a gallimaufry

On governesses in adult & children's fiction

I was thinking about fictional governesses, as I’ve just read two gothicky novels of the 1960s featuring them as heroes: Joan Aiken’s The Silence of Herondale and Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting. Although it was serendipitous that I read one after the other, there are striking similarities between them. Both play on the reader’s knowledge of the ur-governess novel, Jane Eyre, and feature resourceful heroines, madness, secrets and romance – plus the addition of sinister accidents which keep befalling the child for whom they’re responsible.

Joan Aiken’s approach is playful. In The Silence of Herondale, Deborah Lindsey finds herself in an isolated house on the snowy Yorkshire moors with a child prodigy to care for, a dark and stormy young man and ‘the Slipper Killer’ on the loose from Broadmoor. Mary Stewart’s heroine, Linda, refers overtly to Jane Eyre as she takes up her position in the Château Valmy – as well as drawing on other literary references such as Macbeth and The Duchess of Malfi. Nine Coaches Waiting hews much more closely to Jane Eyre than does the Aiken novel. The Rochester figure – darker and more troubling than Aiken’s Jeremy – is actually split between Léon, Raoul and Philippe. There is a party with a beautiful blonde, a mad woman, a flight through the countryside. It is all very cleverly done and it is one of my favourites of Stewart’s novels.

Both Linda and Deborah are young, brave, practical and kind. What about other fictional governesses? I hypothesised that governesses in adult fiction are generally sympathetically portrayed, and those in children’s fiction are not, and this is because of the power differential. For adults, the governess is a vulnerable figure, caught between two layers of society. For children, the governess is a symbol of unwanted authority. But how true is that? Bearing in mind this is only drawing on novels that I’ve read and can remember reading...

The first governess in fiction I can think of is Miss Taylor, in Emma, who becomes Mrs Weston. She is sympathetically portrayed, kind and sensible. Then there is Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, and Charles Dickens’s Ruth Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit. Again, we warm to them and sympathise with their plight, poorly treated and exploited by their employers.

But complications with my thesis now set in. Being a governess to her own children, who do not know her, is the punishment endured by Lady Isabel Vane in East Lynne (Mrs Henry Wood) for her adultery – she has slid down the social scale. Miss Wade’s treatment in Little Dorrit contributes to souring her. Not every governess will have a happy ending or survive her work unscathed. Further: she may pose a threat, stepping outside her class and failing to know her place. Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair; William Makepeace Thackaray) and Lucy Graham (Lady Audley’s Secret; Mary Elizabeth Braddon) turn the tables, using their somewhat liminal social position to marry up and improve their status, and this is portrayed as threatening. Worst of all must be witchy Madame de la Rougierre, the murderous governess in Uncle Silas (Sheridan Le Fanu). Not only does she have the dubious social position of being a governess, but she’s French.

The last governess I can think of in adult fiction is the narrator of The Turn of the Screw. Here the character’s uncertain social status is reflected in her experience of an uncertain reality – whether it is her own disintegrating mental health or the supernatural intruding grotesquely into her charges’ lives.

Disappointingly, I am very limited when it comes to governesses in children’s literature. This makes my hypothesis – even thinner. The two magnificent villainesses who spring to mind are Sylvia Daisy Pouncer (The Midnight Folk by John Masefield) and Miss Slighcarp (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken). Miss Pouncer is literally a broomstick-flying witch, who looks both old and young, confiscates toys and forces poor Kay to learn Latin declensions. She returns in The Box of Delights as the wife of wicked Abner Brown. Miss Slighcarp, tall and bony, cannot practise magic but is similarly cruel – wolflike, even – and intends to deprive Bonnie of her inheritance. These ladies are perhaps heirs to Madame de la Rougierre.

They are counterbalanced by the lovely Miss Heliotrope, Maria’s kind and elderly governess in The Little White Horse (Elizabeth Goudge). Unfortunately, I have an unusual copy of The Little White Horse: I often notice it – and even think, ah, there it is! – but when I actually want to find it, it vanishes. So I cannot refresh my memory of Miss Heliotrope at the moment, except that I think she has forget-me-not blue eyes, mild ill health and a large nose, and finds happiness marrying the Old Parson.

Thus, I can only find three examples of governesses of children’s literature and one of these apparently disproves my hypothesis that they are always portrayed unsympathetically. However, I would argue that Miss Heliotrope bucks the trend because she is very clearly without much power, thus closer to the governesses in adult fiction than the domineering figures in children’s literature. And my brief survey of adult literature suggests that while some novels treat governesses with sympathy, alert to their ambiguous position in the household, others perceive them as disturbing or even threatening the established order because of this position.

So – do you agree? Can you think of some more fictional governesses? What happens if we add lady companions to the mix, I wonder?

(Illustration from Jane Eyre by Edward A. Wilson; Illustrated Modern Library, 1944; illustration of Becky Sharp up to no good from Vanity Fair by Lewis Baumer; Hodder & Stoughton, 1913; illustration from The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Pat Marriott; Jonathan Cape, 1962)

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (4)

(James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White No. 3, 1866, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham; found here)

Amazing news! I have finally finished rereading The Portrait of a Lady. And it is clear to me that if I am not to be reduced to reading nothing more demanding than the oeuvre of Enid Blyton, I had better start spending less time on the internet. My attention span appears to be the size of a gnat’s these days.

Despite my mental feebleness I have thoroughly enjoyed the novel and am keener than before to read The Wings of a Dove which, Graham Greene assures me in the introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition, is a variation on the same basic plot. I have been thinking more about what I wrote last time, James’s wonderful ability to use metaphor to turn an emotional or cognitive state into a concrete image; an example being about Henrietta’s nosiness into Goodwood’s private business: ‘this enquiring authoress was constantly flashing her lantern into the quiet darkness of his soul’. Do other writers do this and I just haven’t noticed, or is it a peculiarity of Henry James’s? There seems something very particular about it.

Even though I have read the novel before I had completely forgotten the most significant revelation near the end of it and was completely gobsmacked. The actual ending was open yet bleak as James’s endings always seem to be (well, of those of his works I’ve read), and yet perhaps not completely bleak. Isabel returns to Rome because she has promised Pansy she will, repaying a betrayal (not Pansy’s!) with loyalty. And Ralph has left her the use of Gardencourt for a year; the novel has proved Ralph to be prescient and so perhaps Isabel will not stay long with horrible Osmond after all.

Which brings me to something I haven’t yet been able to resolve: what are Isabel’s rights? She married a American in Italy but in an American church. Which nation’s jurisdiction applies to her? Were she British and married in Britain, her property and money would have become her husband’s, but perhaps the US or Italy had more liberal laws? (This is assuming that Isabel might overcome her reverence for the institution of marriage and its duties.)

Another possible bright light at the end of the novel is Henrietta’s future. True, there is not one single precedent of a happy marriage in this book and true, Ralph’s previous experiment in bequests ended disastrously. Like Isabel, I’m a tiny bit sorry that she is going to marry, but at least they know each other well. And this time Ralph seems to have directed his legacy more wisely, in giving his money to Henrietta to start a newspaper and work. I was quite annoyed on Henrietta’s behalf to discover that in this edition of The Portrait of a Lady, revised by James in 1907, the author altered passages about her to make her more of a caricature. She deserves better than that!

Having spent so much time with the characters and known them so deeply, I cannot stop wondering about what will happen to them... Thanks again to Dolce Bellezza, for precipitating this, even though I’ve finished so much later than everyone else in the readalong!

(Antonio da Correggio, Adoration of the Child, 1518–20, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; from here; surprisingly – to me, anyway – ‘Henrietta had a special devotion to this intimate scene – she thought it the most beautiful picture in the world’; perhaps from this we are meant to realise that Henrietta too would like a family?)

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (3)

Civilisations have risen and fallen since I started rereading The Portrait of a Lady, but I am now on the home straight. (Meanwhile, I haven’t read my February What Shall Helen Read? book, Small Island, but I shall as soon as I finish this.) Now that Marie Kondo and I have parted ways (more on this soon!) I have a little more time for Henry James and I thought I’d pause and think about this next part that I’ve read.

(John Singer Sargent, Villa di Marlia, Lucca, 1910; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; found here)

We have skipped forward three years, and Isabel is now unhappily married to Gilbert Osmond who has turned out to be a prize git who really wanted a wife he could shape to reflect his own ideas – a bigger version of the tiny Pansy, I suppose, who is devoted to her papa and does everything she can to please him. Isabel feels that Osmond does have a reason to feel aggrieved, because she was so eager to impress him during their courtship she perhaps made it seem that she was less independent and energetic than she really was. In a way she feels aggrieved with him too, but acknowledges that no one compelled her to marry him: she chose of her own free will. She feels that part of her choice was wanting to bestow her money on her husband, whom she believed a fit recipient. Without her fortune, would she have married him? It seems unlikely that he would have married her.

Considering how disastrously her own marriage has turned out, Isabel’s decision to interfere in Pansy’s future merely to curry favour with Osmond shocked me. She justifies this to herself by remarking that Pansy is docile and obedient, as if these qualities mean that she has no views or feelings of her own. In another novel perhaps the doll-like Pansy would turn out to be a psychopathic killer, but I don’t recall The Portrait of a Lady ending in a bloodbath. Isabel wishes to deny Pansy the freedom to choose for herself that she, Isabel, was able to exercise. In fairness, perhaps Isabel feels that her own bad choice of a mate proves that girls in love do not have very good judgement and someone wiser and more experienced should take charge. Still, it is surprising that she considers herself to be that person, what with her record of character misjudgement... Fortunately, she now seems to be rethinking her interference, if only because she is becoming increasingly doubtful of Lord Warburton’s motivation in offering for Pansy’s hand. But I fear that Pansy’s future will be as grey as that of every other married woman in the novel. Even if she is allowed her choice of Edward Rosier, I am not sure she would be happy, since his appreciation of her principally as an aesthetic and pure object is not so very different from Osmond’s attitude towards Isabel (though Rosier seems a bit silly rather than malignant).

I am enjoying James’s way of using unexpected, detailed and beautiful similes to describe his characters; he uses physical things and spaces to delineate their metaphysical states. He has just described the Countess as:

like a bright rare shell, with a polished surface and a remarkably pink lip, in which something would rattle when you shook it. This rattle was apparently the Countess’s spiritual principle, a little loose nut that tumbled about inside of her.

For me, it’s the flourish of ‘the remarkably pink lip’ which really makes this simile so precisely suited to the Countess; it’s particular and makes the simile concrete; it conveys something of her hard, frivolous and licentious character. And the rattle is her silly chatter, her rattle-pate. But I really love this description of the Osmond marriage, which turns their relationship into a physical space:

She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. Osmond’s beautiful mind gave it neither light nor air; Osmond’s beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her.

Such a horrific evocation of the kind of living entombment Isabel must now endure.

(Romaine Brooks, Le Piano, 1910; found here)

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (2)

I’m inching further along with The Portrait of a Lady. I realise that in my last post, I never once mentioned why I love Henry James’s writing so much – with the proviso that I do not love it quite so much, though I admire it, in The Golden Bowl. With his long, supple sentences and his exquisitely tuned choice of words, James can track every subtle shift in a character’s train of thought or emotion. He describes their rich, inner lives precisely and with nuance. He examines his characters’ motivations scrupulously and sympathetically; he allows them to be many things at once and experience many, maybe conflicting, feelings at once.

No detail is too tiny because every detail reveals something about a person. So Ralph, when he learns from Henrietta that Casper Goodwood has paid a visit and perhaps proposed to Isabel after she had told Ralph that she was expecting no visitors, experiences a pang, ‘and it was a new pang to him to have to suspect her of duplicity. On the other hand, he quickly said to himself, what concern was it of his that she should have made an appointment with a lover?’ Henrietta enlightens him immediately: Isabel had not expected Goodwood because Henrietta had sent him.

‘Isabel was cruel?’ – and Ralph’s face lighted with the relief of his cousin’s not having shown duplicity.

‘I don’t exactly know what passed between them. But she gave him no satisfaction – she sent him back to America.’

‘Poor Mr Goodwood,’ Ralph sighed.

And we know exactly how heartfelt that sigh was without James having to write anything further.

Even Goodwood, about whom I was not very complimentary in the last post, is presented as a complex individual, powerful and certain and yet also uncertain and humble. Although yes, still a bit stalkerish.

(James Tissot, A Widow, 1868, private collection; from here)

And so on to Madame Merle, who has now fetched up at Gardencourt as Mr Touchett lies on his deathbed. (Unfortunately for me, my daughter watched the cartoon film of The Sword in the Stone a couple of days ago and Madame Mim keeps popping into my head whenever I see the words ‘Madame Merle’ which is adding a layer to my reading of the novel that I think I can safely assume Henry James did not foresee.) Like the Touchetts, Madame Merle is a sort of hybrid although she veils her origins and Isabel initially thinks she is French as she appears at least to have sloughed off those ‘American’ characteristics of directness and simplicity, and steeped herself in European culture. Mrs Touchett remarks that Madame Merle loves mystery and she seems exotic to Isabel and a rôle model for her. Madame Merle is accomplished at everything the leisured upper classes most value: she is beautiful, witty but not too witty, worldly and adept at conversation; she plays the piano, sketches and embroiders with skill; she is well connected and knows the best people in Europe. She strikes Isabel as superior to other people; Isabel also considers herself to be somewhat superior to others and here is Madame Merle as the embodiment of all she most admires. She has perfect ‘taste’. Isabel is not uncritical: she recognises that for all her charm Madame Merle is unemotional and lacks ‘wildness’. However, she feels that Madame Merle has much to teach her.

Madame Merle, like Mrs Touchett, has not been happily married; she hints at a stormy past before she was widowed. As an older woman, is Madame Merle an alternative figure to Mrs Touchett of what Isabel, still forming herself, might become in later life?

I have also now met Gilbert Osmond. Interestingly, Osmond’s appearance is described in detail twice – more, I think, than that of anyone else in the book, including Isabel’s. The word ‘fine’ is often used of him, both of how he looks and of his taste. Osmond appreciates Isabel as an aesthetic object, something to own and display like his ‘bibelots’, an expression of his fine taste. Isabel, on being shown his collection, worries not that she will ‘expose’ not ‘her ignorance’ but ‘her possible grossness of perception’, a lapse in taste. Meanwhile, Madame Merle’s taste has been offended by Osmond’s sister, the Countess. (The Countess is also unhappily married!) The Countess immediately realises what Madame Merle has planned and accosts her; for Madame Merle this is ‘one of her pretty perversities’; she finds her ‘manner was odious’ and her expressions ‘coarse’. Directness and honesty, here, are offensive; lying and manipulation, however, are not. Madame Merle and Osmond seem to have refined themselves out of much sense of morality.

As for Pansy, what a cipher she is proving. ‘A convent flower’, ‘innocent’, ‘uncanny’ and ‘insipid’, she is treated by everyone like a baby yet they discuss her marrying the next year.

(John Everett Millais, Hearts are Trumps, 1872; Tate collection)

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (1)

I am rereading this as part of a readalong organised by Dolce Bellezza. I notice that I acquired my copy in October 1994, a period of my life when I wrote my name and the date of purchase (and sometimes, the place of purchase!) in slightly pretentious handwriting at the front of each book I bought. At that time I had just graduated and was working in a bookshop while trying to find a job in publishing. I had managed to study English literature for three years without actually reading a word of James and I decided to start with his most famous work. As far as I remember I loved it, but found Isabel Archer mysterious and quite inscrutable.

As this is a readalong I plan to write two posts about it, as I read through it. These are some of my initial thoughts, up to Chapter 16 and Isabel’s encounter with Casper Goodwood.

(Sir John Lavery, The Lady in White, Manchester Art Gallery, from here; this is the painting used on the cover of my Oxford World’s Classics edition though incorrectly attributed there to ‘James Lavery’)

One thing that struck me more forcibly this time than I remember on my first reading is James’s needling of the English upper classes, with Ralph Touchett being an honorary member of that sect. My attention was caught in a description of Isabel’s drives in the countryside by a reference to ‘patches of ancient common and glimpses of empty park’ which I could not help interpreting as a reference to enclosure and to the holding of vast tracts of land by the aristocracy for their pleasure in contrast with the ‘ancient common’, land which belongs to the people and is grazed by their flocks and worked by them.

 While Isabel settles in to life at Gardencourt and enjoys its beauties, Henrietta Stackpole is less amenable and directly critical of Ralph’s ‘idle’ life (‘when I have to work like a car-conductor’) and ‘sophistication’ which, to her mind, has more than a tinge of dishonesty about it; her class-consciousness is sharpened by her awareness that Ralph is constantly and covertly mocking her. Lord Warburton is depicted as a true ‘noble’ man; he espouses land reform and is considered a ‘radical’. However, he is vague when pressed about actually relinquishing any of his own property; he’s a romantic without real substance, according to Mr Touchett:

He has elegant tastes – cares for literature, for art, for science, for charming young ladies. The most elegant is his taste for the new views. It affords him a great deal of pleasure – more perhaps than anything else, except the young ladies. [...] His views don’t hurt any one as far as I can see; they certainly don’t hurt himself. And if there were to be a revolution he would come off very easily. They wouldn’t touch him, they’d leave him as he is; he’s too much liked.

Mr Touchett has been ‘watching these people for upwards of thirty-five years’, with less hostility than Henrietta Stackpole. Still, he points to the difference between the US and Britain:

You [Isabel] and I, you know, we know what it is to have lived under democratic institutions: I always thought them very comfortable, but I was used to them from the first.

Ouch – Britain is not a true democracy after all. The aristocracy, Mr Touchett explains, is an obstacle to this, well regulated though the country is.

For these leisured people, to amuse and be amused are central tenets of life. ‘You may do what you please [...] if you’ll amuse me till seven o’clock,’ as Isabel tells Ralph. People, including strangers with ‘an introduction’, are invited to country houses to visit. Lady Pensil’s place in Bedfordshire (Bedfordshire, according to Mr Bantling, is ‘tiresome’, tiresome being the opposite of amusing and therefore a damning epithet) offers ‘genuine English sport’ and ‘theatricals and picnics and that sort of thing’, the games with which the wealthy pass their time. Ralph assures Henrietta ‘You’ll amuse yourself much more in Bedfordshire’ than at Gardencourt’ – with two resident invalids and a chatelaine who is rarely there, Gardencourt is generally quiet, ‘not English at all’, ’dull’ and without entertainments, what would a visitor do there? ‘[W]ill they make themselves agreeable to me?’ wonders Isabel about the English. With no other purpose than entertaining each other, it is important to all the characters that the social surface remain smooth, charming, agreeable.

The other aspect that struck me is how condescending many of the male characters are to Isabel. (Even more to Henrietta, who is just that bit further off the feminine ideal of the time.) Casper Goodwood, whom 1990s Helen might have thought romantic in his pursuit of Isabel across the ocean, I now perceive as stalkerish in his refusal to accept no for an answer and his insistence that he knows what is best for her. Ralph badgers his mother: what are her ‘plans’ for Isabel’s future; he is taken aback when she declares that she has none and Isabel is a free agent. Even the generally sympathetic Mr Touchett gets all scoffy when Isabel asks him about books and boasts that he has no use for books since he learns through direct observation and experience of the world; actions that are denied Isabel by her gender. Worst of all: both Ralph and James feel that Isabel somehow needs to suffer in order to become wise and there’s a sense that they are wishing it upon her...

And finally, a foretaste of what may happen:

Mr Touchett used to think that she reminded him of his wife when his wife was in her teens. It was because she was fresh and natural and quick to understand, to speak – so many characteristics of her niece – that he had fallen in love with Mrs Touchett. He never expressed this analogy to the girl herself, however; for if Mrs Touchett had once been like Isabel, Isabel was not at all like Mrs Touchett.

I interpret this as suggesting a number of things: that, like Mrs Touchett, Isabel will make an unhappy marriage but that she will also find a way to assert her independence anyway, unconventionally if need be. I also note that Mr Touchett seems to take no responsibility on himself for those aspects of Mrs Touchett which he once admired and yet seem to have been mostly crushed out of her by marriage to him. I am wondering if there might be a thread here about bright, sensitive young girls being failed by marriage.

on being ill and reading plans

It has been a little quiet around here, and I am very sorry that I haven’t been to many people’s blogs yet to wish them a happy new year. I hope that everyone enjoyed the holidays and has had a wonderful start to 2018.

We spent a really lovely Christmas with my parents and also saw one of my brothers and his family. It was great! Then we returned home to Belgium and I was Struck Down with a lurgy, some sort of ’flu I suppose, and it wasn’t that bad but dragged on for two whole weeks. Now I am practically never ill, perhaps one cold a year, and I’d always thought that being ill might be quite a nice break – one could lie about fragrantly reading, drinking cups of tea and having Profound Thoughts – but it turns out most disappointingly that it isn’t like that at all and – horrors! – often I felt too bad to do anything except doze! What an appalling waste of an opportunity!

(Mister Puss doing an impression of me with ’flu)

Still, thanks to copious amounts of Paracetamol and Diana Wynne Jones novels – how lucky that Father Christmas had bought me a great stack! – I am now recovered. But I don’t have anything interesting to write about and I feel as if 2018 is only now beginning (since getting better I’ve been in a frenzy of exam preparation and sleep). Thus it’s only now that I’ve decided to think a bit about Reading Plans. I don’t usually make these for the very simple reason that they quickly start to feel like duties, which skims off the pleasure, and then I fail at them and feel grumpy and miserable. But I am very tempted by Dolce Bellezza’s readalong of Portrait of a Lady in February.

I am also considering another reading plan, and this is related to my Shelving Madness. I used to keep books I hadn’t read on a shelf apart from the rest of my books. But that shelf grew to two shelves. And then a small bookcase. And then a large bookcase. And then started creeping out across the floor of what I laughingly call my study. So in order to hide my shame, I shelved them among the rest of my books (I do reread a lot, so now I just go and look for whatever I feel like reading). And then a year or so ago I went through all my books and reorganised them; the non-fiction by theme (works well!), the fiction, poetry and plays chronologically (FOOL idea! I nearly had a nervous breakdown over it, it took aaaages and I ended up fudging it quite a bit) although I do like the end result), children’s fiction apart – well, basically scattered through the house on any available shelves or flat surfaces.

To the point: I’m going to read one previously unread novel from one decade every month, working backwards. I’ll start with the twenty-teens this month. And to make it a bit more exciting, I’ll ask you to vote on which one I should read (a revival of the short-lived ‘What Shall Helen Read?’). This will continue until we all get bored or forget.

Without further ado, this month’s list – and this is a bit embarrassing since I have very few unread books from this decade. Perhaps this reflects a more disciplined approach to book-buying in my dotage? I’m going to add a book I’ve borrowed from the library. Yes, I know I’m cheating before I’ve even started, but that’s the sort of person I am.

• Muriel Barbery, The Secret Life of Elves
• Lissa Evans, Small Change for Stuart
• Deborah Levy, Hot Milk
• Sarah Perry, After Me Comes the Flood

So, what shall Helen read? Please vote! I’ll make the decision on Sunday evening.

(Clara)

Emotionally Weird, by Kate Atkinson

As I mentioned in my last post, I have been having a rather desultory clear-out of my books. My hand fell on Emotionally Weird, a book I initially read not long after it was first published, in 2000, and I seemed to remember thinking it wasn’t very good. Ripe for culling, I decided, and yet I felt I might just read a few pages to check if my earlier assessment was one I still agreed with. But then it went a bit like Pooh with checking his pot of honey to ensure there was no cheese lurking anywhere in it, and one book later...

Hmm.
(a) Was I a sterner critic in 2000?
(b) Had I no sense of humour in 2000?
(c) Was I a complete idiot in 2000?

All of these may be true, you needn’t try and answer. (Especially if you think (c).) Suffice it to say I was wrong wrong wrong in 2000, this is an entertaining, funny and dark novel which is just the thing if you enjoy reading fiction about fiction, universities and layabout Scottish students in 1972. And if you can get straight-faced through the Eng. Lit. seminar with the structuralist enthusiast Dr Archie McCue, I despair of you:

Ten minutes after eleven in Archie McCue’s room [...] The gloomy atmosphere was made gloomier by the absence of electricity. A candle, stuck in a Blue Nun bottle, burned at the window like a signal. The university was still managing to run its heating although no-one knew how – perhaps they were burning books, or (more likely) students. [...]

‘When words no longer strive for mimesis they become dislocated and disconnected. They illustrate in themselves the exhaustion of forms. Writers who eschew mimesis, looking for new ways of approaching the fictional construct, are disruptivist – challenging what Robbe-Grillet refers to as the “intelligibility of the world”.’ Archie paused. ‘What do you think of that statement? Anyone?’ No-one answered. No-one had any idea what Archie was talking about. [...]

Archie, scooting round the room in his chair like the glass on a Ouija board, came to a sudden stop in front of Kevin. He looked at him vaguely as if he thought he recognized him from somewhere and then asked him an impenetrable question about Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. [...] Kevin was saved from Gramsci by Professor Cousins, who wandered into the room at that moment. He caught sight of Archie and seemed confused.

‘Looking for something?’ Archie asked, rather impolitely, and under his breath muttered, ‘like your brain perhaps?’ Professor Cousins appeared to be even more puzzled. ‘I don’t know how I ended up here,’ he laughed. ‘I was looking for the toilet.’

‘You found it,’ Terri murmured, without apparently opening her mouth, or even waking up.

Effie Andrews and her mother Nora are weathering a storm in a semi-ruin on a tiny Scottish island, uninhabited except for them, assorted sea birds and some inbred and feral Siamese cats; Effie is there recuperating from a serious bout of ’flu she caught at university in Dundee, her mother is there because she is a bit of a reclusive nutter. To pass the time, Effie tells Nora about student life in Dundee – how much of this is true is open to interpretation – and Nora occasionally discloses to Effie a little about her past, for Effie has no father and her origins are shrouded in mystery. The narrative is further interspersed with pages from a detective novel Effie is writing for her creative writing course, and splattered with snippets of other characters’ novels, most notably Kevin’s interminable opus set in a fantasy world called Edrakonia (‘And the Murk will fall on the land. And the Beast Griddlebart will roam the land and the dragons will flee’), although Archie McCue’s experimental and paranoid work, The Expanding Prism of J, and his wife’s doctor-and-nurse romance, also feature.

In the Dundee narrative, in which she shares a flat with her slacker boyfriend Bob (‘The rays from television sets were vital to Bob’s continued existence on this planet, in the way oxygen is for other people. He claimed the three-day week was having an adverse effect on his metabolism’), Effie is avoiding writing an essay on George Eliot and cultivating dissatisfaction with Bob. Plagued by frequent losses of electricity due to the unions’ strikes, subject to bad weather and decrepitude and peopled by drifters in Afghan coats and Victorian pinafores, it’s a strange and lethargic world in which altered states of consciousness are the norm and a sense of apathy pervades everything. However, Effie-in-Dundee is becoming aware that there is a mysterious yellow dog haunting the streets and that someone is following her. And who is killing the old people? Just because you’re paranoid, as everyone reminds each other throughout the book, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Nora’s tale, when it comes, is much more Gothic.

Nora is not terribly impressed with Effie’s story and interrupts with her complaints: too many characters, not enough plot, too many kettles and loos. There should definitely be no death: ‘No no no no no, Nora says, very agitated, you said this was a comic novel – you can’t kill people.’ Effie changes the story to please her, but Nora’s using the word ‘novel’ is odd since, although this is a novel, Effie is apparently telling it out loud to her mother. Is it a comic novel? It is funny, but it also grows darker towards its conclusion. Effie muses over an essay title, ‘“Tragedy plus Time equals Comedy”: Discuss’. Is the opposite true, ‘Comedy plus Time equals Tragedy’? The book circles around itself, events recur, people echo each other’s words; darkness bubbles up but subsides again. Is Effie’s essay question relevant to life or even literature? It is fair to say that Emotionally Weird is predominantly comic. Atkinson certainly adopts plenty of devices from Shakespearean comedy: puns, missing parents, mistaken identities, coincidences, people running about. She also considers her characters’ many weaknesses with a benevolent eye. And (almost) everything does work out (reasonably) neatly in the end.

(Tower Building, University of Dundee; from here)

The layers of different stories – Nora’s account of Effie’s family, all those novels in progress – and Nora’s interpolated criticisms of the Dundee narrative (too many characters! etc.) push the novel into meta territory, where it frolics about happily. It’s packed full of references, some – like Terri’s poem – fairly obvious even to me:

I drank the glass of
milk you left on the
bedside table. it was
    sour. thank you.

Others are more obscure. The yellow dog who precipitates a bizarre car journey is so random that I looked it up, and it’s a nod to Maigret, who appears in a novel called Le Chien jaune. Alas, I can’t tell you what the significance is as I haven’t read the Simenon – have any of you? What did the yellow dog mean? For everything, from the novel’s epigraph (Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass), to the page of black (Tristram Shandy) to Effie’s essay on Henry James’s interpretation of Middlemarch, helps you to read and understand this complex novel.

As the novel progresses, the different narratives start to elide. First it’s just echoes – phrases and tropes cross from characters’ novels into the Dundee narrative, Nora’s story begins to influence Effie’s. Then Dr McCrindle, the wolfish love interest in Philippa McCue’s doctor-and-nurse romance, suddenly crops up in the hospital. Characters die and are resuscitated as Effie plays with alternative versions of her Dundee story. The strangest instance of this is when someone plunges over the banisters to his death, only for Effie-in-Dundee to realise she is carrying a page of Archie McCue’s novel in which the protagonist, J, meets precisely the same fate: Effie-in-Dundee burns the page, reality shifts and rewinds and the character is alive again. Towards the end, as Effie-in-Dundee grows increasingly ill with ’flu, the borders between all the different narratives become more and more porous.

All in all, if you like your fiction tricksy, funny and unconventional, this is well worth your time. If you have a lot of time, you could write a thesis on it...

The Golden Bowl, by Henry James

I have finished The Golden Bowl! It has taken a while. In fact, on the bus to my Flemish class this morning, a (Belgian) woman leaned over and asked me if I’d ‘finished the Henry James’ (I am recuperating with Jane Eyre), who knows but perhaps the entire bus had been willing me to get through it. Feel free to congratulate me in the Comments. It’s been a long time since I last read such a, for me, challenging novel. Rewarding? Absolutely, though I would get more from rereading it, but can’t face that quite yet.

Amerigo, an impoverished (impoverished in an aristocratic way rather than a not-having-enough-to-eat way) Italian prince, is betrothed to the American heiress Maggie Verver; a little unexpectedly Maggie’s old friend Charlotte arrives in London to attend the wedding. Charlotte had a love affair with Amerigo just before he met Maggie, but Charlotte is not rich and Amerigo believes his love could not survive poverty, so they parted. Charlotte persuades Amerigo to accompany her shopping to find a gift for Maggie and in a poky little Bloomsbury antique shop they discover the golden bowl. It appears massy and is finely wrought, but the gold is gilding and underneath it is made of crystal. After much discussion they leave without buying it, either for Maggie or for each other – Amerigo maintains it has a flaw and Charlotte cannot afford it. Crucially Maggie does not know of this expedition, nor of their previous involvement.

The married pair spends a couple of years in America where Maggie gives birth to a son, and all seems idyllic. Back in England, Maggie feels guilty that she is so happy when she has ‘abandoned’ her father, now prey to husband-seeking women, and she persuades him to have Charlotte to stay. Charlotte protects him and makes him so comfortable that he proposes to her and, after some discussion and referring to Maggie and Amerigo for their consent, she accepts. There is no suggestion of love here, but Adam and Charlotte are fond of each other’s company and each benefits greatly from the alliance. But Charlotte does not tell him of her affair with Amerigo – how could she?

Now that the two couples are living within streets of each other, it is easy for Maggie and Adam to fall back into their old, close relationship – and for Charlotte and Amerigo into theirs. The golden bowl itself reappears later in the novel and is crucial to the plot; it is also symbolic of the relations between the two couples. Commenting upon the action like a Chorus are Colonel and Mrs Assingham. Fanny Assingham knows of Charlotte and Amerigo’s previous affair and quickly discerns that is has been resumed, but she is a friend of all parties and thus caught between them. She likes to gloss her friends’ actions generously, believing their motivations to be noble; her husband is relentlessly cynical and interprets every action in the worst possible light.

Published in 1904, this was James’s final novel. Volume One is told first from Amerigo’s viewpoint, then in turn from Adam’s and Charlotte’s, with chapters devoted to the workings of the mind of their friend, Mrs Assingham; Volume Two almost entirely from Maggie’s. Whether James’s style changed because he started dictating his novels, I do not know, but certainly his syntax in this novel is complex, lengthy, turning in on itself and always seeking to qualify or nuance; it is ideal for interior monologues. If Miriam in Pointed Roofs sometimes found that language failed her, James believes that heaping up his rich vocabulary phrase upon phrase will communicate anything he requires. This creates an effect both intense and layered with ambiguity. However, it is also tightly controlled and consciously artificial – it is not an attempt to mimic the processes of thought themselves.

The syntax and the ambiguity are what make this novel challenging to read. Despite his prolixity, James leaves much unsaid. In this world, where descriptions such as ‘fine’ and ‘beautiful’ and ‘extraordinary’ are bandied about by everyone to the point of meaninglessness, fear of vulgarity prevents characters from naming things, so they skirt around them or discuss them only obliquely. (Maggie is even afraid of experiencing jealousy because it is a vulgar emotion.) Yet there is also a sense that naming things makes them more real, and so it is often better not to. This is most clearly demonstrated in the second volume when Maggie and her father have a series of conversations about their errant spouses without ever mentioning the affair, each hoping the other does not know and can be protected.

Everyone displays an astonishing capacity for disguising selfishness as unselfishness to themselves as well as others. Charlotte and Amerigo are convinced that because they are so clever and secretive about their love affair, they cannot be hurting their spouses:

‘And really, my dear’, Charlotte added, ‘Fanny Assingham doesn’t matter.’

He [Amerigo] wondered again. ‘Unless as taking care of them [Adam and Maggie].’

‘Ah,’ Charlotte instantly said, ‘isn’t it for us, only, to do that?’ She spoke as with a flare of pride for their privilege and their duty. ‘I think we want no one’s aid.’

She spoke indeed with a nobleness not the less effective for coming in so oddly; with a sincerity visible even through the complicated twist by which any effort to protect the father and the daughter seemed necessarily conditioned for them. It moved him, in any case, as if some spring of his own, a weaker one, had suddenly been broken by it. These things, all the while, the privilege, the duty, the opportunity, had been the substance of his own vision; they formed the note he had been keeping back to show her that he wasn’t, in their so special situation, without a responsible view. A conception he could name and could act on was something that now at last, not to be too eminent a fool, he was required by all the graces to produce, and the luminous idea she had herself uttered would have been his expression of it. She had anticipated him, but since her expression left, for positive beauty, nothing to be desired, he felt rather righted than wronged. A large response, as he looked at her, came into his face, a light of excited perception, all his own, in the glory of which – as it almost might be called – what he gave her back had the value of what she had given him. ‘They’re extraordinarily happy.’

Oh Charlotte’s measure of it was only too full. ‘Beatifically.’ [...]

‘I’m not afraid.’

He wondered for a moment. ‘Not afraid of what?’

‘Well, generally, of some beastly mistake. Especially of any mistake founded on one’s idea of their difference. For that idea,’ Charlotte developed, ‘positively makes one so tender.’

‘Ah but rather!’

‘Well then there it is. I can’t put myself into Maggie’s skin – I can’t, as I say. It’s not my fit – I shouldn’t be able, as I see it, to breathe in it. But I can feel that I’d do anything to shield it from a bruise. Tender as I am for her too,’ she went on, ‘I think I’m still more so for my husband. He’s in truth of a sweet simplicity – !’

The Prince turned over a while the sweet simplicity of Mr Verver. ‘Well, I don’t know that I can choose. At night all cats are grey. I only see how, for so many reasons, we ought to stand toward them – and how, to do ourselves justice, we do. It represents for us a conscious care –’

‘Of every hour, literally,’ said Charlotte. She could rise to the highest measure of the facts. ‘And for which we must trust each other – !’

‘Oh as we trust the saints in glory. Fortunately,’ the Prince hastened to add, ‘we can.’ With which, as for the full assurance and the pledge it involved, each hand instinctively found the other. ‘It’s all too wonderful.’

Firmly and gravely she kept his hand. ‘It’s too beautiful.’ [...]

‘It’s sacred,’ he said at last.

Unfortunately, they deceive themselves: they may wish to protect their spouses but their affair can only hurt them, even though they believe it gives them a special duty of protectiveness; and Maggie and Adam are not to be patronised as sweetly simple. Most poignantly, Charlotte cannot ultimately trust the Prince despite their pledge in the quote. Confronted by Maggie, he must end the affair, but cruelly he refuses to tell Charlotte why. This is a sacrifice he makes to Maggie to show his goodwill to her, but it means that Charlotte never knows whether he has broken with her because he no longer loves her or because his wife has forced him to. The repeated images of her at the end of the book as being caged or led around by her husband on a silken rope are heartbreaking, although Amerigo claims that she will make a new life for herself in America, whence she is bound with her husband at the end of the book, neither of them ever to return to England.

Adam is a wealthy collector of antiques and he is assembling the choicest pieces he can find in Europe to form a museum back in America. He cannot enter a room without exploring it for treasures and in fact he decides that he will propose to Charlotte after taking her to witness his purchase of ancient Damascene tiles; the ostentatious expenditure of a large sum in front of her in fact forms a part of the proposal itself (to him, anyway – we do not know how Charlotte feels about it). The text is saturated with the language of commerce and the way it is deployed suggests that both Charlotte and Amerigo have been ‘bought’ as fine examples of their kinds. Even Adam’s grandson, the Principino, is more like a beautiful little doll than a real child. Yet Adam and Maggie agree that they have not paid the price of their marriages – because indeed they have not: they have not changed in their relations to each other and expect to carry on as before with their spouses fitting around them. In fact, James highlights the unhealthy closeness of their relation by comparing father and daughter to a married couple throughout the novel.

Maggie’s trajectory through the novel is from innocence to experience. Early on, she rejects the compliment that she is ‘good’ by pointing out that, rich and happy, she has never been tried. Her trial comes when she first suspects there is something between her husband and stepmother and is tormented by fear that she is right and fear that she has a loathsome imagination. Appealed to, Fanny Assingham cheerfully lies and denies that any such relation exists, and Maggie actually experiences relief when the antiques dealer inadvertently betrays the lovers to her. At all costs she must keep the knowledge from her father because he must not be hurt (presumably on her account rather than Charlotte’s), but she must end the affair. So she too starts lying. Strangely, she is now having ‘the time of her life – she knew it by the perpetual throb of this sense of possession, which was almost too violent either to recognise or to hide’ – meek Maggie, who is always ‘little’ Maggie, with her ‘little’ sense of justice and her ‘little’ ways, to everyone else, whose very name is a diminutive, is enjoying the exercise of power and knowledge. But she is merciful to Amerigo, whom she still loves, helping him retain his self-respect, and she pities Charlotte and, even as she participates in withholding from her the truth – that she knows of the affair – tries to soften her suffering. Perhaps sharing Charlotte’s agony is the closest she can permit herself to acknowledging her own pain. In all this protecting her father is paramount, but yet she is prepared to let him sacrifice himself for her and her marriage, by taking Charlotte far away and never seeing his beloved daughter and grandson again. (Of course, in this Maggie too is making a great sacrifice.)

This is from the final leave-taking of the four main characters:

‘It’s all right, eh?’

‘Oh my dear – rather!’

He [Adam] had applied the question to the great fact of the picture, as she [Maggie] had spoken for the picture in reply, but it was as if their words for an instant afterwards symbolised another truth, so that they looked about at everything else to give them this extension. She had passed her arm into his, and the other objects in the room, the other pictures, the sofas, the chairs, the tables, the cabinets, the ‘important’ pieces, supreme in their way, stood out, round them, consciously, for recognition and applause. Their eyes moved together from piece to piece, taking in the whole nobleness – quite as if for him to measure the wisdom of old ideas. The two noble persons seated in conversation and at tea fell thus into the splendid effect and the general harmony: Mrs Verver and the Prince fairly ‘placed’ themselves, however unwittingly, as high expressions of the kind of human furniture required aesthetically by such a scene. The fusion of their presence with the decorative elements, their contribution to the triumph of selection, was complete and admirable; though to a lingering view, a view more penetrating than the occasion really demanded, they also might have figured as concrete attestations of a rare power of purchase.

 (Henry James painted by Jacques-Emile Blanche in 1908, not long after the publication of The Golden Bowl, from the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC; photograph of Henry James from here; it was actually taken c. 1863 so years before the writing of The Golden Bowl but it is such a great and theatrical picture I wanted to include it as a counterweight to the painting which misses the full force of that penetrating gaze.)