, New York: Vintage Books, 1995, p. 530

During the inter-war years in Osaka, Japan four aristocratic sisters struggle to maintain a way of life that is quickly fading away.  Tsuruko, the oldest sister, clings to the prestige of her family name even as her husband moves their household to Tokyo, where their family is unknown.  Sachiko, in contrast to Tsuruko, is a sympathetic young matron and head of the Ashiya family branch.  Yukiko is shy, old-fashioned, and, most importantly, unmarried.  Taeko is the youngest daughter and an artistic rebel.  

The novel has an elegiac tone.  Change hangs in the air throughout the story and the impermanence of life is highlighted. The Makioka Sisters portrays a way of life ended by World War II and the Allied Occupation.   The Makiokas were once one of the wealthiest families in suburban Ashiya, located in the region between Osaka and Kobe, but over the last generation the status of the family has fallen.  Finding a suitor for Yukiko is the chief conflict in the story, and the quality Yukiko's proposed husbands function as an index of the family's declining fortunes. 

The Princess of Cleves

School of Fontainbleau, Gabrielle d'Estrees and One of her Sisters, c. 1594, Louvre

By Madame de Lafayette, trans. Robin Buss, London, Penguin, 2004, p. 185

This is one of my favorite books!  I've read it four times for the joy of being drawn into the gossip, intrigue,  and psychological complexity of the French court during the reign of Henry II (1547-1559).  The Princess of Cleves is a beloved classic text of French literature. Nicolas Sarkozy caused an uproar when he suggested that a "sadist or an idiot" was responsible for putting questions about this novel on a French civil service exam.  Shouldn't everyone study one of the world's literary landmarks?

A young woman is brought to court and married off to a kind, respectable man, the Monsieur de Cleves, but quickly falls in love with her heart's true desire, the Duc de Nemours.  Smiley argues that Madame de Lafayette asks the same question as Marguerite de Navarre in The Heptemaron:  Does romantic love ruin a virtuous woman?  The Princess of Cleves, desperate to fight her sincere love for the Duc de Nemours, confesses her passion to her husband.  The M. de Cleves respects his wife for her virtue but despairs over her love for another.  He dies.  The Princess is now free to marry the Duc de Nemours but retires to a convent.  In time, Nemours forgets his love for the Princess.

This is the first recognizable modern novel on The List.  De Lafayette combined a step-by-step exploration of the heroine's mind with an expert depiction of court life.  The Princess decides not to marry Nemours because she feels partly responsible for her husband's death, and, more astutely, she fears that the Duc's love would cool with a change of circumstance.  Romantic love is not marital love, and so long as their love affair remains unrequited, their love is equal.  If she yields, their love becomes unequal.  

The French court blurs the line between romantic and political relationships.  The erotic is the political.  At the same time, courtly culture is concerned with traditional Catholic notions of personal morality.  For example, Smiley notes that the Princess does not give in to her passion for the Duc while married because she is aware that he cannot protect her from scandal.  Extra-marital entanglements are the norm, yet there is clearly a price, in terms of reputation, for such liaisons.

Finally, The Princess of Cleves offers a wonderful depiction of Early Modern female identities.  This is not a world that admires transparency.  The Princess flees the court for the countryside when the burden of maintaining appearances (i.e., hiding her desire) becomes too painful.  The Queen yearns for the Vidame de Chartres because, in part, she needs to confide in someone.  The premise of courtly culture is that nothing is as it appears to be. At the very least, the protagonists have three selves: one for the public court, one in their private household, and an introspective self.

The Heptameron

Diane the Hunter, School of Fontainbleau, 1550-1560,  Louvre Museum

By Marguerite de Navarre, London, Penguin Books, 1984, p. 542

Inspired by The Decameron, this text is composed of seventy-two short stories written or compiled by Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), sister of Francois I and patron of Rabelais. Five men and five women take refuge from misadventure in a Pyrenean abbey and they agree to pass the time telling stories.  Unlike Boccaccio's work, however, the participants stipulate that all their tales must be true. The Heptameron was composed during the Reformation, and the mood of the work is considerably darker than The Decameron.   

The rules and rites of marriage are the means to explore both religious foment and changes in aristocratic hierarchy.  Marguerite specifies that the tales should address the question: can a woman know romantic passion and remain virtuous?  The religious controversies the 16th century set the stage for the rise of the novel.  Every sinner was responsible for avoiding sin and demonstrating the presence of God's grace in his or her life.  This prompted an awareness of one's inner life and the inner life of others.  According to Smiley, novels organize themselves around a character's inner life and especially inner conflict. 

The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson or An Oxford Love Story

Watercolor by Max Beerbohm,
Two Lines of Orphans: Can You Pick Out Zuleika?

By Max Beerbohm, illustrated by the author, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 350

Max Beerbohm was a caricaturist, prose writer, and man about town in Edwardian London. After the text's initial publication in 1911, Beerbohm added over eighty watercolor illustrations to a special copy that Yale University Press reproduces here for the first time. The writing and the illustrations are charmingly fey and graceful.  Zuleika Dobson is an upper-class fairy tale: our heroine is an irresistibly beautiful femme-fatal who sweeps into Oxford and by the force of her charm sets off a wave of mass suicides among undergraduates.  The tone is sparkling, light, and I am reminded of novels by Anita Loos and P.G. Wodehouse. Aldous Huxley claimed that Zuleika Dobson portrays an Oxford culture that was swept away by the two World Wars.

For me, this novel is about the dangers of rereading.  I first encountered Zuleika about three years ago and  was enchanted.  Reading the book was like falling headlong into a world of aristocratic aesthetes.  I loved the fanciful elements in the story: sculptures weep, pearl studs change color as the characters fall in love or grieve, Greek gods laugh at the folly of romance, and ghosts roam freely throughout Oxford.  One of the pleasures of reading is how a book can change my mood.  The act of reading itself is one of pleasurable absorption.  This time around, the novel felt like a Twilight of the Elites tale.  Who cares what a bunch of over-privileged toffs get up to?

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes

El Greco, Saint Martin and the Beggar,  1597-1599, National Gallery of Art

By Anonymous, New York: New York Review of Books, 2005, p.118

This narrative tells the story of a poor young man who struggles to find a master, and therefore a livelihood, in 16th century Spain.  Identified as the first picaresque novel, a tale about petty criminals or disreputable members of society, Lazarillo de Tormes revolves around a marginalized protagonist during Spain's Golden Age.  Lazarillo cycles through masters who are types--a greedy priest, a lying friar, and an impoverished nobleman who is too full of his own dignity to work. Beyond this novel's lively critique of the Catholic Church and Spanish social life, it is an important literary precursor to Vanity Fair and Huckleberry Finn.

The early novels on The List are proving to be, in the words of Ms. Smiley, "uncongenial works."  Lazarillo has an engaging voice, but the tale felt fragmentary and crude.   I love the history of Early Modern Europe and want to hear stories from those who are usually silenced.  I was, despite all that, distracted.

Madame Bovary

Isabelle Hubert as Madame Bovary, 1991

By Gustave Flaubert, trans. Lydia Davis, New York: Viking, 2010, p. 342


Reading Madame  Bovary is an exercise in ambivalence.  I want to strangle the heroine because she is so self-absorbed and conventional.  On the other hand, her search for romantic transcendence feels quite familiar to my own longings.  Emma Bovary is married to a provincial doctor who she dismisses as an oaf.  Motherhood leaves her cold.  She has a series of extramarital affairs, shops her way to financial ruin, and swallows arsenic when her disappointments overwhelm her. This plot outline, however, misses the point of the novel.  

Madame Bovary is a psychological portrait.  Emma wants to remake herself in the model of romantic heroine.  Her identity is grounded in a fantasy of aristocratic splendor and amorous achievement. She is especially alive to the power to material elegance.  She dresses herself in the height of fashion, and her home is constructed as a stage set that highlight her personal attributes.  

For Emma, outward beauty is a sign of inner grace.  Flaubert brings the physical world alive for the reader through the articulation of concrete detail.  The ladies at a ball, for example, shimmer before us:

"Along the line of seated women, painted fans were fluttering, bouquets half concealed smiling faces, and little gold-stoppered bottles twirled in half-open hands whose white gloves showed the outlines of their nails and hugged their flesh at the wrist. Lace trimmings, diamond brooches, medallion bracelets trembled on bodices, sparkled on chests, clinked on bare arms."

I keep expecting Emma to achieve emotional connection, but her poetic desires are forever undercut by the brutish or the mundane. Ironic juxtaposition between a romantic ideal and a prosaic reality, rendered in lyric objective prose, is at the core of Flaubert's style. Emma spends a night at the opera seeing Lucie de Lammermoor, for instance, yet she grows bored and wants to leave before the performance is over.  Instead of finding identification with Lucie, "[t]he mad scene was not at all interesting to Emma, and the heroine's acting seemed to her exaggerated."

Flaubert took over four years to compose the novel, he discarded much of the material he produced, and Lydia Davis's translation is equally concerned with precision. Julian Barnes offers a thoughtful--if somewhat snippy--evaluation of the translation here.  Notes at the back of the book explain obscure cultural references, and the introduction provides an overview of Flaubert's working processes and aesthetic goals.