Mary Rowlandson

To shift gears a bit, I want to write briefly on one of my required texts for the semester: A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. I have done remarkably little reading from the 17th century (Rowlandson’s narrative is set in the 1670s), likely because for some time, I found the little pre-1800s reading that I did inaccessible and devoid of pleasure. However, the farther along I get in graduate school, the more I find history, specifically American history, exciting. Rowlandson’s narrative, in turn, becomes fun to read as one moment of insight into tensions within the colonies.

This is not to say that I have a new found love of all things early American. John Winthrop and William Bradford simply don’t do it for me. What I enjoy about Rowlandson is the instability of her narrative. Certainly, it helps that it’s a short piece; this means that the constant detailing of what she eats (and what food is withheld from her) offers insight into the changes she experiences as a captive, without being rehearsed to the point of inanity. But even more intriguing are the constant shifts in her experience and perspective.

While Rowlandson explains her experiences as constantly shifting because her Indian captors are fickle, the changes seem to point to failures of communication, instead or as well. Neither she nor her captors seem to know quite how to define her role in their community. She is repeatedly paid (typically in food) to make garments for the Indians (especially shirts), but in another moment she is forced to give up her own apron to escape a beating. Two Indians bring back goods for her from her community, but become angry and threaten violence when she sells the tobacco without giving any to them. No one seems quite certain whether she is a servant or a slave, someone to trade with or commander from.

There is, arguably, a parallel instability in Rowlandson’s religious characterization of her experiences. She sees God’s role in her experiences in two primary ways: the pain she receives is intended by him to reform her and the pain the Indians receive is a punishment of their sins. These assertions share a sense that transgressions may be punished, yet they differ in that Rowlandson sees the pain whites experience as potentially leading to their redemption while that of the Indians simply confirms their unreedemably savage nature. Admittedly, it is unsurprising to see that she assumes those who identify as Christian are being reformed, while those who do not are being punished, that she unflaggingly reads the same forms of pain inflicted on two different groups in these two different ways suggests her need to assert that there is a clear purpose behind the experiences of those in the colonies.

These two topics both convey the sense of instability that may well have permeated the lives of colonists (and perhaps Indians). Rowlandson finds ways to make sense of her experiences, by defining the character of the Indians and the aims of God. Yet, she reiterates each instance of her constantly shifting interactions and each instance in which bad and good befall those around her. Before describing her return to her husband, she even pauses to catalogue the ways in which her experiences reflect on God. Her catalogue of interactions suggests a driving need to make sense of each moment. The force behind this analyzing and categorizing is what draws me to this narrative as offering insight into the wonder and confusion and terror the colonists’ experienced and the ways they found a framework to make such events seem more predictable.

Jane Austen

To return to my summer course, I also taught Austen’s Persuasion. In part, I wanted to teach one of the Austen novels that seems to be assigned less often. I also thought my students would find the social criticism in it more readily apparent than it sometimes can be in Emma or even Pride and Prejudice. That criticism was, indeed, accessible to them–many wrote about their sense that Austen valued the navy over the aristocracy. In general, I think characters like Sir Walter Elliot are one of Austen’s delightful sources of humor. However, our emphasis on Austen’s adulation of the navy began to feel almost dull (perhaps because we didn’t more closely consider the war that would follow the narrative or the faintly absurd pop star status naval officers acquire for the Musgrove daughters).

The ambiguity that did surface over the course of our discussions was what Austen seems to make of Anne’s past. Some passages, in which Anne criticizes Lady Russell’s advice against her engagement to Wentworth before he attains a fortune, made students confident that Anne regrets her earlier decision. Yet in another moment, Anne insists that she did not act wrongly, nor does she “blame” Lady Russell. That she marries a wealthier Wentworth in the end suggests her decision was not so troubling, after all. These moments leave me wondering whether Anne arrives at any firm conclusions about her past, or whether the novel invites one particular reading of the events.

I find this ambiguity engaging. Anne refuses to criticize with any command her own past or the attachment to the past that Lady Russell represents, as the close friend of Anne’s dead mother. This is striking given Anne’s ultimate association with change and the future: she happily marries a self-made man, who realizes she still loves him in the midst of her playful diatribe on the social conditions of women’s lives. Instead of an estate, they procure a carriage and soon, likely, a war ship. But still, the past is important to her. Austen mocks Sir Walter through his obsession with his ancestry and his vast collection of mirrors. But she grants Anne a profound nostalgia for her mother. The buried past (figuratively meaning Anne’s rejection of Wentworth and literally meaning Lady Elliot) holds more weight for Anne than do its living  embodiments (Sir Walter and the continually open Baronetage).

I think I like this because it offers Anne something, besides a self-important family, to struggle with. She regains her beauty, receives both the sincere admiration of the prodigal heir and the more idyllic love of her former fiance, and even marries into money. That she may not be able to provide a consistent narrative of the past and that her aristocratic heritage still holds meaning for her, make her more sympathetic. For ultimately, they soften Austen’s apparent insistence on the beauty and rightness of the navy and the future.

Zadie Smith

This past summer I taught English 212: British Literature from 1800-Present for the first time. Reflecting on which of the texts was my favorite to teach, I’d have to say it’s a toss up between Mrs. Dalloway and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. While many of my students said they learned the most from the former (thanks to Woolf’s modernist style), many of them seemed to find the most pleasure in the latter. Rereading the novel for class I found myself laughing aloud and paraphrasing it in conversation. Smith, at least via her characters, mocks academics and glee clubs, fake Brooklyn accents and psychobabble. Not only are these things ripe for ridicule, but Smith’s ridicule of a world in which I participate in, admittedly, flattering.

The novel was satisfying to teach not only because my students liked it, but also because I’d never read it in a class before. This made my anticipation of their responses to it somewhat nerve wracking; would they see legitimate reasons to bring the novel into the classroom? But it also meant that when they asked and answered questions about the relationship between the politics and the personal lives, about the significance of the ending, that I was more curious to hear them. It was easier to still the sense that I needed to guide them toward particular readings.They often responded emphatically to characters, confident in their assessments of them and their assertions of what they ought to do. But they also let these readings change over the course of the novel, nor did they feel compelled to agree with one another about the extent to which Smith allows for change and growth in her characters. While I expected my students to move beyond likes and dislikes in their analysis, I was excited by the attachment to the novel that these reactions suggested.

On a more personal level, I was attached to its rich allusiveness. Not only does it encourage reading and rereading, but it also creates this network of beauty. Smith makes paintings, poetry, rap, classical music, and film, to name a few, integral parts of the novel. She gives us a litany of beautiful objects. Some are familiar, some new, which seems just right. The writing is both a reminder of the known beauty and an invitation to explore the unknown beauty. When she integrates Jeff Buckley’s song “Hallelujah” into a family story, I am reminded of its loveliness. But I don’t have the ready image of Rembrandt’s Hendrickje Bathing, and so if I explore it, can add that to my own inventory.

Further, she calls for an investigation of beauty itself. Perhaps, in part the text offers the inspiration for my own attempts here to write simply about what I like. I want to learn how to do that, so that I can integrate it into my academic writing of close reading and historicism. Without simply saying, this is good writing, that, bad writing, I want my readers (once I have them) to see both that I am writing about texts for their ability to help us understand culture and so forth, and because there is pleasure in them.

Michael Chabon

In notes on other writers on which I am not becoming an expert, I read and really, really liked Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union this summer. I already liked Chabon, thanks to Kavalier and Clay. But given my impressive ability to forget everything specific about books that I don’t discuss, it was good to read something new of his, to have something to tie to these vague good feelings. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is different, of course. It fits nicely within the detective novel genre while replacing often cringe-worthy potboiler language with his delightful writing, full of precise words and sometimes crazily expansive metaphors.

When I was younger–perhaps middle school and/or high school–I read a number of page-turner novels, from John Grisham to Michael Crichton. That seems to have made suspense-writing pleasantly familiar, nostalgia-inducing. I find the smart but self-destructive and often wounded detective a comfortable protagonist, even as Chabon affords this particular protagonist (Meyer Landsman) amusingly bizarre foibles. This type calls to mind my very different father, perhaps as another embodiment of middle-aged masculinity. More likely because the novels I read, at first surreptitiously, were his.

As I consider how this book makes me think of my father, I am reminded that one of my favorite passages is a family metaphor:

Landsman gives Berko a look that is meant to remind him not of his age and station in life but of the manifest uncoolness of bickering with one’s relatives. It’s an old and well-worn facial expression dating from the time of Berko’s first strife-filled years with the Landsmans. It never takes longer than a few minutes , whenever they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That’s what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts. (Chabon 308-09)

This passage reminded of how when I walk around campus, I can often tell immediately when students (who I don’t know) are on the phone with their parents. There is a tone of sheer exasperation, like that I imagine Berko using in the lines preceding this passage. And it is supremely uncool. Not the less so because it reminds me of a tone I’ve heard myself use. But more than that, what I love is the sprawl of the metaphor. Chabon deliberately halting a sentence and beginning the next with “And,” calling attention to the mutliplicity of the family’s significance and roles, of their crazedness, of the difficulty of capturing this dynamic. In the sprawl Chabon calls up that frustration with the family, even more their potential deadliness to one another, but also their potential to create drunken revels, and, finally, life. It steers around trite, to a place both humorous and true.

Finally, it is also the family Landsman creates that endears this novel to me. His ex-wife, Bina Gelbfish, is probably one of the strongest female characters in a detective novel I have read. Yes, she is strong and capable and returns to town as her ex-husband’s boss at the police department. But Chabon makes her strength most interesting in the way that Landsman is able simultaneously to admire and to forget it. He is so confident that he knows just where their marriage went wrong, what he did, and what failed as a result. And we, as readers who follow him closely throghout the novel, come to assume that he is right. But she provides the reminder of other perspectives, that their mistakes were more complex because shared. She challenges our ability to pin down one simple, seemingly inevitable narrative of why things go wrong. And we believe her challenge to that narrative because we remember again that she is so strong he could not have controlled their marriage and their losses alone.

So strangely, the dark, often lonely detective story is pleasurable to me because it is, here, about family. I like it for other reasons, too. In particular, for the suspense and for Chabon’s management of interweaving plot threads and contrivances. But it is unsurpising that this story–about a detective who pursues a murder case because the victim reminds him of himself and his family–finds its power in its ability to characterize family and to invite my identification with and sympathy for these families.

Virginia Woolf

Eating lunch with a friend yesterday I mentioned that Virginia Woolf’s writing offers me one of those essential reminders of why I’m pursuing a PhD in Literature. In some ways, a terrifying thought as my choice to specialize in 19th century American literature excludes her from my field of study in two ways! Still, she is a source of pleasure that feels more genuine than my sometimes concerted efforts to appreciate literature that’s both “relevant” and not already taken, like Melville’s Pierre.

The pleasure of Mrs. Dalloway, in particular, comes from the ability of her sentences and words to change the cadence of my thoughts, to lengthen their rhythm. I picked up Friday Night Lights today, having enjoyed the first season of the TV show, looking to be enthralled by more of the high stakes high school drama. And yet, I found myself skimming. The opening stage work Bissinger crafts of the town’s historical context left me wanting to skip ahead, to jump into the relationships, conflicts, renegotiations of how each character will fit into the lives and minds of the others. Woolf, meanwhile, holds my attention—my mind—by opening with these relationships, by making them central throughout the novel. But more than that, she makes the internal reflections on these relations a narrative, one that does not feel the smaller for being about reflection and reaction. She slows my thoughts to linger in the twists and turns of others minds.

Of Rezia, watching her husband withdraw into his own mind full of crazy-seeming platitudes and discoveries and images of WWI comabat: “To love makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus now, and looking back, she saw him sitting in his shabby overcoat alone, on the seat, hunched up, staring. And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus now” (23).  In Woolf’s hands Septimus’s narrative is compelling, his loathing for the doctors who approach him to contain him, contagious. But she also gives us Rezia, isolated by Septimus’s disappearance into him mind and by her own foreignness. She gives us both his impulse to die and the sorrow its expression creates.  Here is the power of another’s words to alter the world, of another’s perspective to shake and isolate.

Thus, Woolf consistently shows the power, the import of the characters’ changing and repeating words to one another. Offhand remarks, insults, complaints, proclamations become talismans, repeated and re-imbued with meaning. Richard Dalloway declares, “My name is Dalloway,” only to have his words repeated by Peter and Sally, and finally defended (or at least cordoned off from mockery) by Clarissa. They move from an offhand remark, meant to establish his relationship with Clarissa more properly, to a way of defining the difference between the proper Richard and Clarissa’s more daring/demanding friends, and finally to a way of asserting Clarissa’s alliance with him.

By extension, the reactions to the words that are spoken and repeated also become weighty. Again, we have both Septimus’s declaration of suicide and Rezia’s subsequent sense of isolation. Alongside Clarissa’s protective gesture, we see Peter’s subsequent knowledge that she would marry not him, but Richard. The conclusion to this novel is not an event, not even Mrs. Dalloway’s long anticipated party, but one character’s surge of feeling for another. That such an ending, a fleeting thought in just one of the many minds that the novel explores, is beautiful and satisfying here, suggests Woolf created a novel which make such thoughts, as well as the words and images to which they respond, of incredible value.