My friend Glenda Funk has invokedMacbeth for how to deal with the coronavirus—or rather, how not to deal with it.
It involves hand washing. “Wash your hands frequently, and don’t touch your face,” we’re all being told. But as Glenda points out, “some things cannot come clean with a little soap and water”:
Perhaps the most famous hand-washing episode in literature is in Act V of The Tragedy of Macbeth. In this scene Lady Macbeth attempts to cleanse her hands of King Duncan’s blood, symbolic of her culpability in the king’s murder. At this point in the play the Macbeths are trapped in their deception. We hear the Doctor, a Gentlewoman, and Lady Macbeth:
Doctor: What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands. Gentlewoman:It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus washing her hands: I have known her continue in this quarter of an hour. Lady Macbeth: Yet here’s a spot. Doctor:Hark! she speaks: I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly. Lady Macbeth: Out, damned spot! out, I say!–One: two: why, then, ’tis time to do’t.–Hell is murky!–Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?–Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.What, will these hands ne’re be clean?
Glenda observes that, earlier in the play following Duncan’s murder, Lady Macbeth sends her husband to cleanse himself. Evidence cleansing is one thing, however, whereas “neither Lady Macbeth nor Macbeth can cleanse their hearts and souls of the stain that blots them.”
Glenda then connects the dots:
Similarly, we’re witnessing the effect of a dirty administration mired in the muck of greed, science denial, deregulation, and dismantling of government institutions designed to protect our citizens. We see the muzzling of the CDC coupled with budget cuts that make disaster preparedness a shadow of its former self.
A makeshift cleanup crew has been summoned by the Grand Poobah: “We’ve ordered lots of medical elements” he promised during a press conference before heading out for a round of golf. It is an accustomed action with him. We hear him calling the coronavirus “a hoax. This is their new hoax.”
We have the great science denier VP responsible for an HIV outbreak in his home state Indiana on hand to dust off and reopen the office created to handle the ebola epidemic during former President Obama’s administration.
We hear the government cries: “Out damned spot. Hell is murky” amid 25 million dollars in cuts to the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response and eighteen million dollars cut from the Hospital Preparedness Program. Oh, and there’s the proposal to cut eighty-five million dollars from the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. COVID-19 is a zoonotic disease.
I’ll just add that Trump, with his autocratic tendencies, shares Macbeth’s paranoia, with the Democratic Party as his Banquo. Unlike the Macbeths, however, Trump has no second thoughts about his past actions. It will take something comparable to the movement of Birnam Wood to oust him.
In an inspiring essay entitled “Though She Be But Little, She Is Fierce” (Helena’s description of Hermia in Midsummer Night’s Dream), my student Gracie LaRue convincingly argues that The Odyssey’s Penelope is severely underrated. Gracie’s insight comes out of a long overdue appreciation of her own mother.
The details are too private to share here, but suffice it to say that, as teenagers, Gracie and her brother failed to realize that their mother was holding the family together in the face of intolerable stresses. Like 8th century Greek society in general and Telemachus in particular, they couldn’t acknowledge how much their mother was doing.
In Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, Penelope looks back at her life and complains that she has become the legend of the model wife, used as a stick by insecure husbands to keep their spouses in line. Gracie notes the numerous times in The Odyssey when wives are criticized. The dead Agamemnon is understandably the primary complainant, saying of Clytemnestra,
…She has such an evil mind that she has poured down shame on her own head and on all other women, even good ones. (trans. Emily Wilson)
And:
So you must never treat your wife too well.
Do not let her know everything you know.
Tell her some things, hide others.
There’s also Eumaeus the swineherd, who tells the disguised Odysseus, “Sex sways all women’s minds,/ even the best of them.”
Gracie understandably focuses on Telemachus, who can’t figure his mother out. Menelaus doesn’t help matters when he points out the uncertainty of his position:
…You know how women are— they want to help the house of any man they marry. When one darling husband dies, his wife forgets him, and her children by him. She does not even ask how they are doing.
Would Telemachus be denied his inheritance in such an
instance? It could happen. For that matter, his stepfather could murder him (if
the suitors as a group don’t do so first). With the absence of Odysseus, Ithaca
is experiencing a power vacuum, and the suitors’ competition may be the only
thing preventing an unscrupulous man from stepping in and grabbing both
Penelope and her wealth. After all, as Telemachus learns from the town counsel,
no one in Ithaca is willing or able to stand up for him.
Penelope therefore, as Gracie notes, follows the best course
of action given her limited options: she plays an intricate waiting game. Her
goal is to keep things in suspension until a solution materializes.
First she employs a delaying tactic, saying that can’t marry until she completes her father-in-law’s shroud, even as she undoes her work each evening. When that is discovered, she tries shaming the suitors for their plot to kill Telemachus. As they are impervious to shame, she next sets up a challenge that she knows they won’t be able to meet: stringing Odysseus’s bow and shooting it through twelve axe heads. It doesn’t gain her a lot of time but it’s something.
A couple of times, the epic mentions that Penelope is
pleased when Telemachus orders her around. In the context of the waiting drama,
Telemachus stepping into Odysseus’s shoes is another hope. Indeed, the suitors are
beginning to see Telemachus as a potential threat.
Reading Gracie’s essay gave me insight into one puzzling passage. At one point, Athena tells Penelope to make herself beautiful and show herself off to the suitors. Since Odysseus is in the hall at that point, some have speculated that, whether consciously or unconsciously, his wife is welcoming him home. However, reminding the suitors of her beauty can also be seen as her using what leverage she has to keep them competing. As long as they do, there’s no moment of crisis.
After Odysseus reveals himself and kills the suitors,
Telemachus once again underestimates his mother, castigating her as Gracie
recalls castigating her own mother:
Mother! Cruel, heartless Mother! Why are you doing this, rejecting Father? Why do you not go over, sit beside him, and talk to him? No woman in the world would be so obstinate! To keep your distance from him when he has come back after twenty long years of suffering! Your heart is always harder than rock!
Odysseus, by contrast, is far more impressed by what his
wife has pulled off:
Hardened Odysseus began to smile. He told the boy, “You must allow your mother to test me out; she will soon know me better.”
Penelope
once again proves up to the task, essentially getting Odysseus to declare the solidity
of their marriage. (Only the two of them know that their bed is constructed out
of a rooted tree.) Having won the war, she now needs to win the peace.
For privacy’s sake, I leave the “it” in Gracie’s conclusion
vague, but you can imagine various life crises that might cause a parent to act
heroically. It is as a Penelope-type hero that Gracie regards her mother:
With the gift of hindsight, I know it wasn’t her fault…What’s amazing is that in all those times my brother and I abused her with our insults, screaming at her that first night in the rental house where the three of us were back to sharing bathrooms, she could’ve told us everything, stripping the blame from herself…but she didn’t. She remained…so selfless that sometimes, looking back, I still can’t figure out her reasoning behind it; but I do know one thing, and that is that my mother is not selfish nor ever has been. In those final years of living together as a family, she was the hero…, just as Penelope is Telemachus’ hero for those twenty years, whether he realizes it or not.
Mothers, when you send your kids off to college, encourage them to take humanities courses. The rewards can be immense.
When I was seven or so, I arrived at what I now realize was a profound observation: there are two kinds of reading, school reading and real reading. Real reading was Winnie the Pooh and Narnia and the Hardy boys while school reading was boring stories with questions at the end that you had to answer. As a dutiful child, I read those boring stories and answered the questions, but I experienced no joy.
I thought back to that early act of literary theory after reading a blog post, sent to me by my teacher friend Glenda Funk, on “How to Stop Killing the Love of Reading.” Jennifer Gonzalez interviews 7th grade teacher Pernille Ripp, author of Passionate Readers, about how schools can do a better job.
Gonzalez first lays out the horrifying reality. Although spending millions on reading programs, special activities, and teacher training, schools aren’t turning our kids into people who love to read. Students may encounter “pages and pages of passages and comprehension questions” but they are spending “little to no time with actual books.”
Becoming a real reader, Gonzalez says, involves “[r]eading actual books alongside other people reading actual books.”
Ripp notes that
reading instruction
tends to emphasize what researcher Louise Rosenblatt calls efferent reading, the kind of reading we do when looking for information, as opposed to aesthetic reading, which is done for enjoyment.
Ripp doesn’t deny the importance of close reading designed to extract and summarize information, but she notes that there can be collateral damage. In far too many schools, she points out,
reading for pleasure has been treated as an afterthought, something we encourage but don’t really make time for. Instead of giving students time to read, we’re giving them activities, projects, computer programs, reading logs, and worksheets that detract from actual reading.
To counter this, Ripp allots the first ten minutes of each class to independent reading. (When she taught elementary school, she gave her pupils 30 minutes.) The students make their own choices and, to help them find interesting material, she has built up a classroom library of several thousand books. This library, she says, works differently than the school library:
Why not just have students use the school library? Ripp believes students need both. “Kids need to see the books staring at them at all times, and I think that has made the biggest difference for some of my kids who would go through the motions of going to the school library and they would even check some books out, but then when it came down to actually sitting down and read it, they didn’t feel that same need or urge to read it.” Her experience has proven the research that says students read more in classes that have good classroom libraries. “I had a seventh-grader come back to me my first year at the end of the year,” she says, “and he said, ‘You know what made the biggest difference? The books were always right there staring at me.’”
Ultimately, the goal is to build up a classroom culture of reading. Ripp constantly communicates
how incredibly important books are to a good life, and how, if we get to know ourselves as readers, and have lots of conversations about our reading, we’ll really get to experience the true magic of reading.
I was a little surprised that Ripp didn’t mention reading aloud to the class, as my own kids’ fourth grade teacher did. (They would come home from school excited about The Rats of NIMH or The Mouse and the Motorcycle.) Having them choose their own books, however, is even better.
Aiding in Ripp’s
culture building is a special “7th Grade Book Challenge,” but ultimately,
she says, it all comes down to “one conversation at a time.” She notes that
teaching reading is, at its core, “about human connection.”
I visited my four Georgia grandchildren this past weekend and spent much of my time reading to and being read to by them. There’s nothing like the human connection of home reading to construct a reading culture, especially when we are plunging into such delightful books as “Arnie the Doughnut” and “I Love My Big Hair.” I also read several chapters of Charlotte’s Webb to five-year-old Etta, after which seven-year-old Esmé kept reading the book on her own. Everything about my son’s household emphasizes the importance of books.
Those children who aren’t raised in such households, however, need teachers like Gonzalez and Ripp if reading is going to have a chance. Why spend millions on special reading programs when you can captivate a child with a five dollar paperback?
Today’s Old Testament reading explains the entry of sin into the world. As this is also the main theme of Milton’s Paradise Lost, I pair up the Genesis passages with Milton’s dramatization of them.
Lent is a good time to reflect upon the existence of human evil. If God is benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient, then how is it that He/She created a being that He/She knew would sin. Religions that believe in good and bad demons, or that see Satan as co-equal with God (the Manichean heresy), don’t have this theological problem. Milton handles it by emphasizing free will, having God explain, “I made him just and right,/ Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.”
The problem of human evil was particularly pressing for Milton, who had just seen the restoration of the monarchy following the Puritan failure to establish God’s kingdom on earth. Invoking the Holy Spirit as Homer and Virgin invoke the muse, Milton begins his epic by asking it to “illumine what is dark” and help him “justify the ways of God to man.” At the moment, he’s finding it extremely hard to do so himself.
Searching for answers is a major reason why he wrote the poem. Sewanee theologian Rob MacSwain says that the British famously conduct their theology through poetry, and while he is speaking mainly of Anglican authors, the observation can be extended to Milton.
Genesis: And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
[Milton’s Eve to Satan as the Serpent] He who requires From us no other service then to keep This one, this easy charge, of all the Trees In Paradise that bear delicious fruit So various, not to taste that only Tree Of knowledge, planted by the Tree of Life, So neer grows Death to Life, what ere Death is, Some dreadful thing no doubt; for well thou knowest God hath pronounced it death to taste that Tree, The only sign of our obedience left Among so many signs of power and rule Conferred upon us…
Genesis: Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
[Milton’s Satan to Eve]:O Sacred, Wise, and Wisdom-giving Plant, Mother of Science, Now I feel thy Power Within me clear, not only to discern Things in their Causes, but to trace the ways Of highest Agents, deemed however wise. Queen of this Universe, do not believe Those rigid threats of Death; ye shall not Die: [ 685 ] How should ye? by the Fruit? it gives you Life To Knowledge…
Genesis: And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat…
Milton: So saying, her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the Fruit, she plucked, she ate: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, That all was lost. … Greedily she engorged without restraint, And knew not eating Death: Satiate at length, And heightened as with Wine, jocund and boon, Thus to herself she pleasingly began.
O Sovran, virtuous, precious of all Trees In Paradise, of operation blest To Sapience, hitherto obscured, infamed, And thy fair Fruit let hang, as to no end Created; but henceforth my early care…
Genesis: … and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
In Milton’s version, Adam is a reluctant
participant but, in the end, chooses to go with Eve rather than with God:
Milton: She gave him of that fair enticing Fruit With liberal hand: he scrupled not to eat Against his better knowledge, not deceived, But fondly overcome with Female charm. Earth trembled from her entrails, as again In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan, Sky lowered, and muttering Thunder, some sad drops Wept at completing of the mortal Sin Original; while Adam took no thought, Eating his fill…
Adam then becomes fully complicit by endorsing the act:
Adam to Eve: Eve, now I see thou art exact of taste, And elegant, of Sapience no small part, Since to each meaning savour we apply, And Palate call judicious; I the praise Yield thee, so well this day thou hast purveyed. Much pleasure we have lost, while we abstained From this delightful Fruit, nor known till now True relish…
Although we don’t see Adam and Eve repenting in Genesis, Milton describes their sorrow in depth. He also shows us Adam later rejoicing when he learns from the archangel Michael about how, in the future, Jesus will sacrifice himself for humankind. Adam wonders whether he should be glad that he sinned–what is known as the felix culpa or fortunate fall–since it provided God an opportunity to show the immensity of His love:
Adam to Michael: O goodness infinite, goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil turn to good; more wonderful Then that which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness! full of doubt I stand, Whether I should repent me now of sin By me done and occasioned, or rejoice Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring…
Edward Dubuffe, Abduction of Clarissa Harlowe by Lovelace (1867)
Friday
While I very much enjoyed the recent BBC/PBS Sanditon series (except for its ending), I was sorry to see that the filmmakers didn’t make the villainous Sir Edward Denham a reader. In Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, he reads novels for their seduction advice.
Many in the 18th century were concerned about young people reading novels. In 1750, the Bishop of London blamed Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random for two earthquakes that hit the city. Samuel Johnson used one of his famous Rambler essays to attack novels for their pernicious moral effects.
In Sanditon, Charlotte Heywood encounters Sir Edward and Esther Denham emerging from a library, which in turn leads to a discussion of novels. Edward is fairly incoherent as he disparages “the mere trash of the common circulating library” but then goes on to praise those novels that “display human nature with grandeur,” “show her in the sublimities of intense feeling,” and “exhibit the progress of strong passion.” In other words, like gothic-reading Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey and romance-reading Captain Benwick in Persuasion, Sir Edward wants novels that engulf him in unbridled romanticism. First, here’s his attack:
… Sir Edward, approaching Charlotte, said, “You may perceive what has been our occupation. My sister wanted my counsel in the selection of some books. We have many leisure hours and read a great deal. I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt. You will never hear me advocating those puerile emanations which detail nothing but discordant principles incapable of amalgamation, or those vapid tissues of ordinary occurrences, from which no useful deductions can be drawn. In vain may we put them into a literary alembic; we distil nothing which can add to science. You understand me, I am sure?”
Sir Edward is saying nothing more complicated than that such compositiosn are shallow and don’t teach us anything of substance, but his convolutions confuse Charlotte. She then gets him to describe the novels he does like:
“I am not quite certain that I do [understand you].
But if you will describe the sort of novels which you do approve,
I dare say it will give me a clearer idea.”
“Most willingly, fair questioner. The novels which I approve are such as display human nature with grandeur; such as show her in the sublimities of intense feeling; such as exhibit the progress of strong passion from the first germ of incipient susceptibility to the utmost energies of reason half-dethroned—where we see the strong spark of woman’s captivations elicit such fire in the soul of man as leads him—though at the risk of some aberration—from the strict line of primitive obligations to hazard all, dare all, achieve all to obtain her. Such are the works which I peruse with delight and, I hope I may say, with amelioration. They hold forth the most splendid portraitures of high conceptions, unbounded views, illimitable ardour, indomitable decision. And even when the event is mainly anti-prosperous to the high-toned machinations of the prime character, the potent, pervading hero of the story, it leaves us full of generous emotions for him; our hearts are paralyzed. T’were pseudo-philosophy to assert that we do not feel more enwrapped by the brilliancy of his career than by the tranquil and morbid virtues of any opposing character. Our approbation of the latter is but eleemosynary. These are the novels which enlarge the primitive capabilities of the heart; and which it cannot impugn the sense or be any dereliction of the character of the most anti-puerile man, to be conversant with.”
“If I understand you aright,” said Charlotte, “our taste in novels is not at all the same.”
At this point Austen weighs in to observe that Sir Edward
is taking the wrong lessons from the novels of Samuel Richardson, who was
Austen’s favorite novelist. (She particularly liked Sir Charles Grandison.)
Unfortunately, in reading Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, Sir
Edward chooses to identify with Lord B___ and Lovelace, the two rakes who
attempt to seduce the respective heroines:
The truth was that Sir Edward, whom circumstances had confined very much to one spot, had read more sentimental novels than agreed with him. His fancy had been early caught by all the impassioned and most exceptionable parts of Richardson’s, and such authors as had since appeared to tread in Richardson’s steps, so far as man’s determined pursuit of woman in defiance of every opposition of feeling and convenience was concerned, had since occupied the greater part of his literary hours, and formed his character. With a perversity of judgement which must be attributed to his not having by nature a very strong head, the graces, the spirit, the sagacity and the perseverance of the villain of the story outweighed all his absurdities and all his atrocities with Sir Edward. With him such conduct was genius, fire and feeling. It interested and inflamed him. And he was always more anxious for its success, and mourned over its discomfitures with more tenderness, than could ever have been contemplated by the authors.
In other words, blame the reader, not the author.
Although Richardson’s Lovelace is a rake who imprisons
and rapes the angelic Clarissa, for Sir Edward this is a point in his favor:
Sir Edward’s great object in life was to be seductive. With such personal advantages as he knew himself to possess, and such talents as he did also give himself credit for, he regarded it as his duty. He felt that he was formed to be a dangerous man, quite in the line of the Lovelaces. The very name of Sir Edward, he thought, carried some degree of fascination with it. To be generally gallant and assiduous about the fair, to make fine speeches to every pretty girl, was but the inferior part of the character he had to play. Miss Heywood, or any other young woman with any pretensions to beauty, he was entitled (according to his own view of society) to approach with high compliment and rhapsody on the slightest acquaintance.
As in the television series, Sir Edward is out to seduce Clara, the poor relation that Lady Denham has taken in and who is therefore a potential rival for her inheritance. Sir Edward, however, has no more success with Clara than either of Richardson’s rakes have with their targets:
But it was Clara alone on whom he had serious designs; it was Clara whom he meant to seduce.
Her seduction was quite determined on. Her situation in every way called for it. She was his rival in Lady Denham’s favour; she was young, lovely and dependent. He had very early seen the necessity of the case, and had now been long trying with cautious assiduity to make an impression on her heart and to undermine her principles. Clara saw through him and had not the least intention of being seduced; but she bore with him patiently enough to confirm the sort of attachment which her personal charms had raised. A greater degree of discouragement indeed would not have affected Sir Edward. He was armed against the highest pitch of disdain or aversion. If she could not be won by affection, he must carry her off. He knew his business. Already had he had many musings on the subject. If he were constrained so to act, he must naturally wish to strike out something new, to exceed those who had gone before him; and he felt a strong curiosity to ascertain whether the neighbourhood of Timbuctoo might not afford some solitary house adapted for Clara’s reception. But the expense, alas! of measures in that masterly style was ill-suited to his purse; and prudence obliged him to prefer the quietest sort of ruin and disgrace for the object of his affections to the more renowned.
In short, despite his inflated self image he’s both ineffective and pathetic.
If the series did not make him a reader, I suspect it’s because, to our modern eyes, this might have signaled some depth. Sometimes we give past audiences more cultural credit than is warranted because we forget that today’s high literature was yesterday’s popular entertainment. The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the plays of Shakespeare, and the novels of the 18th century were essentially the soap operas of their day. To applaud Sir Edward for reading would be like praising someone today for playing video games.
In short, Sir Edward has the depth of a
microchip and is a bad reader as a result.
Further thought: Although Austen defends Richardson against Sir Edward, fiction regularly gets us to identify with evil characters, regardless of authorial intentions. Once Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders launches into her tale, one can’t help but sympathize, even though she’s a prostitute, a thief, and a bigamist. That’s one reason why so many 18th century moralists were worried about young people reading novels at all.
Interestingly, while Johnson was one of these moralists, he didn’t have any problems with Clarissa, which he described as “the first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart.” I wonder if Austen, although she admired Johnson, isn’t taking a slight dig at him in the way she has Sir Edward make use of the novel.
Williams-James: Are they Elizabeth-Darcy or Marianne-Willoughby?
Thursday
I was fully expecting a satisfying Jane
Austen-like marriage to conclude PBS’s six-episode version of Jane Austen’s Sanditon,
which means that the ending came as a shock. Here are some of my thoughts on
that score.
Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to capture the disappointment we feel over Austen’s own unfinished ending. To Janeites like myself, her dying before completing Sanditon is an absolute tragedy. Austen was venturing into new territory with Persuasion and Sanditon, leaving behind gentry dramas for new enterprises (the military, real estate). Anne Elliot’s life as a sailor’s wife will be far more unsettled than the predictable futures of Catherine Morland, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, and Emma Woodhouse. If Sanditon’s Charlotte marries someone in the boom-and bust-real estate market, then all kinds of things are possible. Alas, we’ll never know.
But perhaps the Sanditon filmmakers were just setting us up for a second season. Charlotte will apparently not be marrying into the Parker family, but there’s an up-and-coming builder/architect in the picture. Like Persuasion’s Captain Wentworth, he is a self-made man who has confidence in his abilities. Will he come for Charlotte now that Sidney has abandoned the field.
To be sure, this character doesn’t show up in Austen’s novel. Because Sanditon is unfinished, the show has a lot of freedom, and it takes full advantage. It mostly does so, however, by rearranging previous Austen characters and plots. I share a parallel example in support of my view that this was a wise choice.
My youngest brother is a member of Madison’s
First Unitarian Society, which several years ago confronted the problem of
having outgrown their Frank Lloyd Wright church. An addition was necessary, but
how does one add on to a national monument?
The architect chose to gesture towards the Wright style without slavishly imitating it. It’s partly appreciative homage, partly a new building in its own right. The Sanditon show struck me as doing something similar.
The show is filled with gestures towards the other novels. Charlotte most resembles Catherine Morland in that she is a young, enthusiastic, and somewhat naïve observer of a resort town (Sanditon aspires to be Bath). But there’s also an Elizabeth-Darcy vibe in her relationship with Sidney Parker, who however also has a Colonel Brandon-like past.
The show’s Lady Denham has echoes of Austen’s
tyrannical widows, Mrs. Ferrars (Sense and Sensibility) and Lady
Catherine de Bourgh (Pride and Prejudice). Like Mrs. Ferrars, Lady
Denham has control of her estate and can disinherit if she chooses (and in fact
does so). She’s more down-to-earth than
either of those two, however, maybe a bit like Mrs. Jennings in Sense and
Sensibility. For that matter, the enthusiastic realtor Tom Parker resembles
Mrs. Jennings’s son-in-law John Middleton.
Edward and Esther Denham, who are half-brother and sister, are not unlike the fast-living Crawfords in Mansfield Park. Unlike that novel, however, the Henry-like Edward doesn’t ruin the woman who, against all propriety, falls in love with him (his half-sister in the show, the married Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park), although he comes close. Esther Denham escapes, somewhat like sister Julia Bertram escaping her family’s blow-up by marrying a nobleman who happens to be handy. While we are just okay with the Julia-Yates marriage, however, we are genuinely happy for Esther and Lord Babbington. Their wedding helps console us (although not entirely) for Charlotte’s lack of one.
Clara, the poor relative dependent on Lady Denham’s bounty, is just as cold, shrewd, and manipulative as Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility. Were it not for Lady Denham’s miraculous recovery, Clara would pull off a version of Lucy capturing Robert, Lady Ferrars’s heir. Or to shift novels, she is Mrs. Clay in Persuasion, fully outplaying Mr. Elliot, even though he thinks he’s the one calling the shots.
While the show’s mulatto heiress shows up in Austen’s Sanditon, she plays only a small role. As I watched, however, I thought of Patricia Rozema’s film version of Mansfield Park, which shows the probable horrors occurring on the Bertrams’ Antigua plantation. While I disliked the Rozema film for turning Fanny Price into Elizabeth Bennet, I thought the slave allusions were good, with Austen giving out subtle hints that Fanny is anti-slavery.
In other words, I don’t see the liberties taken by Sanditon as out of line. Just because we don’t see couples making love on the floor in Austen novels doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. A smart television version of Northanger Abbey plausibly imagines that Isabel Thorpe has such a fling with Captain Tilney before he throws her over. And who knows what all Lydia and Wickham do?
In the show’s ending, Sidney goes from Darcy to Sense and Sensibility’s Willoughby, sacrificing the woman he loves for a rich woman. To be sure, Sidney does it for a noble cause, which makes it all the more heartbreaking. Like Elinor for Willoughby, we feel a pang for Sidney.
Pangs are okay, but an Austen work that ends with the jilted heroine returning to her dull life in the country doesn’t feel very Austen-like. In fact, it feels like the ending of Northanger Abbey except without Tilney showing up. We can imagine how the immediate future will be for Charlotte by looking at how Catherine Morland responds to her forced return home:
Catherine’s disposition was not naturally sedentary, nor had her habits been ever very industrious; but whatever might hitherto have been her defects of that sort, her mother could not but perceive them now to be greatly increased. She could neither sit still nor employ herself for ten minutes together, walking round the garden and orchard again and again, as if nothing but motion was voluntary; and it seemed as if she could even walk about the house rather than remain fixed for any time in the parlour. Her loss of spirits was a yet greater alteration. In her rambling and her idleness she might only be a caricature of herself; but in her silence and sadness she was the very reverse of all that she had been before.
No wonder I was bummed out by the ending. Furthermore, informed sources report there will be no second season. Phooey!
It appears that the world has a coronavirus pandemic on its hands. Although not nearly as deadly as the flu that takes out 99.9 percent of the world’s population in Stephen King’s apocalyptic novel The Stand, the coronavirus is still a killer. Thanks to Donald Trump, the United States is far less prepared to deal with it than it would have been three years ago.
In a chillingly impersonal chapter, King describes how the virus spreads. An employee at a biological weapons facility runs away following an accident, but not before he has been infected. Gas station owner Bill Hapscomb contracts the virus after investigating the car in which the man and his family have died, and he passes it along to his police officer cousin Joe Bob Brentwood. The following passage picks up the story from there:
On June 18, five hours after he had talked to his cousin Bill Hapscomb, Joe Bob Brentwood pulled down a speeder on Texas Highway 40 about twenty-five miles east of Arnette. The speeder was Harry Trent of Braintree, an insurance man. … And [Joe Bob] gave Harry Trent more than a speeding summons.
Harry, a gregarious man who liked his job, passed the sickness to more than forty people during that day and the next. … Harry Trent stopped at an East Texas cafe called Babe’s Kwik-Eat for lunch. … On his way out, a station wagon pulled in … Harry gave the New York fellow [Edward Norris] very clear directions on how to get to Highway 21. He also served him and his entire family their death warrants without even knowing it. …
That night [the Norris family] stayed in a Eustice, Oklahoma, travel court. Ed and Trish infected the clerk. The kids, Marsha, Stanley, and Hector, infected the kids they played with on the tourist court’s playground – kids bound for west Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Trish infected the two women who were washing clothes at the Laundromat two blocks away. Ed, on his way down the motel corridor to get some ice, infected a fellow he passed in the hallway. …
During their wait in [Doctor] Sweeney’s office they communicated the sickness which would soon be known across the disintegrating country as Captain Trips to more than twenty-five people, including a matronly woman [Sarah Bradford] who just came in to pay her bill before going on to pass the disease to her entire bridge club. …
She and Angela went out for a quiet drink … they managed to infect everyone in the Polliston cocktail bar, including two young men drinking beer nearby. They were on their way to California … The next day they headed west, spreading the disease as they went. …
Sarah went home to infect her husband and his five poker buddies and her teenaged daughter, Samantha. … The next day Samantha would go on to infect everybody in the swimming pool at the Polliston YWCA
In our interconnected world, viruses spread inexorably unless concerted action is taken to stop them.
As depicted in The Stand, a U.S. government biological warfare lab invents the virus that wipes out the world population. In our own reality, the Trump administration has been busy disassembling the mechanisms that President Obama set up to guard against pandemics.
Foreign Policy’s Laurie Garrett describes how, following the Ebola pandemic, the Obama administration
set up a permanent epidemic monitoring and command group inside the White House National Security Council (NSC) and another in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—both of which followed the scientific and public health leads of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the diplomatic advice of the State Department.
In
his attempt to undo all things Obama, Trump has targeted these command groups:
In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is–not just for the public but for the govenrnment itself, which largely finds itself in the dark.
And
that’s not all:
In the spring of 2018, the White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, proposing to eliminate $252 million in previously committed resources for rebuilding health systems in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Under fire from both sides of the aisle, President Donald Trump dropped the proposal to eliminate Ebola funds a month later. But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.
Meanwhile, the most recent recipient of the Congressional Medal of Freedom assures us that “the coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” That would be right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh.
Stephen King provides a salutary reality check whenever we need to push through denial.
In my Lifelong Learning class on “the Supernatural Gothic in American Literature,” I followed up the section on Southern Gothic writers with an examination of Toni Morrison, who provides an illustrative contrast. With those writers, I argued that the unacknowledged but very real violence against African Americans made possible the cultivated gentility that people romanticized and longed for. Writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, and James Dickey made their gothic home in the gap between brutal reality and gauzy illusion.
But what are we to make of a black author who writes in the Faulkner tradition? After all, African Americans aren’t invested in burying the facts of slavery. There’s nothing in our racist past for them to repress and therefore render toxic. Or is there?
In preparing the class, I became more aware of the psychological toll on the black community caused by slavery, Jim Crow, and continuing racism. Morrison was aware that African Americans are no more eager to explore this past than many whites, and she uses the gothic genre to explore the psychic damage of such repression.
The best example is the house in Beloved, where Sethe is haunted by the baby she kills when her former masters are on the verge of recapturing her. It’s a Sophie’s Choice situation, but that doesn’t lessen the guilt. In the course of the novel, the dead baby grows in strength, especially when Paul Dee enters the house and offers Sethe a new and more hopeful future.
Morrison’s point, I think, is that African Americans can’t simply shrug off America’s bloody past, even though many would like to do so. I’m sure she agrees with Faulkner’s that the past isn’t even past. It doesn’t matter that slavery pressures Sethe to kill her baby to prevent her master from reclaiming her. Blaming whites, while justified, doesn’t make that horror disappear.
Paul Dee not only fails to exorcise the ghost, but he becomes seduced by it. In other words, he becomes trapped by the psychosis of his fellow former slaves.
Another trapped Morrison character is Circe in Song of Solomon, who initially is linked with the spooky witch in “Hansel and Gretel”
When Hansel and Gretel stood in the forest and saw the house in the clearing before them, the little hairs at the nape of their necks must have shivered…[Propelled forward by blinding hunger,] they ran as fast as they could to the house where a woman older than death lived, and they ignored the shivering nape hair and the softness in their knees.
Circe has taken over her mistress’ house following her suicide. To express her anger at the house’s expensive trappings, which have been paid for in blood, she lets the owners’ prized dogs tear it to shreds. Although her sentiments are understandable, she is trapped in this house of the past no less than Sethe. The stench is overwhelming.
To triumph over gothic repression requires facing up to this past. One cannot simply say, as Henry Ford did, that history is bunk. One must delve into and face up to the trauma.
Song of Solomon’s protagonist undertakes this hero’s journey, which takes the form of a roots quest. By uncovering his family’s history, warts and all, he frees himself from his psychic hold on him and, in the process, transforms Circe from impeding witch into Joseph Campbell’s helpful goddess. Light banishes the gothic terrors.
So whenever you find yourself attracted by gothic fiction,
whether Morrison, the Southern Gothic writers, Stephen King, Anne Rice, George
Martin, or whomever, you can use your attraction for self-diagnosis. Ask
yourself what secret corruption you are shutting your eyes to. And don’t think
you are unaware of what that corruption is. Your denial is what supplies the
power.
In my final post on the course, I will be providing my own interpretation of the insights provided by contemporary gothic authors. Stay tuned.
My student John Reineke has written an essay about Odysseus’s lying that I can’t get out of my head. What are we make of a hero, Jack wants to know, who fabricates stories every chance he gets? What are we to make of the fact that his lying receives divine endorsement?
Given that our president has told (according to the Washington Post’s tally), 16,241 false or misleading statements since becoming president—and that certain Christian nationalists nevertheless regard him as God’s anointed–it’s a good question to grapple with. While Jack is not looking at the issue through my political lens, the essay leads me to wonder about the effect such leadership has on young people. Are they becoming as accepting as Homer of a lying leader?
Jack notes that, when Odysseus tries to lie to a disguised Athena upon returning to Ithaca, she heartily approves:
To outwit you in all your tricks a person or a god would need to be an expert at deceit. You clever rascal! So duplicitous, so talented at lying! You love fiction and tricks so deeply, you refuse to stop even in your own land. Yes, both of us are smart. No man can plan and talk like you, and I am known among the gods for insight and craftiness. You failed to recognize me: I am Athena, child of Zeus. I always stand near you and take care of you, in all your hardships. (trans. Emily Wilson)
As
Jack sees it, Odysseus’s lying appears to be just another weapon, one that most
warriors don’t have. In Odysseus’s case, the lying take different forms,
sometimes tricks and deceptions, sometimes fabricated stories.
His
greatest accomplishment, of course, is the Trojan Horse. What ten years of assaults
on the city can’t accomplish, Odysseus pulls off in a day and a night. Odysseus
is also a master of disguise, which allows him to scout out hostile locations (Troy,
his own suitor-filled palace). Jack notes that Homer describes disguising as a noble
craft:
As when Athena and Hephaestus teach a knowledgeable craftsman every art, and he pours gold on silver, making objects more beautiful—just so Athena poured attractiveness across his head and shoulders.
And
in the other direction:
Then with her wand Athena
tapped him; his handsome body withered up;
his limbs became arthritic. She bleached out
his hair, and made his skin look old and wrinkled,
and dimmed his fine bright eyes. She turned his clothes
into a tattered cloak and ragged tunic,
dirty with soot.
While
his lying often saves his life, there are moments where Odysseus sometimes lies
just for the fun of it, as though to stay in practice. When the loyal swineherd
asks the disguised Odysseus not to tell him any lies—he will host him regardless—the
Ithacan leader can’t help himself and tells an elaborate account of himself as
Cretan nobility. The story ends with Eumaeus commenting,
Poor
guest! Your tale of woe is very moving,
but pointless; I will not believe a word
about Odysseus. Why did you stoop
to tell those silly lies!
Yet
Eumaeus appreciates a well-chosen lie, such as the one Odysseus tells a little
later in order to get another coat for himself:
That
was a splendid tale, old man!
It worked. You will get all the clothes and things
a poor old beggar needs—at least for now.
Jack also touched on the fact that Penelope is herself a master deceiver, making her a worthy companion. Facing an explosive situation at home, she holds off the suitors by promising to marry once she finishes weaving a shroud for her father-in-law—a shroud that she unweaves every night until someone rats her out.
In
his essay, Jack entered the arena of situational ethics: lying and deceiving
are fine if done done for a good purpose (one endorsed by Zeus), bad if for an
evil purpose. Jack identified the suitor Eurymachus as one of the evil liars:
Eurymachus, the most vocal suitor, fabricates one of the most malevolent lies directly to Penelope herself as he says to her:
No man will ever, ever hurt your boy while I am still alive upon this earth. I swear to you, if someone tries, my sword will spill blood! … So Telemachus is now the man I love the most in all the world. The boy is in no danger, not from us— there is no help for death brought by the gods. (16.439-448)
Homer addresses this blatant lie in the very next line, writing, “He spoke to mollify her; all the while / he was devising plans to kill her son.”
Lying, in other words, is simply a verbal extension of physical battle. Liars are not taken in by liars, and neither Odysseus nor Penelope believe Eurymachus. Nor does Odysseus fall for Helen’s trickery (this by Menelaus’s account) when she tries to lure the Greek warriors out of the Trojan Horse. Lies are likes bows or spears, most effective when wielded by accomplished hands.
I noted to Jack that attitudes changed 300 years later when numerous Athenian demagogues were using lying to catastrophic effect (like today). Neither Sophocles nor Euripides are okay with Odysseus lying.
In Sophocles’s Philoctetes, for, instance, the Greeks have learned they cannot win the Trojan War unless they bring back the famous archer Philoctetes, whom they have marooned on an island because a foul-smelling, ulcerous wound. Aware that Philoctetes is bitter, Odysseus wants Neoptolemos, son of Achilles, to participate in an elaborate lie. I share the passage because I suspect that the young man’s views are shared by my student:
Son of Laertes, I shall never practice. I was not born to flatter or betray; Nor I, nor he--the voice of fame reports-- Who gave me birth. What open arms can do Behold me prompt to act, but ne'er to fraud Will I descend. Sure we can more than match In strength a foe thus lame and impotent. I came to be a helpmate to thee, not A base betrayer; and, O king! believe me, Rather, much rather would I fall by virtue Than rise by guilt to certain victory. --(trans. Thomas Francklin)
In the end, truth and honor prevail and Odysseus is discredited, but only thanks to the divine intervention of Heracles. Given that lying is a trademark of autocratic leaders, I’m glad to see Jack troubled by Homer’s apparent approval.
I must add that I too am troubled. Normally an author as great as Homer will be ahead of his time and foresee problems. Perhaps I’m missing something. Whatever he thought in 800 BCE, however, I can’t imagine that Homer would have given Odysseus a free pass 300 years later.
Further thought: I acknowledge that different cultures have a different relationship to truth-telling. Because of the importance I myself attach to truth, I still remember being shocked by the following passage from M. M. Kaye’s Far Pavilions (1978) when I read it forty years ago:
The Sahib-log [the British] do not understand that Truth should be used sparingly, and they call us liars because when we of this country are asked questions by strangers, we prefer to lie first and then consider whether the truth could have served us better.
Should I just be culturally tolerant of Homer’s oral society? In any event, such a lax relationship to truth is among today’s greatest threats to democracy.
