Yeats – September 1913 (1914)

From the volume Responsibilities (1914), which continues the move away from magical Irish past in Green Helmet, but now explicitly linking that move to the political environment of the day. The first epigraph “In dreams begin responsibility” can be read as a direct overhaul of his previous ideas concerning the role of poetry and the poet (cf. Wandering Aengus). in his essay on the volume, Pound would declare that Yeats had struck “a new note,” more harsh and severe–apparent in “minor ways” in the Green Helmet collection.

“September 1913” refers to the workers strike, which for Yeats is directly linked to “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone.” The opening describes in sordid detail the miserliness characteristic of Ireland’s rulers (“fumble in greasy til / And add the halfpence to the pence”). He laments the squandered deaths of particular Irish heroes by name–looking forward to the specificity of citation that will arise in other late poems. Formally,the four stanzas comprised of eight lines of alternating verse. But after the first stanza, the rhymes begin to break down (kind/wind; again/pain; were/hair). Yeats is working in a form struggling against its material. Crucially, this poem is about Ireland not living up to it Romantic past; Yeats is not saying that such a past did not exist or is not interesting. He is locating an historical rupture. The final stanze looks back to “No Second Troy,” when it accuses “You” of consigning the uprising to a unbridled passion inspired by “some woman’s yellow hair.” Yeats is saying, no, that sort of use of history and myth is not appropriate to explaining the workers strike of 1913.

Yeats – The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1893)

Part of the Yeats’ second volume “The Rose” published in 1893. The poem is thought to have been composed in 1890. Takes the first-person pronoun as voice and assigns it action (“I will arise and go now”) in the sense that it takes or at least looks forward to responsibility. But the future undercuts the vision of the lake; in the final stanza, the present enters as check to the imagination:

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shorel
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s cove.

Along with the present comes the intrusion of “pavements grey,” which highlights the material necessity of actually traveling to such a locale (i.e. this is not in the imagination only!). Also, earlier, the cabin has already “of clay and wattles [been] made,” which shows that the vision of the lake has already been constructed before the poet enters the landscape. The present is thus a sticking point that cannot be escaped. But the “deep heart’s cove” does open a spatial coordinate that might offset the temporal constriction at least within the realm of poetic creation.

Yeats – The Song of Happy Shepherd (1889)

The opening poem of  Yeats’ first volume, Crossways, which was dedicated to A.E. with an epigraph from William Blake: “The stars are threshed, and the souls are threshed from their husks.” The poem calls attention to the insufficiency of the stars for guidance, and in their place recommends the use of words (“Words along are certain good” gets repeated), however cracked language may be. “Then nowise worship dusty deeds” is a call to leave beyond the mythology of “warring kings” who have for their glory now only “an idle word.” They may be old and dusty, but the present is threatened more violently:

The wandering of the earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.

Just an early call for the writing of poetry that is appropriate to the conditions of the present. Adopts the image of the shell only to call for the poet to speak into it rather than hold it up to the ear. Connect all this to the Blake epigram.

 

Elizabeth Gaskell – Mary Barton (1848)

Mary is the daughter of John Barton, a worker that is actively involved in the labor movement and is critical of the current means of wealth distribution. His wife dies (along with all of his other children) in the first few chapters, leaving him with Mary, who becomes the object of Jem Wilson’s affection (anothe honest laborer) and Henry Carson’s affection (the son of Carson, the tycoon that runs the show in Manchester). Esther, the sister of Barton’s wife, returns to warn him to save Mary but he ignores her. Carson won’t marry Mary, and Jem knocks him down. Carson is killed and Jen is arrested on suspicion, but Mary (after seeing the piece of paper with her name on it) realizes that her father committed the crime (he was randomly selected to do so by his quai-anarchist Chartists). She tries to get an alibi and only barley catches Will Ladislaw’s ship before it leaves for another voyage. In court, Will returns just in time and Jem is found not guilty, but Mary swoons and almost does not recover. Eventually Barton confesses to Carson that he killed his son but he explains his motives as part of the poor fighting against the rich. Carson reads the Bible and decides nto to prosecute, and Barton dies in his hands. Jem and Mary get married and move to Canada. Margaret (a friend of Mary and a great singer) gets back her sight and marries Will.

Depiction of the working class from the perspective of the working class. She claims her original impetus in the Preface: “when I bethought me how deep might be the romance in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets of the town i resided.” To this end, the first half of the novel is devoted to “vivid” portraits of daily life in contrast to the sumptuous excess of the Carsons, while the second half of the novel revolves around the murder plot. There is an insistence on the maternal aspect of the working poor (men themselves must become maternal) as opposed to coldness of bourgeoisie.

Characterization is typical Gaskell, who attempts to create characters that are out of her control. A good example is Mary swooning in the court scene. The attempt to make them “life like” will be taken up in various ways by Eliot in particular, but not so much by Dickens or even James.

The mode of observing the streets at street level is merged with more abstract generalization. The convergence is on what we might call “personally verifiable material”–objective facts gathered through authorial experience. There is this an increased physicality and attention to detail that links her with someone like Engels. All this leads towards the goal of conveying “a sense of the real,” in Gaskell’s own words.

The mob: More prevalent in North and South, but the revolutions of the late 40s certainly registers as being connected to the struggles of the working class poor, and the fear that this will disrupt English stability.

The Chartists made demands fueled by economic hardship and fueled by the Corn Laws, which kept the price of gild high.

In terms of narrative, there is an attention to the interplay between knowing and speaking. Various characters can know things and don’t speak them, while others speak without knowing. Both are dangerous. Gaskell herself admits to knowing nothing about Political Economy, but goes on speaking about. The narrator has the most confident voice, but language itself repeatedly fails–perhaps pointing in the end, to a call for better listening above all.

Brigid Lowe (2005) uses Henry James dictum–the novelist is someone “upon whom nothing is lost”–as a way of locating Gaskell at the beginning of a tradition that stretches past James and into Joyce: the figure of the realist novelist who not only orders materials, but gathers and amasses detail. Woolf would complain about this impulse to focus on the trivial (an imposition of a modernist aesthetic peculiarly masculine according to Lowe), even though Gaskell’s attention to concrete detail is what earned her praise, and admiration from the like of George Eliot. Mary Barton in particular claims that workers are the fit subject for literature, in a way similar (but different) to Dicken’s attempt in Bleak House to look at the Romantic side of ordinary life. Pity is not always called for overtly, but the reader is able to feel poverty’s encroachment. In Mary Barton, there is still the hope that classes will be reunited into a social whole. In North and South, in response to criticisms that her first novel was one-sided or overly optimistic, Gaskell would portray the goal of various innovations (of factory owners) as hopefully softening the violence between classes. But the ending of that novel is not so hopeful, as the owner becomes churned up in the very turbulence of financial misery he sought ameliorate by reform, etc.

William M. Thackeray – Vanity Fair (1848)

Becky Sharpe (marries Rawdon Crawley) and Amelia Sedley (marries Geroge Osborne and later Major Dobbin) are central characters. Jos Sedley is a gourmand who lives in colonies, a parody of King George, I think. Younger George Osborne and Rawdon Crawly replace Becky and Emmy, but with equalized social positions; Lady Jane (married to Sir Pitt) replaces Becky as the mother.

 

Form is sloppy, vulgar, corporeal, rambling, unformed  Contrast with Henry Esmond

Authorial (narratorial) interventions: 88 (on insignificance of chapter, content), 109 (on privacy, concealment), 116 (on title), 117 (on characters), 154 (on form, digression), 198 (on cause and effect: determinate effects of narrative; cf. Cynthia Chase and D.A. Miller), 220 (advice for women, e.g.), 293 (non-chronological temporal ordering), 310 (on marriage in novels), 453 (fortune), 493 (funerals: occasion for clustering vanities; cf. Middlemarch funeral), 586 (the “best”) , 650 (dissection of affect), 663 (more advice), 721 (narrator comes out, enters stream of narrative), 792 (the “last page),

Implicating Reader: 572 (allowed to choose at feast), 583 (can’t enter upper echelons of society), 660 (I can see Vanity Fair yawning: ambiguity of “vanity fair” personae), 750 (ambiguous “we”),

Hero/Heroine: 353 (“If this is a novel without a hero, at least let us lay claim to a heroine”), 659 (female martyrdom), 798 (“She has her enemies…Her life is answer to them”)

Proliferating list: 104 (dinner), 589 (satirical dinner party list; cf. Joyce)

Novel dominated by exchange principle. 438-9 (secrets of living on nothing: effects on working class—the base-line currency of exchange principle and exploitation), 467 (deceiving others about means), 715 (Jewish slight, one of many),

Veiling, concealment, knowledge: 100 (active veil thrown over event), 389 (the novelist knows all), 440 (on unknowability of women’s fashion), 583 (can’t enter upper echelons of society: “tremble before those august portals”), 592 (the possibilities generated by veiling: connect to potentiality of debt; cf. Sedgwick and Francois on Open Secrets), 621 (Rawdon exposes Becky’s private papers), 738-40 (truth/falsity of Becky’s story; selective representation), 759 (active veling, “skipping”)

History: 214 (grand events connect to insignificance characters; cf. Gwendolen in Deronda ‘thread’), 420 (war tourism),

Transience: 584 (who doesn’t like roast beast even though it’s transient), 685 (Jos’s eating), 725 (how characters age),

Education: Advantage of Georgy’s education, 720 (Amelia’s vulgar education)

 

Jane Austen – Sense and Sensibility (1811)

The novel can be summarized by listing a whole bunch of doubles: thematic, ideological, charaterological, etc. In short, Marianne Dashwood, with much “sensibility,” is educated into being more sensible, like her sister, Elinor Dashwood. The parallel lives of these sisters, one marrying the reserved, old Colonel Brandon and the other the somewhat irresolute, flaky Edward Ferrars, constitute the plot. Willoughby, who picks up and drops Marianne, is a free radical of sorts, playing double to many different characters. How he is read determines the interpretation of the novel as whole (much like the reading of Heathcliff determines Wuthering Heights).

The setting moves between Delaford, Barton, and London, the latter being completely fraught with chaotic social upheavel and emotional crises. THe countryside is pastoral in all the expected ways. There is a long discourse on COTTAGES, which are at once picturesque and genuinely authentic emblems of simple, rustic, moral living, but also (in Robert Ferrars’ judgment) objects of tourism and vacation…

The novel is in dialogue with Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Elinor and Brandon epitomize Smith’s ideal of deservedness and propriety, concealing emotion and accommodating expressiveness according to the given situation—the betterment of the community is first and oremost. Marianne (with a name that harkens back to the French revolution and the jacobins) is dangerously individualistic, and this also turns out to be Willoughby’s error, rather malicious deceit. Likewise, Fanny Dashwood (wife of Elinor and Marianne’s brother John) and Lucy Steele (one time lover of Edward and later wide of Robert) are portraits of individualistic and selfish desire gone unchecked. [Put this in dialogue with the shifting attitudes to community in Wuthering Heights as it moves between romantic and Victorian mores…)

Connect Smith with larger tropes of concealment, veiling, propriety, etc.

Narration: Imbedded narrators include Willoughby (competent self-narrator), Brandon (awkward narrator), Mrs. Jennings (rumor mill), and others. Austen imbeds these narrators and uses them to focalize and counter-focalize the action. There is also an explicit training of the reader, especially in the mode of correct comparison—which demands not only the correct drawing of contrasts, but also the correct choice of binary. Reader is trained alongside Marianne.

Cause and Effect (Cynthia Chase) is complicated in the novel.

Eliza, an orphan loved by Brandon and disabused by Willougby, is yet another portrait of the problems of urbanism. Counterpoint Petter Brooks’ claim that orphan status represents social mobility and possibility rather than misery.

Edward, like Daniel Deronda, is unemployed and undirected man to begin with, and needs other to set his course for him. This is the case with many characters: their happy outcomes are shownt o be the explicit result of a social web that is not entirely savory. Elinor and Edward’s union is premised on Lucy’s selfish ambition.

Charles DIckens – David Copperfield (1850)

David Copperfield (son of D. Copperfield the elder, who dies) is born to Clara. Against Miss. Peggotty’s and Betsey Trotwood’s wishes, Clara marries Murdstone, who along with his sister, “kills” Clara (and her second baby) and leaves David to fend for himself in London. The first 15 chapters include his initial disciplining (Salem House, etc.), including his friendships with Steerforth and Traddles, his lodging with the insolvent Mr. Micawber; but he runs away to his aunt’s place and eventually lands, through the help of Wickfield, in a comfortable school in Dover under the tutelage of Mr. Strong. He meets Agnes, the boring lady whom he’ll evnetually marry (after Dora dies). He battles with Uriah throughout for his good name. Steerforth seduces his childhood friend Emily (part of the Peggattoy family living on the boat at Yarmouth) and then abandons her. her whole family will move to Australia to escape the disgrace. Steerforth drowns in a shipwreck. Micawber indicts Uriah for stealing from Wickfield. Mr. Dick, a simpleton, solves the martial problems of Mr. and Mrs. Annie Strong (who almost had an affair with a sailor/childhood friend). David marries Agnes in the end and has a bunch of kids. The book closes with a scene of writing.

Memory: Can be read as critique of Wordsworthian mnemonics. instead of recollecting in tranquility, we could take the Wolf Man paradigm (David bites Murdstone and wears a beware of dog sign around for a while), which claims that memory is constantly being made according to the psychological demands of the present. Perhaps connect this to Peter Brooks argument.

Time: The tense oscillates between past and present. The “Recollections” are done in the present, but are describing past scenes. The compresses the affective registers of experience and writing. Recollections could be thought of as a way of compensating for experience that could not be previously ordered by the phenomenological subject. So he narrates in the “present tense” as a way of patching over the inability of the past tense to contain various affective experiences such as an engagement with Dora, etc. The book also dramatizes those times when the past tense is breaking down without the solution of the retrospect. When he is drunk, the phenomenological subject is split, which double the spilt between the narrating subject and the narrated. Given this, we could talk about how time solves a spatial (identity) problem.

Names: David has a bunch of names given to him by other characters. This diagetic naming  is different from early phase, marks transition to Bleak House and Mutual Friend. Dick lives up to his name Richard–fulfills its potential.

Novelistic Convention: David is constantly imagining himself as the hero in a romance…but again, it’s unclear whether this imagining is taking place in the temps de recit or the temps d’histoire. Is this a continuation of Romanticism or a laying bare of its mechanism?

Sleep: Moments of falling asleep are crucial psychological moments, interesting in terms of the capacity fro dreaming (backwards and/or forwards)

Homosexual bonds – David is constantly described as effeminate (by both characters and critics), and he fulfills many of the domestic roles of a Victorian female heroine. Further, Steerforth acts as a threat that needs to be fully repressed as perverse (unweidly and therefore expendable) for David to move from Dora straight to the boring Agnes. On top of all this, his aunt treats him like the girl he always wanted him to be.

Autobiography – Compare to JS Mill in terms of the Bildungsroman.

Foils, repression, subjectivity – Littimer and Heep, two doubles of David (infact, productions of his unconscious) need to be produced by the social-text in order to adequately effect David’s consolidated ego. Int his way, the prison becomes a synecdoche for the text (even if that very social system–its ineffective at change) is what Dickens wants to bring under critique.

Imbedded Critiques, excised characters – Micawber (sorta like Skimpole in Bleak House) is used to critique the Victorian system of capital that constantly excises him. other unassimilable character (Steerforth, Rosa Dartle, Heep, Annie) are let fall, killed off, showing the embarrassment of a fictional writer attempting to uphold bourgeois norms–but also, at the same, registering the sensitivity to passions that, however muffled, live in these pages.

Mr. Dick is a case of trauma that runs into desire that is no longer bound to the original loss. Condensation and displacement becomes goods in themselves.

Secondary – David Copperfield

In David Copperfield, Dickens is attempting to create a masculine version of the domestic novel by writing a novel about a male writer who successfully transforms domestic space into economic space, while retaining the domestic novel’s traditional association with moral uplift. Dickens is claiming that a man can write a better domestic novel than a woman can, which provokes his contemporaries as well as ours into accusing Dickens of gender confusion: both have a habit of calling Dickens “effeminate.” The violence of these reactions should lead us to question the role of the male writer in the nineteenth century.

“Re-gendering the Domestic Novel in David Copperfield,” Emily Rena-Dozier (2010)

This essay first examines a variety of complex Victorian responses to the promise and problem of a conjugal heaven and then unfolds the eschatology of David Copperfield. The seemingly conservative language of Victorian angelology unexpectedly allows for David’s fantasy that he will share heaven with his two sequential wives.

“Soul-Mates: David Copperfield’s Angelic Bigamy,” Maia McAleavey (2010)

The strongly plotted novel David Copperfield distinguishes itself from [Mr. Dick’s] kites it describes, though Mr. Dick’s name pointedly invites a comparison to Dickens’s own writing. Ultimately Mr. Dick presents a “line of flight”—a schizophrenic alternative to the patterns of writing, subjectivity, desire, and temporality embraced by the other characters and the novel as a whole.

“Desiring-Production and the Novel,” Lorri Neandra (2010)

Dickens’s figures belong to poetry, like figures of Dante or Shakespeare, in that a single phrase, either by them or about them, may be enough to set them wholly before us.

Selected Essays, T.S. Eliot

Rosa can be understood, then, not only as typifying but as allegorizing Dickens’s means of characterization in general. This is particularly notable in the scar, the expressive use of the scar, and the gestures surrounding it. First of all, the scar, Rosa’s characteristic feature, overwhelms the whole of her character: the scar is overcharged with expressiveness in relation to her other features, and her representation is overcharged with the feature of the scar. Secondly, the essential features of Rosa’s character are set against the ego or secondary processes of the personality or individual. Thirdly, like many of Dickens’s characters’ characteristic traits, Rosa’s take the form of an impediment, a distortion or disfiguration of realistically, mimetically represented character. This last quality did not fail to unsettle those of his audience who expected mimetic characterization or to bring much criticism upon Dickens from his bourgeois contemporaries…. The scar inflicted upon mimesis is thus not simply an aggressive gesture but a means of, as it were, subverting the mimetic bind on subjectivity in order to achieve an expressiveness repressed by the very form of realism. In the gesture of defacing Rosa’s portrait—precisely the gesture which marks the representation with its subjectivity (“The painter hadn’t made the scar, but I made it”)—Dickens repeats his own desire to subvert the image of totality implied in mimetic representation by exposing the scar, the aporia, of the subject that it represses.

“The ‘Unbearable Realism of a Dream’: The Subject of Portraits in Austen and Dickens,” Alexander Bove (2007)

In The Novel and the Police, D.A. Miller biefly traces the several stages of David’s early disciplining (212-13), and goes on to show in his profession as writer is at once liberated and imprisoned. What is missing from this story is how the various forms of overt discipline to which David is subject in the frist twelve chapters–family, education, and work–reappear, disguised as liberal humanitarianism…. In other words, David’s arrival at the comfortable middle-class haven of Dover Cottage and his subsequent experiences, far from being “another beginning” as the title to chapter 15 states, is a continuation of the more obviously coercive disciplining suffered at the hands of his early persecutors.

“Foucault, Dickens and David Copperfield,” Gareth Cordery (1998)

Dickens shows how a name imposed in the economy of power and desire pushes a person into an expression of that name. but he also shows how the essence to which a truen name refers pushes back on that economy with the moral force of truth.

“The Gentleman’s True Name: David Copperfield and the Philosophy of Naming,” Joseph Bottum (1995)

 

Oscar Wilde – Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

The young and beautiful Dorian Gray becomes Basil Hallward’s artistic muse. Lordy Henry meets and corrupts him with his deacadent cynicism. Dorian wishes that he will never age, and after some time, the Basil’s portrait begins to shown the signs of his age. He falls in love with Subyl Vane, gets engaged, but when she fails to act well in front of Basil and Lord Henry, he withdraws his offer and scorns he. She commits suicide. Dorian becomes increasingly decadent but never ages. Rumors spread about his infamy. Basil comes to give advice. Dorian show him the now gruesome portrait before violently murdering him. Dorian calls his friend Campbell to melt the body down…and threatens to reveal his “secret” if he does not. He goes on an opium binge outside of London. He encounters James Sibyl, who tries to kill him, but is fortuitously shot during a hunting outing. Dorian can’t bear his guilt, vowing to be good, he tries to slash the portrait but is found, a withered old man, stabbed to death.

Time/Portrait/Narrative – One way to frame Dorian’s fear of aging is a fear of narrative in general. Couch within a broader discussion of portraiture around the turn of the century. Commitment to static, non-literary form begins usurp 19^th-century forms of plotting. Contrast with James’ Portrait of a Lady and Joyce’s Portrait/Stephen Hero. Also, the form of the novel is epiphanic, a collection of moments, strung together by social episodes, letters, etc….the formalities requires by the social and plot itself. One can see both deteriorating.

Actor/Spectator – Several times, Dorian suddenly becomes a spectator rather than actor in his own affairs. Read this as a perfected and perverted form of Smith and Hume’s early development of the impartial spectator. What does it mean to be entirely impartial to your own and other’s actions? Couch within discussion of decadence and aesthetic distance.

Art/Life – Dorian conceptual categories are dominated by theatrical and literary clichés, which mediate his relation to both himself and to others. Sibyl exhausts her potential by performing, consecutively, all the Shakespearean heroines. Simialrly, Basil represents Dorian in a variety of poses, dressed up as Hellenistic, Roman, etc..

More broadly, Paterian, Jamesian and Huysmanian ideas about relationship between art and life surface. Is art a separate sphere? What is the harm of making one’s life into a work of art? Wilde’s philosophically rich aesthetics foreshadows discussion of modernist aesthetics of autonomy in works like Portrait/Hero, Tarr, Eliot-Pound-Hulme-Ford essays, etc.

Concealment – an updated for of 19^th-century concealment. No longer the secret that needs to be decoded for the plot to unfurl and become transparent, but secrets become “open” (Sedgewick, ALF)—and they are not benign, rather, they can be forced on others and used for the purposes of manipulation. Further, portraits are concealed, faces, etc…

Sensorium – Lord Henry and Dorian become exemplars of Paterian decadence in their pursuit of bodily sensation. At one point, Dorian, to relive himself of boredom, explores perfume, drapery, etc. in order to satisfy all the senses. Actively unseats vision as the primary mediator of outside world.

Society – Important plot moments are narrated off-scene through dialogue

Bram Stoker – Dracula (1897)

Joanthan Harker goes to Transylvania as a young solicitor and is held captive by Count Dracula. He is prevented from writing to his boss and his wife-to-be, Mina Murray. Meanwhile Lucy Westerna, best friend of Mina Murray, becomes engaged to Arthur Godalming, after turning down John Seward (director of an insane asylum) and Quincey Morris (an impetuous but kind American). Soon after Harker escapes, and goes to convalesce, Dracula starts to suck Lucy’s blood. Van Helsing is called from Holland by Sward to help. Eventually, Lucy becomes a vampire and they have to cut off her head. Dracual has come to London and they start to track him down, sterilizing the 50 coffins that he has imported from Transylvania (full of that native earth). He eventually flees to Romania, but not before vamping on the angelic Mina Murray, now married to the fully recovered Harker. They set off, using hypnotism on Mina to discover that Dracula is traveling by water. They eventually find him in Romania, and Harker kills him just before sundown, but not before Quincey is killed by a gypsy.

Language – attention give to different languages, speech impediments, shorthand, translation, etc.

Life – where does life reside? In blood, earth, mind? Different answers given thtoughout.

Modes of writing – Stoker runs the gamut of recording devices: diary, journal, phonograph, typewriter, traveler typewriter, “angelic recorder.” In the end, after compiling the compulsively written documents, they decide that no document is authentic except for the original written diaries.

The Press – Press clippings are often pasted into journals and used to speed along events. In short, everything is seen and able to be written about by someone.

Knowledge/Power/Concealment – This often breaks down along gendered lines. When mina is left out of conversations, Dracula starts to vamp her.

The Host – use of Christ’s signified body as defense

Ships – connect with Sign of Four and Moonstone – the ocean, sea is a wily mode of transportation, slower but more effective than trains, coaches, etc. for evasion

Euthanasia – read as arch-word (357)

Stuff on child-brain and man-brain – Child-brain is slave to empirical training and testing, and is highly selfish. Interesting Humean discourse here.