Roxana

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue in William Congreve's  Love for Love, 1771, Yale Center for British Art

By Daniel Defoe, ed. with an intro. and notes by John Mullian, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 356

Defoe took a while to grow on me.  Immediately, however, I loved the 18th-century punctuation (e.g., the first sentence reads: "I was Born, as my Friends told me, at the City of Poictiers, in the Province, or County of Poictou, in France, from Whence I was brought to England by my Parents, who fled for their Religion about the Year 1683, when the Protestants were Banish'd from France by the Cruelty of their Persecutors.") We have traveled a long way from German's injunction that all nouns be capitalized!  There is so much feeling expressed through italic font, capitalizations, and apostrophes. 

This is one of the England's first novels, and the characters' psychological development seemed a little rough and ready. Smiley claims that sex is the engine in the rise of the novel and here, like in Clarissa, Defoe is focused on the moral and material situation of women.  The novel was originally titled Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress, or a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, afterwards called the Countess de Wintselsheim in Germany Being the Person known by the Name of the Lady Roxana in the time of Charles II.  

The mechanics of the first-person narrative are quite complex.  The story is told as the self-condemning reflections of a woman who made her way in the world as an expensive mistress.  Her tale is edited by a "relator" who vouches for the veracity of the history.  All of Defoe's novels are presented as transcriptions of a character's story and not as the creative inventions of an author.  There is, furthermore, a difference  between the the protagonist whose story we are reading about and the first-person narrator. The story ends with Roxana claiming that her life was crushed.  The reader doesn't know the details of her tailspin.  As Mullian perceptively notes in the introduction, we don't know how the main character became the person telling the story. There is a narrative break, a lack of reconciliation between the past wicked self and the present wiser self.  The protagonist and the narrator remain different people.  

The self-estrangement at the center of the narrative combines with Defoe's treatment of proper names to produce a very dark mood of shifting ambiguity in Roxana.  The narrator's name is Susan.  She becomes Roxana, a generic name in 17th century drama for an "oriental queen," at a masked ball.  Susan was performing before a crowd when they hailed her as"Roxana."  This symbolizes Susan's new identity in aristocratic French circles.  All the other characters in the novel, save Roxana's lady's maid Amy, are addressed as types.  Lovers are called The Prince or The Dutch Merchant, and a friend is called The Quaker.  

Characters are also identified by their social titles with their name blanked out, for example Sir R---.  Defoe is borrowing from a late 17th century  fashion for "secret histories."  These stories centered on lives of the rich and famous that thinly veiled the protagonists' identities through blanks and pseudonyms.  I always thought that these types of identifications in novels marked off a specific cultural type (e.g., Joseph K in The Trial), so its fun to consider that this could indicate a secret of a famous person.  This blog entry is rambling.  I grew to appreciate, in summary, Roxana's intricate techniques of story telling and Defoe's place in the rise of the novel.

The Last Chronicle of Barset

Worcester Cathedral, England

By Anthony Trollope, London, Penguin Books, 2002, p. 889

Anthony Trollope is the Victorian king of the mega-novel.  He wrote six novels about the fictional cathedral town of Barchester in the 1850s and 1860s in addition to a series of of novels about English political life called the Palliser novels.  Like Balzac's Comedie humaine, characters who appear in the foreground in one novel may reappear in another book in the background.  The mega-novel, according to Smiley, permits the author to explore a mileau in depth and to follow characters as they age.  The Last Chronicle of Barset centers on an impoverished country curate, Mr. Crawly, who inadvertently passes a bad check.  Crawly cannot remember how he happened to hold the check and fears he is either mad or a thief.  All of Barchester is consumed with the question of Crawly's guilt or innocence.

I must admit that I read Trollope with a divided heart.  He is a superb storyteller.  According to Smiley, "Trollope is a master at entering the minds of a variety of characters and showing how their thoughts progress, and also at showing how they are often deluding themselves or how their views of themselves contrast with the ways others see them."  I love his portraits of social networks.  Like Middlemarch and Alice Munro's work, he's telling the story of a community as well as individuals.  His novels are both deep (pictures of an individual soul) and wide (pictures of a interlocking social structures).  

He is, on the other hand, repulsively sexist and anti-Semitic.  I understand that his work is a product of its time, and its not fair to hold Trollope responsible for Victorian-era prejudices.  I still find it hard to tolerate.  Crawly is a domestic tyrant and unless a woman is a simpering fool, Crawly wants silence her!  Its like tucking in to a beautiful salad only to look down and see a worm waving up from the plate.

The Eustace Diamonds

Alfred Stevens, Portrait of Mrs. Stevens (nee Deering), 1900

By Anthony Trollope, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 637

Lizzie Eustace is a beautiful young widow who schemes to hold on to the Eustace family's diamond necklace.  This is a novel about lying.  Trollope seems to be making the point that mendacity permeates Victorian society.  The most powerful scenes for me involved Lucinda Roanoke.  Trollope uses this character to retell the story of Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor.  In Scott's story, Lucy Ashton is a young woman forced into a marriage with a man she doesn't love.  She goes mad on her wedding day and stabs him.  Here, Lucinda is sold off to an aristocratic husband to obtain financial security for her family.  She refuses her family's injunction and goes crazy on her wedding day.  Excellent melodrama! Lucinda rides to the hounds with shocking recklessness.  She cares little for her body or her life.

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.