martyrdom for the pleasure

Fanny Burney’s Evelina wishes that the people she doesn’t like would leave her alone and that is the dominant tone in the novel, more than anything else, the subject of its most constant inventions. The introductory essay that comes with my edition (Edward A. Bloom, 1968) talks about an educational development that she undergoes, Bloom writing, “Like any education, hers is cumulative, with virtue and self-awareness directed to social fulfilment,” but I reckon I am not convinced, the word education is wrong in this context, she is not Austen’s Emma of 1815, or even Betsy Thoughtless of 1751, she has not been confronted with a body of wisdom that transfers her by increments from a child into an adult, the city-knowledge that she obtains is patchy and functional – don’t go down that dark walkway in Marybone Gardens – but the longing to go there did not need to be conquered and chastised – she never had a desire to go – Betsy Thoughtless had to learn not to but Evelina Annville would always rather not – I would rather not is her self-awareness and it is in place from the beginning to the end – not taught, no, fundamental, consistently reiterated (eg, at her first London ball, Vol. 1, letter XI; in her reluctance to accompany Madame Duval, Vol. 1, letter XXI; in the fact that she "wished extremely to shew" Mr Macartney that she was not part of the group, Vol. II, letter XIV; in her avoidance of Tom, Vol. II, letter XXIV; she is impressed when Lord Orville refuses to participate, Vol. III, letter III; her discussion of the Orville note, Vol. III, letter XVI, etc), and the people around her ignore it. “Can you then,” they say, “refuse me the smallest gratification, though, but yesterday, I almost suffered martyrdom for the pleasure of seeing you?” and so, sabotaged, she puts up with their wheedling, periodically trying to make them stop – "I entreat you never again to to address me in a language so flighty, and so unwelcome," she says, and rises to go, but Clement Willoughby "flung himself at my feet to prevent me" – scenes like that are repeated: the wheedling person is Sir Clement, or it is Polly, or Mr Smith or Mr Braughton "demand[ing]" "Why so?" when she ("looking alarmed") tells him that a thing "is utterly impossible," and then Madame Duval chimes in at her, "Ma foi child, you don't know no more about the world than if you was a baby" – so the group does that vulgar thing anyway, and she has to be involved, "I would rather have submitted to the severest punishment  – but all resistance was in vain" – it is not Evelina that the author wishes she could train to virtue, it is everybody else – cos they are hopeless – “I find all endeavours vain to escape any thing which these people desire I should not ...”

and so I am

The absence of adaptive flexibility here fascinates me: once the subject matter changes then the style has to change as well, into a different mode that must have felt right (felt Vidal) for the non-Austeny classes; that mode is high physical shouting drama, raving misery, characters going mad, and the "melancholy cry" of the curlew.

But she awoke, and had quite an access of delirium, screaming and talking, knowing no one, but always insisting that she was going on some weary journey, among trees, with nothing to eat, and a very high wind; and that Jack was free, and was expecting her. Then she looked at her stained arms and hands and shuddered, exclaiming at her horror of blood.

The lead characters among the convicts are ordinarily desperate and either frantic or cruel in ways that do not have any correlation among the Austen people, who, when they suffer, do it without madness or visions of blood. The Austens have probably read Shakespeare and the non-Austens haven't, but it is the dying non-Austen whose literary bodily self gets miscegenated with Ophelia, with Lady Macbeth, and with repetitive mad-person lines that have been written for spoken-acting voices. "Yes, yes; I'm ill, am I? Well, and so I am. That's odd," she says. (Repetitions in Shakespeare: "No more o' | that, my lord, no more o' that," "It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul," "Now, now, now, now:" all tether-ended people gone frantic, closing in on death.)

And her Jack is driven into a cul de sac that seems doomed and fated, which is not a state that afflicts the Austens, but it does affect people in Shakespeare as well as the Ancient Greeks and Romans who were at the mercy of their spiteful gods who came down and shot your tootling sons with arrows because you had insulted them. In the same Ancient vein, one of the characters in a Vidal short story from Tales for the Bush discovers (when the author gives him the words to say so) that his wife has died from a lingering illness because he did not go to church. The convicts and workers in Bengala are closer to Vidal's early people than to these later Austenesques; they are closer to plays and poetry and the Austens are closer to prose.

So the characters, like two sets of alien species who have landed at the same time on an identical planet, live in at least two different behavioural worlds. Those worlds can touch one another: the people from the Austen world can put the young woman from the drama world to bed and try to cure her ("Miss Terry gave her some nourishing drink") but she is true to the world of poetry and she dies calling for Jack and her mother.

besides, you are Ticket and I'm not

"Austenesque realism" (at the end of the last post) is not a stretch, and I reckon that anyone who reads Bengala is going to assume (almost without reflective thought, it seems so obvious) that Mary Theresa Vidal is paying a debt to Austen in this book, with the comedies of manners moving shiftily between the people as they eat their lunches and Isabel Lang channelling Emma from Emma as she goes around matchmaking while the level-headed older man hovers over her like the one played by Alan Rickman in the movie, and maybe even the part about the custard owes something to a scent of Austen-atmosphere or floating memory, since (I remembered when I was writing this out in the comments to Tom) it begins with Mrs Vesey insulting the Lang family by asking them to show her how they make their custard, insinuating in this way: Rich people such as myself have servants to do these jobs for them.

Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice: "The dinner too in its turn was highly admired; and he begged to know to which of his fair cousins the excellency of its cooking was owing. But he was set right there by Mrs. Bennet, who assured him with some asperity that they were very well able to keep a good cook, and that her daughters had nothing to do in the kitchen."

The presence of convict workers does the following thing: it makes the Austen style warp a little when it touches them. The comedies of manners leave the story; that area of sensitivity is gone. (The sensitivity becomes a sensitivity to the characters' suffering, which is a form of pity and therefore different to the sensitivity that flavours the Austen-parts, which is not pity.)

I know that people have criticised Austen for the absence of servants' personalities in her books, and my impression is that this criticism has been more of a twentieth-century phenomenon than a nineteenth-century one, but Vidal made that same point in 1860, not by actually stating it or even by giving any sign that she thought it consciously as she probably did not, but by changing her tone from Austen to melodrama every time the convict servant-workers become the focus of the book, which they do periodically because there is a sub-plot about a prisoner who can't rescue a young woman from her vicious guardians because Mr Lang won't let him have his ticket of leave.

Vidal knew it in her bones or with a reader's inarticulate intuition, that absence in Austen.

(A ticket of leave, which Caroline Leakey in The Broad Arrow abbreviated down to T.L. or just "ticket," sometimes with a capital letter if somebody was using it as a personal description, "Oh, Bob, I couldn't! you'll do it beautiful, you says everything so clever and nice; besides, you are Ticket and I'm not," was a way of allowing a convict some independence before their sentence was up.)

On the social level Mr Lang is a good-hearted man who gives his friends toast but he's unintentionally malicious when it comes to the field of convict management. In this role of a good man with a careless flaw he is something like Mr Bennet, who only has his family to wound but Mr Lang has a large bush-isolated property inhabited by worker-prisoners who are in his power and who may, if they are feeling desperate, run off and become bushrangers at any moment, sentencing themselves to death since they know they will be hung if they are caught.

This is a version of blindness with which Austen was not conversant and so (Harry Haseltine touching on it in the introduction) the book finds another model for the convict parts. It is as if the Austen-style itself has said, "I will not describe this, I can't, I don't have the words, you have to find something else." The style has a personality; it speaks.

reason, by anticipating the future, brought before her mind the full picture

Pulling a name out of nowhere, or pulling anything out of nowhere, is contrary to the spirit of Radcliffe, a writer who surrounds the emotions in Romance of the Forest with calm explanations and can describe the movement of any character's mind from one state or feeling to another -- the plot twitches with shock sometimes, when banditti appear, or ghosts, but the prose itself is indomitable -- the plot tries to smack it in the head and it never raises an eyebrow, it cruises on serenely like the swan of folklore, a spectacle I have seen myself, in Australia, where the black swans heaved around on the salt waves like carved stoics, brave as a doll nailed to a rocking horse -- for example --

Adeline, mean while, in the solitude of her prison, gave way to the despair which her condition inspired. She tried to arrange her thoughts, and to argue her herself into some degree of resignation; but reflection, by representing the past, and reason, by anticipating the future, brought before her mind the full picture of her misfortunes, and she sunk in despondency.

There is no despondency in the voice though, this murmur that asserts itself. No decision in her book comes from nowhere, and no behaviour is spontaneous. Her prose doesn't imitate the speed of the events but always moves at its own pace. Her commas soothe thought by dividing it into portions. Each sentence proceeds like a menu. One item then another. Characters are startled, the writer is never startled. "Adeline was surprized and shocked," she observes, "at this careless confidence, which, however, by awakening her pride, communicated to her an air of dignity that abashed him," moving on serenely from surprize and shock to the product of surprize and shock and then to the result, the abashment of a villain, one thing connected so logically to another that the abashment in retrospect was always his imperative destiny, laid down by a creature that is like the idea of God in Boethius, a being that can see past, present, and future as though they were all happening at the same time; it's only mortals who have to move through time to catch up with events.

Jane Austen read Radcliffe, and the reasonable tone surfaced again in her like a dolphin (and not only her, though English society at that point had loved Reason so much that it was also abandoning it and loving Romance, the long century of Enlightenment becoming Counter-Enlightement as they wrote), yet Radcliffe never made a Mr Collins, and Austen did not write an Adeline; and there is no sign that Radcliffe ever joked as Austen joked in a letter to her sister: "Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted." (Sent from Cork Street, Mayfair, London in 1796.)* I haven't seen the biographical Austen movie Becoming Jane but I know that it represents the meeting between them by using actors, which sounds like a sane way for a film to engineer an encounter, even if one of the actors was really playing a book, Austen in reality speaking to the book and listening to the book, and not the real woman, who was reclusive in her husband's house.

Two users on imdb.com have submitted this dialogue:

Mrs Radcliffe: Of what do you wish to write?
Jane Austen: Of the heart.
Mrs Radcliffe: Do you know it?
Jane Austen: Not all of it.
Mrs Radcliffe: In time, you will. But even if that fails, that's what the imagination is for.

The Romance of the Forest has an implicit message that goes like this: I, Ann Radcliffe, I believe that "all of it" could be known and explicated if you took the time to think your behaviour through one step at a time. Nothing but the constraints of space and literary convention prevent me following every one of my characters' emotions to its ultimate progenitor, whatever that is.

A woman who can go a little way so clearly could go the whole way if she had enough time. She would follow the stages of each feeling until the start was revealed. The moment beating in her hand.




* I wouldn't have thought of the letters if Whispering Gums hadn't written a post about them yesterday.

that in the middle

Last week someone asked a few of us to read a poem she'd written, so we did. It went -- well I don't have any kind of permission to copy it out here, but the ideas went like this:

A thing has happened: it is terrible
A thing has happened: it is terrible
A thing has happened: it is terrible
Did you think this wasn't going to affect you?
It will. The terrible thing must be dealt with
The terrible thing must be dealt with
The terrible thing must be dealt with
Or else everything will get worse.

She had variety in there, you understand: she didn't write, "A thing has happened" three times: that was me. But it was the part in the middle I picked up on, the direct address. It wasn't something I'd noticed before. I've never studied poetry, or not since high school, and for all I know they might point this out in the first tertiary-level poetry lesson right after they ask you what your name is, and the name of your favourite colour, and your cat, but for the first time it occurred to me that a line like this in the middle of a poem could act like a clip to the reader's face, saying, "You thought you knew where this was going, didn't you -- you were starting to feel complacent. But now we're about to expand this idea further, so focus your attention."

The next night I was reading Czesław Miłosz's essay "Against Incomprehensible Poetry" when I came across this paragraph,

Nothing, perhaps, is simpler and more obvious than what supplied the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummon de Andrade with the theme for his poem [In the Middle of the Road]. When a thing is truly seen, seen intensely, it remains with us forever and astonishes us, even though it would appear that there is nothing astonishing about it.

followed by this translation of the poem by Elizabeth Bishop:

In the middle of the road there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
there was a stone
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

Never should I forget this event
in the life of my fatigued retinas.
Never should I forget that in the middle of the road
there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
in the middle of the road there was a stone.

"It's the same thing again," I thought. "That belt around the middle of the poem, giving it a wasp-waist …" then I amended myself "… but of course you don't read a poem in a single glance, the way that you see the silhouette of wasp-waist, from a distance, no, you travel through it over time, and the fastening at the centre arrives like a surprise, catching hold of your brain and giving it a flick, or sharpening it for a moment: long enough to reach the end of the poem. I wonder if the conversation between Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, the one in which he lets her know that, "My feelings will not be repressed," and she advises him to begin the repressing process immediately because she has no intention of marrying him -- I wonder if that works in the same way?" It was a long time since I'd read the book, and I wasn't sure, but in my mind I saw Pride and Prejudice rearranged like this -- in an instant, reshaped -- like an hourglass, with that scene pinching in the middle, drawing your attention to a point there, a pivot.