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The Invention of Morel

December 18, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, plot summary, and study resources

The Invention of Morel (1940) is a science fiction novella by the Argentinean writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. It was his seventh book, but the publication launched his reputation as a major Latin-American writer. It was awarded the First Municipal Prize for Literature of the City of Buenos Aires in 1941. Bioy wrote many other novels and short stories, some of them in collaboration with his friend, Jorge Luis Borges, whose sister Norah designed the cover of the first edition.

The Invention of Morel – critical commentary

Spoiler alert

The Invention of Morel relies heavily for its dramatic effect upon a plot device which is only revealed to the reader half way through the book. The critical commentary that follows therefore contains plot spoilers which it would be unfair not to announce before you read any further. If you are not already acquainted with the story, but want some idea of what it is about – limit yourself to the first four paragraphs of the plot summary below.

Form

Bioy Casares is best known via the recommendations of his friend and fellow Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. The Invention of Morel is no exception in carrying his endorsement: “To classify it [the novel] as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole”. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz is even more emphatic, calling it “the perfect novel”.

But this is not a novel in the normal sense of the term. It is a short science fiction fantasy; it has only one meaningful character; and the narrative is concerned almost exclusively with the development of his fears and his reactions.

The only other named characters in the story are not developed in any way and they do not interact with each other. In fact they cannot interact – because they are only recorded projections from Morel’s machine, acting out the same scenes over and over again.

But the book does have a legitimate claim to being a successful novella. Its events take place in one location; it has one central character; and it is concerned with one idea – the notion that human life can be recorded and re-transmitted.

The island itself acts as a controlling image or metaphor. It is a curious mixture of pestilence and advanced technological development – which combines the two threats that confront the narrator. – extinction by disease or by Morel’s invention.

It is a short narrative, permeated by the narrator’s fear of being apprehended, and it is ‘open’ at both ends. We are offered no real explanation why he has to be there, and at the conclusion we do not truly know if his attempts to unite himself with Faustine will be successful or not.

At a crude statistical level, the story is less than 100 pages long – approximately 33,000 words. This is the length of a novella, not a novel. Distinctions between. the two genres are often difficult to make. There are busy and crowded novellas, just as there are short and spare novels. But the unities of a single character, location, and dramatic event in this narrative make it a novella rather than a novel.

Strengths

The strongest feature of this work is the central conceit of ‘recording’ human life – the technology involved, and the implications for the fictional characters and their virtual counterparts. Morel’s invention is just about acceptable as science fiction. We know that such a machine is not possible, but we can suspend our disbelief for the sake of a drama in which a ‘real’ human being falls in love with the artificial image of a beautiful woman.

The narrator even becomes jealous of her possible relationships with other artificial images, and he is finally prepared to risk death by merging himself with the recorded world in which she exists.

We do not know what the narrator is escaping from – though there are hints that it is some sort of political problem. But Bioy conjures up very successfully a sense of fear and paranoia as the narrator struggles to adjust to the environment and distinguish reality from hallucination in his fervid state of mind.

The explanation for the mysteries that baffle him (Why do visitors on the island ignore him? Why are there two suns?) are cleverly withheld until half way through the story. After the details of Morel’s invention are revealed, dramatic interest switches to what the narrator can do about his situation. He is in both an existential and a metaphysical trap, and his only solution to the problem puts his own life at risk.

Weaknesses

The first part of the narrative is designed to build mystery and tension as the narrator (and the first-time reader) struggles to understand the events in which he is embedded. He changes his mind about his interpretation of events; he thinks he might be hallucinating; and at one point he even thinks he might already be dead.

The problem with the narrative is that there is very little contextual relationship between these earlier scenes of paranoia and the later revelation of Morel’s invention. At the outset the narrator is suffering from the fear of being captured, and he is beset by the privations of living on a desert island. The first few entries in his diary are almost a re-enactment of Robinson Crusoe, with details of tides, food shortages, and the rotting plant-life of a tropical island.

The other main problem is the status of Morel, about which Bioy seems to be ambivalent, since Morel operates as both a ‘real’ character and as an ‘image’ in one of his own recordings. In order to construct the machine and its wave-powered supply of energy in the first place, Morel must be a ‘real’ (fictional) human being, on the same plane of reality as the narrator. Or to be more accurate, we can say that he must once have been a real human being.

But in the early pages of the story, the narrator realises that Morel and Faustine are repeating the same conversation that they had a week previously. We realise (later) that this is because the narrator is witnessing a ‘recording’ of Morel and Faustine which is being ‘projected’.

Later in the story, Morel explains that he has assembled the visitors for a week’s visit to the island which he has recorded, so that afterwards they can all exist ‘for eternity’. This declaration itself cannot be a recording, and when someone reveals that previous participants have died, Morel takes umbrage and disappears.

Moreover, if previous characters in his recordings have died, we are given no explanation why he has not died himself – since he has recorded himself talking to Faustine and has taken part in earlier experimental recordings.

A similar problem arises in the case of the visiting ship. The narrator records in his diary: “The only ship I have ever seen from this island was Morel’s, and that was only the image of a ship”. Yet Morel has earlier claimed that the only person who knows how to navigate the reefs that protect the island is “our captain, McGregor”. This is the (presumably real) person from whom Morel has rented the ship. So McGregor too seems to exist as part of a projected image at the same time as being a fictionally ‘real’ person. In this story, he cannot inhabit both spheres of being, even consecutively.

Maybe this is demanding rational explanations for what after all is a science fiction fantasy. Perhaps it is like demanding to know how someone could really become an Invisible Man or how Dr Frankenstein successfully assembled the parts of his monster. But it is not Morel’s recording and transmitting devices which are the fictional weaknesses: it is the fact that Bioy seems to lose control of their implications – ironically enough, just like Morel himself. As the author, Bioy appears either not to have thought through the implications of his conceit, or in terms of the logic of the narrative he is in a sense having his fictional cake and eating it as well.

first edition – cover by Norah Borges

The Invention of Morel – plot summary

An un-named narrator and fugitive has escaped to a tropical island somewhere in Polynesia. Although we do not know the nature of his wrong-doing, he has an almost paranoid fear of being recaptured and imprisoned for life. He is keeping an account of his existence on the island, a diary in which he records his intention of writing two books.

From the sound of footsteps, a record player, and voices, it appears there are other people on the island, but the narrator at first hides away from them and accuses them of snobbery for ignoring him. Swamps on the island are fed by erratic tides, and they carry a strange disease which causes human flesh to rot. The tides also generate power which is supplied to a building called a ‘museum’ which he visits to search for food.

Every day at sunset he sees a mysterious gypsy-like woman who sits looking out to sea. He becomes fascinated by her, but is meanwhile consumed by fears of being detected. The woman is called Faustine, and she has conversations in French with a bearded man named Morel. When the narrator decides to approach them, they take no notice of him.

The narrator realises that Morel and Faustine repeat the same conversation that they had the previous week. One day when she does not appear, the narrator searches the whole island, but Faustine and all the others have disappeared. But then they suddenly reappear with new visitors at a dinner in the museum. The narrator sees two suns and two moons, and tries to find an explanation for the mysterious ‘intruders’. He thinks he may be hallucinating, invisible, or already dead?

The island is visited by a large boat, from which the captain and his crew disembark. The narrator fears that Faustine will leave the island. There is a party atmosphere, and the inhabitants are eventually addressed by Morel. He explains that he has invented a machine which can ‘record’ and then ‘replay’ complete human beings. He has recorded the group’s visit to the island, and their existence is being endlessly re-boadcast.

One of the visitors claims that earlier experiments using the machine resulted in death for the participants. Morel is annoyed and leaves the meeting, whereupon the narrator seizes his lecture notes. The narrator moves into the museum and starts to live amongst the images, following Faustine around and even sleeping on the floor in her bedroom.

He thinks Morel might have been deceived by his own invention, and he speculates about other machines which could take Morel’s invention one stage further, giving images an independent life. He begins to enjoy the repetition of the images, and resents the haphazard nature of his own life.

One day when the images fail to appear, he goes into the basement of the museum and re-starts the machines. He records himself for a week, inserting himself into the other recordings so that he and Faustine will be together for eternity. He begins to lose his sight, his body starts to disintegrate, and he ends the diary with an odd patriotic note to Venezuela and the hope that someone else will invent another machine so that he can enter the consciousness of Faustine.

The Invention of Morel – study resources

The Invention of Morel – in English – Amazon UK

The Invention of Morel – in English – Amazon US

La invention de Morel – in Spanish – Amazon UK

La invention de Morel – in Spanish – Amazon US

The Invention of Morel – principal characters

—	the un-named narrator, a fugitive
Faustine	a gypsy-like woman who speaks French
Morel	inventor of the machine and owner of the island

Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, New York: New York Review Books, 2003, pp.120, ISBN: 9781590170571

The Invisible Man

June 10, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study resources, plot summary, web links

The Invisible Man was first published as an abridged serial version in Pearson’s Weekly in 1897. It then appeared in single volume book format later the same year in England and America. It is worth noting that the ‘Epilogue’ that follows the end of the main story was added after the first edition. This does not significantly alter the ‘facts’ of the main narrative, but it does introduce a shift in tone after the dramatic finale to the tale.

The Invisible Man – critical commentary

The structure

The story is split into three parts, which are presented out of their chronological sequence. If the actual order of events as they happened is represented by 1- 2 – 3, they are revealed to the reader in the order 2 – 1 – 3. In other words the novel begins part way through the story.

The Invisible Man is on the run when he arrives in the village of Iping at the start of the novel, causing havoc amongst the Sussex locals. This is the start of Part 2 in the events of the narrative. After a lot of high jinx amongst the villagers, he locates his friend Dr Kemp, to whom he then reveals the origins and the scientific basis of his experiment, and the reasons he has had to escape from London. His account to Kemp is Part 1 of events, or the ‘back story’.

When Kemp alerts the police to the possible danger posed by the Invisible Man, this leads to the attack on Kemp’s house then to the pursuit of the Invisible Man. These events constitute Part 3 of the novel, which culminates in his being killed by a man with a shovel.

As a structure it has a lot of potential – because as readers we are as puzzled as the hapless residents of Iping by the strange events at the start of the novel. In Part 1 we do not know why the man is invisible or how he has got into such a state. Then in Part 2 we are given a quasi-scientific ‘explanation’ of how this experiment has been brought about. Finally, in Part 3 we are invited to witness some of its social and personal consequences.

But the problem is that there are huge differences of tone and content in the three different parts – and very little in the way of a common thread holding them all together.

The first part of the novel reads like a third rate farce, or the story line in a children’s comic. There are stock yokel figures baffled by events they do not understand – which include disappearing clothes, moving furniture, interfering vicar and local doctor, doors mysteriously opening and closing, and a melee at the Whit Monday festival, with people actually crying out “Stop thief!”. There is nothing remotely serious in these events.

Yet when the Invisible Man explains the origins and development of his experimental investigations to Kemp, we are expected to take the narrative seriously. And maybe we do – up to a point. But there are major shifts in tone and substance which disrupt the coherence of the text.

Suddenly in the second part of the novel the Invisible Man runs out of money and robs his own father, who in turn commits suicide, because his money belonged to somebody else. Then the Invisible Man sets fire to the house where he lodges (which just happens to be owned by a Jew). These are events of a different kind that belong to a different literary genre from the events in the first part of the novel.

In the final part of the story we are expected to believe that the Invisible Man becomes a homicidal maniac and suddenly develops a desire to establish a ‘Reign of Terror’. There is no credible psychological explanation offered for this sudden megalomania. None of this presaged by what we know of him from the earlier parts of the story, and the switch from farce to what purports to be a sort of existential terror is just not credible.

Is it a novel?

H.G. Wells classified the books of the 1890s that catapulted him to fame as ‘scientific romances’. The term ‘romance’ had originally been a literary genre for works that were set in non-real or imaginary worlds. Wells was following the trend set in France by Jules Verne with works such as Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in 80 Days (1873). All of these (including Wells’ own stories) are what we now call ‘science fiction’.

But The Invisible Man is set in the very real worlds of London and the Sussex downs and seacoast, so it does not fall into the ‘romance’ category. The events of the narrative centre almost exclusively on one character – the Invisible Man. Only the character of his friend Dr Kemp is in any way psychologically developed, and the narrative makes no attempt to develop secondary themes or the social texture of a realistic fiction.

It is less than 50,000 words long – yet it does not have any of the thematic density and intellectual coherence of a novella – so perhaps the safest classification would be to call it a ‘short novel’.

One good idea

The Invisible Man is one of H.G. Wells’ earliest works, and it can hardly be called a literary success. The writing is clumsy and full of cliches; his characterisation is amateurish; he makes lots of mistakes in the chronology of events (even describing scenes twice); and the novel seems to change its purpose as the story progresses. Yet just as in his novel of the previous year (The Island of Doctor Moreau) he created a work with lasting appeal because it based on one good idea.

We know that even the cleverest research scientist cannot really make himself invisible. (Just as we know that Doctor Moreau cannot really make half-human creatures out of animals and teach them to speak.) But we are prepared to suspend our disbelief in exchange for literary entertainment and maybe some thought-provoking ideas.

The idea of somebody making himself invisible is one of those good single ideas that have struck home, endured, and spread – especially in the realms of popular media. There have been several screen adaptations of the novel, and lots of spin offs. This is the 1933 version directed by James Whale, with screenplay by R.C. Sherriff. Starring – Claude Rains (Dr Jack Griffin, The Invisible Man), Gloria Stuart (Flora Cranley), William Harrigan (Dr Arthur Kemp), and Henry Travers (Dr Cranley). Filmed in Universal Studios, California.

The Invisible Man – study resources

The Invisible Man – Penguin Classics- Amazon UK

The Invisible Man – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

H.G. Wells Classic Collection – five novels – Amazon UK

H.G. Wells Biography – Amazon UK

The Invisible Man – DVD film adaptation – Amazon UK

The Invisible Man – chapter summaries

1 A man arrives at the Sussex village of Iping during winter. Mrs Hall the landlady of the Coach and Horses is puzzled by his bandaged face and secretive manner. She assumes he has been in an accident.

2 The man claims to be making ‘experimental investigations’, and impatiently demands isolation and quietness.

3 Next day the man’s luggage arrives, consisting largely of bottles and books. When he is bitten by a dog, no flesh shows through the rent in his trousers.

4 The villagers are baffled, curious, and hostile. The local doctor challenges the man and cannot understand his ’empty sleeve’ which seems to contain something solid.

5 There is a burglary at the vicarage, but nobody can be seen in the house when the vicar goes to inspect.

6 Mr and Mrs Hall are snooping in the man’s room when he surprises them by entering – first invisibly, then reappearing fully dressed.

7 When challenged by Mrs Hall over an unpaid bill, the man takes the bandages off his head to prove that he is invisible. This creates a skirmish in the pub, from which he escapes.

8 Out on the Sussex downs, a local naturalist hears somebody sneezing nearby, but can see nothing.

9 The Invisible Man comes across a tramp, Thomas Marvel, whose help he seeks to acquire clothes and shelter.

10 The tramp goes into Iping during the Whitsuntide festival to obtain clothes.

11 At the Coach and Horses, the doctor and vicar are looking through the Invisible Man’s diaries when he enters and threatens them.

12 The Invisible Man and the Tramp steal clothes and cause mayhem amongst their pursuers.

13 The tramp Marvel complains about the way he is being treated, but the Invisible Man dominates and threatens him.

14 At Port Stowe Marvel is in conversation with a sailor who tells him about a newspaper report of events at Iping.

15 Dr Kemp in Burdock sees Marvel running across the fields, raising an alarm about the possible appearance of the Invisible Man.

16 Marvel seeks refuge in the Jolly Cricketers. When the Invisible Man arrives, the pub clientele attack him.

17 An injured Invisible Man breaks into the house of Dr Kemp, who gives him food and drink. They are former university contemporaries.

18 Whilst the Invisible Man sleeps, Kemp reads newspaper reports of the incidents at Iping and wonders what he should do. He sends a note to the police.

19 Next day the Invisible Man explains his invisibility to Kemp. It is based on the reflective power of human tissue. He has worked in secret for more than three years on the experiment, but having run short of funds he has robbed his own father. The money belonged to somebody else, and his father has committed suicide.

20 The Invisible Man recounts the early stages of experimenting to Kemp, including making a cat (almost) invisible. Threatened by his landlord in London with eviction, he makes himself the subject of experimentation. He sets fire to the house, and leaves invisibly.

21 The man mixes amongst crowds in Oxford Street but realises he is leaving a trail of wet footprints.

22 The man goes to hide in a department store, where he steals food and clothing. But he is discovered next morning and gives up the idea of staying there.

23 The man goes to hide in the house of a theatrical costumier in Drury Lane He knocks out the owner and robs the shop.

24 The man explains to Kemp his vague plans to escape to North Africa, but first he wants Kemp to be an accomplice in establishing a Reign of Terror. When the police arrive he escapes again.

25 Kemp and the police make plans for recapturing the Invisible Man.

26 A widespread manhunt is organised, and the murder of an estate steward with an iron bar is attributed to the Invisible Man.

27 Next day Kemp receives a death threat. He sends his housekeeper with a note to the police, but she is attacked b the Invisible Man. The police chief is also attacked and killed. The invisible Man breaks into Kemp’s house but is attacked by two policemen.

28 Kemp escapes from the house and runs downhill into town, pursued by the Invisible Man. Eventually, a crowd forms in pursuit, and the Invisible Man is caught and killed.

Epilogue The tramp Marvel has become a pub landlord and has the Invisible Man’s three notebooks in his possession, the contents of which he does not understand.

The Invisible Man – principal characters

The Invisible Man	Griffin, a former scientist
Dr Kemp	his contemporary at university
Mrs Hall	landlady of the Coach and Horses
Adye	local police chief
Thomas Marvel	a tramp, later a publican

More science fiction by H.G. Wells

The Time Machine (1895) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Wheels of Chance (1896) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The War of the Worlds (1898) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The First Men in the Moon (1901) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Shape of Things to Come (1933) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

More on H.G. Wells
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Island of Doctor Moreau

June 3, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study resources, plot, and web links

The Island of Doctor Moreau was first published in 1896 in London by William Heinemann. The novel was successful in England and America, and a French edition was produced in 1900. There were later, slightly revised editions in 1913 and 1924. It is worth observing that the note explaining the origins of the narrative (written by the narrator’s nephew) appears in some editions as an introduction, and in other editions as an appendix to the main text.

The Island of Doctor Moreau – commentary

The background

The late nineteenth century was a period of considerable social anxiety. Many intellectuals had lost the consolation of religious belief, and following Darwin’s theories of ‘natural selection’ many people imagined that the human race was destined for nothing other than a brutal survival of only the fittest.

There were popular theories of eugenics (selective breeding) based on the presumption that the world was overcrowded and would only become more so unless checked. Scientific discoveries and industrialisation were also seen in a threatening light. H.G.Wells was aware of these developments. He had studied science and would participate actively in the public debates on all these issues.

He launched his literary career with a series of novels that he called ‘scientific romances’ and we now classify as science fiction. The term ‘romance’ had originally been a literary genre for classifying works that were set in non-real or imaginary worlds. Wells was following the trend set in France by Jules Verne with works such as Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in 80 Days (1873).

The horror

The Island of Doctor Moreau certainly fits comfortably within the category of ‘Gothic horror’ that was popular towards the end of the nineteenth century – alongside works such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Dracula (1897).

The element of horror in Wells’ novel is all the more effective for being understated. It begins with the repeated sounds of animals or beings in torment – all of which are recounted from Prendick’s point of view. He is disturbed and mystified, but he sees nothing .

As readers, we too see nothing, but are bound to suspect that Moreau, by his very absence, must be engaged in some activity he wishes to conceal. We are also told that he is a notorious vivisectionist who has been hounded out of England. Even when Prendick is pursued by some of the Beast People, they are not at first described, but exist as menacing presences.

Prendick eventually seizes a brief glimpse of Moreau’s laboratory – but the horror is still impressionistic, not specific:

There was blood, I saw, in the sink, brown and some scarlet, and I smelled the peculiar smell of carbolic acid. Then through an open doorway beyond in the dim light of the shadow, I saw something bound painfully upon a framework, scarred, red, and bandaged.

Even later, when Prendick is mixing with the Beast People, they are given names such as Dog Man and Swine Woman, not described in any detail. The reader is provided with general outlines, and left to imagine the worst.

They were naked … and their skins were of a dull pinkish drab colour, such as I had seen in no savages before. They had fat heavy chinless faces, retreating foreheads, and a scant bristly hair upon their heads Never before had I seen such bestial-looking creatures.

Intertextuality

The Island of Doctor Moreau makes reference to several other texts, without labouring the connections or drawing particular attention to them.

The term ‘intertextuality’ is used when discussing one text that makes reference to another. The reference may be slight and trivial, such as a brief quotation or the name of a character, or it might be something on a larger scale such as a setting or an entire plot.

There is a fine line between intertextual references and stealing another writer’s ideas – but the history of Western literature is full of texts that echo or refer directly to texts which preceded them. Most people are aware that Shakespeare took the basic stories of many of his plays from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. The practice is usually acceptable so long as the second author is doing something new with the material and is not relying too heavily on the original.

The first is Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610). This drama takes place on an island where a single man (Prospero) has pronounced himself lord of the island. He has also enslaved two non-human creatures (Ariel and Caliban) to do his bidding. Ariel has very little substance, but Caliban is actually described as half-beast and half-man. The parallels between Prospero and Doctor Moreau should be quite clear.

The tensions in Prospero’s situation are not resolved until a boat appears at the island and gives them the opportunity to leave it – just as Prendick is only able to leave when the two dead men turn up in a dinghy. Prospero ‘frees’ Ariel and Caliban and leaves them behind – just as the remaining Beast People are left on the island when Prendick finally departs.

The second major ‘influence’ on Wells’ novel is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). This is the story of an ambitious and unscrupulous scientist who pursues experiments using animal body parts to create a new quasi-human creature – all of which he does in secret. Doctor Frankenstein, like Doctor Moreau, also rationalises this step beyond what is acceptable behaviour with a dubious theory of moral superiority.

Victor Frankenstein’s monster eventually feels degraded by his lowly status and rebels against his creator. He takes revenge by murdering Victor’s bride-to-be Elizabeth, and Victor dies in pursuit of his own creation. Similarly, Doctor Moreau’s creations the Beast People strain against the simplistic Rule of Law he has imposed upon them, and they begin to defy its strictures. Eventually, Moreau is killed by one of his own creations – the. puma or Leopard-woman.

The third influence is Defoe’s Robnson Crusoe (1719) who establishes dominance over his desert island because he has the advantage of tools and material supplies rescued from his shipwreck. When the island becomes ‘populated’ by others, he turns Man Friday into his slave, and holds him in submission because he is in possession of a gun – just as Moreau, Montgomery, and Prendick keep the Beast People in submission with their firearms. Ironically, the Beast people are the more ‘natural’ inhabitants of the island, because they have been created there.

The parallels between the two texts become more obvious when Prendick is eventually stranded ‘alone’ on his island following the deaths of Moreau and Montgomery. He constructs an escape device (a raft) just as Crusoe constructs a boat, only to find that he has built it inland, and cannot get it to the sea.

Prendick and Moreau

Prendick is the innocent and lone survivor of a maritime accident in the south Pacific Ocean and is at first relieved to be rescued and taken to the island. He is mystified by what he finds there, and then horrified when he discovers the truth about Moreau’s experiments.

He feels antagonistic towards Moreau, and attacks him – even though technically Moreau is his protector and host. But then Prendick gradually begins to assume the role Moreau has established on the island. As soon as he is in possession of a gun, Prendick starts shooting the Beast People.

When Moreau is killed by the puma, Prendick demands that the Beast People obey the Law that Moreau created – ‘Is the Law not alive?’ He also tells them that Moreau is not really dead, so that they regard him as ‘The Master’ instead. ‘Salute’ he tells them. ‘Bow down!’

As soon as the Beast People are under his command, Prendick immediately downgrades them: ‘I dismissed my three serfs with a wave of my hand’. And he hands out summary ‘justice’: ‘The wretched thing was injured so dreadfully that in mercy I blew its brains out at once’.

Once this wave of slaughter gets under way, Prendick accelerates it, even though the Beast People have let him live amongst them: ‘Presently … I will slay them all’. But more than that, he also commands his slave the Dog Man to kill his fellow creatures.

Moreau is presented as the archetypal ‘mad scientist’ who has pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable practice. He has used non-anaesthetised surgery on live creatures to create hybrids – creatures who are half human, half animal. But at least he has been creative in a perverse sort of way. Prendick on the other hand eventually does nothing but destroy life – and he destroys the very creatures that allow him to live amongst them when he has nothing else left.

His motivation is summed up in an admission that clearly echoes The Tempest even down to the image of Prospero’s symbol of power: Prendick reflects, ‘I might have grasped the vacant sceptre of Moreau, and ruled over the Beast People’. Instead he goes home and lives as a recluse.

The Island of Doctor Moreau – study resources

The Island of Doctor Moreau – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Island of Doctor Moreau – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

H.G. Wells Classic Collection – five novels hardback- Amazon UK

H.G. Wells Biography – paperback- Amazon UK

The Island of Dr Moreau – DVD film adaptation – Amazon UK

The Island of Doctor Moreau – chapter summaries

Introduction Charles Prendick explains the origin of his uncle’s written narrative.

I The narrator Edward Prendick survives a shipwreck in the Pacific Ocean and is picked up alone by a passing schooner.

II The former medical student Montgomery helps to revive Prendick, who is worried by strange animal noises on board.

III On deck, amongst filth and animals, Prendick sees an ugly man with a black head whom he thinks he has seen somewhere before. A drunken captain abuses the black-headed man.

IV Late at night on deck, Montgomery reveals to Prendick that he was driven out of his medical studies in London because of a brief indiscretion.

V Next morning the animals are being offloaded for transit to the island. The drunken captain throws Prendick off the ship and sets him adrift in his own old dingy.

VI Prendick is rescued by Montgomery and the evil-looking islanders who speak a language Prendick thinks he has heard before but cannot understand. Rabbits are released onto the island to breed.

VII Prendick is given a room but forbidden to enter the enclosure. He recalls the case of Moreau, a notorious vivisectionist who was hounded out of England.

VIII Prendick and Montgomery have lunch served by the assistant with a black face and pointed ears. Montgomery refuses to acknowledge the man’s strangeness. Next door the puma screams during a vivisection.

IX Prendick escapes the horrible sounds by exploring the island, where he spots a half-savage creature then a trio of bestial like people whose language he cannot understand. At sunset he retreats, pursued by a creature whom he fights off.

X On Prendick’s return to the enclosure, Montgomery gives him a sleeping draught. Next day he hears the sounds of a human being in torment, but when he goes to inspect, Moreau expels him from the compound..

XI Fearing that he is in great danger, he attacks Montgomery then runs away and hides on the island. He meets another Beast Man and follows him to a ravine.

XII He is taken into the squalid camp of the Beast People, where they chant their ritual of beliefs. Moreau and Montgomery arrive to capture Prendick, but he escapes again.

XIII He thinks to drown himself in the sea, but is ‘too desperate to die’. Moreau and Montgomery corner him and offer to parley.

XIV Moreau claims that the creatures he creates are all animals that have been surgically turned into semi-human forms. He rationalises the pain and torment involved. But the results are not entirely successful: some creatures ‘revert’ to their bestiality.

XV The Beast People are programmed to be obedient, but their animal instincts sometimes emerge at night. Montgomery’s assistant M’ling is more humanised than the others. Prendick becomes accustomed to their ugliness.

XVI Montgomery and Prendick discover that some Beast has killed a rabbit and tasted blood. Moreau calls an assembly at which he is attacked by the Leopard-Man, who is then chased down by the Beast People and shot by Prendick.

XVII Some weeks later Prendick is attacked by the escaped puma which breaks his arm. Moreau pursues the animal and disappears. Montgomery shoots some rebellious Beast People.

XVIII Montgomery and Prendick go in search of Moreau, and find him killed by the puma. Prendick threatens some rebellious Beast People, and tells them that Moreau is not really dead. He destroys Moreau’s current experiments.

XIX Prendick argues with Montgomery, who gets drunk and goes off with the Beast People. Prendick plans to escape, but Montgomery burns the boats then is killed in a fight. Prendick accidentally burns down the enclosure.

XX Prendick commands the Beast People on the beach, where they take all the dead people into the sea. Prendick is unsure of his power, and has run out of food and shelter.

XXI Prendick lives amongst the Beast People and assumes command over them. The Dog Man becomes his assistant. But the the Beast People begin to revert to their animal state. Prendick builds a raft, but it falls to pieces. A dinghy approaches, but it contains two dead men.

XXII Prendick sets himself adrift in the dinghy and is picked up by a passing ship three days later. On return to England he looks on his fellow men as animals and he lives in isolation.

The Island of Doctor Moreau – adaptations

The novel has given rise to a number of film adaptations. The first was in 1913, a French silent film called Ile d’Epouvante which was later re-named The Island of Terror. Most of the film versions take minor liberties with the original text – but there are two interesting features they all have in common. First, the introduction of a glamorous female character – of whom there is no trace in the novel. And second, they all change the character of Prendick to someone with a different and less awkward name.

This is 1932 version called Island of Lost Souls. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Screenplay by Waldemar Young and Philip Wylie. Starring – Charles Laughton (Dr Moreau), Richard Arlen (Edward Parker) Julia Hyams (Ruth Thomas), and Bela Lugosi (Sayer of the Law). Filmed in the Channel Islands, California, and Paramount Studios, Hollywood.

The Island of Doctor Moreau (1977). Directed by Don Taylor, Screenplay by Al Ramus, John Shaner, and Richard Simmons. Starring – Burt Lancaster (Dr Paul Moreau), Michael York (Andrew Braddock), Nigel Davenport (Montgomery), Richard Baseheart (Sayer of the Law), Nick Cravat (M’Ling), Barbara Carerra (Marie). Filmed in St Crois, the US Virgin Islands.

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996). Directed by John Frankenheimer. Screenplay by Richard Stanley and Ron Hutchinson. Starring – Marlon Brando (Dr. Moreau), Val Kilmer (Montgomery) David Thewle (Edward Douglas), Fairuza Balk (Alssa), Ron Perlman (Sayer of the Law). Marco Hofschneider (M’Ling). Filmed in Queensland, Australia.

The Island of Doctor Moreau – principal characters

Edward Prendick	the author of the narrative
Charles Edward Prendick	his nephew, who presents the narrative
Montgomery	a former medical student
Doctor Moreau	a disgraced vivisectionist
M’Ling	black-faced assistant to Montgomery

More science fiction by H.G. Wells

The Time Machine (1895) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Wheels of Chance (1896) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Invisible Man (1897) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The War of the Worlds (1898) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The First Men in the Moon (1901) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Shape of Things to Come (1933) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

More on H.G. Wells
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The Jolly Corner

June 15, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Jolly Corner first appeared in English Review in December 1908. It’s one of Henry James’ most-anthologised stories – mainly because it seems to combine the best parts of a traditional ghost story with something more psychologically challenging. It also lends itself to a variety of possible interpretations – rather like his other famous ghost story The Turn of the Screw.

New York in 1909

The Jolly Corner – commentary

Redemption

The most popular and obvious interpretation of the story is seeing it as a parable of redemption. Brydon left America ‘almost in the teeth of my father’s curse’ (we don’t know why) and he has stayed in Europe for a third of a century. He describes his own time there in rather negative terms:

I have not been edifying—I believe I’m thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I’ve followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods… I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life.

It is clear from the start that Alice Staverton is a supportive figure. She believes in his notion of an alter-ego figure, and twice dreams about it on his behalf. When Brydon wakes up from his fright at the end of the story, his head is on her lap – almost like a Pieta composition, with Alice Staverton as the Vigin Mary and Mrs Muldoon as an attendant figure. Alice too has seen the figure, but she reassures Brydon “it isn’t—you!”

This reading of the story involves taking everything at face value. Brydon has seen a ghost figure of what he might have become if he had stayed in New York – rich but disfigured (“a million a year”, “ruined sight” and missing two fingers on his right hand). Alice’s sympathetic understanding offers him a relief from his troubles and of course the comfort of an emotionally supportive relationship.

Guilt

Another way of looking at these same elements of the story is to see them as symptoms of a profound sense of guilt on Brydon’s part. We don’t know exactly why he left America with his father’s curse, but he certainly turned his back on the collective enterprise of the family. Moreover he has lived on the family’s rental incomes whilst in Europe, and has now inherited the entire family fortune.

We also don’t know what he has been doing in Europe, but his own account suggests something disreputable (see above). In this interpretation his alter-ego is the embodiment of all these negative attributes which he must face up to and purge from his system if he is to regain his homeland and live in peace.

He confronts the image of his guilt conjured up by his bad conscience, and doesn’t like what he sees. Brydon wears a monocle: the alter ego has two ‘eye glasses’ in the form of a pince-nez.

In this reading Brydon suffers a psychic breakdown – but Alice’s reaction (and she claims to have seen the figure too) is to recognise it as his ‘other self’ – but to pity it. “He has been unhappy, he has been ravaged” she says. She even draws attention to their both wearing glasses. The argument here is that she is forgiving Brydon his weaknesses, and offering to take him on.

Wish-fulfilment

There remains a further possible interpretation – though it is difficult to substantiate without reading against the grain of its surface meaning. In this reading Brydon really is scared to death by the ghost, and part III of the story is a form of wish-fulfilment fantasy or a sort of ‘beyond life’ experience.

There are a number of hints in the details used to describe the scene of someone apparently recovering from a period of unconsciousness which, looked at another way, could be said to suggest that Brydon does not in fact recover.

For instance, the black-and-white tiles in the hallway are cold, “but he somehow was not”. Then, “He had come back, yes—come back from further away than any man but himself had ever travelled”. And there are some typically Jamesian double negatives which create the vague sense of somebody ‘coming round’. “What he most took in…was that Alice Staverton had for a long unspeakable moment not doubted that he was dead.”

Maybe he is dead – but the events of part III of the story are what he would have wished to happen – recovery, forgiveness, and understanding. This is the sort of device used in other fictions, such as Ambrose Bierce’s Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1890) and William Golding’s Pincher Martin (1956) – in which the protagonist’s escape from a traumatic event (hanging, drowning) forms the basis of the narrative, only for it to later be revealed that there was no escape, and the incidents described were what the protagonist imagined whilst in the process of dying.

The Jolly Corner – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Jolly Corner – Digireads reprint – Amazon UK

The Jolly Corner – eBook at Project Gutenberg

The Jolly Corner – read the story on line

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Prefaces of Henry James – Introductions to his tales and novels

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Jolly Corner – plot summary

Part I. Spencer Brydon returns to New York City at the age of fifty-six after an absence in Europe of thirty-tree years. He has come to inspect a property portfolio he has inherited following the deaths of his father and two brothers. He is mainly interested in the family home, which he visits frequently late at night. He discusses the changes he sees in New York and in himself with an old friend Alice Staverton who takes a sympathetic interest in his concerns. He becomes preoccupied with what might have become of him, had he stayed behind in America instead of going to live in Europe.

Part II. The notion of some sort of alternative self becomes an obsession, to the point that he starts to think of this other self as a character that actually exists. Visiting the old family home late at night, he convinces himself that his alter ego inhabits the building like a ghost. He goes from room to room, searching for it, ‘cultivating’ it, tracking it down to a top floor room in the building, to which there is only one door. He thinks it was previously open, but is now closed.

He argues with himself, both for and against the idea of opening the door. He feels one moment intimidated, and the next confidently superior. Finally, he decides to exorcise the whole problem by simply leaving the building. But on the way out he has a powerful vision of a horrid figure lurking in the hallway, so frightening that he passes out.

Part III. Later the next day he wakes up to find himself rescued and nursed by Alice Staverton and his cleaner Mrs Muldoon. Alice reveals that she was prompted to search for him having had a dream about the Alter Ego (her third) and had in fact seen the same figure on reaching the building. Brydon realises that this figure is the other self he would have become – rich, but made ugly by the life he had led. Alice takes emotional possession of him and reassures him that he is not at all like the other figure.

Principal characters

Spencer Brydon	a 56 year old American bachelor
Miss Alice Staverton	his oldest friend in New York
Mrs Muldoon	his cleaner

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Ghost stories by Henry James

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

The Private Life (1892)

Owen Wingrave (1892)

The Friends of the Friends (1896)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

The Real Right Thing (1899)

The Third Person (1900)

The Jolly Corner (1908)

Other works by Henry James

Washington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel, It’s the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict authoritarian (but rather witty) father. She is rather reserved, but has a handsome young suitor. However, her father disapproves of him, seeing him as an opportunist and a fortune hunter. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant New York town house. Who wins out in the end? You will probably be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, offering a sensitive picture of a young woman’s life.
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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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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.

More tales by James
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The Kingdom of This World

July 20, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, critical commentary, further reading

The Kingdom of this World (1949) is Alejo Carpentier’s historical novel documenting the first successful slave revolution in the Americas. It took place on the island of Hispanola in what is now Haiti between 1791 and 1804. The story is told largely from the point of view of a poor slave, and it unfolds in a series of amazingly vivid tableaux that capture both the confusion of political upheavals and the complexities of European colonialism in the New World. It is generally considered Carpentier’s first great novel.

The Kingdom of This World – commentary

Historical background

The islands that make up the Antilles were first visited (‘discovered’) by Christopher Columbus in 1492. He was making his journey westward in search of spices and gold, and he thought he had landed in China or India. That’s why the area is known as the West Indies.

His journey was quickly replicated by the British and the French. All of these European nations claimed ownership wherever they landed. And they were meanwhile at war with each other. At this time even America was a colony ‘belonging’ to England.

Having established political and military control over the islands, the next phase of European colonial expansion was to import slaves from Africa to do the work of exploiting the natural resources of the islands – the sugar cane, tobacco, and minerals. Much to the chagrin of Columbus, there was no gold. Carpentier gives a vivid account of this episode in his other novel The Harp and the Shadow (1979).

The events of The Kingdom of This World take place on Hispanola in the Caribbean, an island which is split into two separate countries – Haiti and San Domingo. The political history of the region is quite complex. Haiti was then a French colony, whilst San Domingo was under Spanish domination.

The French regarded the island as a colony, but during the French Revolution there was a humanitarian decision made in Paris that slavery should be abolished. Hispaniolan slave leaders such as Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines took advantage of this, seized power, and declared the first ever black republic. Napoleon Bonaparte sent troops (such as Leclerc) to crush the rebellion, but they lost two thirds of their forces – largely due to cholera.

Voodoo

The slaves imported from West Africa brought with them a form of witchcraft that in Haiti became known as Voodoo. Like other religions this is founded on a belief in a supreme and unknowable creator. It has ritualistic ceremonies, a hierarchical system of priests, a belief in evil spirits, talismanic icons, reincarnation, trance-like states, and the sacrifice of animals.

When the colonial authorities tried to impose Christianity on the slaves, they merely incorporated European saints, altars, holy water and votive candles into their rituals. They also used religious celebrations as covert political meetings to strengthen their bonds of allegiance. The fictional character Boukman was a real historical person and religious leader who helped to prepare the 1791 revolt against the French.

Magical realism

Carpentier incorporates these elements of mystical beliefs into his narrative quite naturally, using the device he called ‘magical realism’. That is, elements of rational, material, and realistic depiction of the world are mixed with fanciful, non-realistic elements such as the slaves’ belief that Macandal can change himself into a bird or an animal to evade capture.

Their belief is a metaphoric reflection for the hope of salvation being kept alive in a community. Despite their beliefs, Macandal is eventually captured and executed horribly by being burned alive in an auto-da-fe. Carpentier thus combines his modernist technique of el real maravilloso with a realistic and historically accurate account of events. It is the past re-imagined and expressed in a literary style that combines some of the traditional elements of the realist novel with modernist techniques of a particularly Latin-American flavour.

Literary style

It should be obvious from even a cursory reading of Carpentier that he delivers his narrative in a manner that is radically different from conventional European novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

For instance there is less emphasis on the psychology and the emotional experience of individual characters. He is more interested in providing an overview of events – of showing historical forces at work.

In addition he does not create a continuous narrative, with events following in detailed chronological sequence. Instead, he arranges his scenes as a series of tableaux which represent, either symbolically or metaphorically, the important stages of historical development.

For example, the sudden emergence and even more rapid death of General Leclerc at first appears somewhat arbitrary. He had not been mentioned before this brief appearance. But he represents the counter-revolutionary forces sent by Napoleon to quell the revolution. Leclerc is on a ship with a cargo of savage dogs that will be used to track down and terrorise slaves.

But Leclerc does not complete his commission – because he dies of cholera. This might appear to be another accidental episode to an inconsequential character. It is not – because Leclerc represents the French government’s counter-revolutionary forces – two thirds of whom died of cholera in their attempt to repress the slave revolt.

The Palace of Sans Souci

The narrative

A great deal of the novel is related from the point of view of Ti Noel, who is an uneducated slave with no material possessions. He starts out enslaved on the de Mezy plantation; he takes part in the uprising; and he even thinks of raping de Mezy’s French mistress – though it is not made clear if he does or not.

He is eventually sold on to another slave owner in Santiago de Cuba. Technically, he then becomes a free man, but on return to Haiti he is enslaved anew during the construction of the fortress by the new ‘King’ Henri Christophe I.

When the ‘King’ is in his turn overthrown, Ti Noel returns to the former, now devastated de Mezy plantation and and lives in makeshift accommodation amongst the ruins. Many critical commentators have seen this sequence of events as Carpentier offering a cyclic view of history. That is, when one system of oppression is overthrown by a revolution, it will be replaced by another system imposing a similar tyranny under a different name.

This is a short-sighted view in my opinion that does not take into account Carpentier’s generally positive view of social development. It certainly does not take into account the heroic epiphany which is accorded to Ti Noel in the finale of the novel – in which he replaces his former religious views with one which takes a realistic and material view of the world.

In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, inasmuch as there all is an established hierarchy, the unknown is revealed, existence is infinite, there is no possibility of sacrifice, all is rest and joy. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of his misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of This World.

The Kingdom of This World – study resources

The Kingdom of This World – at Amazon UK – (text in English)

El reinido de este Mundo – at Amazon UK – (text in Spanish)

The Harp and the Shadow – at Amazon UK – (text in English)

El arpa y la sombra – at Amazon UK – (text in Spanish)

The Fortress of Laferriere

The Kingdom of This World – plot summary

Part One

I Poor black slave Ti Noel compares feeble European rulers with the warrior kings of his African ancestors.

II Macandal’s arm is crushed in the de Mezy plantation sugar mill – then amputated.

III Macandal collects herbs and poisonous plants, then takes them to a Voodoo witch. He poisons a dog, then runs away.

IV Ti Noel misses Macandal’s African influence. He finds him hiding in the mountains, having made contact with other resistance fighters. Macandal begins to spread poison in the plantations

V The poisons spread, killing animals and humans alike. Slaves are tortured until one reveals that Macandal is the culprit.

VI There is a search for Macandal but he is not found. People believe he can change his form into that of birds and animals.

VII Four years later M. de Mezy remarries at Christmas. Ti Noel attends a Voodoo ritual celebration where Macandal reappears in human form.

VIII Slaves are herded into the town square to witness Macandal being burned alive. They believe his spirit escapes in a different form.

Part Two

I In twenty years the island prospers. M. de Mezy imports a French actress as a mistress but continues raping slave girls. Ti Noel keeps the memory of Macandal alive.

II Ti Noel attends a meeting at which Bouckman brings news of freedom won in the French revolution. They seek help from the Spanish in adjacent San Domingo.

III A general revolt against the whites takes place. The slaves pillage de Mezy’s house and estate.

IV de Mezy finds Mlle Floridor murdered in the house. The revolt is supressed, with severe reprisals. Ti Noel is spared for his re-sale value.

V de Mezy escapes to Santiago de Cuba along with other landowners. He sells off his slaves and gambles away the proceeds.

VI Self-indulgent Pauline Bonaparte arrives from France with her husband General Leclerc who is to put down the revolt.

VII General Leclerc contracts cholera and dies. His wife Pauline returns to France.

Part Three

I Ti Noel returns from Cuba to Haiti as a free man.

II Ti Noel arrives at the magnificent palace of Sans Souci built for the new ‘King’ Henri Christophe.

III Ti Noel is forced into a new form of slavery – building the Citadel La Ferriere which Henri Christophe constructs as a bulwark against the French.

IV When the Citadel is finished Ti Noel returns to live in the remains of the de Mezy estate. He travels to Cap Haitien but the city is in the grip of fear. Henri Christophe has buried his personal confessor alive.

V The confessor reappears at a mass, and the King falls into a terrified spasm, afraid that the people will rise against him.

VI A week later there is a revolt of the King’s officers, and Henri Christophe is stranded alone in Sans Souci. He watches from the palace as the fires and the insurgents close in on him. He dresses in ceremonial uniform then shoots himself.

VII The queen and her retinue escape to the fortress whilst the palace is being looted. The king’s body is submerged in a vat of mortar then intered as part of the Fortress

Part Four

I The queen and princesses escape to Rome with Solimon. He is an object of curiosity in the city. In the Villa Borghese he comes across a statue of Venus modelled by Pauline Bonaparte. The experience unnerves him, and he wants to go home again. He dies dreaming of his African roots.

II Ti Noel equips his makeshift lodgings with furniture looted from Sans Souci. He dresses in Henri Christophe’s old uniform and imagines himself the ruler of a kingdom.

III Mulatto surveyors arrive to take over the land. Ti Noel tries to hide from them by assuming various animal forms.

IV Ti Noel contemplates the geese that have escaped from Sans Souci. He then has an epiphany that man finds his greatness by suffering and enduring in the real world, not in some imaginary afterlife.

The Kingdom of This World – characters

Ti Noel	a black slave on the de Mezy plantation
Lenormand de Mezy	the French plantation owner
Macandal	a black slave and freedom fighter
Bouckman	a Jamaican slave
Mlle Floridor	de Mezy’s French mistress, a failed actress
Henri Christophe	a cook who becomes the first ‘King’ of Haiti
General Leclerc	a French soldier sent to quash the slave revolt
Pauline Bonaparte	his self-indulgent and adulterous wife
Soliman	Pauline’s black slave and masseur

More on Alejo Carpentier
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Lady in the Looking-Glass

September 24, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Lady in the Looking-Glass was first published in the American monthly Harper’s Magazine in December 1929. The story was inspired by a visit Woolf made to Ethel Sands in Normandy. She noted in her diary for 20 September 1927:

How many little stories come into my head! For instance, Ethel Sands not looking at her letters. What this implies. One might write a book of short significant separate scenes. She did not open her letters.

Virginia Woolf’s old house in Sussex

The Lady in the Looking-Glass – critical commentary

This is one variation of a story that Virginia Woolf wrote many times over – the imaginative musings of a narrator speculating upon the life of someone else – only to have the picture of the imagined life shattered by the revelation of a truth quite different. The same thing happens in her earliest experimental short story The Mark on the Wall (1917) and in An Unwritten Novel (1920) .

In one sense the story is a form of making fun of invention and imagination – a satire of her own occupation as a creator of fiction. And yet at the same time it’s also a superb demonstration of Woolf’s literary skills and her ability to create fiction out of seemingly nothing – in this case someone sitting alone in an empty room.

The speculation about the imagined personality however is not entirely wasted – for it forms a sort of amateur philosophy of ‘essences’ or ‘being’. It fictionalises an attempt to get below the surfaces of appearances, to dig out something more profound or important. This was one of Virginia Woolf’s important contributions to characterisation as a modernist phenomenon.

The story is also a dramatisation of the creative mind at work, as the narrator weaves together ideas, images, and metaphors. In that sense the subject of the story is not so much Isabella Tyson, the owner of the house, but the narrator, whose imagination we are being invited to follow.

The Lady in the Looking Glass – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Lady in the Looking-Glass – story synopsis

Sitting in the drawing room of a house in the country, an un-named narrator describes scenes outside the house that can be seen reflected in a mirror in the hall. The play of light and flicker of shadows in the room is evoked as the movement of small creatures, and the garden outside is paradoxically static as reflected in the mirror.

Isabella Tyson, the owner of the house, has gone into the garden to gather flowers. The narrator speculates which type of flowers will best describe her, and realises that even after knowing her for many years such comparisons are meaningless because they do not establish a reliable ‘truth’ about a person.

Isabella is a rich spinster who has travelled extensively and furnished her house with beautiful objects from her travels. The narrator speculates that these objects could yield up valuable information about the richness of her life.

Suddenly the view in the mirror is changed dramatically when the postman delivers a number of letters onto the hall table. The letters are seen like marble tablets establishing a new visual significance, and the narrator thinks their contents might disclose further revelations about Isabella’s character.

The narrator feels an urgent need to uncover hitherto unknown information about her hostess. She pictures her in the lower garden dressed in her expensive and fashionable clothes. Isabella is rich, successful, distinguished – and the narrator wants to know the contents of her hidden depths.

The narrator tries to imagine what the nature of Isabella’s thoughts must be, and conjectures that they will be like the drawing room – full of shadows and light. And then Isabella herself becomes visible in the mirror, returning from the garden. The narrator then has a new vision of the truth’ about Isabella. She isn’t thinking wonderful thoughts at all; she has no friends; and the letters are all bills – which Isabella doesn’t even bother to open.

Virginia Woolf – by Vanessa Bell

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
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Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
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Kew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
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Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
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Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.
Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.
Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – short stories
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works

The Lagoon

September 10, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Lagoon was written in 1896 and published in Cornhill Magazine in 1897. It was later collected in Tales of Unrest which appeared in 1898. The other stories in the collection are Karain, A Memory, An Outpost of Progress, The Return, and The Idiots. Joseph Conrad later claimed ‘It is the first short story I ever wrote’, but he might have meant it was the first he ever published.

The Lagoon – commentary

Literary style

No matter if it is his first-written or his first-published story, this tale is notable for the literary style that Conrad made his own

In the stillness of the air every tree, every leaf, every bough, every tendril of creeper and every petal of minute blossoms seemed to have been bewitched into an immobility perfect and final.

He uses verbal repetition (‘every tree, every leaf’) then repetition of construction with variation (‘every tendril of creeper and every petal of minute blossoms’) followed by what is almost his trademark – an abstraction qualified by ponderous nouns (‘an immobility perfect and final’). It is also worth noting that the expression ‘an immobility perfect and final’ is not conventional English syntax. Adjectives normally come before the thing they qualify (‘a perfect and final immobility’) – but then the amazing thing is that English was Conrad’s third language (after Polish and French) and he often imports constructions and even transliterations from other languages into his very idiosyncratic English.

The Lagoon – study resources

Tales of Unrest – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

Tales of Unrest – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

Tales of Unrest – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Lagoon – plot summary

A white European sailor and his crew arrive at Arsat’s outpost on the edge of a lagoon in the Malayan archipelago, to find that his friend’s wife is dying of fever. The two men fall into reminiscence, and Arsat recounts how he came to form the relationship with his woman.

He abducts her from her family with his brother’s help. His bother taunts him for not being more defiant, but Arsat knows that he will be killed if caught. Nevertheless, Arsat greatly admires his brother’s courage and strength.

When they are pursued by the local Rajah’s men, Arsat’s brother holds them at bay with a gun whilst Arsat and the woman escape. But when all his shots are fired the pursuing men catch the brother and kill him.

At this point in the narrative Arsat’s wife dies. The white man offers to take Arsat away on the ship, but he chooses to stay by the lagoon.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Lagoon – principal characters

—	an un-named European narrator
Arsat	a Malayan
Diamelen	Arsat’s ‘wife’

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.
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Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
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Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
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Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

The Last Asset

February 20, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

The Last Asset first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine for August 1904. It was one of many stories Edith Wharton wrote with the subject of divorce in the background. She did not dissolve her own marriage to her husband Edward until much later in 1912, but the topic was very much a live social problem at that time. She had already explored the issue in Souls Belated (1899) and she had produced a comic version of divorce and its consequences in The Other Two published earlier the same year in February 1904.

cover design by Parish Maxfield

The Last Asset – critical commentary

This is a mildly humorous and bitter-sweet story of social outcasts unscrupulously re-integrating themselves with society via a carefully arranged marriage. Mrs Newell is separated (but not divorced) from a husband who has been impoverished by her extravagance. He lives in down-at-heel seclusion in a sleazy Parisian back street.

She moves between one upper-class group and another, sponging on their generosity. But she has run out of friends, so she uses her daughter as a pawn in a game of social reclamation. She uses Garnett, and he in turn recruits her estranged husband (‘the last asset’) to make sure the marriage takes place.

But Mrs Newell needs a dowry for her daughter who will be married to a French aristocrat. The money is provided by her lover Schenkelderff, who appears to be a Jewish roué, and who also wishes to be accepted into polite society after being excluded from it following a money-lending scandal which ended in someone’s suicide. He is a double outsider, because of his race and his dubious behavior and shady past.

So Garnett is drawn into Mrs Newell’s scheme – as is her long-suffering husband, who ruefully remarks ‘One way or another, my wife always gets what she wants’. Mrs Newell at the end of the story is related by her daughter’s marriage to a French aristocrat with relatives in England – so she is back in the highest echelons of society. But the darker side to this Balzacian view of voracious social climbing is tinged with the mild aura of redemption in Garnett’s vision of the shabby father in his over-sized and rented morning suit, re-united with his beloved daughter, and giving her away at the altar to a man she loves.

The Last Asset – study resources

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

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

The Last Asset – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

The Last Asset – Kindle edition

The Last Asset – paperback edition

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Last Asset – story synopsis

Part I Paul Garnett has made the acquaintance of a quasi-philosophic fellow American in a cheap Parisian restaurant. The man preaches a morality of expecting very little in life – and tolerating the consequences.

Part II Garnett has received a note from Mrs Newell to say that she is at the Ritz. She is a social parasite who lives recklessly at other people’s expense. She also has an undistinguished daughter Hermione who lives very much in her mother’s shadow. Garnett suspects that Mrs Newell might have run out of friends in London.

Part III When he visits her, Mrs Newell announces that Hermione is to marry a French aristocrat. She wants Garnett to locate her estranged husband and persuade him to attend the marriage ceremony – otherwise the Count’s family will call off the match.

Part IV At dinner the same evening Garnett feels sure that Baron Schenkelderff (who seems to be Mrs Newell’s lover) has provided the money for Hermione’s dowry. But he thinks the marriage should go ahead because Hermione and her intended Count seem to be simple, well-matched, and in love. So he resolves to find her father.

Part V Garnett discovers that his friend in the restaurant is Mr Newell, but when told about his estranged wife’s plans he does not want anything to do with the wedding.

Part VI Garnett reports back to Mrs Newell on his lack of success, and whilst there Hermione asks him not to persuade her father against his will – because of the injustices he has suffered at the hands of his wife (her mother) in the past. But when Garnett reports Hermione’s plea to her father, Mr Newell realises that his daughter’s chance of happiness might be threatened, and he drops his objection.

Part VII On the day of the marriage all goes according to plan. Garnett at first sees the event as an ugly triumph of manipulation by Mrs Newell, and feels ashamed of the part he has played in her machinations. But then he finally has a very positive vision of the event, seeing Hermione reunited with her father.

Principal characters

Paul Garnett	an American journalist, London correspondent of the New York Searchlight
Mrs Sam Newell	an extravagant social climber
Hermione Newell	her retiring young daughter
Baron Schenkelderff	a rich roué and money-lender with a shady past
Mr Samuel Newell	an impoverished American businessman, exiled in Paris
Count Louis du Trayas	a French aristocrat with English relatives (23)

Edith Wharton’s writing

Other works by Edith Wharton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Last of the Valerii

July 12, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Last of the Valerii first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for January 1874. It was reprinted the following year in James’s first published book, The Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales. It is sometimes included amongst collections of James’s ‘ghost stories’.

The godess Juno

The Last of the Valerii – critical commentary

This whimsical tale is sometimes included in collections of James’s ‘ghost stories’ – of which he wrote several. He was quite prepared to give qualified consideration to various forms of the supernatural – ranging from the quite demonic intensity of The Turn of the Screw to the light-hearted Sir Edmund Orme and the almost farcical satire of The Third Person

No actual ‘ghost’ inhabits The Last of the Valerii but Marco Valerio explains to the narrator how strongly he feels his Pagan ancestry as a citizen of Rome. And of course Roman history was deeply Pagan for seven centuries before the arrival of Christianity, and it was also part of the Greek empire – something that Marco acknowledges in calling his unearthed godess ‘Greek’.

It is interesting to note that at the outset of the tale, Martha offers to change her religion to Marco’s, but he protests that he is not a ‘good Catholic’. This turns out to be true in that he is far more deeply moved by Paganism. It is a neat turn of irony, given the events of the tale, that she wishes to excavate old Italy, whereas Marco thinks it should be left alone. He knows where his history is – because he feels it inside of himself. This is a story of the pre-Christian Italian past casting its influence into the present.

The Last of the Valerii – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Last of the Valerii – read the original text

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Last of the Valerii – plot summary

The un-named narrator, an American painter, is in Rome where his god-daughter Martha is engaged to Count Marco Valerio. They offer to make sacrifices by changing religion for each other before the wedding. After the marriage the narrator is a frequent visitor to their antique villa. The couple seem idyllically happy, but the narrator finds the count emotionally empty, if polite.

Martha decides that she wants to excavate the villa’s grounds in search of antiquities, but her husband thinks that old things should be left in their place. However, when a statue of Juno is unearthed he is delighted. He becomes very possessive and secretive about the statue, and it is thought that he has confiscated a detached hand and regards it as a sort of holy relic.

Marco becomes distant from the people around him, including his wife. The narrator fears that some of Marco’s ancestral vices might re-surface, and he challenges him over his moodiness. But Marco insists that he is entirely sane and happy. Martha on the other hand is becoming increasingly unhappy.

Some time later the narrator meets Marco in the Pantheon and finds that he is deeply immersed in a form of neo-Paganism, which he sees as part of his historical birthright as an Italian.

Late one night the narrator comes across the Count prostrate in reverential worship before the statue. The excavation chief tells the narrator that such cases are common – because there are still traces of primitive belief amongst some Italians.

The narrator shares his concerns with Martha, who is sympathetic to her husband if only he will share his beliefs with her. When they go to see the statue, they discover blood on an altar that has been placed before it, and the Count is nowhere to be found.

The next day Martha and the narrator arrange for the statue to be re-buried in the grounds. This breaks the spell, and the count returns to normal, though he retains the detached hand as a memento of his relationship with the ‘Greek’ goddess.

Principal characters

I	the un-named narrator, an American painter
Martha	his god-daughter, a rich young American girl
Count Marco Valerio	a handsome young Italian

Other works by Henry James

The Bostonians (1886) is a novel about the early feminist movement. The heroine Verena Tarrant is an ‘inspirational speaker’ who is taken under the wing of Olive Chancellor, a man-hating suffragette and radical feminist. Trying to pull her in the opposite direction is Basil Ransom, a vigorous young man from the South to whom Verena becomes more and more attracted. The dramatic contest to possess her is played out with some witty and often rather sardonic touches, and as usual James keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.

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What Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.
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The Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
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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 tales by James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Legacy

December 20, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Legacy was a short story commissioned by the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar in 1940. However, without offering any explanation, they declined to publish it, despite angry letters of complaint from Virginia Woolf to the editor.

The Legacy – critical commentary

By the late 1930s Virginia Woolf’s period of literary experimentation was coming to an end, and she returned to a more traditional manner of presentation. After the highpoint of The Waves in 1931 she produced the more conventional The Years (1937), the biography Roger Fry, and her last novel Between the Acts (1940). She also produced far less short fiction and concentrated instead on essays and polemics such as Three Guineas (1938). So it is not surprising to find her returning to earlier conventions of the short story in her composition of The Legacy.

Certainly it sits alongside some of her other short fictions from the 1920s and 1930s in being a study in egoism and complacency, but she comes back to the strategy of the ‘surprise ending’ which dates back to the nineteenth century and writers such as Guy de Maupassant.

Of course an alert first time reader might not find the ending altogether surprising. After all, why would Angela have left her effects labeled as gifts for other people unless she was preparing for her own death? BM’s death too is foretold by a brief mention in the opening of the story – but we do not know his significance at that point in the story.

What we do know from the conventions of story plotting is that someone reading another person’s intimate diaries for the first time in fifteen years is likely to be in for something of a surprise revelation or shock to the system.

The highlight of this particular story is Woolf’s well-paced depiction of emotional disintegration as Gilbert Clandon plummets from smug self-regard into the agonies of unappeasable jealousy as he discovers the truth of Angela’s secret life – culminating in his realisation that she chose to follow her lover into death.

The Legacy – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Legacy – story synopsis

Gilbert Clandon, a prominent politician, is clearing away his wife’s effects following her sudden death in a road accident. He presents Sissy Miller, his wife’s secretary, with a brooch, and offers to help her in any way he can. She makes him a similar offer, which he interprets as the sign of a secret passion she has for him.

He then begins to look through his wife’s private diaries that she has left him as her personal legacy. He basks in a glow of satisfaction on reading the flattering entries she has written about him. As he reads on it becomes apparent that the childless Angela was trying to make an independent life for herself.

First she takes up charity work in the East End; then she befriends someone referred to by the initials BM, who is obviously a lower class radical with critical views on the upper class. Gilbert instinctively disapproves of him and is shocked to learn that she had invited BM to dinner on an occasion when Gilbert himself was giving a speech at the Mansion House.

As he reads on, Gilbert becomes incensed with retrospective jealousy and feels a shattering blow to his own ego. Finally, the diary records BM pressing Angela to make a decision, coupled with some sort of threat. Desperate to know the identity of BM, Gilbert telephones Sissy Miller and demands to know who it is. Sissy reveals that it was her brother, who committed suicide – and Gilbert realises that his wife Angela has done the same thing.

Virginia Woolf’s handwriting

“I feel certain that I am going mad again.”

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – short stories
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works

tutorial, commentary, plot summary, and study resources

The Invention of Morel – critical commentary

The Invention of Morel – plot summary

The Invention of Morel – study resources

The Invention of Morel – principal characters

tutorial, study resources, plot summary, web links

The Invisible Man – critical commentary

The Invisible Man – study resources

The Invisible Man – chapter summaries

The Invisible Man – principal characters

More science fiction by H.G. Wells

tutorial, study resources, plot, and web links

The Island of Doctor Moreau – commentary

The Island of Doctor Moreau – study resources

The Island of Doctor Moreau – chapter summaries

The Island of Doctor Moreau – adaptations

The Island of Doctor Moreau – principal characters

More science fiction by H.G. Wells

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Jolly Corner – commentary

The Jolly Corner – study resources

The Jolly Corner – plot summary

Principal characters

Ghost stories by Henry James

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

tutorial, study guide, critical commentary, further reading

The Kingdom of This World – commentary

The Kingdom of This World – study resources

The Kingdom of This World – plot summary

The Kingdom of This World – characters

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

The Lady in the Looking-Glass – critical commentary

The Lady in the Looking Glass – study resources

The Lady in the Looking-Glass – story synopsis

Further reading

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

The Lagoon – commentary

The Lagoon – study resources

The Lagoon – plot summary

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Lagoon – principal characters

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Further reading

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad web links

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

The Last Asset – critical commentary

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The Last of the Valerii – critical commentary

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The Legacy – critical commentary

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Virginia Woolf’s handwriting

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