Archives for 2014

Pygmalion

December 8, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, web links

Pygmalion was written in 1912 and first performed in England at His Majesty’s Theatre, London in April 1914, with Mrs Patrick Campbell in the lead role as Eliza Doolittle. She was a fifty year old grandmother at the time (‘with increasing girth’) but impressed audiences with her delivery of both Cockney and received pronunciation.

Pygmalion and Galatea

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who hated women and vowed never to marry. However, when he carved a statue of a woman out of ivory (called Galatea) she was so beautiful he fell in love with his own work. At the festival of Aphrodite (goddess of love) he secretly made a wish for a bride who would be a living likeness. On arriving home he kissed the statue and found that its lips were warm. The goddess had granted his wish, the statue came to life, and he married her. They had a son called Paphos.

Pygmalion – critical commentary

Playtext and literary studies

As a subject of literary studies, the playtext of Pygmalion is a complex and problematic object. It is worth remembering that a playtext is only the intermediate vehicle of which a staged performance represents the ‘realisation’ of the text. Playtexts are only a recorded set of instructions to directors and actors – but in traditional literary studies (in Europe and America) they are treated as the equivalent of poetry and prose fiction.

Like many other plays, Pygmalion exists is a number of different versions. The controversial ending was changed on a number of occasions by theatrical producers and directors, and Shaw himself wrote supplementary materials which he added to the original play in an attempt to ‘explain its meaning.

The text itself is an almost bizarre mixture of literary modes. It begins with an essay on phonetics and a biographical sketch of the linguist Henry Sweet. The play itself is a combination of spoken dialogue and stage directions which vary from amazingly trivial details (‘on her daughter’s right’) to lengthy passages in prose fiction, fleshing out the mise en scene, and even intrusions by Shaw himself, passing comment on the events he is creating.

In its ‘complete’ form, the text also includes additional material for each Act which may or may not be performed and which were added for cinema adaptations. And the end of the play is now conventionally followed by a prose explanation of ‘what happened next’, written by Shaw four years after the first performance. This contains his justification for the absence of a conventional ‘happy ending’; generalisations about bachelors and marriage; and a development of the character of Clara Enysford Hill, someone who had barely figured at all in the previous five Acts.

Language

Modern readers may find the language used by the characters nothing remarkable, but it should be borne in mind that at the time of its first performances Shaw was challenging the orthodox notions of decency on stage.

Higgins uses expressions such as ‘Where the devil are my slippers’ – which although it seems quite innocuous in the twenty-first century, probably marked the limit of what was acceptable in the early twentieth, when society was still emerging from a long age of Victorian prudery. But Mrs Pearce warns him that he should not swear in front of Eliza:

there is a certain word I must ask you not to use … It begins with the same letter as bath … Only this morning, sir, you applied it to your boots, to the butter, and to the brown bread.

Higgins doesn’t use the word. It is saved up by Shaw for the coup de theatre in Act Three when Eliza, having succeeded in transforming her pronunciation, lets slip her lower class origins when she replies to Freddy’s suggestion that he walk with her across the Park. She exclaims – ‘Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi.’ The use of this single word bloody was enough to cause a sensation on the Edwardian stage.

Shaw’s stage directions

In the early part of his literary career Shaw wrote five unsuccessful novels, and the instructions given to director and actors in Pygmalion suggest that he continued to think in the mode of someone writing prose fiction.

The stage directions range from issues of complete insignificance (slightly to her left) via what are authorial comments (hearing in it the voice of God, rebuking him for his Pharisaic want of charity to the poor girl) to the frankly absurd in terms of possible staging (Torrents of heavy summer rain).

Phonetics, shorthand, and spelling

In his preface to the play text, Shaw makes quite clear his interest in the subject of phonetics, as well as the origins of the Henry Higgins character in the figure of well-known Oxford philologist Henry Sweet.

Higgins claims he can pinpoint the origins of a London inhabitant to within a couple of streets by their pronunciation, and he is taking shorthand notes on Eliza’s speech at the beginning of the action.

Shorthand is a system of recording speech by symbols which represent sounds rather than the letters which are used for conventional writing. The best-known version of this system was devised by Sir Isaac Pitman in the middle of the nineteenth century, and became very popular in Britain and the United States.

There was a great deal of interest in these matters at the end of the nineteenth century, and Shaw put a great deal of time (and his own money) into a doomed experiment to reform English spelling. He and many others thought spelling in English could be simplified and regulated to iron out apparent difficulties. This approach did not sufficiently take into account the fact that speech and writing are two separate systems. The futility of these attempts were very pithily (and accurately) satirised by Mark Twain in his Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling.

It is worth noting that this same period also gave rise to another experiment in artificial language which was doomed to failure – the invention of Esperanto, a totally fabricated, so-called international language created by a Polish linguist Ludwik Zamenhof in 1887.

Esperanto was an amalgam of Latinate languages and it made sense to anyone who had studied French, Spanish, Italian and Latin. However, because of its artificiality and the fact that it did not therefore reflect a culture, it lacked life and remained a flat inanimate system of vocabulary and grammar.

Pygmalion – study resources

Pygmalion – Penguin edition – Amazon UK

Pygmalion – York Notes – Amazon UK

Pygmalion – 1938 film – Amazon UK

Pygmalion – Penguin edition – Amazon US

My Fair Lady – at Amazon US

Pygmalion – at Wikipedia

Daily Telegraph article
Mark Bostridge discusses the origins of the play, its sensational first night, and the problems of its controversial ending.

Pygmalion – plot summary

Act One

Mrs Eynsford-Hill with her daughter Clara and son Freddy are sheltering from the rain in Covent Garden after a concert with some others. When Freddy is despatched to find a cab he bumps into Eliza, a Cockney flower girl. She tries to sell her produce to a bystander Colonel Pickering, whilst nearby Professor Henry Higgins is taking notes on her pronunciation. Higgins then identifies everyone’s origins from their accents. It emerges that he and Pickering are both interested in phonetics and were on their way to meet each other. Higgins claims he can transform Eliza into a Duchess by changing her accent and speech. He gives her some loose change, which enables her to take a cab back home.

Act Two

Pickering is visiting Higgins in his ‘laboratory’ when Eliza turns up, offering to pay for elocution lessons. She wants to speak properly so that she can get a job working in a shop. Pickering challenges Higgins to make her socially acceptable, and offers to pay for the lessons. Higgins patronises Eliza, but offers to take her on permanently when she reveals that she has no family. The housekeeper Mrs Pearce offers common sense objections, but Higgins over-rules them. Pickering wonders about Higgins’ probity, but Higgins reveals that he distrusts women and is therefore a confirmed bachelor. Mrs Pearce reappears to ask Higgins to be more careful about his language and his table manners, and announces the arrival of Eliza’s father, Mr Doolittle. After verbal skirmishes with Higgins, Doolittle arranges to sell Eliza for five pounds. As he leaves, Eliza re-enters in clean new clothes.

Act Three

Some months later Higgins arrives at his mother’s house. She reproaches him for his lack of good manners and for still being a bachelor. He has invited Eliza to visit his mother on her ‘at-home’ day. The Enysford Hills and Pickering arrive, followed by Eliza, who speaks with exaggerated correctness. But during the ensuing conversation she lapses into topics from lower-class life and swears as she takes her leave. Higgins and Pickering congratulate themselves on the improvements they have brought about, but Mrs Higgins warns them that they have neglected to think about Eliza’s future.

Act Four

Higgins, Pickering, and Eliza arrive home at midnight following her successful debut in society. Higgins complains that he is tired of their experiment and now finds the whole thing a bore. Eliza explodes with anger at his self-centredness. She perceives that she has no future. He suggests that she marry someone. They argue about what belongs to her, and he accuses her of treating him badly. They part violently on bad terms.

Act Five

Next morning at Mrs Higgins’ house Higgins and Pickering arrive, worried that Eliza has disappeared. Mr Doolittle arrives, transformed into the appearance of a toff by the good fortune of an inheritance from an American benefactor. He complains that his newfound wealth has brought him nothing but problems. Mrs Higgins reveals that Eliza is upstairs and she hopes to reconcile her with her son. But when Eliza appears Higgins insults and patronises her again.

Eliza explains that she has learned to be a lady from the good example of politeness and respect presented to her by Pickering. Doolittle reveals that he is on his way to get married, and asks Pickering to help him through the ceremony. This leaves Higgins and Eliza to continue their argument. He claims that he cannot change and that he treats everybody in the same way. He continues to be arrogant and patronising, whilst inviting her back to live with him. She explains that a woman wants both respect and love, and that is what Freddy is offering her. When challenged by Higgins she claims she can even support herself by working in phonetics, something he has taught her so well. The play ends inconclusively.

Pygmalion – film version

1938 film version – Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller

Pygmalion – principal characters

Mrs Eynsford Hill	fallen upper-class woman
Freddy	her unemployed and talentless son
Clara	her unmarried and snobbish daughter
Colonel Pickering	a retired army officer
Henry Higgins	an upper-class professor of phonetics
Mrs Pearce	housekeeper to Higgins
Eliza Doolittle	a Cockney flower-seller
Mr Alfred Doolittle	her father, a dustman

Radical Larkin

June 21, 2014 by Roy Johnson

‘A Study of Reading [and Writing] Habits’

Radical Larkin, John Osborne’s second book on Philip Larkin is (like the first) polemical: ‘Larkin died in 1985. No-one now under 40 (and few enough aged 50) can really be said to have known the man. The future of his reputation is passing irrevocably out of the hands of those who knew him and into those who did not’. It also strikes postures: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, in place of the obdurately English poet of the critical consensus, I offer you Philip Larkin, master of deterritorialization’.

The pugilistic Osborne (a light heavy-weight) throws some below the belt punches at such distinguished Larkin commentators as Andrew Motion, who believes that the poems are autobiographical (‘as Larkin’s biographer he would say that, wouldn’t he?’), Trevor Tolley (‘A master of thinking inside the box’), Anthony Thwaite (who ‘twice recycled Larkin’s Betjeman review without referencing the source’), and James Booth (‘not because he is the worst exponent’ of ‘the conventional view of Philip Larkin as a lyric poet….but its best’.) David Timms and Richard Palmer stand jointly accused of having ‘converted [Larkin] from what he is, the greatest poet of doubt and ambiguity since Hardy, into a poet of certitude, often to the point of bigotry’. Even Archie Burnett, editor of Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems (2012), to which Osborne declares himself greatly indebted, is taken to task for including ‘mere scraps of verse’ (Burnett’s own phrase) in his magisterial compilation.

Osborne’s reiterated contention is that Larkin’s poems are not autobiographical but rather the creations of ‘a professional intertextualist’ which require ‘a post-authocentric’ reading and analysis. He focuses on such seminal poems as An Arundel Tomb, The Whitsun Weddings, This Be the Verse and Aubade – as well as his second novel A Girl in Winter.

Warming to these themes, Osborne liberally sprinkles his text with such unattractive words and phrases as ‘Phonocentrism’, ‘Anti-Textualism’, ‘Radical Ekphrasis’, ‘Radical Deterritorialization’ and ‘Radical De-essentialism’. At one point his taste for neologisms leads him astray. He heads one section ‘A monstrance against the sexing of texts.’ The word monstrance either means ‘demonstration or proof’ in Middle English or ‘an open or transparent vessel in which the host is exposed’ in contemporary English. Osborne actually wants to launch ‘an assault’ upon ‘biographicalism’ and his choice of words is baffling.

Unlike Larkin’s, much of Osborne’s language is convoluted, and presumably directed at a ‘post-modernist’ readership. Summarising his contentions in Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence, Osborne reminds his readers that Larkin’s techniques ‘include ellipsis, a four-act structure with closing reversal, asymmetrical stanza lengths and rhyme schemes, plus a battery of disaggregative linguistic devices such as split similes, negative qualifiers, oxymora and rampant paronomasia’. In this new book, such doubtful coinages as ‘the sexing and racing of narrators or addressees’ do little to aid comprehension.

In his chapter on The Whitsun Weddings, Osborne triumphantly ‘proves’ – largely thanks to Burnett’s researches – that Larkin’s famous train journey (from Hull to King’s Cross) never took place, and cautions that most of his poems ‘tell one nothing about the gender, race, class or nationality of either their narrators or their addressees’. Yet Larkin’s champions and detractors ‘fill in the missing information by jumping to the conclusion that the protagonist is always and only a white, male, middle-class Englishman named Philip Larkin’. Osborne presses his ‘intertextual’ reinterpretation of The Whitsun Weddings to a ludicrous conclusion when he suggests that the line ‘Free at last!’ reflects not only the poet’s well-known passion for jazz and its roots in African-American spirituals and blues, but also echoes Martin Luther King’s famous peroration in his 1963 ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in Washington, DC so ‘the reader has been licensed to speculate whether the narrator might be an American visitor to these shores, and not necessarily a white one’. These putative Americans (whatever their ‘racing’ or ‘sexing’) might well expostulate: ‘Pur-leeze!’

But Radical Larkin does contain original insights into some of the poet’s ‘greatest hits’. Four examples substantiate the point. As a poem, Vers de Société relates ‘the foibles of polite society. In Larkin this becomes something else: a meditation on the merits of social life, the life lived in company, versus those of the meditative life, the life of solitude’. Then, This Be The Verse, with its much-quoted opening lines

They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to, but they do.

is described as ‘a tweet-sized poem of atomic destructiveness detonated by laughter’. Larkin’s last great poem, Aubade, is ‘a masterpiece which affords a barometric reading of late millennial Western culture as encapsulated in its ideologies of death’. And finally, commenting on At Grass, Osborne shows that he is perfectly capable of writing clearly while offering a perceptive analysis:

…it surely offers as complex a statement as may be found in our literature of the mixed emotions with which we approach the constraints and the liberations of the later stages of life. This subsuming of the elegiac into a more nuanced address to the neglected subject of retirement is a good example of Larkin’s genius for involving poetic genres only to elude them…

Unfortunately, such astute judgements are few and far between in the densely-packed pages of Radical Larkin. Too much space is taken up by Osborne’s (generally informed) comments on Western art, sculpture and literature. And, unless one applauds his statements that ‘it would do no harm to Larkin studies if for the foreseeable future we desisted from visiting the (imaginary) certitudes of the life upon the work but rather visited the (real) polyvalency of the work upon the life’, or ‘not only do [Larkin’s] poems sabotage conventional pieties regarding church, state, nationality, marriage, gender, race and capital, but in the process they play a central role in the cultural transition to postmodern indeterminacy’, I can only recommend this book to those willing to struggle with the postmodern terminology.

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John Osborne, Radical Larkin: Seven Types of Technical Mastery, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 292, ISBN: 0230348246

More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

Revenge

April 15, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Revenge was written in the early spring of 1924 and was published in
Russkoye Ekho in April 1924. In his list of stories collected for publication in single volume form, Nabokov listed the story under the heading ‘Bottom of the Barrel’, and it was first included in Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1995.

Vladimir Nabokov

Revenge – critical commentary

This is an early (and rather crude) example of Nabokov’s love of the grotesque, coupled with his penchant for narrative suspense and playfulness, as well as the use of irony and the dramatic twist.

The contents of the professor’s second suitcase are not revealed – but we know that fellow passengers on board the cross Channel ferry think it is something unusual. The professor has previously joked to a student trying to assist him that it is ‘Something everybody needs. Why, you travel with the same kind of thing yourself. Eh? Or perhaps you are a polyp?’

So – we know the professor wishes to murder his wife, but we do not know that the suitcase contains a skeleton. And the suspense generated by these two features of the narrative (and the connection between them) is not resolved until the final words of the story.

The principal irony is that the professor’s young wife actually loves him, even though he is an unattractive bully, and her note to ‘Jack’ is just a girlish piece of romantic nonsense written to an imaginary man who has appeared to her in a dream. But the professor wants her to die in the most excruciating way possible – something he actually fails to achieve, for we are led to believe that she has died of fright.

Nabokov also shows his early love of first person narrators and self-referentiality in fiction – that is, stories that comment upon themselves. In the opening of the narrative a student and his sister are discussing the professor’s appearance and his similarity to a comic actor:

‘He’s really enjoying the sea,’ the girl added sotto voce. Whereupon, I regret to say, she drops out of my story.

Narrators commenting on their own narratives became almost a hallmark of Nabokov’s later works as both a novelist and writer of short stories. It is also worth noting that his narrators sometimes became increasingly unreliable – reaching perhaps what is a highpoint in his novel Pale Fire where Charles Kinbote comments on and interprets another writer’s work – to create a narrative which is an elaborate, gigantic, and very amusing lie.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Revenge – study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of photographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Revenge – plot summary

Part 1 A middle-aged biology professor is travelling back from a scientific congress in Berlin to his home in England. On the Ostend ferry he has two suitcases – one old and well-travelled, the other new and orange-coloured. He has hired a private detective to spy on his much younger wife and received evidence of a love note she has written to a man called Jack. He has therefore determined to murder his wife. At the customs inspection the contents of the orange suitcase amaze his fellow travellers.

Part 2 His young wife who believes in ghosts has written a note to Jack, a man who has appeared to her in a dream, but in fact she loves her husband the professor even though he is jealous of her and very temperamental.

When he arrives home he makes fun of her beliefs then tells her a macabre story about a woman whose body unravels until she is just a corpse. He then goes to bed and tells her to follow him. She prepares herself then joins him in the dark, snuggling up to him under the covers. But her husband has put into their bed the skeleton of a hunchback, and she dies of shock on making contact with it.

Revenge – further reading

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
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Collected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
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Sanctuary

January 30, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Sanctuary was first published in 1903, and is thus only Edith Wharton’s third published fictional work, after the two earlier novellas The Touchstone and The Valley of Decision.

Sanctuary – critical comment

Structure

The structure of the tale is relatively simple – and is closely connected with what seems to be its principal meanings. The narrative is divided into two parts which are connected by the presence in both of Kate Orme-Peyton. In the first part Kate is presented with a moral dilemma. Her fiancé Denis inherits money from his step-brother Arthur by morally underhand means.

Arthur’s wife and child have been disinherited. Denis has known about the existence of Arthur’s wife all along, and yet he has not revealed the fact at the court proceedings. He is prepared to accept the tainted inheritance, even though he is indirectly responsible for the deaths of Arthur’s wife and child – because the wife has taken their lives in despair.

Denis has looked after his step-brother Arthur (just as Dick will look after Paul) – but he has betrayed him nevertheless, by withholding knowledge of the marriage during the court proceedings. He has also tried to buy off the wife and salve his own conscience by offering her money – which she refuses.

Kate is appalled by this behaviour and what she sees as a lack of moral fibre. She suggests to Denis that he has a duty to own up to the truth publicly and that he should forfeit the money. When he refuses to do so, she ceases to love him and puts the marriage on hold.

But she then conceives of her grand sacrificial scheme. She realizes that Denis is likely to marry somebody else and have a child ‘born to an inheritance of secret weakness, a vice of the moral fibre, as it might be born with some hidden physical taint’. Rather than that, she decides to marry Denis and bring up his child under her own protection.

In the second part of the tale she has therefore raised her son Dick in this self-sacrificing manner, and her husband Denis has proved himself a moral wastrel after all by squandering his inheritance. But she now fears a repetition of the same events, which are directly paralleled in the case of Dick and his close friend Paul Darrow. The friend dies, leaving Dick an inheritance of the architectural designs which could win the competition. These designs have even been passed over to Dick quite willingly, and there is a temptress in the sidelines (Clemence Verney) urging him to profit from this morally dubious act.

His mother is anxious that he will succumb to the temptation, but does nothing to directly interfere. In the end we are asked to believe that his mother’s moral influence prevails – though it is stretching credibility when Dick renounces the prospect of marriage to Clemence only twenty-four hours after becoming engaged to her – and at that point the tale takes on a distinct suggestion of nineteenth century melodrama, with a last-minute resolution to the drama.

A Freudian interpretation

Edith Wharton was over forty when she wrote Sanctuary. She had no children of her own, and her marriage to her husband Teddy was less than satisfactory – but it is difficult to find anything in her private life that would explain or throw light on the extraordinary illustration of the Electra complex which this tale reveals.

Kate Orme is radiantly happy with her fiancé at the start of this tale, but then discovering that he is morally flawed, she rapidly falls out of love with him. Nevertheless, she decides to marry him so that he will not marry and father a child with someone else (from whom he is likely to conceal his moral turpitude). Kate reasons to herself that by taking on his ‘sin’ she can prevent it from being passed on unknown to another generation.

In other words, she embarks upon a path of controlling biologically and psychologically the next generation. We do not have an account of the intervening years, but when Dick Peyton emerges as a young architect on Fifth Avenue, presumably twenty-odd years later, the bond between him and his mother is pitched at a very serious emotional level. She has travelled to France and lived with him during his post-graduate studies at the Beaux-Arts. She wishes to control his actions; she disapproves of his fiancée Clemence and they dispute quite openly over the ability to influence him.

Eventually, Dick reverses his actions and allegiances, and allies himself with his mother – knowing that he is sacrificing his success as an architect and his prospective marriage to Clemence. He is resisting the compromising lure of easy success – for morally good (though scarcely credible) reasons – but the decision ties him even more closely to the mother who has had his destiny in mind before he was even born.

We do not know what happens beyond the text, but by the end of the tale Kate Peyton emerges as a successfully controlling mother figure (with good motives) whose feckless husband is dead and who has a somewhat unhealthily close relationship with her son. It is reasonable to see this as an illustration of the Jocasta complex first proposed by Raymond de Saussure in 1920 – which may be described as ‘different degrees of attachment, including domineering but asexual mother love – something perhaps particularly prevalent with an intelligent son and an absent or weak father figure’.

Form

This is a difficult piece of work to place in terms of literary form. The narrative lacks the range and the social depth of even a short novel, and for that reason it is often categorised as a novella – the story of young woman who discovers ‘the moral sewage that surrounds her’ (Houghton Mifflin). But Kate has made this discovery half way through the tale, and spends its second part making what turns out to be a successful act of resistance to it. She does not learn anything new in the second part of the narrative: she merely hopes that her passive moral stance will prevail – which is does. This is not the shape or the structure of events shared by classic novellas.

It also does not have the densely concentrated complexity of a novella, apart from the similarity of the two ‘inheritances’. And given that the events are stretched over the time scale of two generations, it lacks the temporal unity and the compression of events required by the novella form. Yet it is more ‘shaped’ than simply a long story – and might therefore better be classified as a tale – a form sufficiently elastic to accept anything which is squashed into it. However, others might wish to argue that the structural parallels of the two temptations and the continuity of Kate’s presence constitute the case for it being considered a novella.

Sanctuary – study resources

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Sanctuary – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Sanctuary – plot synopsis

PART ONE

Part I. Arthur Peyton has died under dubious circumstances after a long illness, leaving his inheritance to his step-brother Denis, who has been engaged to Kate Orme for two months. Denis arrives to see Kate with the news that a woman claiming to be Arthur’s wife has killed herself and her child, having lost an inheritance claim in court against the family, who denied that Arthur was married.

Part II. Kate has lived a protected life and now feels that she is facing the grim realities of the world. But when she expresses her sympathetic understanding of the dead woman’s situation to Denis, he reveals that he knew all along that Arthur was married.

Part III. The woman previously nursed Arthur through his illness, married him, and bore him a child. A lawyer has pursued her claim for inheritance in court, but lost the case. Arthur made over his inheritance to Denis, but no witnesses to this agreement are traceable, and Denis could face jail for misleading the court. Kate feels that Denis is responsible for the deaths of two people and is bitterly disappointed in him.

Part IV. Denis’s mother visits Kate to pleads his case, based upon the supposition that he is honourable and innocent. Kate feels socially pressured, but feels that she must stand by a decision to postpone the marriage.

When her father returns home from business, he reveals to Kate a similar scandal in another remote part of their family. Kate reflects on the element of corruption lurking beneath the polite surface of life. She then persuades herself that she might expiate Denis’s sin by marrying him – so that he does not pass on his tainted inheritance to some other woman’s child.

PART TWO

Part I. A generation later Kate’s son Dick is in an architecture practice on Fifth Avenue. Denis has died long ago, after squandering the inheritance. Kate has devoted herself protectively to her son, who she fears might have inherited his father’s weakness of character. Dick has entered an architecture competition along with his industrious friend Paul Darrow. Dick also wishes to impress a female admirer, Clemence Verney.

Part II. Kate discusses ambition and architecture with Miss Verney at Dick’s office tea party. Then she discusses Miss Verney with the clever but gauche Paul Darrow, who has completed his own competition entry designs. Both of them suspect Miss Verney of being an ambitious social climber.

Part III. Dick has not completed his competition designs, and is running out of time. Darrow falls ill with pneumonia, and Dick hastens to look after him. Kate feels guilty that she has sacrificed everything for her son, when he now appears to shirking his responsibilities to his chosen profession. But then Darrow dies, and it transpires that he has generously left Dick his own competitions designs to use.

Part IV. Dick inherits all Darrow’s effects, and decides his own competition plans are not good enough to submit. His mother protests, and asks to see both sets of designs so that they can judge. But he does not comply with her request, and she fears that all her vigilant protection of him will come to nothing.

Part V. Next day Dick leaves for the office without discussing the matter. Kate fears that his weak character will lead him into the easy temptation of passing off Darrow’s designs as his own. She meets Miss Verney at a concert, where the young woman admits her interest in Dick and her ambition on his behalf. Kate reveals the issue of Darrow’s bequest, but Miss Verney argues that this fully justifies Dick’s appropriation of the designs as his own for the competition.

Part VI. Two days later Dick decides to dine out, but then his business partner Gill calls at the house looking for him. He phones to Miss Verney’s house, and the conversation reveals to Kate that Dick is using Darrow’s sketches to complete his own competition entry. When Dick arrives home, it is to announce his engagement to Clarence Verney.

Part VII. Kate feels that Miss Verney has triumphed over her in the struggle for Dick’s conscience.However, Miss Verney has stipulated that the engagement should not be made public until after the competition result has been announced.

Part VIII. On the eve of the competition judgements Kate goes to the opera, spots Miss Verney, and retreats in defeat. She calls at Dick’s offices on her way home. There he reveals that after a long struggle he has felt his mother’s silent influence prevailing, and has decided to give up the competition – and by implication his engagement to Miss Verney as well.

Video documentary

Principal characters

Kate Orme	a young American woman
Denis Peyton	her fiancé
Mrs Peyton	Denis’s mother, the second Mrs Peyton
Arthur Peyton	Denis’s step-brother
Mr Orme	Kate’s father
Dick Peyton	Kate’s son, an architect
Mr Gill	Dick’s partner in business
Clemence Verney	a young American social climber
Paul Darrow	Dick’s friend, also an architect

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
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The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster

April 4, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, further reading, plot, and web links

Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster was written in English and first published in The Reporter in 1950. The story then appeared in the single volume collection of Nabokov’s short stories Nabokov’s Dozen (1958).

Vladimir Nabokov

Critical commentary

The term ‘scenes’ in the title should alert readers to the fact that it is not a short story in the conventional sense, but a sketch or the unfinished germ of an idea. Having set up the conceit of a narrative told from the point of view of a conjoined twin, Nabokov does not seem to have known what to do with it. Not only is there no development or elaboration in the point of view, but the chain of events simply comes to an abrupt halt when the two boys are captured by their uncle. The only sense of closure to the narrative is the grim revelation that the brothers remain captives twenty years later.

It is interesting to note that in contrast to all that is known about the telepathic levels of communication that normally exists between twins, Nabokov completely excludes the second brother Lloyd from the narrative. Indeed Floyd’s consciousness is rigorously individualistic, and he even observed that the two brothers do not speak to each other. He distances himself from Lloyd, observing of their dead parent the ‘bliss’ he feels in calling her ‘my mother’. And he mentions a propos their miserable childhood that Lloyd ‘forgot much when he grew up. I have forgotten nothing’.

The story is a typically Nabokovian mixture of pathos and the grotesque, but the Black Sea setting remains quite unconvincing.

Study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – 1967 interview, with jokes and put-downs

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of photographs

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Plot summary

The story is narrated in the first person by Floyd, one of conjoined twin brothers who are born as a result of their mother being raped. Following her death in childbirth, they grow up on a remote farm somewhere near the Black Sea which is owned by their villainous grandfather.

As children, local villagers are allowed to regard them as a circus-like curiosities, and the grandfather quickly realises he can make money from exhibiting them as such. Floyd naively wonders (exclusively on his own behalf) if normal ‘single’ children have any advantages in life, whilst he and his twin Lloyd are forced into humiliating proximity with each other

The twins grow to the age of twelve, at which point their wellbeing is threatened by another relative – a newly arrived uncle. Floyd dreams of being separated from his brother and escaping to freedom, and when the uncle threatens to tour them as a freak show spectacle, they escape from the farm and head to the nearby seashore. However, the uncle is waiting for them when they arrive. He abducts them, and for the next twenty years they are in his power. It is from this point, at the age of thirty-two, that the story is related.