The Village

Ivy Walker: When we are married, will you dance with me? I find dancing very agreeable. Why can you not say what is in your head?

Lucius Hunt: Why can you not stop saying what is in yours? Why must you lead, when I want to lead? If I want to dance I will ask you to dance. If I want to speak I will open my mouth and speak. Everyone is forever plaguing me to speak further. Why? What good is it to tell you you are in my every thought from the time I wake? What good can come from my saying that I sometimes cannot think clearly or do my work properly? What gain can rise of my telling you the only time I feel fear as others do is when I think of you in harm? That is why I am on this porch, Ivy Walker. I fear for your safety before all others. And yes, I will dance with you on our wedding night.

from The Village (M. Night Shyamalan's best)

"Altered beyond his knowledge"

"Captain Wentworth is not very gallant by you, Anne, though he was so attentive to me. Henrietta asked him what he thought of you, when they went away, and he said, `You were so altered he should not have known you again.'"

Mary had no feelings to make her respect her sister's in a common way, but she was perfectly unsuspicious of being inflicting any peculiar wound.

"Altered beyond his knowledge." Anne fully submitted, in silent, deep mortification. Doubtless it was so, and she could take no revenge, for he was not altered, or not for the worse. She had already acknowledged it to herself, and she could not think differently, let him think of her as he would. No: the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages. She had seen the same Frederick Wentworth.

from Jane Austen's Persuasion (Penguin edition, p. 57)

IMAGE: Photograph by Robert Warren

Louisa May Alcott: "I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls"

"I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man's soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman's body ... because I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man."

(from an 1883 interview with Louise Chandler Moulton)

* * * * *

Quote:

Daughter of educator and reformer Bronson Alcott, raised in the heady intellectual milieu of midcentury Concord, Louisa May Alcott was encouraged in her literary aspirations to a degree unusual in Victorian America. Yet that encouragement was qualified in a variety of ways. Since Bronson and Abba May Alcott strictly monitored their four daughters' development, Louisa's work had to satisfy strict parental standards of philosophical value and moral worth; further, since Bronson was chronically insolvent, her writing had to bring financial rewards to support the family. The larger intellectual world of Concord in which the Alcotts circulated added to this sense of constraint. "To have had Mr. Emerson for an intellectual god all one's life," she once remarked in conversation to a friend, "is to be invested with a chain armor of propriety."

Despite the innovations of her upbringing, in short, Louisa May Alcott came of age in a culture whose moral and familial constraints compounded, rather than undercut, the propriety demanded by Victorian gender ideology. It is no surprise that by age twelve, she registers the "chain armor of propriety" in her journal as a homiletic discourse on the necessities of self-denial: "What are the most valuable kinds of self-denial? Appetite, temper. How is self-denial of temper known? If I control my temper, I am respectful and gentle, and every one sees it. What is the result of this self-denial? Every one loves me, and I am happy." Faithfully copied from her daily lessons, these comments were almost certainly read by her parents; Bronson had been observing Louisa closely since her infancy, while Abba wrote in the same journal entry, "I often peep into your diary, hoping to see some record of more happy days." Even Alcott's private exercise of self-discipline was open to surveillance, in a pedagogy of self-control monitored both internally and externally. Her coming-of-age accords closely with what Richard Brodhead, following Foucault, has termed the "disciplinary intimacy" characteristic of antebellum America, whereby self-imposed restraint lovingly taught by the family, rather than corporal punishment harshly imposed by an external authority, became the privileged mode for disciplining the self. For all the joyful eccentricities of Alcott's early life, she was governed by a self-regulating pedagogy that rewrote the implicitly male credo of Emersonian self-reliance as female self-denial.

In this narrative of female identity as psychic self-regulation, Alcott's work provides insight into the possibilities, metaphoric as well as literal, afforded women by the onset of the Civil War. Alcott's private writings make clear an identification with masculinity that long predated but was energized by the war. At fourteen, for example, she wrote in her journal: "I was born with a boy's spirit under my bib and tucker. I can't wait [for a time] when I can work"; and at twenty-eight she echoed in a letter, "I was born with a boys nature & always had more sympathy for & interest in them than in girls, & have fought my fight for nearly fifteen [years] with a boys spirit under my 'bib & tucker' & a boys wrath when I got 'floored,' so I'm not preaching like a prim spinster but freeing my mind like one of 'our fellows.'" In these quotations, a woman who speaks assertively is immediately suspect--"preaching like a prim spinster"--while maleness, by contrast, signifies a way of working and speaking freely, as much a style as an identity. Long before the war begins, Alcott identifies agency with masculinity, in a culture in which the only way to imagine being a person is to envision being a man.

When war arrives, it offers Alcott a particular psychic charge, since it increases the value of masculine freedom by framing it as patriotic duty. "War declared with the South," she writes in her journal, "I've often longed to see a war, and now I have my wish. I long to be a man; but as I can't fight, I will content myself with working for those who can." At a turning point in her own life, she declares, "Thirty years old. Decided to go to Washington as a nurse. . . . Help needed, and I love nursing, and must let out my pent-up energy in some new way. . . . So I set forth . . . feeling as if I was the son of the house going to war." Metaphorically turning from thirty-year-old "prim spinster" to "son of the house," Alcott grows up in wartime by growing down to her favorite state, that of boyhood. The war, in short, marks Alcott's coming-of-age as a man...

...Alcott's topsy-turvyness implicitly involves inversions of sexuality as well as gender and race. She declared in an interview, for example, that "I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man's soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman's body . . . because I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls, and never once the least bit with any man." Bringing together masculine identification with female object-choice, this passage is startlingly proleptic of the sexological language of the "invert," only just beginning to emerge by the end of Alcott's lifetime, which pathologized the lesbian as a "man's soul trapped in a woman's body." Such codifications were prescriptive rather than descriptive, and Alcott's biographers provide little conclusive evidence about whether she was lesbian. But her comment suggests at minimum her swerve away from the accoutrements of heterosexuality--husband, children, household--which normatively accompanied Victorian womanhood. Thirty and still unmarried when she went to Washington, Alcott was topsy-turvy--or, to use another of her favorite adjectives, "queer"--by virtue of being a permanent spinster as well as a "boyish" girl.

from Elizabeth Young's A Wound of One's Own: Louisa May Alcott's Civil War Fiction
(American Quarterly 48.3 (1996) 439-474)

IMAGE: "Sabinella" by John William Godward

Sunday sermons:
A humorous passage from A Handful of Dust...

The vicar climbed, with some effort, into the pulpit. He was an elderly man who had served in India most of his life. Tony's father had given him the living. He had a noble and sonorous voice and was reckoned the best preacher for many miles around.

His sermons had been composed in his more active days for delivery at the garrison chapel; he had done nothing to adapt them to the changing conditions of his ministry and they mostly concluded with some reference to homes and dear ones far away. The villagers did not find this in any way surprising. Few of the things said in church seemed to have any particular reference to themselves. They enjoyed their vicar's sermons very much and they knew that when he began about their distant homes, it was time to be dusting their knees and feeling for their umbrellas.

"...And so as we stand here bareheaded at this solemn hour of the week," he read, his powerful old voice swelling up for peroration, "let us remember our Gracious Queen Empress in whose service we are here, and pray that she may long be spared to send us at her bidding to do our duty in the uttermost parts of the earth; and let us think of our dear ones far away and the homes we have left in her name, and remember that though miles of barren continent and leagues of ocean divide us, we are never so near to them as on these Sunday mornings, united with them across dune and mountain in our loyalty to our sovereign and thanksgiving for her welfare; one with them as proud subjects of her scepter and crown."

from Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust

Bookish things

Though Mr. Darcy is apparently the ideal romantic hero for many modern women, it would seem that Austen wasn't one to hold out much hope in real-life soulmates:

"There are such beings in the World, perhaps, one in a Thousand, as the Creature You & I should think perfection, where Grace & Spirit are united to Worth, where the Manners are equal to the Heart & Understanding, but such a person may not come in your way, or if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a Man of Fortune, the Brother of your particular friend, & belonging to your own County."

Jane Austen in a letter to her niece, Fanny Knight
(November 18, 1814)

I think I've finished my Jane Austen kick, though there are still a few articles and quotes that I'll probably be posting when I get around to it. I've read Sense & Sensibility, Persuasion, and Emma over the last few weeks. Persuasion was definitely my favorite - Anne Elliot is an endearing, sympathetic heroine and the themes of sadness, regret, and lost youth make the final happy resolution of the story a very satisfying one.

This just leaves Mansfield Park (I've already been through Pride & Prejudice and Northanger Abbey) - which I think I'll save for another time. I bought a copy of MP from Aqua Books the other day but I haven't been able to move past the introductory essay. Mansfield Park is so far my favorite Austen film-adaptation, but supposedly Fanny Price is Austen's most hated heroine.

So instead I've moved on to Heart of Darkness and a Y.A. series by Tamora Pierce that I've been wanting to check out for a long time, ever since I read that it didn't shy away from plotlines related to gender and sex. That's pretty rare for a medieval fantasy series - especially a Young Adult one. (Can you imagine a young character having sex in a Susan Cooper or a Narnia book?)

I'm at a hilarious bit right now where the heroine Alanna has just been given a magical gold pendant that will keep her from getting pregnant indefinitely. (Well, its hilarious to me anyway - in the book I don't think its necessarily meant to be funny.)

Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed

Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven's zone glistering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th'eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime
Tells me from you that now it is bed time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowery meads th'hills shadow steals.
Off with your wiry coronet and show
The hairy diadem which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shoes: and then safely tread
In this love's hallowed temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes heaven's angels used to be
Received by men; thou, Angel, bring'st with thee
A heaven like Mahomet's Paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these Angels from an evil sprite:
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my empery,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be,
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are as Atlanta's balls, cast in men's views,
That when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them:
Like pictures, or like books' gay coverings made
For lay-men, are all women thus arrayed.
Themselves are mystic books, which only we
(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)
Must see revealed. Then, since that I may know,
As liberally as to a midwife, show
Thyself: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,
There is no penance due to innocence:
To teach thee, I am naked first; why than,
What need'st thou have more covering than a man?

by John Donne

Ok, I'm sorry to display my ignorance but when I first read this, I admit my first thought was, "Wow! Who knew John Donne had it in him!!" I had him pegged as being passionate, of course - but passionate only for God! So this was a nice surprise.
However, I'm a huge fan of the first line, but hate the last. My modern female mind construes it as overtly sexist.
And yes, I realize this is a cop-out post - the trouble is that every time I feel like posting in my blog, I'm too tired to actually write something original. Bah!

P.S. Check this out - Rebecca Ann Bach argues that Donne was actually gay. It seems a well written article, but I'm too tired to read it in full now, I'll have to look at it tomorrow.

(The photograph is of Julianne Moore and it's a favorite.)

'Grand, venerable, and sweet, all at once'

"I paused upon the bridge, and admired and wondered at the beauty and glory of this scene...it was grand, venerable, and sweet, all at once; I never saw so lovely and magnificent a scene, nor, being content with this, do I care to see a better."

- Nathaniel Hawthorne on Durham Cathedral, from "The English Notebooks"

(The photos are of Mont Saint Michel from my trip there in April.)

The hilariously hypochondriacal Mr. Woodhouse on the danger of open windows

She was obliged to repeat and explain it, before it was fully comprehended; and then, being quite new, farther representations were necessary to make it acceptable.

"No; he thought it very far from an improvement—a very bad plan—much worse than the other. A room at an inn was always damp and dangerous; never properly aired, or fit to be inhabited. If they must dance, they had better dance at Randalls. He had never been in the room at the Crown in his life—did not know the people who kept it by sight.—Oh! no—a very bad plan. They would catch worse colds at the Crown than any where."

"I was going to observe, sir," said Frank Churchill, "that one of the great recommendations of this change would be the very little danger of any body's catching cold—so much less danger at the Crown than at Randalls! Mr. Perry might have reason to regret the alteration, but nobody else could."

"Sir," said Mr. Woodhouse, rather warmly, "you are very much mistaken if you suppose Mr. Perry to be that sort of character. Mr. Perry is extremely concerned when any of us are ill. But I do not understand how the room at the Crown can be safer for you than your father's house."

"From the very circumstance of its being larger, sir. We shall have no occasion to open the windows at all—not once the whole evening; and it is that dreadful habit of opening the windows, letting in cold air upon heated bodies, which (as you well know, sir) does the mischief."

"Open the windows!—but surely, Mr. Churchill, nobody would think of opening the windows at Randalls. Nobody could be so imprudent! I never heard of such a thing. Dancing with open windows!—I am sure, neither your father nor Mrs. Weston (poor Miss Taylor that was) would suffer it."

"Ah! sir—but a thoughtless young person will sometimes step behind a window-curtain, and throw up a sash, without its being suspected. I have often known it done myself."

"Have you indeed, sir?—Bless me! I never could have supposed it. But I live out of the world, and am often astonished at what I hear. However, this does make a difference; and, perhaps, when we come to talk it over—but these sort of things require a good deal of consideration. One cannot resolve upon them in a hurry. If Mr. and Mrs. Weston will be so obliging as to call here one morning, we may talk it over, and see what can be done."

from Jane Austen's Emma
(Chapter 29)

It may be possible to do without dancing entirely...

"It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind;—but when a beginning is made—when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt—it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more.

Frank Churchill had danced once at Highbury, and longed to dance again; and the last half hour of an evening which Mr. Woodhouse was persuaded to spend with his daughter at Randalls, was passed by the two young people in schemes on the subject..."

from Jane Austen's Emma

(Illustration artist unknown)

The Fist

The fist clenched round my heart
loosens a little, and I gasp
brightness; but it tightens
again. When have I ever not loved
the pain of love? But this has moved

past love to mania. This has the strong
clench of the madman, this is
gripping the ledge of unreason, before
plunging howling into the abyss.

Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

by Derek Walcott


(I find it interesting that the person this reminds me of is also the same person who told me they disliked all poetry. How is that even possible...??)