Why Victorian Literature Still Matters: 23 - Rilegato

Davis, Philip

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1405135786 ISBN 13: 9781405135788

Casa editrice: Blackwell Pub, 2008

Riassunto

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is a passionate defense of Victorian literature’s enduring impact and importance for readers interested in the relationship between literature and life, reading and thinking.

• Explores the prominence of Victorian literature for contemporary readers and academics, through the author’s unique insight into why it is still important today
• Provides new frames of interpretation for key Victorian works of literature and close readings of important texts
• Argues for a new engagement with Victorian literature, from general readers and scholars alike
• Seeks to remove Victorian literature from an entrenched set of values, traditions and perspectives - demonstrating how vital and resonant it is for modern literary and cultural analysis

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Philip Davis is Professor of English Literature in the School of English, University of Liverpool, UK. He is the author of The Victorians and, most recently, Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life. His other books include The Experience of Reading; Real Voices: On Reading, and Memory and Writing: from Wordsworth to Lawrence, as well as works on Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson. He is also editor of The Reader, a non-academic literary magazine aimed at the serious reader.

Dalla quarta di copertina

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is a passionate defense of the enduring impact of Victorian realism today. With a nod to the popularity of phrenology within that era, noted literary scholar Philip Davis points to a corner of the human mind where all Victorian literature resides. This "Victorian bump," he argues, is an area concerned with human purpose, morality, secularization and belief, human stories, and living in time.

Rather than emphasizing Victorian literature as an historical and reassuring body of knowledge, Davis explains its centrality for contemporary readers as an important mode of thinking and feeling, and provides a gateway of analysis into the popular prose and poetry of the Victorian Age. Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is a positive manifesto, inviting readers to discover what they really like about a book. The author offers an insightful window for readers to formulate a sense of what Victorian literature means for them and how it relates to our wider human existence.

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Why Victorian Literature Still Matters

By Philip Davis

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2008 Philip Davis
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4051-3578-8

Chapter One

Victorian Hard Wiring

Feeling for the Victorian "bump," we would often begin the part-time MA by reading early on, for example, Mrs Gaskell's Ruth (published in 1853). It is ostensibly the usual old Victorian story. Pretty young girl from the lower classes, seduced by young "gentleman," is left abandoned and pregnant. Just when she is on the point of drowning herself, however, a brother and sister take her in, and help her through the birth and the subsequent years of rearing her baby boy, passing her off as a young widow for the sake of social appearances. But of course, one day the so-called truth comes out, and suddenly Ruth finds that, before he hears it from the unkind lips of others, she has to tell her son Leonard, still no more than a boy, the one thing from which she had always shrunk as a parent - the true story of her sexual past. Here is the confession of mother to son that one person in the MA group, herself a single parent, naturally chose:

Up they went into her own room. She drew him in, and bolted the door; and then, sitting down, she placed him (she had never let go of him) before her, holding him with her hands on each of his shoulders, and gazing into his face with a woeful look of the agony that could not find vent in words. At last she tried to speak; she tried with strong bodily effort, almost amounting to convulsion. But the words would not come; it was not till she saw the absolute terror depicted on his face that she found utterance; and then the sight of that terror changed the words from what she meant them to have been. She drew him to her, and laid her head upon his shoulder; hiding her face even there. (Ruth, ch. 27)

It is that rebounding sight of the boy's absolute terror that leaves her no room for her own fearful feelings. Collecting herself, she no longer hides her face but almost visibly takes on the responsibility - that forbidding Victorian word (responsibility!) suddenly made human:

"Leonard!" said she at length, holding him away from her, and nerving herself up to tell him all by one spasmodic effort, "Listen to me."

Then she tells him that when she was very young she did very wrong. God, she believes, will judge her more tenderly than men. But still, she says, it was wrong in a way that Leonard will not understand yet. And even as she says it, "she saw the red flush come into his cheek, and it stung her as the first token of that shame which was to be his portion through life." People will call her the hardest names ever thrown at women:

"and, my child, you must bear it patiently, because they will be partly right. Never get confused, by your love for me, into thinking that what I did was right ... "And Leonard," continued she, "this is not all. The punishment of punishments lies awaiting me still. It is to see you suffer for my wrong-doing. Yes, darling! they will speak shameful things of you, poor innocent child, as well as of me, who am guilty. They will throw it in your teeth through life, that your mother was never married - was not married when you were born -"

The punishment of punishments is for a parent to know that the mistakes of her youth - the very mistakes that made her a mother - have damaged the life of her child almost before it began, in a way that as a protective mother she herself would never have wanted or allowed. And that she has now to explain to the boy. It turns life back to front. You don't have to be a Victorian in that particular circumstance to have the imaginative emotion.

But think of "the Victorians" when you read this, and you may well think how characteristically unjust it is - in ways that the literature itself is only just beginning half to register - not only that Leonard should be stigmatized as illegitimate but also that Ruth should still blame herself for that. There is something indignantly important to be said about the way that social shame creates, unconsciously, a personal guilt and a misplaced sense of personal responsibility in an unhappily victimized woman, such as to redouble her injury. But the reader will also be noticing other things - for example, all the subtly implicit thought that is going on within the changing physical language of the sequence: Ruth never letting go of her boy, first holding him with her hands on his shoulders, while silently "gazing into" his face; then drawing him "to" her and "hiding her face" in his neck; then finally, holding him "away" from her as she begins to speak the all too adult, separating words.

It is by putting oneself into the tangle of these physical and emotional specifics that a great test comes upon a reader. In the modern world Ruth would have nothing for which to apologize, no terrible sense that her son could be labeled a bastard and herself a loose or fallen woman. Thankfully, the world of Ruth the novel has been left behind, made a painful historical document merely, in the subsequent march of social progress. For surely it would have been better here if Ruth could have carried out her task of explanation without the pain of thinking she had done wrong in her youth or that the people who now wrong her with cruel names "will be partly right"?

But in one sense it would not have been at all better: it would only have been easier. Undoubtedly that humane Unitarian Elizabeth Gaskell wanted more kindness in the world. But what moves Mrs Gaskell is not how her characters could imaginably get out of the temporary givenness of their situation but rather how they recommit themselves to staying within it and making something of it. It is not so much a feeling of guilt as a sense of primal responsibility that makes Ruth, regardless of extenuations, not seek finally to evade all the implications of her own story howsoever it has come upon her. Here this persistence depends upon Ruth having to believe that the position in which she finds herself is not wholly unjust, but a mixture of innocence in guilt. And though it is clearly wrong to her that her wrong-doing should have its effect upon Leonard's future life, still Leonard himself must not get confused, even by his love for her, into ever thinking that it was simply right. Seen from some humane political position far outside the novel, it may well be socio-historical pressure that makes her take that moral line against herself; but from within it, personally, and from within her, what motivates Ruth is love for Leonard, in the mother's care that the mother's own past example should not be his false moral standard. I love the way Ruth has to take that difficult double view of herself as both person and parent: in the personal feelings of her own private autobiography; in her overriding duty as a mother. That is what is so powerful about Victorian literature: the constant shift between vulnerable person and necessary function, in a world that must find its formal changes achieved even through informal and contingent means. In Dickens it is terrible when the great father-figure is revealed to his children as also a man in his own damaged right, embarrassing, vulnerable, or crudely culpable: it is a sudden and painful rite de passage that the age has to keep reliving.

The Victorian bump can feel hard. But what is hardest for the modern reader in this novel is that the imaginative situation would not be so deep here if Leonard were free of this unjust stigma. It is essential to the predicament. So: do we let children go on being called bastards and young girls slags because it produces better novels? Am I really saying that life is deeper when it was harder and we had what Mrs Thatcher used to call "Victorian values"?

Certainly it would be easier to be the man who saves Ruth from committing suicide, if he did not believe that she had committed a sin in becoming pregnant. But what is remarkable about Thurstan Benson is the way in which he finds himself rejoicing in the birth of Ruth's baby as a new life, even in the teeth of an argument with his own sister, Faith:

"The sin appears to me to be quite distinct from its consequences."

"Sophistry - and a temptation," said Miss Benson, decidedly.

"No, it is not," said her brother, with equal decision. "In the eye of God, she is exactly the same as if the life she has led had left no trace behind. We knew her errors before, Faith."

"Yes, but not this disgrace - this badge of her shame!"

"Faith, Faith! Let me beg of you not to speak so of the little innocent babe, who may be God's messenger to lead her back to Him. Think again of her first words - the burst of nature from her heart! Did she not turn to God, and enter into a covenant with Him - 'I will be so good'? Why, it draws her out of herself! If her life has hitherto been self-seeking, and wickedly thoughtless, here is the very instrument to make her forget herself, and be thoughtful for another. Teach her (and God will teach her, if man does not come between) to reverence her child; and this reverence will shut out sin, - will be purification." He was very much excited; he was even surprised at his own excitement; but his thoughts and meditations through the long afternoon had prepared his mind for this manner of viewing the subject. "These are quite new ideas to me," said Miss Benson, coldly. "I think, you, Thurstan, are the first person I ever heard rejoicing over the birth of an illegitimate child. It appears to me, I must own, rather questionable morality." (Ruth, ch. 11)

This is a "Victorian" religious language but not least because the situation is like a religious paradox: the disaster in Ruth's first life is also at the self-same time the saving gift and triumph of her second - namely, that she has become a mother. In George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) a child saves an adult's life, naturally, without intent or consciousness, but there the bad father is split off from the good adoptive parent. Here in Ruth what is good and what is bad are entangled. It would be easier if there were no problem here; it would be easier if one had a single, simple belief under which to categorize the situation. But Benson, like Ruth herself later in confession to Leonard, has not one but two powerful thoughts, at once inextricable and yet hardly compatible, the good-in-the-bad. These contrary pulls in the dense mix of the Victorian realist novel are what produce between them something humanly less definable and less predictable, making for the personal individual achievement that is re-creative of a real morality. For this is Benson acting more like Christ than like a Christian - the Christ who surprised his over-literal disciples when he would not condemn the woman taken in adultery or blame another who poured precious ointment on his head instead of selling it to help the poor. Grace overcomes ethics narrowly conceived. It is in that very spirit that some of the greatest Victorians, such as Mrs Gaskell herself, are in a sense anti-Victorian, if Victorian only means such men as Mr Bradshaw in Ruth, the condemning Pharisee who likes to draw "a clear line of partition, which separated mankind into two great groups" - the saved and the damned (ch. 25). But Benson himself has no such clear lines, and it is telling that he was "very much excited; he was even surprised at his own excitement": that human response, transcending itself, is also what being a reader means, in going beyond any over-clear agenda.

This present book is thus for the reader, not "the critic" or "the student" or "the scholar" as such - though with the hope that the reader survives still within those other forms. For the Victorian is the first great age of nation-wide reading, Matthew Arnold insisting in his preface to Culture and Anarchy (1869) that it mattered not only that a person read every day but what the person read every day. Critics (even Arnold himself to a degree) are those who seek distance from the text, theoretical and historical, making it an object; but readers go to the book to internalize it, personally, emotionally, as if they might just find revealed there a version of the secrets of their lives. That's why, to teach reading to an ordinary, serious community, the part-time MA that we first offered in Liverpool was in Victorian literature - because Victorian literature, and in particular the realist novel, is the most accessible of all, in terms of its commitment to a recognizably ordinary, mundane life. As such, it offers the portrait of such lives to real-life equivalents and identifiers as a form of emotional education.

Such reading is an immersed kind of thinking, different from other kinds of conceptualization, yet too often unrecognized as thinking. The reader first simply accepts the life-form in which the book exists, and then is absorbed in the people involved in it. The historical accidents of the predicament don't matter, save as clothing. For there are many ways in which a parent can harm a child's life without ever having wanted to do so; just as many as the ways in which children can be felt as a gift whatever the mess that engendered them. Good readers know that their deep, unsorted memories hold more of themselves than do their mere ideas of what they are. That is why they are glad to find a moment, a passage, in a literary work releasing feelings and triggering forgotten sympathies that surprise them with echoes that have lost, or never even held, a place in the limited frameworks of their conscious agendas. The emotion the reader feels is the immediate act of imagination here, the book's meaning existing simultaneously in front of the eyes and behind them. And thus with Ruth that affective sympathy, close to the novel's original intent and on the novel's own terms, is actually nearer to the past - precisely in so far as it is no longer felt as past, historically.

But the predicament is what matters, howsoever it arises, because what is moving is what human beings do with the given predicament, what the predicament as form brings out of those human beings as life's content. All the other, less individual ways of dealing with the predicament are history and are politics, but they are not literature.

That is no reason, of course, to let everything in the literal world outside books remain as it is, whatever the suffering or injustice. But equally, if you could imagine being able to remove all the predicaments in the world, it still might not be enough, and it might even be too much. And that last, famously, is the thought that precipitated the symbolic breakdown of the great program of nineteenth-century social reform in the person of its epitome, John Stuart Mill.

Almost from the cradle, Mill had been hot-house educated by his philosopher-father to become the great utilitarian social reformer. The son, as rational logician, was to make and to be that utopian future for which James Mill had worked in his own life-time. With that inherited master-scheme of increasing human happiness and abolishing human misery so firmly worked into his mind, the younger Mill recalls in his Autobiography how

I was accustomed to felicitate myself on the certainty of a happy life which I enjoyed, through placing my happiness in something durable and distant, in which some progress might be always making, while it could never be exhausted by complete attainment.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Blackwell Pub
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1405135786
• ISBN 13: 9781405135788
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 171
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile