English literature Archives - Page 43 of 44

Washington Square

March 24, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study resources, film version, and web links

Washington Square (1880) is a short novel originally published as a serial in Cornhill Magazine and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. It is a structurally simple tragicomedy that recounts the conflict between a dull but sweet daughter and her brilliant, domineering father. She has a handsome young suitor – but the father disapproves of him. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant town house. Who wins out in the end? You will be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, with a sensitive picture of a woman’s life. The plot of the novel is based upon a true story told to James by his close friend, the British actress Fanny Kemble. The book is often compared to Jane Austen’s work for the clarity and grace of its prose and its intense focus on family relationships.

first American edition 1880

Washington Square – plot summary

Dr. Austin Sloper is a rich and intelligent widower who lives in Washington Square, New York with his only surviving child, Catherine. She is a sweet-natured woman who is a great disappointment to her father, being physically plain and, he believes, mentally dull. Sloper’s beloved wife, along with a promising young son, died many years before. His busybody sister, the widowed Lavinia Penniman, is the only other member of the doctor’s household.

One day, Catherine meets the charming Morris Townsend at a party and is swept off her feet. Morris courts Catherine, aided by Mrs. Penniman, who loves melodrama. Dr. Sloper strongly disapproves, believing him to be after Catherine’s money. When Catherine and Morris announce their engagement, he checks into Morris’s background and finds him to be penniless and parasitic. The doctor forbids his daughter to marry Townsend, and the loyal Catherine cannot bring herself to choose between her father and her fiancé.

Dr. Sloper understands Catherine’s strait and pities her a little, but also finds an urbane entertainment in the situation. In an effort to resolve the matter, he announces that he will not leave any money to Catherine if she marries Morris. He then takes her on a twelve month grand tour of Europe to distract her attention from Townsend.

During their months abroad, he mentions Catherine’s engagement only twice; once while they are alone together in the Alps, and again on the eve of their return voyage. On both occasions, Catherine holds firm in her desire to marry. After she refuses for a second time to give Morris up, Sloper sarcastically compares her to a sheep fattened up for slaughter. With this, he finally goes too far: Catherine recognises his contempt, withdraws from him, and prepares to bestow all her love and loyalty on Morris.

Upon their return however, when Catherine convinces her fiance that her father will never relent, Townsend breaks off the relationship. Catherine is devastated, then eventually recovers her equanimity, but is never able to forget the injury.

Many years pass. Catherine refuses two respectable offers of marriage and grows into a middle aged spinster. Dr. Sloper finally dies and leaves her a sharply reduced income in his will out of fear that Townsend will reappear. In fact, Morris – now fat, balding, cold-eyed, but still somewhat attractive – does eventually pay a call on Catherine, hoping to effect a reconcilation. But she calmly rebuffs his overtures. The novel concludes with “Catherine … picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again — for life, as it were.”

Study resources

Washington Square – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Washington Square – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Washington Square – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Washington Square – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Washington Square – Brodie’s Notes

Washington Square – York Notes

Washington Square – 1998 film adaptation on DVD

Washington Square – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Washington Square – audioBook (unabridged) at Amazon UK

Washington Square – audioBook at LibriVox

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James – biographical notes

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Principal characters

Dr Austin Sloper	a successful, rich, and satirical doctor
Catherine Sloper	his unmarried daughter
Lavinia Penniman	Catherine’s intefering widowed aunt
Morris Townsend	a handsome young fortune-hunter
Mrs Almond	Sloper’s married sister
Marian Almond	Mrs Almond’s vivacious daughter
Mrs Montgomery	Morris Townsend’s impoverished sister

Washiongton Square – film version

1949 William Wyler screen adaptation

An all star cast of Olivia de Havilland as Catherine, Ralph Richardson as Doctor Sloper, and Montgomery Clift as Morris Townsend. Aaron Copland is credited with having composed the theme music, but he denied it.

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database.

Film version

1949 William Wyler screen adaptation

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database.

Other works by Henry James

The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Daisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

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Wessex Tales

May 10, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tragic and comic tales of the rural past

Thomas Hardy is one of the few major novelists (D.H.Lawrence was another) who is equally celebrated as a poet and a writer of short stories. Wessex Tales is a collection of his best-known tales which he shaped and re-shaped during his lifetime. It gathers together incidents, anecdotes, and folk memories which record the passing of an old rural era which Hardy captures with his customary sense of drama, his powerful language, and his wonderful depiction of the English countryside. All of these qualities make him an enduring favourite with the common reader.

The stories seem to exist in three simultaneous time zones. Their events capture the social history, the practices, beliefs, and language of the early nineteenth century which Hardy was keen to document before they disappeared from living memory. They were written in the late nineteenth century and contain many of the literary devices of that period for which Hardy is famous – the use of fateful and tragic coincidences, plots which strain credulity, and a post-Darwinian sense of tragedy which pervades almost all of his work. Yet there are also elements of modern sensibility that reflect the fact that Hardy did in fact live for almost three decades as part of the twentieth century, and was personally acquainted with modernists such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf.

Those people familiar with Hardy’s novels will recognise his use of traditional and melodramatic plot devices in these stories. The young country girl who arranges to elope with a dashing soldier, but at the very meeting point overhears a man from her past and changes her mind – with tragic consequences for her and for the soldier. A christening party interrupted by the arrival of two strangers, who turn out to be an escaped convict and the hangman who has been summoned to execute him.

One of the most interesting stories (Fellow Townsmen) is set, unusually for Hardy, not in the countryside but in a manufacturing Dorset town (Bridport) amongst businessmen, a solicitor, and the local doctor. It concerns a number of Hardy’s favourite themes – the building of a house (a symbol of prosperity and status) an unhappy marriage, a former sweetheart who marries the hero’s best friend, and a series of missed opportunities which lead to a bleak outcome for all concerned.

These are correctly entitled ‘tales’ rather than ‘stories’ because they lack some of the compression and singularity of purpose we expect in a story – long or short. They have instead multiple characters, locations, and incidents. Some even have chapters with descriptive titles, and are almost like scenarios which might easily have been fleshed out into full length novels had Hardy felt the inclination to do so.

At a biographical level of comment and interpretation, it’s notable that many of the stories turn around matters of improvident, unhappy, and second marriages. We know that Hardy was less than content in his relationship with Emma, his first wife, but these stories were written twenty years or more before he met Florence Dugdale, with whom he formed his second and no more successful marriage. It’s almost as if he is exploring unconsciously these issues in advance of living them out, just as he did in his later novels. Tess of the d’Urbervilles has a heroine who is deserted on her wedding night. The Mayor of Casterbridge has a hero who sells his wife. And Jude the Obscure is the story of a man who marries twice – both times without success.

But whatever the plot, all these stories are imbued with that profound love and understanding of the countryside for which Hardy is rightly famous. He has a perception which combines historical consciousness, scientific accuracy, and a lyrical evocation of his native Dorsetshire which is truly poetic:

They were travelling in a direction that was enlivened by no modern current of traffic, the place of Darnton’s pilgrimage being an old-fashioned village – one of the Hintocks (several villages of that name, with distinctive prefix or affix, lying thereabout) – where people make the best cider and cider-wine in all Wessex, and where the dunghills smell of pommace instead of stable refuse as elsewhere. The lane was sometimes so narrow that the brambles of the hedge, which hung forward like anglers’ rods over a stream, scratched their hats and hooked their whiskers as they passed. Yet this neglected lane had been a highway to Queen Elizabeth’s subjects and the cavalcades of the past. Its day was over now, and its history as a national artery done forever

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Thomas Hardy, Wessex Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.248, ISBN: 0199538522

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What Good are the Arts?

June 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a bracing and polemical look at theories of art

The chapter titles of John Carey’s book on art theory make his sceptical position quite clear. ‘What is a work of art?’, ‘Is ‘high’ art superior?’, ‘Do the arts make us better?’, ‘Can art be a religion?’. He is taking a radical perspective on claims that are traditionally made for the appreciation of art. And his answers to those questions (in order) are – Art can be anything people claim it is – No, ‘high’ art is not necessarily superior – No, there is no evidence it makes us better – and Yes, unfortunately, art is sometimes seen as a form of religion. He asks challenging questions and raises points some readers might find quite difficult to take on board.

For instance, on the issue that the appreciation of art is capable of inducing feelings of transcendent ecstasy, he points out that such states of mind can be perceived as essentially complacent and selfish, since they are customarily associated with a feeling of harmony and oneness with the world. In a world where a huge part of its population is living in starvation and misery, this is hardly a desirable state of being and certainly not one which can claim to be ethically superior.

He manages some of his arguments by slightly devious means. For instance in attacking Kant’s absolutist values he claims that aesthetics were ‘invented’ in the eighteenth century – conveniently omitting Aristotle’s Poetics which he clearly knows about, because he mentions them in a later chapter.

It’s a very amusing read, because he takes an ironic and dismissive attitude to the snobs and the vainglorious commentators on art, including some celebrated figures whose bogus ideas he is debunking. Nobody is spared: lots of Big Names are dealt with by almost summary execution – Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer – all ‘essentialists’ who believed that great works of art had something unreachable and transcendent which lesser works did not. But they couldn’t ever prove it.

His assessment of the American art collector John Paul Getty is typical. Pointing out that Getty’s personal opinions included support for eugenic engineering and capital punishment, he observes:

Viewed as a humanising influence, the Getty art collection was admittedly a failure insofar as it affected its owner … There is little point in acquiring two Rembrandts and a Rubens if your social views remain indistinguishable from those of any saloon-bar fascist.

You’ll have to hold on to your intellectual hat when he gets round to extolling Adolf Hitler’s interest in painting , architecture, and music – but it’s only to argue that Western culture can easily co-exist with barbarity when it is elevated to a form of quasi-religious belief.

He does skip around somewhat between painting, literature, music, and other forms of traditional art – but ultimately nails his colours to the mast in the second half of the book when he defends literature. He does so on the grounds that unlike the other arts it is self-reflective. That is, it can criticise itself, and offer multiple moral perspectives. Indeed, it demands more of participants than the other arts, because it must be interpreted through the act of reading.

He even celebrates its indistinctiveness, which accounts for so many possible interpretations – which then come out and compete with each other for acceptance. All this is illustrated by close readings from novels and poetry straight from the traditional English Literature curriculum.

When it first came out, this book upset a lot of people with an interest in maintaining ‘essentialist’ positions. So he even indulges himself with a postscript in which he replies to all the reviewers who took offence – saving his most withering remarks for the likes of the self-aggrandising ‘religion of art’ supporter Jeanette Winterson.

It’s a very invigorating and entertaining read. And it’s likely to make most people think twice about the claims they make for the art they like. I hope he follows this up with a book on modern literary criticism.

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John Carey, What Good Are the Arts?, London: Faber and Faber, 2005, pp.296, ISBN 0571226035

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What is close reading?

September 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a brief guide to advanced reading skills

Close reading – explained

1. Close reading is the most important skill you need for any form of literary studies. It means paying especially close attention to what is printed on the page. It is a much more subtle and complex process than the term might suggest.

2. Close reading means not only reading and understanding the meanings of the individual printed words; it also involves making yourself sensitive to all the nuances and connotations of a language as it is used by skilled writers.

3. This can mean anything from a work’s particular vocabulary, sentence construction, and imagery, to the themes that are being dealt with, the way in which the story is being told, and the view of the world that it offers. It involves almost everything from the smallest linguistic items to the largest issues of literary understanding and judgement.

4. Close reading can be seen as four separate levels of attention which we can bring to the text. Most normal people read without being aware of them, and employ all four simultaneously. The four levels or types of reading become progressively more complex.

Linguistic
You pay especially close attention to the surface linguistic elements of the text – that is, to aspects of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. You might also note such things as figures of speech or any other features which contribute to the writer’s individual style.
Semantic
You take account at a deeper level of what the words mean – that is, what information they yield up, what meanings they denote and connote.
Structural
You note the possible relationships between words within the text – and this might include items from either the linguistic or semantic types of reading.
Cultural
You note the relationship of any elements of the text to things outside it. These might be other pieces of writing by the same author, or other writings of the same type by different writers. They might be items of social or cultural history, or even other academic disciplines which might seem relevant, such as philosophy or psychology.

5. Close reading is not a skill which can be developed to a sophisticated extent overnight. It requires a lot of practice in the various linguistic and literary disciplines involved – and it requires that you do a lot of reading. The good news is that most people already possess the skills required. They have acquired them automatically through being able to read – even though they haven’t been conscious of doing so.

This is rather like many other things which we learn unconsciously. After all, you don’t need to know the names of your leg muscles in order to walk down the street.

Studying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and technical terms you need when making a study of stories and novels. It shows you how to understand literary analysis by explaining its elements one at a time, then showing them at work in short stories which are reproduced as part of the book. Topics covered include – setting, characters, story, point of view, symbolism, narrators, theme, construction, metaphors, irony, prose style, tone, close reading, and interpretation. The book also contains self-assessment exercises, so you can check your understanding of each topic. It was written by the same author as the guidance notes on this page that you are reading right now.

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6. The four types of reading also represent increasingly complex and sophisticated phases in our scrutiny of the text.

Linguistic reading is largely descriptive. We are noting what is in the text and naming its parts for possible use in the next stage of reading.
Semantic reading is cognitive. That is, we need to understand what the words are telling us – both at a surface and maybe at an implicit level.
Structural reading is analytic. We must assess, examine, sift, and judge a large number of items from within the text in their relationships to each other.
Cultural reading is interpretive. We offer judgements on the work in its general relationship to a large body of cultural material outside it.

7. The first and second of these stages are the sorts of activity designated as ‘Beginners’ level; the third takes us to ‘Intermediate’; and the fourth to ‘Advanced’ and beyond.

8. One of the first things you need to acquire for serious literary study is a knowledge of the vocabulary, the technical language, indeed the jargon in which literature is discussed. You need to acquaint yourself with the technical vocabulary of the discipline and then go on to study how its parts work.

9. What follows is a short list of features you might keep in mind whilst reading. They should give you ideas of what to look for. It is just a prompt to help you get under way.

Close reading – Checklist

Grammar
The relationships of the words in sentences
Vocabulary
The author’s choice of individual words
Figures of speech
The rhetorical devices used to give decoration and imaginative expression to literature, such as simile or metaphor
Literary devices
The devices commonly used in literature to give added depth to the work, such as imagery or symbolism
Tone
The author’s attitude to the subject as revealed in the manner of the writing
Style
The author’s particular choice and combination of all these features of writing which creates a recognisable and distinctive manner of writing

Close reading – Example

10. Now here’s an example of close reading in action. The short passage which follows comes from the famous opening to Charles Dickens‘ Bleak House.

11. If you would like to treat this as an interactive exercise, read the passage through a number of times. Make notes, and write down all you can say about what goes to make up its literary ‘quality’. That is, you should scrutinise the passage as closely as possible, name its parts, and say what devices the author is using. Don’t be afraid to list even the most obvious points.

12. If you are not really sure what all this means however, allow yourself a brief glance ahead at the first couple of discussion notes which follow, and then come back to carry on making notes of your own.

13. Don’t worry if you are not sure what name to give to any feature you notice. You will see the technical vocabulary being used in the discussion notes which follow, and this should help you pick up this skill as we go along.

Bleak House

London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

Close reading

14. This is the sort of writing which many people, asked for their first impressions, would say was very ‘descriptive’. But if you looked at it closely enough you will have seen that it is imaginative rather than descriptive. It doesn’t ‘describe what is there’ – but it invents images and impressions. There is as much “it was as if …” material in the extract as there is anything descriptive. What follows is a close reading of the extract, with comments listed in the order that they appear in the extract.

London
This is an abrupt and astonishingly short ‘sentence’ with which to start a six hundred page novel. In fact technically, it is grammatically incomplete, because it does not have a verb or an object. It somehow implies the meaning ‘The scene is London.’

Sentence construction
In fact each of the first four sentences here are ‘incomplete’ in this sense. Dickens is taking liberties with conventional grammar – and obviously he is writing for a literate and fairly sophisticated readership.

Sentence length
These four sentences vary from one word to forty-three words in length. This helps to create entertaining variation and robust flexibility in his prose style.

Michaelmas Term
There are several names (proper nouns) in these sentences, all signalled by capital letters (London, Michaelmas Term, Lord Chancellor, Lincoln’s Inn Hall, November, Holborn Hill). This helps to create the very credible and realistic world Dickens presents in his fiction. We believe that this is the same London which we could visit today. The names also emphasise the very specific and concrete nature of the world he creates.

Michaelmas Term
This occurs in autumn. It comes from the language of the old universities (Oxford and Cambridge) which is shared by the legal profession and the Church.

Lord Chancellor sitting
Here ‘sitting’ is a present participle. The novel is being told in the present tense at this point, which is rather unusual. The effect is to give vividness and immediacy to the story. We are being persuaded that these events are taking place now.

Implacable
This is an unusual and very strong term to describe the weather. It means ‘that which cannot be appeased’. What it reflects is Dickens’s genius for making almost everything in his writing original, striking, and dramatic.

as if
This is the start of his extended simile comparing the muddy streets with the primeval world.

the waters
There is a slight Biblical echo here, which also fits neatly with the idea of an ancient world he is summoning up.

but newly and wonderful
These are slightly archaic expressions. We might normally expect ‘recently’ and ‘astonishing’ but Dickens is selecting his vocabulary to suit the subject – the prehistoric world. ‘Wonderful’ is being used in its original sense of – ‘something we wonder at’.

forty feet long or so
After the very specific ‘forty feet long’, the addition of ‘or so’ introduces a slightly conversational tone and a casual, almost comic effect.

waddling
This reinforces the humorous manner in which Dickens is presenting this Megalosaurus – and note the breadth of his vocabulary in naming the beast with such scientific precision.

like an elephantine lizard
This is another simile, announced by the word ‘like’. Here is Dickens’s skill with language yet again. He converts a ‘large’ noun (‘elephant’) into an adjective (‘elephantine’) and couples it to something which is usually small (‘lizard’) to describe, very appropriately it seems, his Megalosaurus.

up Holborn Hill
There is a distinct contrast, almost a shock here, in this abrupt transition from an imagined prehistoric world and its monsters to the ‘real’ world of Holborn in London.

lowering
This is another present participle, and an unusual verb. It means ‘to sink, descend, or slope downwards’. It comes from a rather ‘poetic’ verbal register, and it has a softness (there are no sharp or harsh sounds in it) which makes it very suitable for describing the movement of smoke.

soft black drizzle
He is comparing the dense smoke (from coal fires) with another form of particularly depressing atmosphere – a drizzle of rain. Notice how he goes on to elaborate the comparison.

as big as full grown snow flakes
The comparison becomes another simile: ‘as big as’. And then ‘full grown’ almost suggests that the snowflakes are human. This is a device much favoured by Dickens: it is called ‘anthropomorphism’ – attributing human qualities or characteristics to things which are themselves inanimate. Then ‘snowflakes’ is a well-observed comparison for an enlarged flake of soot, because they are of similar size and texture. Notice next how Dickens immediately goes on to play with the notion that whilst soot is black, snowflakes are white.

gone into mourning
This reinforces the anthropomorphism. The inanimate world is being brought to life. And of course ‘mourning’ reinforces the atmospheric gloom he is trying to evoke. It also introduces blackness (the colour of mourning) to explain how these snowflakes (actually flakes of soot) might have changed from white to black.

the death of the sun
This is why the flakes have changed colour. And if the sun has died the light and life it brings to earth have also been extinguished – which reinforces the atmosphere of pre-historic darkness he is creating.

15. We will stop at this point. It would in fact be possible to say even more about the extract if we were to relate it to the novel as a whole – but almost everything listed was accessible even if you were reading the passage for the first time.

16. Literary studies are not conducted in such detail all the time, but it is very important that you try to develop the skill of reading as closely as possible. It really is the foundation on which everything else is based.

17. The next point to make about such close reading is that it becomes easier if you get used to the idea of reading and re-reading. The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov (famous for Lolita) once observed that “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only re-read it”.

18. What he meant by this apparently contradictory remark is that the first time we read a book we are busy absorbing information, and we cannot appreciate all the subtle connexions there may be between its parts – because we don’t yet have the complete picture before us. Only when we read it for a second time (or even better, a third or fourth) are we in a position to assemble and compare the nuances of meaning and the significance of its details in relation to each other.

19. This is why the activity is called ‘close reading’. You should try to get used to the notion of reading and re-reading very carefully, scrupulously, and in great detail.

20. Finally, let’s try to dispel a common misconception. Many people ask, when they first come into contact with close reading: “Doesn’t analysing a piece of work in such detail spoil your enjoyment of it?” The answer to this question is “No – on the contrary – it should enhance it.” The simple fact is that we get more out of a piece of writing if we can appreciate all the subtleties and the intricacies which exist within it. Nabokov also suggested that “In reading, one should notice and fondle the details”.

Sample close reading of Katherine Mansfield’s The Voyage

Sample close reading of Virginia Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday

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What Kind of Day Did You Have?

August 2, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, web links, and further reading

What Kind of Day Did You Have? (1984) is one of five pieces in the collection Him with his Foot in his Mouth. It first appeared in slightly different form in Vanity Fair. The story is a fictional account of a single day in the lives of two real people Saul Bellow knew well. It reveals the personal tensions and the dramatic situations that arise during a clandestine love affair, set against the backdrop of a midwinter journey by plane between New York State and Chicago.

The four other stories in the collection are Him with his Foot in his Mouth, A Silver Dish, Cousins, and Zetland: By A Character Witness.

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – commentary

Fiction and biography

Saul Bellow often uses real historical figures as the models for his fictional characters. His friend and mentor Delmore Schwartz was the original for the protagonist of his early success Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and his colleague the philosopher Allan Bloom was the inspiration for his last novel Ravelstein (2000). The character Victor Wulpy in What Kind of Day Did You Have? is based on Harold Rosenberg, someone whom Bellow knew from his early days associated with left-wing magazines such as Partisan Review. Rosenberg was a writer, a social philosopher, and art critic for the New Yorker magazine.

These characters are often eccentric, larger-than-life, and an entertaining mixture of talent and gaucheness. Bellow pulls no punches in depicting both their strengths and weaknesses in unsparing detail. They all tend to be great talkers, and the narratives in which they feature are packed with their racy, egotistical monologues.

This blending of historical ‘fact’ and fiction raises a number of problems for literary interpretation and judgement. Readers will have an understandable inclination to believe that the portraits and episodes in the fiction are accurate, true, and based on ‘real events’. Yet the author is under no obligation to make them so. A novel or a story declares itself from the outset to be a fabrication, and there is nothing to prevent authors from blending fiction and historical ‘fact’ in any way they choose.

We know from external evidence that Wulpy and his mistress Katrina are based on Harold Rosenberg and a woman called Joan Ullman with whom he had an affair. But as a piece of writing, the story must be judged on internal (that is fictional) evidence alone. Any comment which takes into account evidence from the lives of the ‘originals’ of the characters becomes biographical comment.

It is also rather pointless searching in works of fiction for character studies of real historical people. Novels are not written for this purpose – and they should be taken at their own face value. Even serious biographies are literary constructs – though the best are founded on verifiable evidence.

Characterisation

It should be quite clear that Victor Wulpy is being offered to us as some sort of loveable rogue – an oversized rascal who speaks his mind and is quite prepared to offend others in doing so. He is also a famous intellectual who can earn enormous public-speaking fees.

But he was a talker, he had to talk, and during those wide-ranging bed conversations (monologues) when he let himself go, he couldn’t stop to explain himself … As he went on, he was more salty, scandalous, he was murderous. Reputations were destroyed when he got going, and people were torn to bits. So-and-so was a plagiarist who did not know what to steal, X who was a philosopher was a chorus boy at heart, Y had a mind like a lazy Susan, six spoiled appetisers and no main course.

But the problem in the case of Victor Wulpy is that his philosophic originality is largely told and not shown. That is to say, we are told how radical, freewheeling, and scandalous his private opinions are, but they are not dramatised. We are not sufficiently shown those opinions in action.

What we are shown is an enormous amount of self-centred, boorish behaviour, and male chauvinism bordering on the pathological.

Wulpy like the original Harold Rosenberg is a self-styled bohemian who pours scorn on all conventional opinions and behaviour. Rosenberg was the man who coined the expression ‘the tradition of the new’. And yet both the historical Rosenberg and the fictional Wulpy are living the life of an old-fashioned Victorian patriarch. Wulpy keeps a long-suffering wife in the background whom he refuses to divorce; and he has a lover/mistress whom he picks up and puts down again at his own convenience.

The female character Katrina Goliger is based on the journalist Joan Ullman, who has written her own account of the relationship with Rosenberg:

Bellow had pillaged key incidents from my life, which should have been mine to tell … It’s only been recently, that for the first time the true cost—the steep price I’d paid to be with Harold—struck home.

Yet despite the understandable outrage at having her personal life made the subject of fiction (for which permission was not sought) her own description of the affair is remarkably similar to that in Bellow’s story. The fictional Katrina comes across as a very willing doormat on which Wulpy wipes his size sixteen feet.

Is it a novella?

The strongest feature in favour of the piece being considered a novella is its unity of time and action. The events of the narrative take place over exactly a single day. They begin one evening in Chicago when Katrina is having dinner with her would-be suitor Krieggstein. On receiving a telephone call from Wulpy, she flies to Buffalo to join him. They then fly back to Chicago, with an enforced stop-over in Detroit. The story ends in the early evening, twenty-four hours later, back at her home, where she is reunited with Krieggstein.

The story has two principal characters, Wulpy and Katrina, who are locked in a very conventional power struggle. He is using her for sexual convenience whilst maintaining his independence from her – with a wife safely tucked away in the background. She feels vulnerable as a single mother and is looking for emotional commitment. This tension between them is brought to a climax when their return flight hits dangerous turbulence. Even as they think they might die, Wulpy refuses to say he loves her – because he thinks it is such a situational cliché.

The story ends in an apparently unresolved state. Wulpy goes on to give his lecture; Katrina is met by Krieggstein, who has been supervising her children after school. Krieggstein is present at the beginning and end of the story and the day, offering her devotion and support. This suggests in terms of fictional convention and logic that her future lies with him. As a policeman he might have a concealed firearm strapped to his leg, but at least he will come home every night – unlike Wulpy.

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – resources

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

A Saul Bellow bibliography

Harold Rosenberg at Wikipedia

Joan Ullman’s side of the story

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – synopsis

Famous but egocentric art critic Victor Wulpy is in an adulterous relationship with Katrina Goliger. Her husband has divorced her, and she is left with two teenage daughters. Whilst she is having dinner with her friend Lieutenant Krieggstein, Wulpy telephones, insisting she travel from Chicago to Buffalo to join him.

Katrina is vigorously chided by her sister Dorothea for tolerating Wulpy’s self-centred demands. Katrina gets up before dawn and flies to Buffalo. Wulpy is petulantly distressed because he will be sharing a conference platform with people he does not like.

In the VIP lounge he makes political analyses of America from what he claims is a Marxist point of view. He is powerfully attracted to Katrina even though he realises that there is an intellectual gap between them. They are joined by Larry Wrangel, an old bohemian associate of Wulpy’s who wants him to consider some hippy political views.

On the flight back to Chicago Katrina thinks about the children’s story about an elephant she is trying to write. Wulpy reflects on memories of his Jewish childhood. The plane is forced to land in Detroit because of heavy snow in Chicago.

Larry Wrangel turns up again and takes them to lunch, where Wulpy turns on his ingratiating host with insults. Katrina and Wulpy stay in a hotel room and have sex whilst they are waiting for an emergency rescue flight.

They then fly on to Chicago, Katrina recalling Wulpy’s recent near-death operation, and her being tolerated by his wife Beila. Their light plane hits turbulence, and they think they might crash, but even in what might be their last moments, Wulpy refuses to say “I love you” to Katrina.

She eventually reaches home to find that her friend Krieggstein has been looking after her children and is obviously hoping to become her suitor.

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – characters

Victor Wulpy	an egocentric art critic and theorist
Beila Wulpy	his stoical and ‘understanding’ wife
Katrina Goliger	his lover, a mother with two children
Alfred Goliger	Katrina’s ex-husband, a dealer in antiques
Dorothea	Katrina’s outspoken sister
Sammy Krieggstein	a war hero and lieutenant in the police force
Larry Wrangel	a writer and sci-fi film maker

More on Saul Bellow
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Twentieth century literature

What Maisie Knew

October 30, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

What Maisie Knew (1897) comes from the late period of Henry James’ long and prolific career as a novelist, and yet it is written in a relatively straightforward manner compared with The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). The narrative is split into mercifully short chapters, and since the protagonist is a young girl, the first part of the book at least is psychologically uncomplicated – by James’ standards. It’s also (rather unusually) quite funny.

Henry James – by John Singer Sargeant

As a subject, or as James would call it a donnée, the story is quite ahead of its time. It deals with what we would now call a ‘dysfunctional family’. Two adults behave appallingly both to each other and to their only child. Maisie is only six years old when the story begins, and she has to endure neglect of both a physical and emotional kind. She never receives any schooling – though that would not be altogether unusual for a girl at the end of the nineteenth century (even Virginia Woolf didn’t go to school) – and she is protected only by the presence of paid governesses.

The triumph of the novel is to persuade us that as she becomes older, Masie begins to understand what is happening around her and develops ‘a moral sense’. She is an entirely passive heroine – rather like Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. She can only sit tight and watch as adults manoeuvre around her, manipulating her vulnerability for their own ends. But eventually, as she becomes older (her age is always left vague) she is confronted with a situation in which she is able to make a moral choice which reveals her inner maturity.

What Maisie Knew – critical commentary

Social conventions

There are a number of forces at work in this novel that stem from conventions in the upper echelons of society in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. These might be difficult to understand for contemporary readers.

A married couple were free to do more or less what they wished – so long as the appearance of respectability was maintained. Married men could absent themselves from home on the pretext that they were visiting friends or staying at their club. A married woman could entertain single men in her home – but only if there were others present – either other single men, or in the case of What Masie Knew if a child was present, acting as a sort of under-age chaperone.

Most of these conventions were designed to preserve power structures and concentrations of wealth in the form of both capital and income. People marrying outside (that is beneath) their social class were endangering the accumulation of capital via inheritance. To marry into a higher class was desirable but rare.

Many of James’s novels are concerned with this connection between money and social prestige. This is often presented in the form of newly rich Americans seeking to establish social prestige with Europeans who have social caché but no money (The Golden Bowl). In Masie figures such as Mr Perriam and the ‘Countess’ perform this role. Mr Perriam is viewed with suspicion because he is newly rich – and might even be Jewish. The American ‘Countess’ (who is of course not a countess) is very rich but is black and is therefore unacceptable.

But this social phenomenon is complicated by the fact that there is also a great deal of prestige attached to the source of the capital. To marry into an old family with centuries of inherited wealth as the acme of success. But to accumulate capital via commerce or trade was simply not acceptable – unless of course the capital accumulation was so enormous as to either pay off the debts or buy a way into the upper class.

Many of James’s novels have these conventions as a basis of their morality, but they are unstated, as are many ideological constructs in society. They are taken for granted, as if part of the ‘natural’ order of things. The characters of his novels must know these conventions to survive socially, and part of the interest in Masie’s case is that being very young, she is only in the very early stages of developing this understanding.

Marriage

The novel sheds a very negative light on the state of marriage. It begins with the divorce of Beale Farange and Ida, who go on to despise each other. They then re-marry – both of them to younger people than themselves. These second marriages are no more successful than the first. Beale Farange marries Miss Overmore, but eventually spends most of his time away from the family house – in clubs (the Chrysanthemum) at Cowes yachting week, and eventually as the paid lover of the black American ‘Countess’. Ida has a succession of lovers (a City broker who goes bust, the Captain, and Lord Eric) and when last seen she is threatening to go abroad. Even Sir Claude’s relationship with Miss Overmore/Mrs Beale eventually turns sour.

It is also interesting to note the subtle relationship between geography and morals. In the late nineteenth century it was quite common for people (usually males) to travel outside Britain to indulge in what is today called sexual tourism. Once the physical border of the Channel had been crossed, the social and psychological landscape changed. Unconventional social and sexual relations were tolerated – partly because of less puritanical mores, and partly because any deviant behaviour was being conducted beyond the sharp-eyed scrutiny of British society.

Ida Farange, possibly the most raffish of the characters, goes to Florence and ‘picks up’ a gentleman en route; and when Sir Claude takes Maisie away to try and persuade her to live with him and Mrs Beale, they go to Boulogne. He proposes that they live together in the south of France, and even when Maisie is trying to persuade Sir Claude to accept her alone on her own terms, it is to Paris that she wants him to take her. They almost do make that journey, narrowly missing the train by just a few moments.

Point of view

James very cleverly gives the impression that he is telling the story from Maisie’s point of view. There are no scenes in which she is not present for instance, and the separate chapters invariably begin with an account of events as Maisie perceives them. But in fact the controlling point of view is that of James himself. From time to time he shows his hand as first person narrator – “We have already learned … on a certain occasion hereafter to be described … in the manner I have mentioned”.

She met at present no demand whatever of her obligation, she simply plunged, to avoid it, deeper into the company of Sir Claude. She saw nothing that she had seen hitherto – no touch in the foreign picture that had at first been always before her. The only touch was that of Sir Claude’s hand, and to feel her own in it was her mute resistance to time. She went about as sightlessly as if he had been leading her blindfold. If they were afraid of themselves it was themselves they would find at the inn.

The young girl is foregrounded, the detail of the hand is one she might realistically notice – but the controlling vision here is that of an outsider – James himself commenting on her position and that of her stepfather.

Motifs

Careful readers will have no difficulty recognising the repeated motifs that occur in the novel. Whenever Beale Farange makes an appearance in the narrative he is described in terms of his teeth. In Ida’s case it is her over-use of jewellery and cosmetics – her “huge painted eyes … like Japanese lanterns”. In Sir Claude’s case it is his addiction to cigarettes. After repeatedly blowing smoke into Masie’s face throughout the novel, there is one scene where James describes them as smoking together – in the plural. “After dinner she smoked with her friend – for that was exactly what she felt she did … they stood smoking together under the stars”.

What Masie Knew – study resources

What Maisie Knew – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

What Maisie Knew – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

What Maisie Knew – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

What Maisie Knew – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

What Maisie Knew – Dover Thrift – Amazon UK

What Maisie Knew – Dover Thrift – Amazon US

What Maisie Knew – Kindle eBook (includes 60 James books for £2.23)

What Maisie Knew – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

What Maisie Knew – Audio book edition at LibriVox

What Maisie Knew – 2012 film version – Amazon UK

What Maisie Knew – 2012 film version – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James – biographical notes

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

What Maisie Knew – plot summary

Maisie is the young daughter of louche and divorced parents Beale and Ida Farange. She is looked after by two governesses – the attractive Miss Overmore at her father’s house and the unattractive Mrs Wix at her mother’s house in six monthly intervals. Both parents use Masie as a bargaining counter and neglect her emotionally whilst in pursuit of their own self-indulgent ends and their psychological war games against each other.

Both parents subsequently re-marry, to people much younger than themselves. Ida’s marriage to Sir Claude quickly deteriorates, and Ida takes up with other men, leaving Sir Claude to look after the interests of Masie and Mrs Wix.

Beale Farange meanwhile marries Miss Overmore (who becomes Mrs Beale) but spends most of his time living away from home. Sir Claude establishes a romantic liaison with Mrs Beale which enables him to place Maisie back in her (absent) father’s household.

Maisie is used (and abused) by most of these adults as a screen of respectability for conducting liaisons with other people. Sir Claude alone tries to maintain a degree of social respectability that will leave Maisie protected, but it becomes apparent that he is in thrall to Mrs Beale.

When both her natural parents abandon her completely, Sir Claude takes Maisie to France, and Mrs Wix follows. They are then joined by Mrs Beale. Maisie is confronted with the choice of living with Sir Claude and Mrs Beale (who are not married to each other) in the south of France, or staying with Mrs Wix in an indefinite future. Maisie is deeply enamoured with Sir Claude, but she chooses Mrs Wix, and the two of them return to England.

Principal characters

Beale Farange	tall, handsome, lounge lizard – Maisie’s father
Ida Farange	tall, attractive, billiard player – Maisie’s mother
Maisie Farange	six years old at the start of the novel, a teenager at the end
Moddle	Masie’s nurse at the original Farange household
Miss Overmore	Maisie’s attractive first governess, later to become Mrs Beale Farange
Mrs Wix	cross-eyed and unfashionable – Maisie’s governess at Ida’s
Clara Matilda	Mrs Wix’s (possibly imaginary) dead daughter
Lisette	Maisie’s french doll at Ida’s
Susan Ash	an under-housemaid at Beale Farange’s
Sir Claude	handsome, young, Ida’s second husband
Mr Perriam	rich City businessman, a suitor of Ida’s who goes bust
Lord Eric	a suitor of Ida’s who is mentioned but never appears in the novel
The Captain	sun-tanned and short-lived suitor of Ida’s
The ‘Countess’	rich but ugly black woman who pays Beale Farange to be her lover

Henry James’s study

Literary criticism

Martha Banta, ‘The Quality of Experience in What Maisie ‘Knew, New England Quarterly, 42 (Dec 1969) 483-510.

Jean Frantz Blackall, ‘Moral Geography in What Maisie Knew‘, University of Toronto Quarterly, 48 (1978) 130-148.

Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood, London: Penguin, 1967.

Randall Craig, ‘”Reading the Unspoken into the Spoken”: Interpreting What Maisie Knew‘ Henry James Review, 2/3 (1981), 204-212.

Lloyd Davis, Sexuality and Textuality: Reading Through the Virginal, New York, 1988.

Barbara Eckstein, ‘Unsquaring the Squared Route of What Maisie Knew‘, Henry James Review, 5/3 (1984), 207-215

James W. Gargano, ‘What Maisie Knew: The Evolution of a Moral Sense’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 16 (June 1961), 33-46.

F.R.Leavis, ‘What Maisie Knew: A Disagreement’, in Anna Karenina and Other Essays, London, 1967.

Juliet Mitchell, ‘What Masie Knew: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl’, in John Goode (ed), The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James, London, 1973.

Muriel Shine, The Fictional Children of Henry James< Chapel Hill, NC, 1969.

Harris W. Wilson, ‘What Did Maisie Know?’ College English, 17 (February 1956), 279-282.

Ward S. Worden, ‘A Cut Version of What Maisie ‘Knew, American Literature, 24/4 (September 1953), 493-504.

Other works by Henry James

Daisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

More on Henry James
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Where Angels Fear to Tread

February 27, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

Where Angels Fear to Tread, (1902) is Forster’s first novel and a witty debut. A spirited middle-class English girl goes to Italy and becomes involved with a local man. The English family send out a party to ‘rescue’ her (shades of Henry James) – but they are too late; she has already married him. But when a baby is born, the family returns with renewed hostility. The clash between living spirit and deadly rectitude is played out with amusing and tragic consequences.

E.M.Forster

E.M. Forster is a bridge between the nineteenth and the twentieth century novel. He documents the Edwardian and Georgian periods in a witty and elegant prose, satirising the middle and upper classes he knew so well. He was a friend of Virginia Woolf, with whom he worked out some of the ground rules of literary modernism. These included the concept of ‘tea-tabling’ – making the substance of serious fiction the ordinary events of everyday life. He was also a member of The Bloomsbury Group.

His novels grew in complexity and depth, until he eventually gave up fiction in 1923. This was because he no longer felt he could write about the subject of heterosexual love which he did not know or feel. Instead, he turned to essays – which are well worth reading.

Where Angels Fear to Tread – plot summary

Lilia Herriton is a young woman whose huband has recently died. Leaving her daughter in the care of her in-laws (whose money she has inherited) she makes a journey to Tuscany with her young friend and traveling companion Caroline Abbott. She falls in love with both Italy and Gino Carella, a handsome Italian much younger than herself, and decides to stay. Furious, her dead husband’s family send Lilia’s brother-in-law to Italy to prevent a misalliance, but he arrives too late. Lilia has already married the Italian and in due course she becomes pregnant.

When she dies giving birth to a son, the Herritons learn that Lilia’s one-time traveling companion, Caroline Abbott, wishes to travel to Italy once again, this time to save the infant boy from an uncivilized life. Not wanting to be outdone – or considered any less moral or concerned than Caroline for the child’s welfare – Lilia’s in-laws try to take the lead in traveling to Italy. Philip is despatched again, but this time accompanied by his sister Harriet.

They make it known that it is both their right and their duty to travel to Monteriano to obtain custody of the infant so that he can be raised as an Englishman. Secretly, though, they have little regard for the child, only for public appearances. Both Italy and its inhabitants are presented as exuding an irresistible charm, to which eventually Caroline Abbott also succumbs.

The family manage to kidnap the child, but they bungle the event and the child is killed in an accident. Gino’s physical outburst toward Philip in response to the news makes Philip realize what it is like to truly be alive. The guilt felt by Harriet causes her to lose her mind. Finally, Philip realizes that he is in love with Caroline Abbott but that he can never have her, because she too admits to being in love with Gino.

Study resources

Where Angels Fear to Tread – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Where Angels Fear to Tread – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Where Angels Fear to Tread – BBC audio books – Amazon UK

Where Angels Fear to Tread – film adaptation on DVD – Amazon UK

Where Angels Fear to Tread – eBook versions at Gutenberg

Where Angels Fear to Tread – audioBook version at LibriVox

The Cambridge Companion to E.M.Forster – Amazon UK

E.M.Forster at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

E.M.Forster at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Principal characters

Lilia Herriton	a young widow
Caroline Abbott	her friend and travelling companion
Mrs Herriton	Lilia’s mother-in-law
Philip Herriton	Lilia’s young brother-in-law
Gino Carella	a handsome but poor Italian
Harriet Herriton	Lilia’s sister-in-law
Irma Herriton	Lilia’s young daughter

Where Angels Fear to Tread – film version

1991 Charles Sturridge film adaptation

This film version is not a Merchant-Ivory production, although it’s done very much in their style. But it is accurate and entirely sympathetic to the spirit of the novel, possibly even stronger in satirical edge, well acted, and superbly beautiful to watch. Much is made of the visual contrast between the beautiful Italian setting and the straight-laced English capital from which the prudery and imperialist spirit emerges. The lovely Helena Bonham-Carter establishes herself as the perfect English Rose in this production, and she carried it through to several more. Helen Mirren is wonderful as the spirited Lilia who defies English prudery and narrow-mindedness and marries for love – with results which manage to upset everyone.

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

The novel title

The title Where Angels Fear to Tread is taken from Alexander Pope’s Essay in Criticism (1711). This is a verse essay written in the Horatian mode and is primarily concerned with how writers and critics behave in the new literary commerce of Pope’s contemporary age. The poem covers a range of good criticism and advice. It also represents many of the chief literary ideals of Pope’s age.

Part II of An Essay on Criticism includes a famous phrase A little learning is a dangerous thing, which is often misquoted as ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’.

Part II is also the source of this famous line: To err is human, to forgive divine.

Other work by E.M. Forster

A Room with a View (1905) This is another comedy of manners and a satirical critique of English stuffiness and hypocrisy. The impulsive and cultivated Lucy Honeychurch must choose between taklented but emotionally frozen Cecil Vyse and the impulsive George Emerson. The staid Surrey stockbroker belt is contrasted with the magic of Florence, where she eventually ends up on her honeymoon. Upper middle-class English tourists in Italy are an easy target for Forster in some very amusing scenes.

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Howards End (1910) is a State of England novel, and possibly Forster’s greatest work – though that’s just my opinion. Two families are contrasted: the intellectual and cultivated Schlegels, and the capitalist Wilcoxes. A marriage between the two leads to spiritual rivalry over the possession of property. Following on their social coat tails is a working-class would-be intellectual who is caught between two conflicting worlds. The outcome is a mixture of tragedy and resignation, leavened by hope for the future in the young and free-spirited.

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Wilkie Collins biography

November 29, 2016 by Roy Johnson

biography, study resources, and web links

Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was one of the best-selling authors of the nineteenth century. He was a friend of Charles Dickens, and like his more famous contemporary he maximised his commercial success by publishing in all available formats. His work appeared as newspaper journalism, short stories, magazine serials, novels in three volume format, and adaptations for the stage. Even in his private life he was similarly prolific. He supported two separate families who lived round the corner from each other.

Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824. His father William was a reasonably successful painter – a member of the Royal Academy – but ‘constitutionally insecure and self-critical’. His mother Harriet was a governess and proved to be the principal agent in Wilkie’s early education.

The family lived in Cavendish Street and took their summer holidays in what was then the outlying rural area of Hampstead. This was a location favoured by artists, and family friends included the painter Constable and the poet and ‘philosopher’ Coleridge.

Wilkie was educated largely by his mother, but in 1836 when he was an impressionable twelve year old the whole family went on a two year tour of Italy. This included visits to museums, mixing with English expatriate artists in Rome, and Collins’ first erotic adventure when he became enraptured by a married woman. The tour also took in Naples, Sorrento, Bologna, and Venice – all the time pursued by the threat of cholera.

Collins was fourteen before he entered formal education – a boarding school in Highbury where he was bullied and regarded by staff as a model bad student. He was glad to leave at seventeen, when his father found him a virtually unpaid job as a clerk.

By the time he was twenty he had begun placing short stories and sketches in various magazines – almost all anonymously. He also made the first of many visits to Paris, where he indulged his taste for wine, good food, and the habits of a flaneur.

He switched from working as a clerk to studying law at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and began Antonina, a historical novel. However, when his father died in 1847, he dropped everything for six months and wrote a paternal biography – which was dedicated to family friend Sir Robert Peel. The book was well reviewed and even a modest commercial success.

Collins developed an interest in the theatre, and through his work in amateur productions he eventually came into contact with Charles Dickens. The two got on very well together. Dickens appreciated Wilkie’s hard work and professional attitude to writing: Wilkie enjoyed the older man’s appetite for adventurism – fuelled by the disappointment of his marriage. They went on late night sorties into the underworld of Soho and the East End.

He became active as a journalist, writing for the radical newspaper The Leader founded by George Henry Lewes (Mr George Eliot). In religious terms he was a sceptic and critic of the Church, but not an atheist. He took an interest in hypnotism and clairvoyance which were both fashionable at that time. In 1852 he was called to the Bar – not having worked for or passed any exams, which was quite common in the Law at that period.

He contributed to Household Words and Bentley’s Miscellany, but in 1852 published his first serious novel, Basil, for which he wrote a long preface explaining his artistic intentions. The novel was well received and has the distinction of being perhaps the first ‘sensation novel’.

Despite his commercial success and social connections with the Coutts banking family, the odd thing is he didn’t have his own bank account. He placed all his earnings in his mother’s account and drew off cash when he needed it.

He grew closer and closer to Dickens, acting as a sort of bachelor support at a time that Dickens’ marriage was floundering. There were long expeditions together with painter Augustus Egg to France, Switzerland, and Italy. However, Wilkie’s revelries were slowed down somewhat by a venereal infection he picked up around this time.

He continued to produce enormous amounts of magazine sketches and journalism, and made his first efforts to break into the theatre with plays such as The Lighthouse and The Frozen Deep. These were not initially successful, whereas he was able to turn any number of his holiday jaunts and seagoing cruises into profitable non-fiction.

Rather surprisingly (since his best work was yet to come) he started to develop a Europe-wide reputation. A critical study of his early work appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes and his next novel, After Dark (1856), was published by Tauschnitz for circulation on the Continent.

Although he was still quite young at thirty-two, he began to suffer from the various pains and ‘rheumatic gout’ which would affect him for the rest of his life. However, this did not affect his prodigious output, and around this time he added to the pressures under which he worked by embarking on serial publication. He worked out the plots of his novels in advance, but had to maintain a crushing level of production to stay a fortnight ahead of the printers – on both sides of the Atlantic.

As his international reputation took flight and his income rose as a consequence, he developed more interest in the establishment of copyright agreements. Like his friend Dickens, he took exception to unscupulous publishers issuing pirated editions of his work for which they had paid nothing. It was not until much later in the century that this practice was prohibited.

United as they were by many of their literary works, Dickens and Wilkie also shared central roles in two sexual scandals that developed around the same time. Dickens, the now world-famous author and family man, left his wife and nine children and took up secretly with the eighteen year old actress Ellen Ternan. Wilkie Collins did almost the opposite, but with the same effect. He started living openly with Caoline Graves, an older widow with a young daughter. They never married but stayed together (with one interruption) for the rest of his life. Caroline occupied the role of common-law wife, rather than that of mistress.

In 1859 he produced what was to become one of the most successful and best-selling novels of the nineteenth century. The Woman in White is a mystery story, a sensation novel, and a subtle critique of conventional values that piles up one thrilling incident after another. It became the talk of London, and when published in volume form sold out immediately in England and France.

It was around this time that Wilkie, still suffering from the pains of his ‘rheumatic gout’, began the regular use of opium as an analgesic. Laudanum (opium disolved in alcohol) was available at any pharmacy for three pence an ounce around that time. Half an ounce was enough to kill a horse.

He started work on his next novel, spurred on by an advance from publishers Smith and Elder of £5,000 – the equivalent of half a million pounds today. After that he took Caroline and her daughter Carrie on an extended stay in Italy, where all three of them seemed to improve their health.

His next major work was Armadale which had been two years in the planning. It was successful both in England and America.even though the States were in the middle of a civil war. In order to protect his theatrical rights he immediately wrote a stage adaptation. He still hankered after success in the theatre, despite the fact tha a production of The Frozen Deep had been a flop.

In 1868 he had just started the serialisation of what was to be his second major success, The Moonstone when he suffered a double blow. First his mother died, then he suffered a savage attack of ‘gout’ which affected his eyes – though it is now thought that this affliction was actually a strain of venereal disease. He was forced to dictate some passages of the novel.

Wilkie had always used his mother’s snobbish objection to the lower-class Caroline as a reason for not marrying. But even with maternal opposition now removed he still didn’t make the relationship decent and legal. Caroline’s reaction was understandable: she married someone else under an assumed name. Wilkie’s was less so – he actually went to the wedding.

But by then he also had another working class servant girl in his life. Martha Rudd was about have the first of his three children. He installed her in lodgings a short walk from his large house in Marylebone and gave her an annual allowance and the name ‘Mrs Dawson’. Caroline’s daughter stayed on with Wilkie as his occasional amanuensis.

If this arrangement was not complex enough, it became so two years later when Caroline (now Mrs Crow) returned ‘home’ when her marriage failed. Yet like the plot of a Henry James novel, the respectability of her young daughter Carrie (seen socially as Wilkie’s adopted child) conferred social acceptability back onto her mother, even though she was married to one man and living with another.

Throughout all this personal upheaval Wilkie was working on The Moonstone which when it was published made him a lot of money. It also profited Dickens, even though he was critical of the novel’s over-elaborate construction. Not long after this, even though the two friends had so much in common, the relationship between them deteriorated. Shortly afterwards Dickens died.

Wilkie’s next book was Man and Wife (1870) which was based on an idea he had originally conceived as a play. At a personal level he was now a man with two wives and two families. The next year he had his first taste of theatrical success when The Woman in White was staged at the Olympic Theatre. The original novel was completely changed by Wilkie himself, and whole scenes either omitted or added. The performance lasted four hours, but the play was a popular and critical success.

It is possible that this very success was detrimental to his later works, because the novels he went on to produce were always written with potential dramatisation in mind. They are full of long conversations between leading characters, set in a limited range of indoor locations. It proved to be the case that what was dramatic in a prose narrative was not necessarily so before the footlights – and vice versa.

In 1873 Wilkie embarked on a reading tour of America. He was well received as a famous author and a friend of Charles Dickens, but the trip was not profitable financially, largely because of poor management.

His next book, The Law and the Lady (1875) was not successful, but he was compensated by continued triumphs on the stage, even though his adaptation of Armadale altered and watered down the story until it was almost unrecognisable.

He was forever thinking of new ways to present old material – so much so that at times he sailed very close to self-plagiarism. But he was very keen to exploit all the avenues of publication open to him. He had an idea that there was an enormous audience or readership for literary entertainment ‘out there’ which had not yet been reached. He was right – and he also had not one but two families to keep.

He found assistance in this quest by hiring A.P. Watt – the first person to set himself up as what we now call a literary agent. The relationship was a good one – but Watt found difficulty in placing material that was considered too highbrow for provincial newspapers. The masses were not to be reached quite so easily.

As he got older his physical ailments multiplied and he became virtually a self-made invalid, living on cold soup and champagne. This did not prevent his conducting, at over sixty years of age, a flirtacious relationship with a twelve year old girl he befriended locally.

He continued to push himself right up to the end, sometimes working twelve hours a day to produce more stories and journalism. But he was sinking fast, and his last novel had to be passed over to Walter Besant for completion. Wilkie died in his recently acquired Wimpole Street apartment in September 1889.

His popular reputation continued to decline in the years after his death, even though the influence of sensation novels was still present in the work of younger writers such as Thomas Hardy. But there has been a revival of interest in his work starting in the late twentieth century, and now there is no reason why he should not be considred as a talented and major literary figure of his era, along with the equally neglected (and prolific) Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

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Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, London: Secker and Warburg, 1992, pp.498, ISBN: 0436367122

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William Wilson

April 29, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

William Wilson was first published in the October 1839 issue of Burton Gentleman’s Magazine. Later in 1844 it was translated into French and published in the Paris newspaper La Quotidienne. This marked the first introduction of Poe’s work into France, where it has been highly regarded ever since.

The story has surprisingly autobiographical elements. During his youth Poe spent some time at Manor House School in Stoke Newington in north London, on which the ‘academy’ in the story is based. However, he did not go on to either Eton or Oxford University – which he describes in the tale as ‘the most dissolute university in Europe’.

Edgar Allan Poe

William Wilson – critical summary

The double

This is an early and now-famous example of the double in literature – sometimes known by its German term the ‘Doppelganger’. The elements of a double in the story should be quite clear from the start. William Wilson is confronted by another schoolboy at the academy who has the same name as himself. They have the same birthday; they are the same height; they wear the same clothes; and they both join the academy and leave it on exactly the same day.

Wilson is exasperated by the appearances of what he perceives as a ‘rival’, and yet the double gives him ‘advice’ which Wilson, writing in retrospect, now wishes he had heeded. It is also significant that nobody else in the story seems to be aware of the double; he ‘appears’ only to Wilson himself.

“Yet this superiority — even this equality — was in truth acknowledged by no one but myself; our associates, by some unaccountable blindness, seemed not even to suspect it.”

It is one of the common features of the double in literature that it appears only to the protagonist of the story or the novel. The double figure acts as ‘another self’ to the protagonist which acts as the embodiment of good, evil, or ‘otherness’. It is for this reason that stories featuring a double are often seen as studies in psychological aberration or what is often called ‘the divided self’.

It should be fairly clear that William Wilson’s double is a manifestation of his conscience. The double appears at crucial moments when Wilson is about to commit a morally dubious act. Because the story is narrated from Wilson’s point of view, there is a strong tendency for the reader to be sympathetic to the account of events he gives us. He sees the double as a source of irritation and interference. But the double, the conscience, is merely giving him advice, and warnings – always in a low tone of voice.

The epitaph to this story provides an unmistakable clue to Poe’s intended meaning.

What say of it? what say Conscience grim,
That spectre in my path?

The essential conflict is between Wilson who wishes to do wrong, and his conscience which is warning him against himself. The two finally clash at the Roman ball, where Wilson finally kills off his double, only to discover that he is killing himself. The double tells him – no longer in a whisper – “In me didst thou exist—and in my death, see … how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

An extended tutorial on The Double

Structure

William Wilson follows all of Poe’s own rules for the constituents of a successful short story. It strikes its distinctive tone from the opening sentence – ‘Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson’. And the story deals with that one topic alone – the inner identity (and conflict) of the protagonist.

Poe also claimed that a story should have a ‘unity of effect’. That is, all the elements of the story should be directed towards the point it is trying to make. This means in its turn that there should not be any digressions or the inclusion of unrelated material. William Wilson certainly does follow this rule. The story begins with Wilson’s anguish over his personal identity, and the focus of attention remains on that topic until the story’s dramatic finale.

Oscar Wilde

The striking image of ‘self’ destruction at the conclusion of the story was echoed famously by Oscar Wilde in the conclusion to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Wilde’s is another story of moral decline, in which the protagonist becomes progressively degenerate yet remains amazingly youthful in appearance. He finally confronts a portrait painting of himself which has aged in an attic to reveal his corruption. In a rage he stabs the painting with a knife and is found dead with the knife in his own heart – and the portrait has become young once again.

The idea of a portrait hidden in an attic which reveals the unpleasant truth about someone’s behaviour and age has become a commonplace image and figure of speech – often humorously applied. It is rightly attributed to Wilde, but it has its origins in Edgar Allan Poe.

William Wilson – study resources

Poe: The Ultimate Collection – Amazon UK

Poe: The Ultimate Collection – Amazon US

Poe: Collected Tales – Penguin – Amazon UK

Poe: Collected Tales – Penguin – Amazon US

Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Kindle illustrated – UK

Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Kindle illustrated – US

William Wilson at Wikipedia

William Wilson – plot summary

William Wilson’s reputation has been ruined, and as death approaches him he wishes to make a record of his descent into wickedness.

Believing that he has inherited a ‘remarkable’ nature, he recalls his youth as a schoolboy in England. His academy school is like a Gothic prison, and its ethos is disciplinarian. Another boy with the same name becomes a competitor and a rival.

Wilson is worried by the other boy’s easy superiority, but it is not noticed by anybody else. The two boys have the same birthday, they are the same height, and they join the school on the same day.

They become inseparable companions. The rival can only speak in a very low voice, but he dresses in the same clothes as Wilson. He also takes pleasure in his superiority – though this is noticed only by Wilson himself.

The rival patronises Wilson and gives him advice, which Wilson now wishes he had heeded. Wilson visits the rival’s bedroom at night whilst he is asleep – but he does not look the same.

Wilson leaves the academy and goes to Eton where he plunges himself into a life of folly and vice. One drunken night he is visited by the rival who raises a warning finger then disappears.

Wilson moves on to Oxford University where he uses his wealth to gamble and take advantage of others. On the occasion of completely ruining a young nobleman he is visited again by the rival, who reveals to the company that Wilson has been cheating at cards. Next morning he leaves the university in disgrace and flees to the Continent.

The double figure pursues him throughout Europe, thwarting his plans for ‘bitter mischief’. Finally at a masked ball in Rome, the figure appears when Wilson is about to seduce a young married woman. Wilson draws a rapier to kill the figure, but finds himself confronting his own image in a full length mirror, spattered with blood, and saying ‘thou hast murdered thyself’.

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Wingstroke

July 16, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

Wingstroke was written in October 1923 and was first published in the Russian emigré periodical Russkoye Ekho for January 1924. It is quite possible that the story is unfinished, since Nabokov mentioned in a letter to his mother that he had written a continuation to the tale. The story also has numbered sections, which suggests that it is a fragment of what was planned as a longer work.

Vladimir Nabokov

Wingstroke – critical commentary

Young men in states of existential anxiety are quite common in Nabokov’s early fiction. One thinks of the 1924 story, A Matter of Chance (1924) – and indeed they persist as late as the novella The Eye (1930) and his novel Despair (1936). This is not counting the inspired madmen who continue through to Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1955) and Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire (1962).

The protagonist Kern has a rational source for his state of unease: his wife has betrayed him with another man, then killed herself on discovering her lover was a rogue and a thief. But there are also hints that Kern might be unwell. He is repeatedly beset by pains in his chest and presentiments of death.

In fact there are several pre-echoes of death throughout the story. Isabel explains to Kern her exhilaration at skiing dangerously at night, pre-figuring exactly what does happen to her, only a few pages later:.

“It was extraordinary. I hurtled down the slopes in the dark. I flew off the bumps. Right up into the stars.”
”You might have killed yourself,” said Kern.

Shortly afterwards Kern feels that ‘He had the sensation that he had glanced into death.’ There are far too many symbolic references for a simple short story, and another reason to believe that what exists of Wingstroke is a fragment of what was originally conceived as a longer work.

There is also the problem of what is presumably an unintended suggestion. Whilst Kern is grappling with his desire for Isabel he is picked up by the character Monfiori, who is clearly a homosexual Monfiori warns Kern against Isabel: “She’s a woman. And I, you see, have other tastes.” He is quite open about his intentions, telling Kern:

“I search everywhere for the likes of you – in expensive hotels, on trains, in seaside resorts, at night on the quays of big cities.”

Yet at the conclusion to the story, as the two males return to the hotel following Isabel’s fatal accident on the ski slope, Kern makes a very suggestive invitation to Monfiori:

”I am going upstairs to my room now … Upstairs … If you wish to accompany me”

By all the conventions of fictional development and narrative logic, this can only be interpreted as a suggestion that Kern is accepting Monfiori’s gay advances.

Nabokov has a number of homosexual characters in his fiction, but they only ever feature as figures of derision. It is very unlikely (and it would be unique in his oeuvre) if he were suggesting that Kern is escaping from disappointment over his wife’s death and his fascination regarding Isabel – into the arms of a short man with red hair and ‘pointed ears, packed with canary-coloured dust, with reddish fluff on their tips’. This is simply not Nabokov’s style at all.

Study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection

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.

Wingstroke – plot summary

1 Kern is a thirty-five year old man staying in a Zermatt hotel during the winter skiing season. He is in an emotionally depressed state since his wife of seven years has fallen in love with someone else, then when he turned out to be a thief and a liar, has killed herself by taking poison. Kern is attracted to Isabel, a glamorous English fellow guest in the hotel. He dances with her, then finds it difficult to get to sleep afterwards, because she is in the next room, is playing a guitar, and has a noisy dog.

2 Next day she denies having made any noise. Kern is invited to the bar by the homosexual Monfiori who advises him to forget Isabel. The two men consume lots of cocktails, and Kern tell Monfiori that he is planning to kill himself next day. Monfiori says he wants to watch.

Kern goes up to his room quite drunk, then remembers that Isabel is next door. When he goes to her room she rushes out, and Kern is confronted by what he perceives as a dishevelled Angel who has come in through the window, but is clearly the dog that has followed Isabel to the hotel. He stuffs the dog into a wardrobe, collects Isabel, and goes back to his room where he tries to write an important letter announcing his suicide.

3 Next day he cannot find the letter, but still plans to shoot himself at lunch time. He goes to watch the ski jumping event where Isabel is competing. But on her jump, she falls from mid air and is killed. Kern returns to the hotel and invites Monfiori to join him in his room.

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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Vladimir Nabokov links

Vladimir Nabokov – life and works

Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories – critical analyses

Vladimir Nabokov: an illustrated life

tutorial, study resources, film version, and web links

Washington Square – plot summary

Study resources

Principal characters

Washiongton Square – film version

Film version

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

tragic and comic tales of the rural past

a bracing and polemical look at theories of art

a brief guide to advanced reading skills

Close reading – explained

Close reading – Checklist

Close reading – Example

Close reading

tutorial, study guide, web links, and further reading

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – commentary

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – resources

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – synopsis

What Kind of Day Did You Have? – characters

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

What Maisie Knew – critical commentary

What Masie Knew – study resources

What Maisie Knew – plot summary

Principal characters

Literary criticism

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

Where Angels Fear to Tread – plot summary

Study resources

Principal characters

Where Angels Fear to Tread – film version

The novel title

Further reading

Other work by E.M. Forster

biography, study resources, and web links

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

William Wilson – critical summary

William Wilson – study resources

William Wilson – plot summary

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

Wingstroke – critical commentary

Study resources

Wingstroke – plot summary

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov links

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