Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1984"

History, Figuration and Female Subjectivity in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles"

Abstract: The first two chapters of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles form a curiously assorted pair of frontispieces to that novel. Chapter 1 focuses an untroubled eye upon John Durbeyfield, whose physical appearance yields immediate access to his years ("middle-aged"), health ("rickety"), social and economic status ("quite worn away") and moral inclinations ("somewhat to the left of a straight line").' Chapter 2 offers no such readable or even consistent a portrait. It introduces the reader to Marlott via a complicated approach, beginning with a distant and unpeopled view of the environs, and concluding with a baffled (and baffling) scrutiny of Tess. During this approach the vantage point shifts constantly, moving from a series of panoramic images to a close-up of an individual human form, and locating the reader variously within the discourses of late nineteenth century ethnology, landscape painting and tourism.2 Vision is further problematized by the insistent anchoring of these shifting scenes to a viewer, who assumes in turn the guise of a tourist, a landscape painter, and a random passer-by. This viewer is present initially only through his absence, an absence which is made the implicit precondition for preserving Marlott as a "virgin territory." (Chapter 2 opens with the observation that "The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern undulations of the beautiful Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor aforesaid, an engirdled and secluded region, for the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or landscape-painter, though within a four hours' journey from London" [48]). However, the description which follows insistently routes all access to Marlott through the eyes of that very tourist/artist who has been seemingly banished:

Romance Revised: Charlotte Lennox's "The Female Quixote"

Abstract: heightened for eighteenth-century writers, especially aware that their novels were not only given shape by, but were shaping, their form-was not to dissect romance, but to use it to define the novel. Romance meant different things to different novelists, but for none of them was it exact; none of them needed it to be. Romance was what the novel was not: "everything we do not understand or are unwilling to imitate." The utility of romance consisted precisely in its vagueness; it was the chaotic negative space outside the novel that determined the outlines of the novel's form. To novelists, and, they hoped, to their readers, the novel was unified, probable, truly representational because romance was none of these. The contrast between them gave the novel its meaning. Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote: or, the Adventures of Arabella (1752) structures its story on the contrast between the novel and romance. Its heroine, Arabella, is a female quixote-a girl so affected by her reading of romances that they seem to have driven her mad. Yet Arabella's excesses of behavior actually reflect what is wrong with romance. She acts the way she does because she believes in romance and is simply acting out its conventions. Through her, The Female Quixote shows that romance is excessive fiction, so excessive that it is nonsensical, ultimately mad. The silly extravagances of romance that Arabella illustrates are meant as a foil for the novel's strengths. More than simply providing a contrast to the novel, romance acts as a displacement of the novel's problems. Lennox does not explicitly define her novel against romance. Instead, she condemns romance as specious fiction, and covers up the fictiveness of her own form, implying by her blindness to it as a form, that it is real and true. Yet Lennox's equation of romance and fiction attests to a tacit recognition that the problems of romance are the problems of fiction, the novel's as well. By deriding romance, construing it as the realm of excess and nonsense, The Female Quixote veils its own excesses, tries to appear stable and controlled. One way to read Arabella's madness is as a danger the novelist wants

The Occult in Bleak House

Abstract: "In Bleak House," Dickens declares in a provocative and now much-discussed formula, though one that still needs elucidation, "I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things." 2 First there is the stress on "purposely": the radically mixed technique of this novel, Dickens is insisting, is a deliberate, conscious invention with its own artistic purpose-though what this is he leaves for the moment unexplained. He is seeking with this adverb to protect himself against the perennial assumption, lately revived, that what Henry James called the "fantastic" vein in his fiction is simply an uncontrollable reflex akin to hallucination rather than art.3 But the core of the phrase is his acknowledgment of the peculiarly equivocal quality of Bleak House, its constant fusion-or is it fission? -of the "romantic" and the "familiar." Both terms have obvious loci in the text even though their interconnections may at first be enigmatic. On the one hand, as a number of scholars have insisted, Bleak House presents itself as a "predominantly topical" work anchored at a hundred places in the familiar, in contempo-

The Exile of Adulthood: Pedophilia in the Midlife Novel

Abstract: Pedophilia is a curious phenomenon of twentieth-century fiction.1 Why should novelists of the stature of Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov write about it, and why do readers with presumably minimal interest in the actuality continue to praise and analyze Death in Venice and Lolita-without considering what role this subject matter plays in the narratives?2 The most powerful explanation (leaving aside writers' strategies for distracting attention from the perilous subject, and readers' willingness to be distracted) is also the one with most reverberations for related texts. Writers use the subject as an indirect but powerful way of dealing with anxieties about the life course. Pedophilia represents in an extreme form a normal problem of human development, the transition from latency to accepting adult sexuality and therefore aging." Behind every story of pedophilia is a drama of normal human regret at growing older in the body, distorted by the protagonist's illusory attempt to circumvent his aging in this particular way, by trying to possess youth vicariously through the bodies of the young.

For a New (Psychological) Novel in the Works of Manuel Puig

Abstract: "Four P.M. + bare trees + fading light + the walk to work + pleasant sensation of warm clothes + sensation of a day leaving never to return + fear of meeting disagreeable patient + sensation of something either very good or very bad about to happen." The girl typed the propositions into her portable computer .. / ... / ... The girl, serial number W218, added one more proposition to the series, "dissatisfaction with the unnecessary severity of the public buildings" and pressed the button for the total. Answer: "a natural insecurity given the challenge of satisfactorily fulfilling one's responsibilities." (Pubis angelical)'

"A Little Spirit of Independence": Sexual Politics and the Bildungsroman in "Mansfield Park"

Abstract: Mansfield Park has never lacked detractors. Kingsley Amis is typical, if a little intemperate, in calling it an "immoral book" and the character of Fanny Price a "monster of complacency and pride, who under a cloak of cringing selfabasement, dominates and gives meaning to the novel." 1 Others have criticized the book for being too severely moral, for its serious and even pietistic tone which militates against the familiar Austen virtues of liveliness and wit.2 And even those critics who praise the novel tend to see it as a thesis book, a book where character and action are subordinated to ideology, whether that be the "war of ideas" between Jacobinism and anti-Jacobinism, or the "improvement of the estate" versus the preservation of the estate with its ideals of stability and continuity.3 Finally, some readers who profess a sympathetic interest in the character of Fanny Price as having more than schematic interest, sometimes do so largely because of a clinical interest in the pathology of the abused child.4 It might be supposed that a feminist critic would be the last to take an interest in Fanny Price and her life history. As an image of weakness not strength, of obedience not independence, of passivity not venturesome activity, Fanny perfectly exemplifies ideal femininity in a patriarchal culture, leading Susan Gubar, for example, to see her as paradigmatically a Snow White, immobile in her deathly virtue.5 Because Mansfield Park is "the story of a girl who triumphs by doing nothing," 6 the most disturbing aspect of the book would appear to be Austen's endorsement of Fanny's weakness as a covert form of strength, leading to her unjustified recognition and redemption at the end. Yet the novel does provide interesting issues for the feminist critic. As Austen's

"Lives" of Women Writers: Cather, Austin, Porter / and Willa, Mary, Katherine Anne

Abstract: Like Virginia Woolf's fantastical biography Orlando, recent biographies of American literary women raise the controversial issue of sexual difference. One wonders if the story of a life, the writer's life, can remain, like Orlando's face, "practically the same," essentially the same, when the sex of its protagonist has changed. Modern feminist theory would lead one to assume that literary biography tells a different story and tells it differently when its central character is Willa Cather, Mary Austin, or Katherine Anne Porter rather than, say, Ernest Hemingway.1 Indeed, a statement that gender affects genre seems platitudinous: not surprisingly, a recent study of women's autobiography concludes that it differs significantly in style as well as content from the life stories men have traditionally told.2 Literary biography has not yet been formally examined for gender variation, though as a genre (defined persuasively by Leon Edel)3 it might be expected to alter its mode in response to sexually altered content, to make accommodations,

The Gift of Clothes: Of Mme de Lafayette and the Origin of Novels

Abstract: Our ultimate gratitude to art.-If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of the general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science-the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation-would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. But now there is a counterforce against our honesty that helps us to avoid such consequences: art as the good will to appearance. We do not always keep our eyes from rounding off something and, as it were, finishing the poem: and then it is no longer eternal imperfection that we carry across the river of becomingthen we have the sense of carrying a goddess, and feel proud and childlike as we perform this service. As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us, and art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon. At times we need a rest from ourselves by looking upon, by looking down upon, ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing over ourselves or weeping over ourselves. We must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly, or we cannot continue to find pleasure in our wisdom. Precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings-really more weights than human beings-nothing does us as much good as a fool's cap and bells: we need it in relation to ourselves-we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose the freedom above things that our ideal demands of us. It would mean a relapse for us, with our irritable honesty, to get involved entirely in mortality and, for the sake of the over-severe demands that we make on ourselves in these matters, to become virtuous monsters and scarecrows. We should be able also to stand above morality-and not only to stand with the anxious stiffness of a man who is afraid of slipping and falling any moment, but also to float above it and play. How then could we possibly dispense with art and with the fool?--And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourselves, you do not yet belong with us. Nietzsche, The Gay Science (trans. Walter Kaufmann)