24 October 2009

Andrew Marvell, Upon Appleton House

Here are the notes I took on it in the basement of Alderman:

MAR-vuhl

  • prospective poem (like "Cooper's Hill"; also bring in Cindy on description?)
  • rural shit—"Georgics," "The Task," but there are HUMANS in "Appleton House"
  • buildings and their ruins and STRUCTURE—of building described, AND of poem—Pamela as a story about the interiors of buildings/characterological interiority. And trying to get inside buildings as an allegory for rape—Pamela, Shamela, Evelina.
"Height with a certaing race doees bend,
But low things clownishly ascend." (59-60)
—something about satire, maybe even Burney's mockery of middle-class pretensions in Evelina
later men become grasshoppers in "the abyss.../Of that unfathomable grass"—poetry about the English Civil War, class-warfare, the Levellers/Diggers had a rebellion that Lord Fairfax (Appleton's owner) was involved in squashing. Will Hume's history of the Civil War explain enough of this to me???

Puritan woodpeckers chopped down the royalist oak with their beaks 'cause it was rotten inside.
  • Building as chastity belt:
XII
And oft she spent the summer suns
Discoursing with the subtle nuns.
Whence in these words one to her weaved,
(As 'twere by chance) thoughts long conceived.

XIII
'Within this holy leisure we
Live innocently as you see.
These walls restrain the world without,
But hedge our liberty about.
These bars inclose the wider den
Of those wild creatures, callèd men.
The cloister outward shuts its gates,
And, from us, locks on them the grates.'
(93-104)

Allegories of temptation—the evil prioress wants Isabella Thwaites to become a lesbian slut nun
  • and "Paradise Lost"
  • and Pilgrim's Progress
  • allegory of the Protestant Reformation in England—but how does work with contemporary Puritan/Anglican stuff?
This is the same year Leviathan comes out—what can I say about THAT???

Does a Herrick and has a sexy dream about ivy:
And ivy, with familiar trails,
Me licks, and clasps, and curls, and hales.
Under this antic rope I move
Like some great prelate of the grove.
Then languishing with ease, I toss
On pallets swoll'n of velvet moss. (591-6)
What??? Why is the speaker an embodied person here? Is this an appropriate move for young Maria Fairfax's tutor to make in a poem? What is Marvell doing? (naughty tutors and sex in gardens: see Julie)

Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

It turned out to be a very good text for thinking about how the nineteenth-century novel thinks about selfhood. Dr. Jekyll is a nice man, well respected by his fellow doctors and other professional old single men in London (the character who spends a lot of time investigating his 'strange case' is his friend, the lawyer Mr. Utterson). But Jekyll also has strange tendencies that he worries are evil—he has a "certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public" (ed. Emma Lately, 60). There's no way of telling what, actually, Jekyll's "impatient gaiety of disposition" leads him to do, although his singleness, and Victorian paranoia about London's moral and hygienic depravity, suggest that he may have a fondness for whores.

Anyway, his solution, as a doctor, is to find a medicine that will allow him to split his personality into two—when he's Dr. Jekyll, he's overwhelmingly good but also slightly bad; when he takes the drug, he's Mr. Hyde, and he's all bad. (Where does the good disappear to when he does this? Is the new Dr. Jekyll actually ALL good, since Mr. Hyde was ALL bad? The novella won't say, leaves it deliberately open. There are some interesting arguments about Calvinist stuff in here, I think—and Stevenson was raised in Scotland, so he certainly had room and biographical background to make these arguments. But he won't, because he's not from the seventeenth century—poo on him.) Mr. Hyde does several appalling things, like walking directly over a small child in the street when Mr. Utterson meets him for the first time. (It's not clear HOW you just walk over an 8-year-old, but because this is also a horror novel, the unimaginability of this act makes it terrifying.) But Jekyll learns that splitting himself is dangerous—shades of nuclear bomb-making, shades of Voldemort and his horcruxes (although of course the influence goes the other way—but it's what I'm thinking)—because eventually he can't stay Jekyll: he keeps turning involuntarily into Hyde. (It's not clear that Hyde really gets to have much fun when he's in that persona, either—mostly he seems to stay in his room, snapping at the servants, and making himself tea. When he goes out, he just walks over little kids, and once murders an M.P. Where are the whores? Where's the ludicly evil fun that being Hyde was supposed to allow???) Meanwhile, Jekyll/Hyde's building up a tolerance to the drug and needs more and more of it to switch, which is complicated by the fact that he can't get a supply of the precise strain of it he was using when he started all this mess. So on one level, this is just a story about opiate addiction (that was how I read it when I was ten—I'd picked the book up in the library, but understood it as an extension of the D.A.R.E. program). In the end, Jekyll can't hold off turning into Hyde any longer; he fixes himself a beaker of the stuff and is about to drink it, but dies in the process of his transformation.

So what happens to the self? When Jekyll is dead, so is Hyde (and had Hyde died, Jekyll would have to, too). Stevenson isn't going to offer any answers. Instead, I think, he wants to just set up something horrible—gothic—that's self-explanatory up to a certain point, but also has certain gaps in its explanation of things. These gaps are terrible, because they're spots where an explanation of the self should go, and instead there just isn't anything there.

14 October 2009

Edith Wharton on Ethan Frome

Terribly depressing, even in a tub full of organic orange-scented suds, which you'd think would dispel some of that Western-Massachusetts-in-the-dead-of-winter-and-terminal-sexual-frustration gloom. But no. A really disturbing novel. Like the other gothic on my list (Castle of Otranto), it's fascinated with the terrible emotional things people who should love each other but don't do to each other in houses full of malevolent objects. Instead of Walpole's giant shield and helmet, Wharton's got a broken glass pickle dish (pickle dish pictures here) and a bottle of glue. And some medicine bottles, I guess, and a lot of fur robes for keeping warm in. Wharton's objects don't have the same agency Walpole's do, but they still are crucial to marking the turning points in the narrative—because Ethan and Mattie never have sex (or do much more than kiss three times and try to kill themselves once), they have to be ashamed of breaking the pickle dish instead, which they then hide as a bizarre little reification of their guilty desire for each other. (But it's so SHITTY, just like the shitty office Ethan puts together for himself as the last individuated space in his house of women—the last place where he can be himself. Except that it's got a shitty couch he made himself, and a cushion his wife embroidered for him, and they're both really shitty to show that his life is also shitty. That's what upsets me about Wharton—she's having a lot of fun making their economic and intellectual poverty an emblem of their emotional poverty. Can I pause a moment and call Wharton on making such a snobby move? ... Okay, now I can move on.)

Otranto was about how patriarchy will kill you. (A lot of what I've been reading from the 1760's has been about how patriarchy will kill you—although I mistakenly watched Dead Poets Society last night, and in between getting really cranky with it, I decided it's definitely a story about how patriarchy wants everyone dead. 'S because there are no other available villains in a story that wants to be about the ultimate triumph of good, but has the disadvantage of being set in a world of rich white young men—they already have almost everything, so it's very hard to make them victims. The movie can only do it by making the people they're supposed to grow up to be extremely evil, so that the movie's able to make it seem reasonable, for heaven's sake, when the main character kills himself because he isn't allowed to act in another production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In a less ridiculous atmosphere, you'd notice easier that this is a really really stupid suicide narrative...) But Ethan Frome seems to be about how women will kill you, instead. Sure, the women may be dangerous because they're endangered by patriarchal society—but it's Ethan's dead mother's decline that scares the shit out of him in the first place, it's Zenobia's tendency to spend money on vibrators and kidney pills that's most immediately bankrupting the farm, and it's Mattie's idea that Ethan kill them both by steering the sled into the elm tree. Like the victimized female heroines of the sentimental novels I've been reading, Ethan has no agency of his own—he just reacts to what the women around him want. Elaine Showalter has a fairly crazy introduction to the novel in the Oxford World's Classics edition where she talks about the castrating feminine maternal body of the farmhouse, and she's getting at something there, although she does say it in a typically CRAZY way. Anyway. Scary women feel like a new thing in my reading list.

13 October 2009

William Congreve, The Way of the World

Dryden would have approved of the double plot, which ties itself up nicely because all the characters are related to each other or friends with each other or sleeping with each other. Some young gallants try to keep an aunt from marrying again so that they'll end up with her fortune, but unlike Jonson's Epicene, the aunt never gets her money taken away from her. (So the nephew's inheritance is still safe? It's not clear—no one ever actually mentions the money, but since that's always what's at stake in plays about aunts and uncles getting married, the presumptive inheritance must be what's moving the plot here, too.)

There are a LOT of Jonson references, really—a dumb cousin comes in from the country and someone mentions Bartholmew Fair; when the gallants discuss how they'll keep the aunt from marrying the suitor, they mention Mosca in Volpone to explain how, if the fake suitor did get proposed to, he'd demand too many conditions in the marriage settlement for the aunt to agree to it—and he'd do this not because he didn't want to marry her, but because they'd already had him married that morning to another servant. But a better Jonson parallel for a story about a fake marriage would have been Epicene—and I can't figure out why Congreve doesn't use that, instead.

11 October 2009

Dryden's Essay of Dramatick Poesie

This one is weird. Four London dramatists with Classical names—Neander, Lisideius, Crites, and Eugenius—get in a barge and go floating down the Thames on June 3, 1665. They get in the boat so they can hear the naval battle going on between the English and the Dutch at Lowestoft, but then instead of paying attention to the sound of cannons (the battle is never mentioned in the course of the Essay), they argue about the role of verisimilitude in contemporary English Drama. Topics include:
  • How artificial (=contorted?) the syntax of plays should be
  • Whether multiple plots are okay and if so what they're supposed to accomplish
  • Whether blank verse is better than rhyme, or whether rhyme is better than blank verse
  • Whether one character telling another to shut the door is properly part of the dramatic action or not and so whether it should or shouldn't be in verse
I'd forgotten that the Essay isn't just Dryden saying what he thinks plays should do—because he has four different characters debating with each other, they're able to offer different opinions and interpretations of similar themes (number of plots, number of humors in the various characters, degree of artificiality in language) without having to come up with any single opinion. So that's nice, although I think a lot of critics who cite Dryden quickly (particularly Jonson critics, who like to dwell on how Neander thinks Jonson's not quite in Shakespeare's league) forget that it isn't just Dryden talking: that he's representing a less individuated and more social picture of what 1660's London dramatists were doing. So basically, I guess, my reading of the Essay is just a reminder to myself not to over-simplify when treating criticism that everyone refers to but doesn't read fully. (Sadly, there's almost no other reason to read the Essay. It's dreadfully boring. But those who cite it without reading it through—see me, spring of 2008—get a distorted sense of the opinions and attitudes it offers about the state of the play.)