Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance

She may be dull, but she knows what she's talking about:

Hortensius. I rejoice that you do not defend Circulating libraries,—if yon [sp] had, I would have fought against them with more success, than I have met with hitherto, when I have been your opponent.

Euphrasia. I am entirely of your opinion, they are one source of the vices and follies of our present times; and we shall have occasion to say more of them when we come to draw inferences from the effects of novel-reading upon the manners.

Hort. They have been well ridiculed in Mr. Colman's farce called Polly Honeycombe.

Euph. In some respects, but the Satire would have been much stronger and the moral more commendable, if he had not exhibited the parents as objects of Ridicule; which spoils the effect, and puts it upon a footing with too many other Dramatic pieces upon the same plan.

Sophronia. I am delighted with your remark, and have often been offended with this dramatic error: it is so general that most of the plays seem calculated to teach our youth, that they are wiser than their parents, and that they may safely deceive and ridicule them.

Hort. You say true, there is hardly a play where one does not meet with these absolute children and undutiful parents, and the poets always take care to punish the latter, and reward the former.

Euph. This likewise is one of the evils of our times; but we will not enlarge upon it here, as it is foreign to our present subject.

Soph. I beg your pardon!—undutiful parents and arbitrary children are as frequently found in Novels as upon the Stage, and the remark is equally proper upon both kinds of writing.

Euph. I cannot deny it.—But I shall neither applaud, nor recommend any that have a tendency to weaken the respect due to parents; for upon that depends in a great measure, the education of youth, their introduction into life, and indeed all the social and domestic virtues.

Hort. It was I that led you into this useful observation:—I do not repent it, nor will I reckon the time as lost.

(from The Progress of Romance, through Times, Countries, and Manners; with Remarks on the Good and Bad Effects of It, on them Respectively; in a Course of Evening Conversations. Vol. II, Evening IX, pp.7-11[9].)

Conflicts between parents and children—whose roles Sophronia cleverly switches—are totally the plot of all the 18th-c novels I've read so far. Her thesis that children were behaving badly because they'd read Richardson and Fielding needs a little re-consideration—LMWM notes that reading Clarissa (pub.1748) in the late 1750's painfully reminded her of her of her own courtship in the early 1710's—but when Reeve pins responsibility for children's bad behavior on the novel, she gives fiction a whole lot of social power, and this is interesting.

Virginia Woolf, Flush

Read this a while ago, but I've been thinking about it. Could connect it to Don Quixote because there's a wonderful parody of a courtship plot--Flush's emotional investment in Miss Barrett, his desire to protect her, and then his conflict over this with Mr. Browning. Flush is definitely a person, because Flush is really a story about feminism and about running away from Stuffy English Authority To Have Fun In Italy. There's something weird about that, though--writing a story about a helpless dog to show how when Miss Barret's father forbids her from paying the ransom on her helpless dog, he's turning her INTO a dog. Her helplessness was already pretty obvious--was it really necessary to do this? But Woolf isn't afraid of being heavy-handed when she wants to be.

It could also talk to Jekyll&Hyde as a story about Nasty Things That Happen in London. And with all my later-18th/early-19th-century novels about Nasty Things Fathers Do To Daughters.

Frances Burney's Evelina

I'm listening to Evelina on Librivox and it's making my really happy. The reader has a weird fake British accent which I don't understand (I don't understand why she's doing it, anyway—when she announces her name and the Librivox stuff at the beginning, she does it in a convincingly American accent), but other than that it's really fun. Evelina is kind of a total bitch—smart, critical, funny—but also scared and shy and making enough mistakes that her judgments don't strike me as bitchy so much as really, really fun. That is, Evelina doesn't know how out of place she is, which means that her criticisms aren't nearly as nasty as they really should register. And Burney's SO GOOD at putting in really appalling characters—Evelina's embarrassing French grandmother Mme Duval, Captain Mervin, Clement Willoughby are all terrible, terrible people who say ridiculous petty shit ALL THE TIME and behave badly and pick fights really appalling fights with each other. And then, the best part, Evelina's describing all this shit in letters to her guardian, who's even more socially clueless than she is (that is, more out of the loop of fashion—he's a much better judge of character than she is, but his letters haven't been in the narrative a while, so I tend to forget it), so it never feels as gossippy and bitchy as it properly is. Good job, Burney. She's created the perfect critical epistolary narrator without making her vulnerable to being called rude or impertinent.

What War and Peace is About

Tolstoy's problem is: how do you write about something really, really big and complex? How do you describe and explain the Napoleonic Wars, for heaven's sake? His solution seems to be to say that there's not really a good way to do it, that you have to look at big history and individual lives and figures and shit with a weird kind of double- or triple-vision so that you're always blinking to shift the emphasis from one way of looking at it to another. (At the end of the novel, in the boring 42-page second epilogue where he considers what this has to do with choice and fate and comes out as pretty skeptical about individual freedom, he writes, "In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious," 1351.) The way that individuals are indebted for their conduct to much larger world-historical events means that both sides of the war, French and Russian, are both equally HUMAN.

So here's how that philosophizing works out in the dramatizing of actual events in the narrative. It's the last major battle of the war. The Russian troops haven't taken Napoleon prisoner, but they've done everything but, and it's time for things to be over. The old Russian field marshal Kutuzov gives a speech to the men at night in the ice. Afterward,

Kutuzov's words were hardly understood by the troops. No one could have repeated the field marshal's address, begun solemnly and then changing into an old man's simplehearted talk; but the hearty sincerity of that speech, the feeling of majestic triumph combined with pity for the foe and consciousness of the justice of our cause, exactly expressed by the old man's good-natured expletives, was not merely understood but lay in the soul of every soldier and found expression in their joyous and long-sustained shouts. Afterwards when one of the generals addressed Kutuzov asking whether he wished his caleche to be sent for, Kutuzov in answering unexpectedly gave a sob, being evidently greatly moved. (1210)

As it turns out, this ISN'T a great passage to illustrate what I'm talking about. But it's what I underlined and circled and wrote "this passage matters a lot" next to when I was at Panera this afternoon. So.

Rousseau's Julie: Or the New Eloise

I'm reading William Kenrick's 1761 (first) English translation, on ECCO. (Kenrick decides to cal the novel Eloisa, instead of Julie; I'll be referring to the translation by Kenrick's title.) Kenrick's pretty wacky, and the novel itself is great too. It's also fun to read things that are clearly referenced by other things, and so now I can pick out the fact that Horace Walpole must have been a fairly big fan of Eloisa. The footprints of a scene like this one are all over The Castle of Otranto:

On this [suggestion that Eloisa marry the poorer Saint-Preux) your father expressed himself in a violent passion: he treated the proposal as absurd and ridiculous. How! my lord! said he, is it possible a man of honour, as you are, can entertain such a thought, that the last surviving branch of an illustrious family should to to lose and degrade its name, in that of nobody knows who; a fellow without home, and reduced to subsist upon charity. Hold, sir, interrupted my lord, you are speaking of my friend; consider that I must take upon myself every injury done him in my company, and that such language as is injurious to a man of honour, is more so to him who makes use of it... (v.1 216-217)

Fielding's Shamela

Problem is, I'm still not sure what I mean about Richardson's people seeming like robots. But I'm glad that in Shamela, she fakes drowning herself in order to cover up the fact that she disappeared for a couple hours to fuck Parson Williams—by giving Shamela a surface story and an inner real story, Fielding makes her seem so REAL to me. (Richardson's Pamela doesn't get to do that—she always means exactly what she says, and she's so so so BORING.)

End of Bidulph

Kind of a let-down, actually—horrible things keep happening, and then finally they stop. Sidney stays alive for a while, I think, I can't remember. (Orlando Faulkland completely loses his mind, which is really very entertaining, and Sidney seems to finally find him an acceptable suitor at that point, because she marries him when he says he'll kill himself if she doesn't. She finally stops agonizing about things, just says she'll do it. (Her BROTHER does agonize, and says it'll look bad if Sidney goes off with Orlando right after the wedding; she should wait a while first.) But then he kills himself anyway because he's discovered that his wife who he thought he'd shot dead with her lover wasn't actually dead, just the lover, and so he was kind of a bigamist. So it was good, all in all, that Sidney HADN'T run off with him, even though it means that Sidney and Faulkland never have sex with each other. Sad face.)

Then I read Kathleen M. Oliver's article in SEL, "Frances Sheridan's Faulkland, the Silenced, Emasculated Male" (http://www.jstor.org/stable/4625090 ). Oliver does a nice job examining how Faulkland is feminized in the novel—he's excessive, he falls in love too easily, he stays in love too long, he has a tendency to drink too much and play cards too long and lets himself get manipulated by women like Mrs. Gerrarde, Miss Burchell, and (of course) Sidney and Lady Bidulph. Oliver is responding to critics like Spacks, who have contrasted Faulkland's 'activeness' with Sidney's passivity (Faulkland, after all, gets rid of Mrs. Gerrarde as Mr. Arnold's mistress by kidnapping her and marrying her to his servant in France); Oliver says Faulkland is much more subjugated within structures of feminine power than other people have seemed to find him. Then she does something interesting where she talks about how Faulkland is Continental and Feminized, and Sidney (Sir Philip is her obvious namesake, although Spacks ties her to Lady Mary Wroth, and the Countess of Pembroke, and whatever) is English and Masculine. So HOW is Sidney MASCULINE? This would have been a really interesting way to look at the novel (Sidney not so much the victim but the victimized spokesperson of patriarchy), and I wish Oliver had gone there more. I LIKE novels in which women are men, and men are women (like how Captain Wentworth is a mother figure for Anne Elliot in Persuasion).