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The Defence

April 26, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, plot, study resources, web links

The Defence was Vladimir Nabokov’s third novel. It was written in the French Pyrenees and Berlin during 1929, then first serialized as Zashchita Lubina in the Russian emigre quarterly Sovremennye Zapiski. This was followed by publication as a single volume novel by Slovo in Berlin (1930).

Nabokov had composed chess problems and various puzzles (as well as short stories) for the Russian emigre newspaper ‘Rul that his father had established in Berlin in the early 1920s. All of these contributions were composed under the pen name of ‘V. Sirin’ which he adopted to distinguish himself from his father, whose name was also Vladimir Nabokov. The novel was later serialized in The New Yorker and then appeared simultaneously in the UK and the USA in 1964, translated by Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author.

The Defence – critical commentary

Autism?

In a typically tongue-in-cheek, semi-boastful introduction to the novel, Nabokov congratulates himself on the complex structure of the novel and the compositional chess references and allusions he weaves into his narrative:

the chess effects I planted are distinguishable not only in these separate scenes; their concatenation can be found in the basic structure of this attractive novel. Thus toward the end of Chapter Four an unexpected move is made by me in a corner of the board, sixteen years elapse in the course of one paragraph, and Luzhin, suddenly promoted to seedy manhood and transferred to a German resort, is discovered at a garden table

It is certainly true that the moving backwards and forwards in the chronology of events is handled in a masterful fashion, but Nabokov’s more remarkable achievement is the creation of a narrative related largely from the perspective of someone we would now call autistic.

Young Alexandr Ivanovich Luzhin is sullen, withdrawn, and uncommunicative. He fails to recognise social norms and does not respond to the positive efforts and signals of those around him, including his own parents. He isolates himself from his peers at school, and has obsessive compulsive disorders such as stepping on the cracks between paving stones and memorising car number plates in case they will come in useful at a later date .

Later he is unable to distinguish between dream fantasies and reality, he clings to ‘favourite books’ (Jules Verne and Sherlock Holmes) and he rejects replacements because they are ‘the wrong edition’ – that is, they are not visually identical to the volumes he read as a child. In the medical jargon of autism, this is called ‘sameness’ – a pathological clinging to what is already known.

Luzhin is emotionally detached from both his mother and father, feels only a glimmer of interest in his aunt because she shows him the rudiments of chess, and he lives in a parallel universe of abstract metaphors and tapping every tree he passes with his walking stick. These are all classic symptoms of autism, which at the time of the novel’s composition in 1929 was not as widely recognised as a psychological disorder as it is today.

Leo Kanner of the Johns Hopkins Hospital first used autism in its modern sense in English when he introduced the label early infantile autism in a 1943 report of 11 children with striking behavioral similarities. Almost all the characteristics described in Kanner’s first paper on the subject, notably “autistic aloneness” and “insistence on sameness”, are still regarded as typical of the autistic spectrum of disorders. [Wikipedia]

Nabokov’s skill is to create Luzhin’s sense of detachment and failure to understand or empathise with what is going on around him, whilst the same time giving the reader enough information to see both Luzhin’s point of view and that of the other characters.

Names

Nabokov appears to have been making some strange and not always successful experiments regarding the naming of his characters in this novel. His protagonist Luzhin is referred to by his surname (family name) throughout – even by his fiancée and then wife, which would not be at all likely or realistic. Apart from this distancing effect reflecting the character’s emotional isolation from other characters, the device doesn’t seem to be much more than a literary mannerism on Nabokov’s part. This is underlined by the fact that Luzhin’s birth name and patronymic are dramatically revealed in the very last lines of the novel – to no apparent purpose.

Even more strangely, and for no evident dramatic reason, we never learn the name of his fiancée and bride at all. She is referred to as his fiancée and ‘Mrs Luzhin’. Yet on the other hand, Nabokov does name completely inconsequential characters who have no importance in the development of the novel. They are named, only to disappear a few pages later after making their brief appearances.

The Defence – study resources

The Defence – Penguin Classics- Amazon UK

The Defence – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Luzhin Defence – DVD of 2000 film – Amazon UK

The Luzhin Defence – DVD of 2000 film – Amazon US

Zaschita Luzhina – Russian original version – Amazon UK

Zaschita Luzhina – Russian original version – Amazon US

The Defence – chapter summaries

1 Young Alexandr Ivanovich Luzhin is a shy, sullen, and awkward boy – possibly what would now call autistic. When his parents take him home from summer holiday back to St. Petersburg, he runs away and goes to hide in a wood shed.

2 His father is a writer who hopes that his backward son is specially gifted. But young Luzhin is not happy and is undistinguished at school, where he is bullied by the other boys. He has two favourite books – by Jules Verne and Conan Doyle. He develops an interest in jigsaw puzzles and number games.

3 Luzhin sees a chess set for the first time and immediately wants to play. There is friction between his father and mother regarding relations with her more attractive sister. Luzhin watches a game played at school then starts playing truant to learn the game from his aunt.

4 He learns more about chess from an elderly admirer of his aunt, then he advances to learn chess notation and replays games in his head. He plays against his father and beats him. He stops going to school, loses track of time, and eventually has a breakdown. His parents take him to an Adriatic resort where, after his mother returns to St Petersburg, her sister joins his father.

5 His mother dies. Luzhin tours Russia as a chess prodigy. His father plans to write a novel about a child chess champion. Luzhin goes go on a European tour with his tutor-manager Valentinov, and when the first world war breaks out he refuses to go home. Valentinov acts in a suspicious and unprofessional manner. His father has difficulty writing the novel and dies before it is produced.

6 Luzhin meets a young woman at a German spa where he is playing exhibition matches. Valentinov has kept him on a Spartan regime, and when he is no longer a youthful prodigy, abandons him. Luzhin announces to the woman that she must become his wife. She introduces him to her mother, who thinks Luzhin is an ill-mannered boor.

7 The mother cannot take Luzhin seriously, but she is mildly impressed when he asks for her daughter’s hand in marriage in a gentlemanly manner.

8 In Berlin he meets the woman’s father, who he bamboozles with chess arcana. The mother continues to be hostile and rude. His fiancée is worried about his ‘illness’. He begins to confuse dreams and reality, and he develops spatial dislocation. He engages in a stressful chess tournament against his rival Turati. There is an adjournment, after which he has another nervous breakdown and imagines he is back in his Russian childhood.

9 Luzhin is found unconscious in the street by some drunks and taken to his fiancée’s house. He is placed in a sanatorium and the chess competition is considered ‘unfinished’.

10 His psychiatrist says that he will recover, but that chess is forbidden for the time being. The fiancée’s parents angrily try to forbid the marriage to ‘this penniless crackpot’. Luzhin gradually emerges from his breakdown. He recaptures childhood memories with great difficulty.

11 Luzhin leaves the sanatorium, and preparations are made for the marriage. A flat is rented, he gives up chess, and he begins to behave more normally. After the marriage ceremony he and his new bride return to the flat, where Luzhin immediately falls asleep.

12 He amuses himself in a desultory manner with an office typewriter and a phonograph. At a charity ball he meets someone from his old school who quizzes him about the past in a way that is disturbing.

13 There are further discussions about making a journey abroad. Mrs Luzhin has a lady visitor from the Soviet Union who is mindlessly patriotic about the Stalin regime. Luzhin thinks he has discovered a hidden pattern in the events of his life. He finds a pocket chess set in the lining of his jacket and recreates his game against Turati at exactly the point it was abandoned.

14 Luzhin gradually rejoins the world of chess and believes his life is a contest being played against an invisible opponent. His wife invites Russian emigres to the home, but Luzhin ignores them all and thinks about a plot to beat his unknown opponent. He wants to devise an unbeatable ‘defence’ Valentinov reappears and invites him to appear in a seedy film that involves chess, but Luzhin thinks this is a trap to lure him back into competitions. He decides that the ultimate defence against his antagonist is to ‘leave the game’ – and following the logic of this notion he commits suicide.

The Defence – further reading

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov’s first English editions – Bob Nelson’s collection

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Vladimir Nabokov – Routledge Critical Heritage- Amazon UK

Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels – Cambridge UP- Amazon UK

Women in Nabokov’s Life and Art – paperback- Amazon UK

Strong Opinions (Essays) – Penguin Classics paperback- Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov – Writers and their Work- Amazon UK

More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

The Doctor’s Wife

October 9, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, web links, and critical commentary

The Doctor’s Wife (1865) was the tenth work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a prolific Victorian novelist. She had shot to fame with her fourth publication Lady Audley´s Secret which established her reputation as doyenne of the ´sensation novel´. These works were described as ´novels with a secret´, and they rested heavily on the inclusion of what were considered shocking topics such as bigamy, imprisonment, false identity, forged wills, and other quasi-Gothic elements. Braddon wove these shocking topics into what were otherwise conventional social realist novels of middle and upper-class life – but the´sensation´ elemenst suggested dark forces lurking beneath the surface of polite society.

The Doctor’s Wife – a note on the text

The novel was first issued as a serial in monthly instalments between January and December 1864 in Temple Bar, a magazine devoted to poetry, essays, and prose fiction. It was then published in three-volume format, which was conventional at that time. Various other editions of Braddon´s works were issued during her own lifetime as a result of the popularity of her writing. For a full description of the textual history of the novel, see Lynn Pykett´s notes to the Oxford World´s Classics edition of the text.

The Doctor’s Wife – critical commentary

The sensation novel

Towards the end of The Doctor’s Wife Braddon (speaking with the voice of the narrator) claims ‘This is not a sensation novel. I write here what I know to be the truth.’ But she writes very much tongue in cheek, for the novel has many of the ingredients of a sensation novel – or ‘the novel with a secret’ as they were sometimes described.

The major secret in the narrative is the fact that Isabel’s father Mr Sleaford is not a ‘barrister’ as he is described in an opening chapter. He disappears immediately after this introduction when the family fall behind with the rent and are forced to vacate their Camberwell dwelling. Sleaford emerges again during the middle of the novel as the man who threatens to kill Roland Lansdell – but his identity is disguised behind the pseudonym ‘Jack the Scribe’.

Sleaford (we learn later) is in fact a criminal fraudster who specialises in forgery – for which he is eventually sent to jail. His family home in Camberwell is built on a sham existence, a pretence of respectability which is shattered when he is found out and has to de-camp.

Braddon plays a little unfairly with her readers over this issue. We spend page after page locked in the private thoughts of Isabel Sleaford about every aspect of Roland Lansdell’s character and doings, but not once does she think of the link between her father and the man she loves, who she knows has threatened to kill him.

In other words, psychological credibility in the novel is sacrificed to melodramatic plot manipulation to produce the shock effect of Sleaford’s sudden reappearance at the end of the novel. These are precisely the sort of sensation novel cliches Braddon satirises in the earlier parts of the book which feature the (somewhat superfluous) character Sigismund Smith, who writes sensation novels.

There are many other elements of the sensation novel at work in the plot. When Sleaford comes out of prison he blackmails his own daughter and then bludgeons Roland Lansdell to death as he threatened to do when Roland acted as a witness at his trial.

Roland falls in love with Isabel – who is married – and wishes to elope with her to live in Italy – which introduces the element of adultery, even though this ultimately does not take place.

Madame Bovary

The similarities between The Doctor’s Wife and Madame Bovary (1856) will be obvious to anyone who has read both novels – which were written only a few years apart. Both Isabel and Emma Bovary are victims of an addiction to romantic fiction, both are married to forbearing but boring provincial doctors, and both become emotionally involved with characters of a higher social status.

These similarities are quite obvious – but the differences are instructive. Flaubert’s heroine Emma Bovary does actually commit adultery, which is the logical development of a romantic passion. Braddon’s heroine does not cross this line – since censorship of fiction was much stricter in England than in France at the time. But it should be noted that Flaubert was pilloried by the French establishment and taken to court for the ‘immorality’ of his text.

Isabel rationalises her rejection of Roland’s offer of sexual commitment with the argument that to accept it would sully the romantic image in which she had enveloped him. This attitude blends seamlessly with the quasi-religious sentiments into which the events of the novel descend in its closing stages.

Contemporary readers are likely to find these issues of narrative resolution disappointing if not unconvincing. Isabel suddenly finds ‘respect’ for her husband, Roland forgives the man who has attacked him, and he ‘realises’ that he has ‘wronged’ Isabel by falling in love with her.

Braddon steers cautiously clear of the logical development of the theme she is exploring and merely envelops Isabel in clouds of romantic fiction and love of poets. Isabel never engages physically with Roland Lansdell: they remain lovers in theory alone, reading books underneath Lord Thurston’s oak tree.

Weakness

Braddon was known as ‘the queen of the circulating libraries’ – a role which required her to provide three volume novels that sold, rather expensively at five shillings per volume – half the weekly income of a modest, middle-class household. She did this admirably, writing a total of more than eighty novels during her professional career.

But this had an effect on her literary style. She goes in for long digressions, elaborate scene setting, and the creation of events which fill the pages of the three volumes – but do not add to the coherence of the novel.

The principal weakness which blights The Doctor’s Wife, is the inordinate degree of repetition detailing Isabel’s dilemma. We are told about her attachment to a view of life formed by her reading of romantic literature – but told about it over and over, again and again, in almost every chapter.

This repetition is exacerbated by the glacially slow progress of the plot, which has only one central strand – the tension between Isabel’s romantic views and her fixation on Roland Lansdell. The first two volumes of the triple-decker are almost all taken up with a will-she, won’t-she tension which is never resolved.

Braddon also has a stylistic tic of triplicating her comparisons and metaphors. If a situation or an aspect of character is mentioned, it is elaborated threefold:

Could it be that this woman had deceived him, – this woman for whom he had been false to all the teaching of his life, – this woman, at whose feet he had offered up that comfortable philosophy which found an infallible armour against sottow in supreme indifference to all things under heaven, – this woman, for whose sake he had consented to resume the painful heritage of humanity, the faculty of suffering?

Loose ends

There are also a number of loose ends in the narrative – lines of character and plot which are simply not developed or linked coherently to the story as a whole. They stick out like undigested lumps in the text, reducing its overall coherence.

For instance there is a wonderful character sketch of Horace Sleaford at the start of the novel. He is a cantankerous youth who is trapped half way between boyhood and manhood. He takes out his discontent on everybody he meets. As a character type, he is straight out of Charles Dickens, and is enormously successful as a fictional creation:

Master Sleaford shut the door with a bang and locked it … The disdainful boy took the key from the lock, and carried it in-doors on his little finger. He had warts upon his hands, and warts are the stigmata of boyhood, and the sleeves of his jacket were white and shiny at the elbows, and left him cruelly exposed about the wrists. The knowledge of his youth, and that shabby frowziness of rainment peculiar to middle-class hobbñedehoyhood, gave him a sulky fierceness of aspect … He suspected everybody of despising him, and was perpetually trying to look down the scorn of others with still deeper scorn.

But having made a vivid appearance in the second chapter, he never appears again, and has no relevance whatsoever to the novel as a whole. These elements demonstrate Braddon´s powerful imagination (and her often sardonic turn of humour) but they do not help to create a coherent novel. It is difficult to escape the suspicion that they are created merely to fill out the pages of the three volumes.

The Doctor’s Wife – study resources

The Doctor’s Wife – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

The Doctor’s Wife – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

The Doctor’s Wife – hardcover edition – Amazon UK

The Doctor’s Wife – hardcover edition – Amazon US

The Doctor’s Wife – Kindle eBook – Amazon UK

The Doctor’s Wife – Kindle eBook – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Kindle eBook

The Doctor’s Wife – chapter summaries

Volume I

I Young provincial doctor George Gilbert takes a holiday in London, arriving at the chambers of his friend Samuel (‘Sigismund’) Smith, who is a sensation novelist.

II Smith is a mild young man who writes fanciful adventure fiction. They walk to the decrepit Sleaford house where he lodges and meet the disaffected youth Horace. The whole house is a dilapidated shambles.

III George meets the attractive but hopelessly romantic daughter Isabel Sleaford. They enjoy a jolly lobster supper, but their pleasure is spoiled by the arrival of Mr Sleaford in a very bad mood. Next day Smith takes George to a French bistro, but when they get back the whole house is empty. The family have left for America, having defaulted on the rent.

IV George and Smith are visited by the irate landlord of the house. Smith describes his plagiaristic literary methods and offers satires of the sensation novel.

V George’s father eventually dies, leaving him to take over his medical practice. He is supported by the devotion of the gardener William Jeffson. Smith writes a letter with news of Isabel who is working as a governess near to George, who unconvincingly professes his indifference.

VI George rides over to visit Isabel, but the meeting is uneventful and disappointing. Isabel continues to live via the romantic and sentimental dreams created by fiction and myths.

VII There is a complete mismatch between George’s and Isabel’s dreams of their futures. They go on a picnic with Smith and Charles Raymond, who speculates on Isabel’s future. George finally declares his love and asks Isabel to be his wife. She thinks of the event as part of some romantic fiction.

VIII William Jeffson warns George against rushing into marriage – especially with someone whom he knows so little about and who has not declared her love for him.

IX Isabel enjoys the idea of being engaged, but she delays the marriage itself. She wishes George were more romantic, but he is not. Finally they get married, without any passion or deep engagement with each other.

X They go on a week’s honeymoon and rapidly realise that they have nothing to say to each other. Within a week Isabel feels that she has made a terrible mistake. They arrive home to an unheated and cheerless house.

XI Isabel feels stifled by the uneventful nature of her life, whilst George is absorbed in his work as a doctor. She continues to live in a romantic dream world.

XII On Isabel’s birthday George takes her on a commemorative outing and picnic. They meet Roland Lansdell and Lady Gwendoline. Isabel sees Roland as a living Byronic hero

Volume II

I Landsell had great prospects when young but by thirty they have come to nothing. He has been engaged to Lady Gwendoline, but she broke off the relationship, with her ambition set on higher social connections. He has been in parliament, but left because his reforming schemes failed.

II Isabel loses herself in romantic yearning for Roland Lansdell, whom she meets out in the country. He invites Isabel and George to lunch the following week.

III Lansdell is bored and unoccupied. He pities Isabel’s naievety, and prides himself on doing ‘no harm’ to anyone.

IV The luncheon party is a big success. Raymmond recounts the story of his once having identified a banking fraudster who threatened to kill him once he was released from custody – which causes Isabel to faint.

V Isabel and Raymond have more frequent meetings in the countryside. He lends her books from his library. Sigismond Smith visits and reveals that he was once Raymond’s tutor. They meet Raymond who proposes another picnic and a Sunday luncheon.

VI Roland puts a lot of effort into the picnic, thinking he is leaving England soon. Charles Raymond warns Roland to stop paying so much attention to Isabel, and Roland promises to leave England the next day.

VII Roland rides back home thinking regretfully what his life might have been. He writes a stiff, formal letter of explanation to Isabel.

VIII Next day, Isabel is devastated when the letter arrives. She goes into a state of shock, then thinks of suicide. Her husband is oblivious to what is going on.

IX The autumn and winter months pass by. Isabel tries to find meaningful occupation, but failSs. She starts visiting the library at Mordred Priory, Roland´s country house. It is there that she meets Roland when he suddenly comes back to England because of her.

X Charles Raymond tries to persuade Roland to go away again to avoid a scandal, but he refuses, arguing that he is sincerely in love with Isabel, and she with him. It is a passion that has given meaning to his life. Raymond reveals that he loved Roland’s mother.

XI Isabel is happy that Roland has returned, and he declares his love for her openly. He plans to visit London, and will reveal the results in two days time. She fears he might marry Lady Gwendoline.

XII Next day Gwendoline arrives to issue a dire warning to Isabel about the malicious gossip that is circulating locally. Isabel once again thinks of stoic renunciation and suicide.

XIII Roland finally asks Isabel to leave her husband and elope to live with him in Italy. But she refuses, seeing such a move as spoiling the romantic nature of their relationship. His offer confirms the criticisms made of him by Gwendoline.

Volume III

I Isabel feels galled that Roland has not understood what to her was the ‘pure’ nature of their relationship. She feels the censure of the villagers, and seeks a semi-religious consolation in the sermon of a popular preacher.

II Isabel begins to wonder if she has made a mistake in refusing Roland. He on his part endures a mixture of rage and frustration, hoping she will change her mind. He bemoans his world-weary state to Gwendoline, who reports on Isabel’s enthusiasm for the popular preacher.

III Roland goes to the church in the hope of seeing Isabel. She appears for the afternoon service, and they are both very conscious of each other’s presence.

IV Isabel walks home to find her husband ill with fever. She has been trying hard to be virtuous, but she is suddenly confronted by a threatening stranger.

V George Gilbert’s illness gets worse. Isabel does her best to support him, feeling that she must atone for her ‘sins’. She feels motivated by the parson’s sermons.

VI Roland feels resentful towards Isabel because of her rejection, but when she arrives late one night to ask for fifty pounds, he gives it to her and treats her in a friendly manner.

VII Roland hears from Raymond the local gossip that Isabel has been seen with a strange man late at night. He immediately believes that Isabel has betrayed him with someone else.

VIII Roland goes in search of Isabel and the strange man she is meeting. He attacks the man, only to find that it is her father, and he apologises. But Mr Sleaford is also the cheque fraudster who has vowed to kill him. Sleaford bludgeons Roland then leaves the area.

IX Isabel has asked Roland for the money in order to get rid of her father and protect Roland, fearing he will learn of his proximity in the area.

X Isabel feels relief that her father has gone, but her husband gets worse and eventually dies. Isabel is bitterly reproached by Mrs Jeffson.

XI Isabel is overwhelmed by George’s death, and once again feels guilty for what she perceives as her sinful life. Raymond arrives and takes her to Roland, who is dying. Roland wants Isabel to forgive him for what he now sees as a wrongful pursuit of her. He also wants Gwendoline to befriend her. He appeals to Isabel to devote herself to good works, He has a quasi-religious conversion, and then dies.

XII Mr Sleaford takes his fifty pounds blackmail money to start a new fraudulent venture in America. Isabel is bequeathed Roland’s property and money in his will. She goes abroad with Gwendoline, then settles down at Mordren Priory and makes improvements to the estate.

The Doctor´s Wife – principal characters

Sigismund (Samuel) Smith	his friend, a sensation novelist
George Gilbert	a young provincial doctor
Mr Sleaford	a fraudulent ´barrister´
Horace Sleaford	his son, a cantankerous boy
Isabel Sleaford	his daughter, a beautiful young woman
William Jeffson	a lazy but loyal gardener
Matilda Jeffson	his reproachful and embittered wife
Charles Raymond	a philanthropist, Smith´s uncle
Roland Lansdell	a rich gentleman estate owner
Lady Gwendoline Pomphrey	his cousin
Austin Colbourne	a popular preacher

The Doctor´s Wife – further reading

Richard D. Altick Victorian Studies in Scarlet, New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.

Jennifer Carnell, The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon: A Study of Her Life and Work, UK: Sensation Press, 2000.

Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

P.D. Edwards, Some Mid-Victorian Thrillers: The Sensation Novel, Its Friends and Its Foes, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1971.

Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Woman’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing, London: Routledge, 2013.

Anthea Trodd, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1988.

Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, New York: Garland Publishers, 1979.

The Europeans

February 6, 2015 by Roy Johnson

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

The Europeans was first published as a serial of four parts in the Atlantic Monthly July-October 1878, then in book form later the same year in London (Macmillan) and Boston (Houghton, Osgood). It carries the sub-title ‘A Sketch’, and James did not include the novel in the New York edition of his collected works in 1913. Nevertheless, it marks an important point in the early phase of his development as a novelist.

The Europeans – critical commentary

The international theme

This is an early example of a subject which Henry James was to make into his signature theme in later works – the clash between the Old World and the New – more specifically between traditional nineteenth century Europe and the democratic and republican states of north America. More specifically still, in The Europeans it is between the self-denying and rather strict puritanism of New England and the raffish Bohemian ‘sophistication’ of European adventurers who have mixed motives.

The tensions and misunderstandings between one culture and another were to be an important feature of his works, and in the very same year of its publication he also published Daisy Miller, one of his most famous tales, which explores the same issues from the opposite geographic perspective – the unfortunate result of a free-spirited young American woman challenging European social conventions. In The Europeans the results of these cultural differences have a happier outcome in two successful relationships, though it has to be said that James himself did not generally favour happy endings to his works, and many critics have found the conclusion of two youthful, optimistically portrayed marriages less than convincing.

Money

Baroness Eugenia and her brother Felix arrive in New England with the trappings of European sophistication, but they have no money. She is a commoner who is under threat of being dispossessed by her husband and his family. Felix has been a musician and an actor, and is under contract to produce sketches for a magazine: in other words he is a Bohemian drifter. Both of them have pecuniary reasons for seeking out their rich relatives in the New World.

James does not make clear the source of William Wentworth’s wealth. He owns the big house in which he and his family live, plus a smaller house on the estate. He ‘puts his hand in his pocket’ for any of his family’s needs – but we are not told where the cash he withdraws has its source, except that he has an office he goes to three times a week where he conducts ‘highly confidential trust business’. Similarly, Robert Acton is also very wealthy, but we do not know the source of his wealth either – except that he has tripled an original sum.

The morganatic marriage

In the context of European royalty, a morganatic marriage was one where a male of ‘high’ birth married a woman of much lower rank. Traditionally, royal or noble families were categorised or ‘graded’ according to a snobbish notion of genealogical, biographical, and titular attributes. The main purpose of this system was to keep power and property concentrated in the hands of the ruling class. A morganatic union prevented the lower class wife or any of her children inheriting the husband’s titles, privileges, or property – and thereby diluting any of this concentrated power by distributing it amongst the lower orders.

The pseudo-systematic rationale of this categorisation was printed with characteristic Teutonic thoroughness in the Almanach de Gotha until 1944, when the publisher’s archives were destroyed by invading Soviet troops. Baroness Eugenia (a commoner) is married to the Prince Adolf of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein, whose family would like him to marry someone more suitable, which he is perfectly able to do under such an arrangement.

Structure

The first half of the novel seems poised and successful – with the slightly louche ‘adventurers’ Eugenia and Felix confronted by the stern orthodoxy of puritan New England. James obviously admires the upright and decent values of his fellow Americans, but he has no difficulty making light fun of their extreme piety and their inability to ‘have fun’.

Also successfully contrasted are Eugenia’s ambiguous motives with the Wentworths’ principled offer of Christian comfort to their European cousins. Eugenia is ostensibly visiting America to meet her relatives, but she is also ‘seeking her fortune’. Her husband’s family is in the process of getting rid of her, and she is looking for an alternative social position (and source of income)- but she doesn’t want to broadcast the fact.

These two social forces are kept evenly balanced for the first six chapters of the novel. Unfortunately, the narrative then suffers a severe fracture in terms of credibility at its half way point. The ultra-conservative and puritanical Mr Wentworth, having even refused to have his portrait painted by Felix, suddenly co-operates with this idea without any justification for this change of mind. He then reveals to Felix the truth about his son Clifford, who has been sent down from Harvard for drunkenness. It is simply not conceivable that this ascetic and formidably private man would change his mind on such a matter, and even less reveal such embarrassing information to a dubious outsider whom he had only recently met.

If that is not stretching credibility far enough, Mr Wentworth then accepts Felix’s suggestions of luring his son away from the temptations of drink by dangling the allures of an attractive (and married!) woman before the boy – namely Felix’s sister, the Baroness Eugenia. No stern New England patriarch would condone this sort of behaviour. These are creaking plot devices which damage the delicate picture of conflicting cultures that has been built up to this point. Even though Clifford Wentworth does fall under the spell of Eugenia, then survives to marry Bostonian Lizzie Acton, this is part of the ‘tying up of lose ends’ that injures the latter part of the narrative.

The Europeans is often compared with James’s later novel The Bostonians (1885-6), with which it has much in common. There is a similar lightweight satire of puritan New England values and constrained behaviour- plus a far deeper inspection of early feminism in the later novel; but more importantly, there are no easy solutions offered to the personal dilemmas of the characters. The hero Basil Ransom makes a spirited attempt to ‘rescue’ Verena Tarrant from the influence of the feminist Olive Chancellor, but when he does so, she leaves with ‘tears in her eyes’. The neat pairings and marriages that conclude The Europeans do not seem nearly so satisfactory.

The Europeans – study resources

The Europeans – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Europeans – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Europeans – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Europeans – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Europeans – Kindle edition

The Europeans – eBooks at Project Gutenberg

The Essential Henry James Collection – Kindle edition (40 works)

The Europeans – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Europeans – Library of America – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Europeans – plot summary

Chapter I. Baroness Eugenia Munster and her brother Felix Young have travelled from Europe to visit their cousins in Boston, USA. Eugenia has the additional purpose of seeking her fortune, since she knows her German husband wishes to divorce her. In New York she is vexed by what she perceives as the plainness of the New World, whilst her brother is cheerfully enthusiastic about what he finds there.

Chapter II. At her family home in Boston, Gertrude Wentworth feels ‘restless’ and does not wish to go to church, despite the urging of her elder sister Charlotte. The minister Mr Brand calls and wishes to speak to Gertrude in private, but she puts him off. When Felix arrives to present himself she becomes immediately fascinated by his European background and complex family history- particularly that of his sister the Baroness.

Chapter III. Next day Felix describes the visit to his sister Eugenia, who is mainly interested in the wealth and the social caché of the Wentworths and their circle. Eugenia meets and charms the entire family, and wastes no time in asking to be ‘taken care of’.

Chapter IV. There is a great deal of discussion amongst the extended Wentworth family regarding the potential dangers of being exposed to European influences. However, the austere Mr Wentworth finally invites Eugenia and Felix to stay in a separate house on his estate. Eugenia adds decorations to the puritan ‘chalet’ and Felix finds delight in everything, especially the freedom to socialise with young unmarried ladies. Eugenia holds herself aloof, but pretends to feel neglected. Mr Brand and Robert Acton begin to pay her social visits.

Chapter V. Mr Wentworth does not know how to understand Eugenia, and he refuses to have his portrait painted by Felix. Gertrude however falls under the romantic spell of Felix. Mr Brand eventually declares his love for Gertrude, who repudiates him without hesitation.

Chapter VI. Robert Acton is intrigued by Eugenia and her exotic character, but he tries to conceal his interest behind a facade of nonchalance. Eugenia explains to him the complex history of her marriage and its present state. She has a prepared document rejecting the Prince her husband which she only needs to sign to gain her freedom – which she flirtatiously suggests to him that she might do.

Chapter VII. Felix eventually persuades Mr Wentworth to sit for his portrait. Felix has fallen for Gertrude, but as a penniless artist with no prospects he does not wish to take advantage of his hosts by openly paying court to her. Mr Wentworth reveals to Felix that his son Clifford has been sent down from Harvard for drunkenness. Felix suggests that Clifford should pay court to Eugenia – but Mr Wentworth refuses to accept the idea. However, Clifford does visit Eugenia and suggests that Charlotte should marry Mr Brand.

Chapter VIII. Mr Brand oppresses Gertrude with further courtship, which she flatly rejects. She asks her sister Charlotte to marry him instead. Meanwhile, Clifford is given lessons in emotional and social life skills from Eugenia, who suggests that he visit her in Germany when she returns to Europe.

Chapter IX. Robert Acton is not sure if he is in love with Eugenia or not, but cannot stop thinking about her. After returning from Newport he visits her late at night, and asks about her ‘renunciation’ document, about which she refuses to comment. Clifford suddenly appears, at which she becomes difficult and argumentative. Next day Acton challenges Clifford about Eugenia – but they lie to each other about their intentions.

Chapter X. The weather gets worse and Eugenia is bored. She reproaches Felix for his relentless cheerfulness. He hopes to marry Gertrude, and he urges her to accept Acton as a potential husband. Felix reveals to Mr Brand that Charlotte is hopelessly in love with him, which leaves Brand rather perplexed.

Chapter XI. Eugenia visits old Mrs Acton to say a goodbye. Mrs Acton implores her to stay – for her son’s sake. Eugenia meets Robert Acton in the garden as she is leaving. He is in love with her, but suspects her of lying. Meanwhile Felix appeals to Charlotte for assistance in his quest for Gertrude. He wishes to overcome Mr Wentworth’s objections to his Bohemianism.

Chapter XII. Felix pleads his case for marrying Gertrude to her father. The family are united in their plea that Mr Wentworth give his consent. In the middle of this discussion, Mr Brand appears and requests permission to marry the couple. Mr Wentworth finally consents. That same evening it is announced that Clifford and Lizzie Acton will marry at the same time. Eugenia equivocates with Robert Acton one last time, reveals to Felix that she has not signed her release document, and goes back to Europe.

The Europeans – principal characters

Baroness Eugenia Munster	morganatic wife to Prince Adolf
Felix Young	her brother, an adventurer, painter, and amateur
Mr William Wentworth	a rich Bostonian puritan
Gertrude Wentworth	his spirited younger daughter (23)
Carlotte Wentworth	her serious elder sister
Clifford Wentworth	younger brother, rusticated from Harvard
Mr Brand	a serious Unitarian minister
Robert Acton	a rich Bostonian ex-Harvard
Lizzie Acton	his pretty younger sister
Mrs Acton	his elderly mother who is dying

Other work 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 on Henry James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Glimpses of the Moon

June 24, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

The Glimpses of the Moon was first published in 1922 by D. Appleton and Company. It is one of the least well known of Edith Wharton’s full length novels – perhaps with good reason. It takes a subject she had written about many years previously in her short story The Reckoning (1902) – in which two characters draw up what we would now call a ‘pre-nuptial agreement’ and then have to live with its consequences.

The Glimpses of the Moon – critical commentary

It is worth noting that the essential subject of the novel (or the donnée as Henry James would call it) had already been used by Edith Wharton in a short story written twenty years earlier. Two people of limited means arrange a marriage of convenience on the understanding that they will agree to a divorce if a better prospect emerges for either of them at a later date. The short story version of this theme in The Reckoning is tightly constructed narrative in a triptych of scenes – the agreement, how it came about, and its consequences.

In the case of The Reckoning the motivation is to preserve a sense of individual autonomy within the constraints of a monogamous bond, but in The Glimpses of the Moon the motivation is financial – since neither Nick nor Susy has sufficient funds for long term survival within the social set amongst whom they wish to mix.

The Glimpses of the Moon is almost the opposite of the tightly constructed story. It is a long, rambling, and repetitive novel, with the dramatic situation stretched to breaking point and beyond. Nick and Susy separate quite early in the story. Their rationale for living independently is plausible enough, as are the temptations of the alternative partners who seek their favours. Susy has her friend the ultra-rich Earl of Altringham begging at her feet, and Nick is courted by the plain-but-intelligent heiress Coral Hicks. But the indecision, the ‘will-they, won’t-they’ , and the endless impediments which are placed in the way of any resolution – all drag on far too long, as if Wharton were trying to fill out the pages of a three volume Victorian serial novel.

Once the dramatic tension between Nick and Susy has been established, there’s rather a lot of uncertainty in the psychological motivation of the protagonists. Susy and Nick both doubt, suspect, and then forgive each other in a way which is credible in terms of human uncertainty, but does not make for a very satisfactory narrative.

This major weakness is compounded by the conclusion to the story line which is as rushed as it is improbable. We are asked to believe that two people who have spent the previous eighteen months living in a Venetian palace and on board a luxury yacht, suddenly find personal satisfaction staying in a provincial French boarding house for a weekend whilst looking after someone else’s five children.

This fairy tale resolution is simply not plausible, and it is brought about with no serious consideration for the important issues of the preceding narrative – in particularly that of money. Susy may well be prepared to give up cashmere shawls and dinners at the Hotel Luxe, but we know perfectly well that Nick’s couple of published articles will not be enough to live on. It is not enough to assume that they have had a change of heart in their attitudes to money and their place in society. They have no more means of economic survival than they had at the outset of the novel.

The Glimpses of the Moon – study resources

The Glimpses of the Moon – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

The Glimpses of the Moon – New York Review Books – Amazon US

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Glimpses of the Moon – Kindle version at Amazon

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Glimpses of the Moon – plot summary

Chapter I. Nick and Susy Lansing are on honeymoon, living in a borrowed villa on Lake Como. She is poor but socially ambitious, and a hanger-on amongst rich fellow Americans. She reflects on how her initial relationship with Nick was criticised socially and led to a split from him.

Chapter II. Nick is talented but has no money, and he feels an affinity with Susy as a poor outsider. When they meet up again at the home of some unfashionable but artistic friends, she proposes to him a marriage of convenience. They will scrape together some money, live off their friends for a year or so, and agree to divorce if anything better comes along for either of them.

Chapter III. After a month in Como they are forced to move on to Venice. Nick is prepared to make realistic sacrifices, but wonders if Susy will be capable of doing the same. She organises their transfer to Venice with opportunistic sharp practice, attempting to take with them some expensive cigars provided by their host, Charlie Strefford.

Chapter IV. In Venice, the owner’s wife (Ellie Vanderlyn – a friend) has left her child behind, plus some letters to her husband to be posted on secretly, whilst she is absent with a lover. There is an explicit request attached that this be hidden from Nick. Susy feels morally compromised, but needs to stay somewhere for the summer.

Chapter V. Small differences and secrecies begin to put a distance between Nick and Susy. After some weeks they are joined at the Palazzo by Charlie Strefford. He pumps Susy for information, but she merely reminds him about the terms of her marriage contract with Nick, about which Strefford is understanding but sceptical.

Chapter VI. The summer goes on. Nick has begun to write a ‘philosophic romance’; Ellie Vanderlyn does not return as scheduled; and they are joined in Venice by the Mortimer Hickses, who are rich but unfashionable and unsuccessful, despite their yacht and an entourage.

Chapter VII. Nick begins to find new and deeper happiness in his ‘work’ and his life with Susy, and he hopes they can stay in Venice for the rest of the summer. However, when more of their friends begin to visit, he puts his writing on one side.

Chapter VIII. Ellie Vanderlyn suddenly returns , and since her husband might shortly appear it is important that her earlier absence not be revealed. Susy confides in Strefford that Nick should not find out that their stay in Venice was based on a plot to deceive Nelson Vanderlyn.

Chapter IX. Vanderlyn arrives, but is only en route to join his mother somewhere else. Nick resumes his writing and meets Coral Hicks in a church, where they discuss archeology. When Ellie Vanderlyn departs for another assignation, she thanks Nick for his ‘co-operation’ in the deceit of her husband, which shocks Nick.

Chapter X. Nick demands that Susy reveal the whole story of the deception to him. He argues that it is dishonourable. Susy claims that she did it to keep them both together. The question of the marriage ‘pact’ is re-opened in a painful manner.

Chapter XI. Nick goes out alone, leaving Susy to dine with Strefford and others. They go out afterwards to a party at the Hicks’ Palazzo, but Susy goes home alone. She finds a letter from Nick waiting for her, to say that he has gone to Milan for a couple of days to think things through.

Chapter XII. In fact he goes on to Gerona, where he meets Mr Buttles who is leaving employment with the Hicks entourage because of an unrequited passion for Coral. Nick also reads of an accident which has made Strefford into the Earl of Altringham, one of the richest men in England. He writes to Susy, honouring their agreement and offering her up to Strefford, then leaves on an extended cruise of the Augean with the Hicks entourage

Chapter XIII. Susy retreats to the house of a friend at Versailles which she thinks will be empty, but finds its owner Violet Melrose at home promoting the reputation of painter Nat Falmer. Susy is terrified that Nick has abandoned her, but she receives a message from Strefford.

Chapter XIV. When they meet in Paris Strefford discusses her situation sympathetically, but then offers to marry her. When she refuses, he also offers to lend her money. She refuses this too, and says she will wait to see if she hears from Nick.

Chapter XV. Whilst in Paris she goes to see Grace Falmer, who is very pleased with her husband’s sudden success and who presents a very positive picture of married life. Susy procrastinates over making any plans, and resisting Violet Melrose’s attempts to bribe her into staying to look after the Falmer children.

Chapter XVI. Nick is enjoying a sabbatical break on board the Hicks’s yacht, hoping to hear from Susy, who does not write to him. Coral Hicks suggests that he take son Buttle’s old job as secretary to her father. Nick reads in the paper that Strefford and Susy are socialising in England.

Chapter XVII. Susy is alone in London, waiting to join Strefford and oppressed by the meanness of boarding house life. She meets Ursula Gillow, who invites her to stay at her home, so as to distract her husband). Susy reluctantly accepts, because she will meet Strefford there.

Chapter XVIII. In Paris Susy meets Ellie Vanderlyn who snobbishly patronises her. Susy defends herself by revealing her situation in full. Ellie tells her she is getting rid of her husband Nelson for the super-rich Borkheimer. The two women quarrel over social morals.

Chapter XIX. Strefford visits Paris to receive Susy’s answer to his proposal of marriage. She realises that the world she wishes for can only be gained by the wealth of the people she dislikes. Strefford flaunts his wealth and takes her to an exhibition which includes some of his own family’s art. treasures.

Chapter XX. The Hicks are in Rome, having befriended an archeologist-Prince who is travelling with his mother. They pretend to be democratic and outsiders, but in fact they are sponging off the Hicks on behalf of themselves and their friends. Nick perceives that they are angling for a financial union with Coral to ‘replenish’ the family coffers. Nick feels that he himself has no future.

Chapter XXI. Susy remains with Strefford, promising to look into a formal divorce from Nick. But she becomes more critical of Strefford. At the lawyer’s suggestion, she reluctantly writes to Nick, having so far failed to communicate with him.

Chapter XXII. When Strefford reveals that he let off his villa in Como to Ellie and her lover, Susy feels contaminated by the deception, even though (or maybe because) she was implicated in it herself. She tells Strefford she is not the right woman for him.

Chapter XXIII. On her way back to her hotel she meets Nelson Vanderlyn, who is in Paris for his divorce from Ellie.He takes a cheerful matter-of-fact attitude to his situation, but secretly he is a broken man. Susy writes a letter of renunciation to Strefford, and begins to reflect on the deeper issues of shared experience and understanding that keep people together in a marriage.

Chapter XXIV. Nick meanwhile has written to Susy agreeing to a divorce, and he feels dissatisfied being a patronised employee of the Hicks. The wealthy Coral Hicks offers herself to him as she prepares to be married to the Prince, but he declines the offer, whilst respecting and even admiring her.

Chapter XXV. Susy is looking after the Falmer’s children in Passy whilst their parents are in Italy – and quite enjoying the challenge. Strefford has been dismissed, but he tries to cling on. Nick agrees to come to Paris to see the lawyers.

Chapter XXVI. Nick arrives, intending to go back and marry Coral, but his head is full of Susy. He goes to Passy and sees her at the door – but at that very moment Strefford arrives and is admitted.

Chapter XXVII. Strefford re-asserts his plea to Susy, but she holds him off, and feels that Nick might be nearby (which he is). She writes to him, requesting a meeting, to which he sceptically agrees.

Chapter XXVIII. They meet and talk without revealing their true feelings for each other, or the changes in their circumstances. – and so part without any resolution. Susy realises that she has had another lesson in what true love is – and feels that it is now too late.

Chapter XXIX. Next day Susy is preparing to leave when Nick arrives – and suddenly everything is clarified between them with very little discussion. They decide to go away for a couple of days, taking the Falmer children with them.

Chapter XXX. The excursion is a fairy-tale success. Nick has had some articles published, and they put all the events of the recent past behind them.

Principal characters

Nick Lansing	clever but poor and unsuccessful
Susy Lansing (neé) Branch	his new wife, poor and ambitious
Ursula Gillow	her rich and successful friend
Fred Gillow	Ursula’s husband
Ellie Vanderlyn	another rich and successful friend of Susy’s
Nelson Vanderlyn	a US banker based in the UK
Charlie Strefford	English friend of the Lansings who becomes Earl of Altringham
Mortimer Hicks	rich American yacht owner
Coral Hicks	his intellectual but unattractive daughter
Mr Buttles	polyglot secretary to Hicks
Nat Fulmer	an American painter
Grace Fulmer	his wife – a violinist
Violet Melrose	‘a wealthy vampire’

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

Other works by Edith Wharton

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

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

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

More on Edith Wharton
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The Golden Bowl

February 26, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

The Golden Bowl (1904) comes as the climax of James’ late period. His writing is mannered, baroque, complex, and focused intently on the psychological relationships between his characters. There is very little ‘plot’ here in the conventional sense. The bowl in the title is a gift from one couple to another – but there’s a lot more to it than that of course. It will not be giving away too much of the story to say that it concerns an American heiress as she becomes aware of the secret affair between her new husband and her father’s young wife. As usual in many of James’s great novels, much of the drama is fuelled by relations between Europe and America (his ‘International’ theme) by class, social mobility, and by sex and money.

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

The Golden Bowl – plot summary

Prince Amerigo, an impoverished but charismatic Italian nobleman, is in London for his marriage to Maggie Verver, only child of the fabulously wealthy American financier and art collector, Adam Verver. Amerigo meets Charlotte Stant, a former mistress who he didn’t marry because both of them were seeking to marry into money. They go shopping for a wedding present for Maggie. They find a curiosity shop where the Jewish shopkeeper offers them an antique gilded crystal bowl. But the rather anti-Semitic Prince declines to purchase the bowl because he suspects it contains a hidden flaw.

After Maggie’s marriage she is afraid that her father has become lonely. She persuades him to propose to Charlotte, unaware of the past relationship between Charlotte and Amerigo. Adam’s proposal is accepted, and soon after the wedding, Charlotte and the Prince find themselves thrown together because their respective spouses seem more interested in their father-daughter relationship than in their marriages. The Prince and Charlotte finally consummate an adulterous affair.

Maggie eventually begins to suspect Amerigo and Charlotte. This suspicion is intensified when she accidentally meets the shopkeeper and buys the golden bowl. Uncomfortable with the high price she paid for the bowl, the shopkeeper visits Maggie and confesses to overcharging her. At Maggie’s home he sees photographs of Amerigo and Charlotte. He tells Maggie of the pair’s shopping trip on the eve of her marriage and their intimate conversation in his shop. (They had spoken Italian, but he happens to understand the language.)

Maggie now confronts Amerigo, and then begins a secret campaign to separate the Prince and Charlotte while never letting her father know of their affair. She lies to Charlotte about not having anything to accuse her of, and she gradually persuades her father to return to America with his wife. Amerigo appears impressed by Maggie’s delicate diplomacy, after he had previously regarded her as rather naive and immature. The novel ends with Adam and Charlotte about to depart for America, while Amerigo can “see nothing but” Maggie and embraces her.

Study resources

The Golden Bowl – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Golden Bowl – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Golden Bowl – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Golden Bowl – etext of the 1909 edition

The Golden Bowl – audioBook at LibriVox

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James – biographical notes

The Golden Bowl – Merchant-Ivory film site

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Golden Bowl – characters

Adam Verver	an American multi-millionaire art collector
Maggie	his loving daughter
Prince Amerigo	an impoverished Italian nobleman
Charlotte Stant	an impoverished friend of Maggie
Fanny Assingham	an inquisitive friend of the family
The Colonel	her easy-going husband

The Golden Bowl – film version

2000 film adaptation

Merchant-Ivory pull out all the stops in their repertoire for creating lush period detail. Costumes, furniture, jewellery, and art objects all help to recreate a convincing fin de siècle atmosphere. The inclusion of original film footage from early last century adds tremendously to the period flavour. Nick Nolte plays the American millionaire Adam Verver, Kate Beckinsdale his daughter Maggie, and Uma Thurman the poor but scheming Charlotte. James Fox and Angelica Huston in supporting roles provide added depth. There is an odd use of ‘chapter’ titles – “Adam Verver’s rented castle” – which one associates more with the eighteenth century than the early twentieth, and as in their other productions, the sex is far more explicit than in the original. James implies: Merchant-Ivory shows.

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

Henry James’s study

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

The Good Soldier

March 1, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Good Soldier was first published simultaneously in London and New York by John Lane at The Bodley Head in March 1915. In fact the opening of the novel had appeared a year before in the first issue of Wyndham Lewis’s aggressively modern Vorticist magazine Blast in June 1914, under its original title of ‘The Saddest Story’. Ford was asked by his publisher to change the title of the novel on the grounds that sad stories would be difficult to sell during a time of war. Ford suggested the title The Good Soldier in a spirit of irony, but it was accepted and it stuck.

The Good Soldier – critical commentary

Narrative complexity

Although it is not as well known as other modernist classics, such as D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, or James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier certainly shares many of their values, and was written using a number of similar experimental techniques. The most obvious of those is the chronological complexity of the narrative.

The story is related by a narrator John Dowell who is also a character in the story. But his account of events is extremely fragmented, and their temporal sequence is fractured in a way which makes great demands on the reader. The events themselves occur over a stretch of twenty-four years, essentially spanning the period between 1892 and 1916 – even though the novel was published in 1915. But these events are revealed to the reader in a series of scenes which shift backwards and forwards in time. Ford makes dramatic use of prolepsis and analepsis (flashes forwards and backwards).

Modern editions of the text often have a chronology included, to assist readers in reconstructing the sequence of the episodes. Dowell as narrator is fully aware of this shifting backwards and forwards of the story line, and indeed makes apologies for his uncertainty and lack of skill in reconstructing events.

Having said that, he is also very precise about certain dates, and at other times cannot remember if some something has happened or not. This was a technique which Ford Madox Ford called ‘impressionism’, and it was his attempt to reflect as a form of literary realism the fact that human beings cannot always remember things accurately. Nor can we always know the exact truth about events that have taken place.

It is interesting to note that this technique of narrative fragmentation was also a hallmark of Joseph Conrad, with whom Ford collaborated as a novelist in The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903, and The Nature of a Crime (1909). In addition to this Ford also exploits the modernist device of the unreliable narrator.

The unreliable narrator

Henry James and to a lesser extent Joseph Conrad are often credited as the first modern writers to exploit the technique which has come to be known as ‘the unreliable narrator’ – and Ford was acquainted with both of these fellow authors.

The unreliable narrator is a device which exploits the fact that when novel-length stories are delivered in the first person narrative mode, the reader has a natural inclination to believe that the truth is being told. After all, if the narrator is going to get the facts wrong or tell lies, why use this device in the first place? But modernist writers have embraced the idea that human beings do make mistakes in their perception of events; they are misguided in their judgement of others; and they may have motivations of which they themselves are unaware.

The skill of the modernist is to create a narrative in the first person mode whereby the narrator gives the reader enough information to form an independent judgement about events which differs from the narrator’s

Henry James did this in The Turn of the Screw, where all the ‘facts’ of the case are presented by the governess in a horror story – and the reader has just enough information to realise that she is neurotic and wrong in the judgements she makes. Her narrative tells one story, behind which the astute reader sees another which is quite different.

Vladimir Nabokov takes this literary device to an extreme in his novel Pale Fire, in which his narrator is editing a long poem written by a fellow college professor. The footnotes to the poem purport to explain its meaning, but what they reveal is that the narrator is a mad man.

Ford’s narrator John Dowell is unreliable in that he makes mistakes, forgets what he has previously said, and generally gives the impression of someone who is not sure of what is going on around him. After all, for the whole of his marriage to Florence she is having adulterous affairs with two other men without his knowledge.

The problem is that there are so many mistakes and contradictions, there becomes growing suspicion that these are errors on the author’s part – not simply Dowell’s. The text gives a distinct impression that Ford might be an author who is not incomplete control of the strategy he is adopting. For instance, he seems to forget from time to time that his narrator Dowell is supposed to be American. Dowell passes comments on Americans from a European perspective, in a voice which is suspiciously that of an author, not a fictional character.

And of course all of this is novelist’s sleight of hand on Ford’s part, because the logic of first person narratives is that narrators must have all the facts of the case at their disposal at the point of finishing the story. If they were genuinely unaware of some facts or circumstances in the earlier part of their account, they could go back and correct it later.

Dowell keeps shifting his approach to characters and events, and he claims to be relating his tale over a period of time – so gives the impression of doing just that. But in fact he knows the outcome of events right from the start of his account, as his suggestive hints reveal:

Permanence? Stability! I can’t believe it’s gone. I can’t believe that that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks.

The four crashing days (no matter where they are finely placed in the complicated chronology of events) are the period in which he has learned from Leonora of his wife’s infidelity with first a blackmailer, and then the man he thought of as his best friend. He knew from the outset that he had been duped.

The conversational style

In addition to these complexities of narrative mode, Ford also develops a very conversational tone for Dowell’s delivery of the story. He actually says that he thinks of his account as addressing a listener directly. ‘I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as it comes.’

Dowell speaks directly to the reader; he uses lots of repetition; corrects himself after making mistakes; raises questions, confesses that he doesn’t understand the events he is relating; uses hesitation, ellipsis, and often leaves statements unfinished.

You are to remember that all this happened a month before Leonora went into the girl’s room at night. I have been casting back again, but I cannot help it. It is so difficult to keep all these people going. I tell you about Leonora and bring her up to date; then about Edward, who has fallen behind. And the girl gets hopelessly left behind. I wish I could put it down in diary form.

Credibility

The Good Soldier is also a very difficult novel to ‘interpret’. Even though all the information in the story comes to us from Dowell, he seems as a character to be incredibly dim and lacking in good judgement. His wife is having affairs with the blackmailer Jimmy and Dowell’s best friend Ashburnham for years without Dowell suspecting, and even when he does find out, he does nothing about it. Indeed, he even tells us he felt nothing about it.

And when giving an account of people’s occupations, he describes his own as ‘absolutely nothing’. He spends all his time with people who are poisonously hostile to each other; the lives of other characters all around him are wrecked by deception and adultery; and he does nothing.

In the end, the one character who he continues to admire and hold up as a paragon of virtue, is Ashburnham, his best and only friend, who has been cuckolding him for years. Ashburnham goes through the novel as a serial adulterer who gambles away half his family fortune and ends up cutting his own throat because of his suppressed lust for a young girl whose paternal care he has undertaken. Yet Dowell admires, even ‘loves’ Ashburnham right to the end – because he is kind to his tenants.

The Good Soldier – study resources

The Good Soldier – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Good Soldier – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Good Soldier – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Good Soldier – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Good Soldier – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

The Good Soldier – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

The Good Soldier – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Good Soldier – eBook formats at Gutenberg

The Good Soldier – DVD of 1981 film version – Amazon UK

The Good Soldier – plot summary

Part I

American John Dowell and his wife Florence are living in Europe, ostensibly for the sake of her health, as she has a weak heart. At the German spa resort of Bad Nauheim they meet Captain Edward Ashburnham and his wife Leonora and strike up a close relationship with them. They all enjoy each other’s company, they go on excursions together, and are inseparable as friends.

Dowell as narrator present the Ashburnhams as an ideal if rather colourless couple, but then gradually begins to reveal all sorts of unsavoury details about their lives. Dowell discovers that Ashburnham has committed a string of sexual infidelities in the past, and has lost a lot of money gambling. His wife has forced him to make over all his money into her name. Their marriage was arranged, and he has been a slave to his sexual passions. He has also had to rent out the family estate at Branshaw Teleragh in Hampshire.

It gradually becomes apparent that Ashburnham is conducting an affair with Dowell’s wife Florence. Dowell claims to feel nothing about it, and both couples maintain a polite public appearance. Ashburnham’s wife Leonora also knows about the affair.

The Ashburnhams have recently arrived from India, where the Captain was serving in the army. Dowell reveals that Leonora has paid for the travelling expenses of Mrs Masie Maidan, her husband’s lover in India, so that she could accompany them to Europe. But when Mrs Maidan realises that Ashburnham has tired of her and has turned his attentions towards Florence Dowell, she plans to go back to her husband in India. However, she suddenly dies whilst packing her travelling case.

Part II

Dowell backtracks to recount the story of his courtship and marriage to Florence, after which she immediately begins to feign a bad heart. It transpires that her family , who disapprove of her marriage, have paid Jimmy, an old disreputable ‘admirer’ of Florence’s to stay in Europe, away from her.

When Dowell and Florence arrive in Paris for their honeymoon, Jimmy turns up and stays with them. Dowell fails to realise that Jimmy and Florence are lovers, right under his nose.

Dowell reveals that Florence deployed her new lover Ashburnham to get rid of Jimmy by ‘knocking [his] teeth down his throat’. In fact Dowell claims to empathise with the difficulties Ashburnham, Florence, and Leonora face in maintaining the veneer of respectability whilst all three are involved in this adulterous triangle. Dowell himself appears to be either unaware or untouched by what is going on around him. It is unclear if he is a complete fool, a bloodless psychopath, or a liar.

Florence is plotting to run off with Ashburnham when she is recognised as a former lover of Jimmy’s by an English guest at the hotel, and she commits suicide, not wishing to face the shame of such a revelation. Dowell appears unmoved by his wife’s death, and reveals that he is in love with Nancy, a young girl to whom the Ashburnhams act as guardian. He leaves for America.

Part III

Ashburnham and Leonora are left in Bad Nauheim, fighting over his growing obsession with Nancy. The narrative then leaps backwards again to cover the period of Ashburnham’s early marriage to Leonora which was arranged by their parents. Animus soon develops between them, and when Ashburnham kisses a girl in a railway carriage (the ‘Kilsyte affair’) it awakens his sex urges. These burst into life in his brief dalliance on the Riviera with La Dolciquita, the mistress of a Grand Duke. She demands money to be his mistress, and he loses money gambling to raise the funds to keep her.

Leonora has meanwhile seized control of the family’s finances with a London solicitor. She lets out the family home at Branshaw and arranges for her husband to be transferred to India, where they spend the next eight years, trying to recoup financially.

In India Ashburnham begins an affair with Mrs Basil, the wife of a fellow officer. The husband finds out, and blackmails Ashburnham on a regular basis, threatening to expose him. When Colonel Basil is transferred to the Boer War, Ashburnham begins an affair with Mrs Masie Maidan. Leonora has meanwhile managed to solve their financial problems and proposes a return to their Hampshire estate.

Part IV

The narrative loops back in time again to pick up the story shortly before Masie Maidan’s death in Bad Nauheim. Dowell explains Leonora’s motivation in trying to win back her husband, who is just starting an affair with Dowell’s wife. The Ashburnhams go back to their estate at Branshaw, where Leonora starts to harass Ashburnham over money matters.

Dowell returns from America to stay at Branshaw, where he reports on Leonora’s dejection and headaches. Ashburnham is meanwhile eaten up with unexpressed desire for Nancy, a young girl who has been in their care since her parents abandoned her. Leonora finally confronts Ashburnham about Nancy, then tries to prevent the girl leaving to rejoin her feckless mother. She would sooner hand her husband over to the girl than have her leave. In this confrontation Nancy reveals that she is in love with Ashburnham.

Dowell then switches to recount events from Nancy’s point of view – her youthful awakening to the knowledge of personal unhappiness, divorce, and her love for Ashburnham, who she thinks must love someone else, until Leonora reveals to her that her husband is dying for the love of Nancy herself. But she also reveals Ashburnham’s all infidelities, which kills off Nancy’s idealised vision of him. Ashburnham arranges for someone to take care of Nancy’s mother, then summons Dowell to Branshaw.

Dowell returns to his own point of view, and reveals the end of the story before describing the events that bring it about. Nancy goes to join her father in India, and on the journey there learns that Ashburnham has committed suicide (by cutting his own throat). She becomes slightly mad with religious monomania, and Dowell is despatched to bring her back to Branshaw. Leonora meanwhile sells the house to Dowell and marries the colourless Rodney Bayham. The novel concludes with Dowell living at Branshaw with Nancy, who is now so deranged he is unable to marry her, and at the very end of his narrative he describes the events leading up to Ashburnham’s suicide.

Principal characters

John Dowell	the narrator – a wealthy American living in Europe
Florence Dowell	his wife, a university graduate
Captain Edward (Teddy) Ashburnham	an ex-Army county magistrate and Tory landowner
Leonora Ashburnham	his Irish catholic childless wife
Nancy Rufford	‘the girl’ who has been adopted by the Ashburnhams
Mrs Rufford	Nancy’s mother, who abandons her
Major Rufford	a brutish army man with a loud voice
John Hurlbird	Florence’s uncle, from whom Dowell inherits
Miss Florence Hurlbird	Florence’s elder aunt in Connecticut
Miss Emily Hurlbird	Florence’s younger aunt
Mrs Masie Maidan	Ashburnham’s mistress in India
Bunny	Masie’s husband
Jimmy	Florence’s lover in Paris, a blackmailer
La Dolciquita	the Spanish mistress of a Grand Duke, with whom Ashburnham has an affair
Colonel Basil	a colleague of Ashburnham’s in India who borrows money from him
Mrs Basil	Ashburnham’s sympathetic mistress in India
Rodney Bayham	an admirer of Leonora’s who she marries

Other novels by Ford Madox Ford

Parade’s End – Wordsworth Classics edition

Parade’s End – Kindle edition

The Great Gatsby

August 16, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, plot summary, further reading

The Great Gatsby (1925) was the third novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, following This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922). Though not a great success on first publication, it has since gone on to be regarded as a great modern American classic. It certainly captures the surface glamour of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and ‘the Jazz Age’ – a term coined by Fitzgerald himself.

first edition 1925

The Great Gatsby – commentary

The American Dream

This dream is a theme which runs through a great deal of American history and culture. It is the idea, born out of political egalitarianism, that all citizens of the USA, no matter what their status at birth, have the freedom to better themselves, make a success of life, and even to become rich and famous. This is summed up in the expression from the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) – that individual citizens have the ‘unalienable right’ to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’.

The idea that everybody can become rich and famous is patently untrue of course, but it is commonly held up as an aspirational model, reinforced by the fact that many immigrants and refugees have arrived in America and gained better standards of living than those they left behind.

Young Gatsby (Jimmy Gatz, to give him his real name) is an example of this phenomenon. He comes from a humble background, but is taken up by the rich yacht-owner Dan Cody, who shows him the lifestyle of a millionaire. Gatsby then re-invents himself. He supresses some elements of his biography, embellishes others, and creates a social smokescreen to hide the fact that he makes his money from the illegal business of bootlegging.

Gatsby also has romantic aspirations to fit this model of upwards social mobility. As a young man he falls for Daisy, who is a southern belle, the daughter of a rich family, a debutante and a socialite. It becomes part of Gatsby’s dream to recapture this youthful lost love by impressing her with his ill-gotten wealth.

But he is not allowed to forget that he is not intrinsically a member of the class to which Daisy belongs. This is what explains the class antagonism that springs into being immediately he meets Tom Buchanan (Daisy’s husband) who correctly spots that there is something ambivalent, incongruous about Gatsby. The two men confront each other in a contest over Daisy.

Following the car accident in which Tom’s mistress Myrtle is killed, Gatsby realises he cannot compete in this class war: ‘because ‘Jay Gatsby’ had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out’. Buchanan eventually both wins back his wife and brings about the death of Gatsby.

In this sense the novel is a critique of or a corrective to the American Dream. It reveals that Jimmy Gatz cannot enter into the upper echelons of society, even if he has made a lot of money during prohibition, even if a former debutante (and current ‘flapper’) is attracted to him. And merely in thinking it possible he pays for the mistake with his life.

The narrative

The story is presented in first person narrative mode, with Nick Carraway recounting his engagement with the Buchanans and Gatsby at East and West Egg respectively. For the most part this is unproblematic, with Nick reporting on scenes in which he is a participant.

Fitzgerald is forced to bring variations to this approach in dramatising the character of Gatsby – and he does this rather cleverly. We are first given an account of Gatsby that is very ambivalent – that he comes from inherited wealth, has been to Oxford University, and is a war hero. The first claim is untrue, the second misleading, and the third true.

Gatsby’s real biography is only gradually revealed, and we learn via a combination of flashbacks, inference, and his dramatised statements to Nick that he is a complex mixture of arriviste, romantic, opportunist, semi-gangster, and generous man of honour. Fitzgerald handles this character development very well.

But towards the end of the novel he violates the rules of the first person narrative by having Nick relate in detail events where he wasn’t present. In the middle of Chapter VIII, the day after the car accident, Fitzgerald introduces a rather clumsy flashback into Nick’s narrative: ‘Now I want to go back a little and tell what happened at the garage after we left there the night before’.

The scene in the garage involves two people – George Wilson and a neighbour Michaelis. It features two minor plot elements: the revelation of a leash Myrtle bought for the dog Tom gave her, and George’s assumption that Myrtle rushed into the road to speak to her lover. But the events are related from the point of view of Michaelis and George, with closely observed details only available to participants:

The hard brown beetles kept thudding against the dull light, and whenever Michaelis heard a car go tearing along the road outside it sounded to him like the car that hadn’t stopped a few hours before …

Wilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small grey clouds took on fantastic shapes and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.

Nick Carraway was not present at the scene, and the events can only have been relayed to him later by Michaelis. But these are not the sorts of emotional and atmospheric details of a spoken report. They have the texture of a first-person narrative along with the remainder of Nick’s story.

Fitzgerald is not abiding by the logic of first person narratives, and this is a serious flaw in an otherwise carefully constructed novel. It might be considered a minor blemish, but it was a weakness he carried on even as far as his last novel, The Last Tycoon. That is a story narrated by a young woman Cecilia Brady who is in love with the principal character Monroe Stahr. Her narrative is spirited and amusing, but she presents detailed intimate scenes between Stahr and another woman of which she cannot possibly have any knowledge.

Symbols

In much of the critical comment on The Great Gatsby a great deal is made of the symbolism present in the work. It should be fairly obvious for instance that the ‘single green light’ that burns at the end of the landing stage of the Buchanan garden is a metaphor representing Gatsby’s enduring love for Daisy. He has shown his fidelity to the memory of her throughout his military service and in his post-war efforts to accumulate the wealth he thinks necessary to win her.

He has established himself in his palace directly opposite, on the other side of the Sound, so that he can be as near to her as possible. Even their separation by the waters of the bay is emblematic. She lives in the rich and fashionable suburb of East Egg amongst the traditional families of ‘old money’. Gatsby lives in arriviste West Egg and despite his fabulous wealth and his generosity, he is eventually unable to cross the gap that divides them.

I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him … Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.

This personal, individual disappointment of Gatsby’s failure to win the romantic love of his youthful dreams also serves to reinforce the more general theme of the death of the American Dream.

The other quite striking image which occurs in the story is the giant advertisement for an optician Doctor T.J. Eckleburg which dominates the ‘Valley of Ashes’ in the Queens suburb of New York. A pair of eyes stare out from ‘enormous yellow spectacles’ – ‘blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high’. They look out over the garage where Myrtle lives in her loveless marriage with George and where she is killed by Daisy driving Gatsby’s car.

The images of death and watchful eyes are also brought together in the scene where George recounts to Michaelis that he finally realises that Myrtle has been deceiving him and reproaches her just before she rushes into the roadway:

“God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!”

Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleberg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night.

“God sees everything”, repeated Wilson.

The Great Gatsby – study resources

The Great Gatsby – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Great Gatsby – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Great Gatsby – York Notes – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Fitzgerald: Letters – Amazon UK

The Great Gatsby – DVD – Amazon UK

The Great Gatsby – plot summary

I. The narrator Nick Carraway rents a house in West Egg, Long Island, next door to the rich and mysterious Jay Gatsby. Nick visits his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan across the bay at East Egg. He meets Daisy’s friend Jordan Baker over a dinner interrupted by a phone call from Tom’s ‘mistress in New York’. Tom is a racist and a bully.

II. Tom takes Nick to pick up his mistress Myrtle at her husband’s garage in the Valley of Ashes in Queens. They go to an apartment in New York, are joined by neighbours, and all get very drunk. Tom hits Myrtle and makes her nose bleed.

III. Nick is invited to one of Gatsby’s lavish parties where he meets Jordan and Gatsby, who imparts an ‘amazing thing’ to her. As the summer goes on, Nick becomes closer to Jordan and thinks he might be in love with her – but he believes she is a compulsive liar.

IV. Gatsby tells Nick his (slightly false) life story of inherited wealth, an Oxford education, and war heroism. They have lunch in New York with a gambler Meyer Wolfsheim. Jordan reveals to Nick the earlier connection between Gatsby and Daisy when he was waiting to go to war.

V. Gatsby arranges a meeting with Daisy at Nick’s house, at which he is first embarrassed. He offers Nick dubious ‘business opportunities’ which Nick turns down. Then Gatsby shows them over his own house, which demonstrates his immense wealth.

VI. Nick then reveals more of Gatsby’s true origins. He was a lower-class boy James Gatz who was given an ‘apprenticeship’ by a rich man Dan Cody. Tom and Daisy attend another of Gatsby’s parties, where Tom remains sceptical about Gatsby, who wants to re-establish his past love with Daisy.

VII. Nick and Gatsby go for lunch at the Buchanans on a hot day. Daisy flaunts her love affair with Gatsby. They all go into New York for the afternoon, calling at the garage, where Wilson is planning to take Myrtle away. In the Plaza hotel, Tom challenges Gatsby, who says that Daisy is going to leave him. Tom reveals more of Gatsby’s shady business dealings. On the way back Myrtle is killed by Gatsby’s car, which Daisy was driving.

VIII. Next day Nick visits Gatsby, who reveals the true story of his earlier relationship with Daisy. Nick then recounts what happened at the garage the previous night. This culminates in Wilson setting out to locate the car that has killed his wife. Believing that Gatsby is Myrtle’s secret lover, he kills him then turns the gun on himself.

IX. Nick arranges the funeral. Gatsby’s father arrives and reveals Gatsby’s youthful ambitions and his fidelity as a son. None of Gatsby’s associates attend the funeral. Nick says goodbye to Jordan, then meets Tom, who reveals that he told Wilson the car was Gatsby’s.

The Great Gatsby – characters

Nick Carraway	the narrator, a bond dealer, ex-Yale
Tom Buchanan	Nick’s rich college friend, a bully and racist
Daisy Buchanan	Nick’s cousin, Tom’s self-absorbed wife
Jordan Baker	a socialite and professional golfer
George B. Wilson	a downtrodden garage owner
Myrtle Wilson	George’s wife, Tom’s mistress
Jay Gatsby	a super-rich bootlegger (real name Jimmy Gatz)
Meyer Wolfsheim	‘the man who fixed the World Series’

Twentieth century literature
More on biography
More on literary studies

The Harp and the Shadow

July 7, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

The Harp and the Shadow (1979) is one of the many novels by Alejo Carpentier in which he explores the history of Latin-America. He also deals with the ambiguous relationship between European culture and that of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. These themes were very close to his own experience, since although he was raised in Cuba, his parents were Russian and French, and he spent a lot of his life living in Paris – where he was eventually made the Cuban cultural ambassador. He spoke in French, but wrote in Spanish.

The novel is a mixture of political history, social documentary, and the re-imagined character of a real historical figure – Christopher Columbus. Most of the events in the novel are related from his point of view.

The Harp and the Shadow – commentary

Who was Columbus?

Christopher Columbus is often thought of as ‘the man who discovered America’ or ‘the first man to make a sea crossing to the New World’. Neither of these claims are true, and Carpentier’s novel is his way of setting the record straight. At the same time, he is trying to imagine what would be the real problems and preoccupations of a fifteenth century seafaring adventurer.

The person known in the west as Christopher Columbus was born in 1451 in Genoa, which was then a small independent Mediterranean republic with its own language. It was not incoporated into what became modern Italy until 1871.

His name was Christophoro Colombo. He spent much of his adult life in Portugal and Spain, where he was called Christobal Colon. This is the name by which he is now known throughout the Spanish-speaking world. But the name was also Anglicised as Christopher Columbus

In north America his name is built in to the expression ‘pre-Colombian’ – which refers to art and archaeology in the Americas (north and south) which pre-dates the so-called ‘discovery’ of America. It is also worth noting that Columbus never set foot in what is now the United States of America. All his activity was in the Caribbean islands and on the South American coast.

Magical Realism

It was Alejo Carpentier who coined the term ‘magical realism’. The expression is used in literary studies to describe the mixture of realism and fantasy elements in a single text – two approaches to fiction which are normally kept in separate genres.

This approach originated in Latin-American fiction with Carpentier, the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974), and it was made most popular by the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) with his best-selling novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).

The Harp and the Shadow starts off in a reasonably conventional manner. The first two sections could easily be considered as parts of a historical novel. Section one concerns a real nineteenth century pope’s mission to Chile and his considering the beatification of Columbus on return to Europe.

Section two steps back temporally to the late fifteenth century and presents events from the perspective of Christopher Columbus as he organises and undertakes his voyage of ‘exploration’ to locate the East Indies by sailing westwards across the Atlantic.

But in the third part of the novel these two centuries are brought together. A nineteenth century papal tribunal is considering the application for his sainthood, but other historical figures make arguments for and against the decision. Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, and Leon Bloy (all French writers) participate in the debate. Even Columbus himself is present as the shadowy ‘Invisible One’

When the tribunal reaches its negative conclusion, Columbus then meets Andrea Doria, a fellow Genoan sixteenth century military commander, and they discuss the vagaries of fame and historical reputation.

As readers we are not expected to take these chronological liberties too seriously. They are fanciful, imaginative, and (sometimes) entertaining. But they are not arbitrary. or random. They are thematically linked and justified.

The whole novel is concerned with how history, from the perspective of Latin-America, sees the invasion of Christopher Columbus – not as a ‘discoverer’ (he discovered nothing that didn’t already exist) but someone who brought disease, greed, slavery, and imperialist domination to the continent from which it then had to spend the next two or three centuries liberating itself.

The world map

Columbus was sailing from Europe in a westerly direction, thinking that he could reach what are now known as the East Indies in Asia. These had already been visited and described by European explorers such as Marco Polo – but they had travelled by land routes in an easterly direction from Europe. Nobody at that time knew how big the earth was, and it had certainly not been circumnavigated or accurately mapped.

The first mistake of Columbus was to assume that on reaching what we now call the West Indies, that he had reached Asia. This accounts for his failure to understand where he was and his inability to locate all the spices which had been reported by earlier land explorers. His second mistake was to be blinded by his mistaken idea that there was a huge gold mine ‘just around the corner’, no matter where he found himself.

It is also obvious that he did not ‘discover’ America. Both continents of South and North America were already in existence, occupied by their native inhabitants. It is interesting that the indigenous population on both continents are still referred to as ‘Indians’. Columbus was merely amongst the first Europeans to visit what we now know as Latin-America. It is certainly worth noting that he never set foot in what is now the United States of America.

There is a third ironic mistake, though it is not discussed in the novel. Columbus lands in the West Indies and thinks he has reached the East Indies. Hence the ambiguous and double use of the term ‘Indian’ to describe the inhabitants. Explorers travelling in both easterly and westerly directions thought they were going to India.

Sea travel was very difficult and hazardous at that time, and Columbus must be given credit for his journeys if not his behaviour. But the fact is that he only reached the Caribbean, and his actual goal still lay at the other side of the world. Even discounting central America, he was still separated from his goal by the Pacific Ocean.

The Pacific covers half of the earth’s surface. He thought he had sailed half way round the world, but had only covered less than a quarter of its navigable surface. This is a misconception of distance that is still perpetuated today. It is very common for maps of the world to omit the Pacific Ocean, giving the impression that Central America and Asia are not very far apart – when in fact the distance between them is 12,000 miles.

Anti-heroism

Carpentier is clearly offering an anti-heroic account of Columbus – a figure to whom statues have been erected all over the Spanish-speaking world as a great pioneer. In the novel he is cut down to size as a human being riven with flaws. He confesses that his younger days were those of a rake – a regular visitor to brothels. He lies about his achievements in order to secure patronage. He makes mistakes in navigation and geography – and much of the time does not know where he is. Nevertheless, he inflates himself with artificial pride about his ‘achievement’.

He is fuelled by an infantile lust for easy riches – the dream of a ‘mother load’ of gold just beyond the horizon. When this dream fails he turns to the slave trade as another source of easy wealth – at other people’s expense. He fails completely to deliver the results promised to his patrons, and in an act of petty greed, he keeps the reward offered to the first man to sight ‘land’. As old age and death approach him at the end of his journeys, he is terrified of meeting his ‘confessor’. He has been hailed as a hero – but he knows what sins he has committed.

The Harp and the Shadow – study resources

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

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

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

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

Alejo Carpentier – further reading

Alejo Carpentier

The Harp and the Shadow – summary

The Harp

The first part of the novel is set in the middle of the nineteenth century.

In the Vatican City, Pope Pius IX hesitates over making Christopher Columbus a saint. As a young man, Giovanni Maria Mastai-Perretti, he is scholarly but poor. Because of his knowledge of Castillian, he is appointed envoy to Chile, where Bernado O’Higgins has liberated the country from Spanish rule. The mission arrives in Uruguay, where Montevideo is full of horses and mud, but the upper classes have imported European culture and modern ideas. The group crosses the Argentinian pampas, climbs over the Andes, and descends into Santiago de Chile.

Bernado. O’Higgins is overthrown by Ramon Friere. Mastai pretends to be radical, but the mission is eventually forced to leave Chile. They return via Cape Horn, where Mastai conceives the idea of uniting Europe and the Americas by elevating Chistopher Colombus to sainthood. So – as the later pontiff Pius IX he signs the papers recommending the beatification of Columbus, whose blameless life has recently been revealed in a specially commissioned biography.

The Hand

The second part of the novel is set towards the end of the fifteenth century.

An old seafarer is in the last stages of his life, and is preparing to make a religious confession of his worldly sins. He reveals his youthful lusts and his knowledge of Mediterranean brothels. He lists his beliefs in fabulous sea beasts and medieval myths, plus his enthusiasm for maritime navigation.

He recounts being on board a ship bound westwards towards the end of the known world at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. He has gathered tales of earlier expeditions made by Vikings which had reached Greenland and even further west.

The old sailor is revealed as Christopher Columbus who confesses that he is an ambitious fake. He has constructed the myth of exploration westwards and promoted it in order to find sponsors. He operates from Portugal, and embellishes his reputation with exaggeration and lies. Despite repeated setbacks, he eventually wins the support of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, who have recently driven the Muslims and Jews out of Granada.

He sets off with an inexperienced crew who soon become discouraged because of the length of the journey. He falsifies the ship’s records to make the distance seem shorter. When they finally sight land Columbus is filled with a vainglorious sense of his own importance and his ‘achievement’.

They think they have reached the East Indes. Columbus hopes no other missionaries have already reached there. Worthless gifts are exchanged with the natives, but Columbus is immediately in search of gold. He takes hostages by force and they sail on to Cuba which he finds beautiful – but it doesn’t contain the spices and the gold he expects. He does not know where they are, and he fears going back empty-handed.

They sail on to Haiti (Hispaniola) laying claim to ownership of all the places they visit, but they still find no spices and no gold. Reading over his journal of the voyage, he is ashamed by his obsession with gold, and unconvincingly vows to make religious penances.

They sail back to europe where he is given a hero’s welcome and summoned to the court in Barcelona. There he displays the captured ‘Indians’ (who are dying) and describes his expedition as a great triumph. But Queen Isabella sees through his claims as a vain bluff. Nevertheless she commissions another expedition in order to compete with the Portugese.

On the second voyage Columbus still doesn’t find any gold, but instead he captures natives and turns them into slaves. He argues that this is equally profitable, and regards the captives as ‘rebels against the Crown’.

He makes further journeys, still finds nothing, and lapses into a delusion that he has located an ‘earthly paradise’ in the ‘orient’. He proclaims by decree that Cuba is not an island but a continent. He feels that he has been overtaken by rivals and has been dispossessed of a national identity. He then faces the final confession before death.

The Shadow

The third part of the novel takes place in the late nineteenth century.

In the Vatican under pope Leo XIII the petition for beatification for Columbus is being considered by a tribunal. His bones and remains have frequently been moved and cannot be authenticated. There is a debate about the validity of his claims, with contributions from Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, and Leon Bloy. The tribunal considers his illegitimate son and his involvement in slavery – for which two reasons he is denied sainthood.

Columbus meets Andrea Doria after the tribunal. They discuss the limitations of fame and justice as two Genoan sailors.

The Harp and the Shadow – characters

Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti	a young clergyman, later Pope Pius IX (1792-1878)
Christobal Colon	a seafaring navigator and explorer (1451-1506)
Bernado O’Higgins	leader of the Chilean independence movement (1778-1842)
Queen Isabella I	Spanish monarch and patroness of Columbus (1451-1504

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

The Hound of the Baskervilles

September 23, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and further reading

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) is possibly the most famous of the Sherlock Holmes stories – for three very good reasons. The first is that it is an intriguing murder mystery related in the fast-moving style of the best popular fiction. The second is that it incorporates a vivid and dramatic myth of an unseen but deadly beast which stalks the moors and threatens the fabric of polite society. The third is that it was the basis for a number of screen adaptations, including the very successful 1939 version starring Basil Rathbone. And of course it has as its stand-out hero the best known detective of all time – Sherlock Holmes.

The Hound of the Baskervilles – a note on the text

The Hound of the Baskervilles first appeared as monthly instalments in the Strand Magazine between August 1901 and April 1902, with illustrations by Sydney Paget. The first single volume book version was published by George Newnes in March 1902. The serial publication was a great success, and it is worth noting that it appeared alongside an equally poular tale, The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells.

Some critics class it as a long story rather than a novel. This is a view supported by the full title of the original which is The Hound of the Baskervilles – Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, So there are some reasons for regarding it as merely a longer example of the case studies that are collected in the series of short stories that constitute The Adventures, The Case-Book, and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. But the length of the text (50,000 words), the complexities of the plot, and the number of characters are more characteristic of a novel. It seems to make more sense to classify it along with its predecessors A Study in Scarlet (1888) and The Sign of the Four (1890) as a short novel.

The Hound of the Baskervilles – commentary

The method of detection

Most people will read any Sherlock Holmes story for the pleasure of witnessing his famous inductive method at work. Holmes observes very small details, and from them identifies larger issues and their causes at work. This short novel begins with a demonstration of exactly this method. A visitor to the famous consulting rooms at 221B Baker Street has left behind a walking stick. Holmes challenges Watson to apply the method, which Watson does, with partial success. But then Holmes tops Watson’s observations with an even more detailed account of the stick’s owner – all of which is proven to be true when he appears to recover it. Dr James Mortimer is exactly the sort of person Holmes has described (although he is something of a superfluous character in the narrative).

The ‘method’ is often described as ‘deduction , but technically, in philosophic terms, it is ‘induction’. For a discussion of the distinction between the two, see the tutorial on A Scandal in Bohemia.

The myth of the beast

One of the strongest horror elements of the novel is the idea of a gigantic and man-killing beast roaming loose on the Moors. The origin of the curse of the Baskervilles is that of a dastardly aristocrat who abducts a young lower-class woman. When she escapes he gives chase with his hunting hounds. But the villain is himself killed by a ‘a great black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye had rested upon’.

It is not surprising to learn that the beast is ‘tearing at his throat’ – for all this is just one of the ingredients of this popular myth. Other elements are the Moors, the Beast which is heard howling but cannot be seen, and the deaths from fear alone. Conan Doyle adds a further layer of horror by giving Stapleton’s beast luminous jaws and eyes – rather unscientifically ignoring the fact that phosphorous would have a poisonous effect on the animal .

Such myths are still common today: tabloid newspaper frequently report of sightings of ‘the Monster of Exmoor’, ‘the Beast of Bodmin’, and (more recently) ‘the Essex Lion’. All of these ‘wild beast’ sightings (accompanied by fuzzy photographs or videos) turn out to be nothing much more than large cats or dogs. It is something or an ironic anti-climax in the novel to discover that Stapleton actually purchased his dog from a pet shop in the Fullham Road.

Mythical beasts almost always inhabit remote moors, dense forests, or other inaccessible regions where their existence cannot easily be verified. The same applies to reports of ‘the Abominable Snowman’, ‘Bigfoot’, and ‘the Loch Ness Monster’. To make matters topographically more dangerous, Conan Doyle also throws in a swamp, the Grimpen Mire, in which we are led to believe the villainous Stapleton meets his own well-deserved end.

In other words, the novel draws upon an idea which appeals to the popular imagination, even though there is very little evidence for its existence. It is an idea to which people are attracted – almost as if they wish to believe it exists. Of course Conan Doyle does produce a real (fictional) hound for the purposes of the story – but this is of secondary importance compared to the power of the myth.

The sensation novel

Wilkie Collins is often credited with the invention of both the detective novel and the sensation novel. Whilst Sherlock Holmes probably owes more to Edgar Allan Poe’s detective hero Auguste Dupin, The Hound of the Baskervilles certainly has many elements of the sensation novel which enjoyed a vogue in both popular and highbrow fiction in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Sensation novels dealt with issues that pushed at the limits of what could be accepted in the realistic narrative. These were issues of crime, bigamy, secret identities, forged wills, blackmail, illegitimacy, and madness. The Hound has a full complement of these elements in its makeup.

The story begins with a case of forced imprisonment and aristocratic crime – when the dastardly Hugo Baskerville abducts the yeoman’s daughter and locks her in the upper part of the ancestral Hall. This incident is followed by the sudden and violent death of Hugo when the great black beast on the moor tears at his throat with its fangs.

This establishes the curse of the Baskervilles, which seems to repeat itself when Sir Charles meets his sudden and unexplained death in the Yew Alley of Baskerville Hall. But this incident (we learn later) has been engineered by someone masquerading under not one but two false identities.

The villain Stapleton is actually a Baskerville, but having stolen money and changed his name to Vandeleur, he returns to England from South America and sets up a school that fails ignominiously. He then changes his name yet again to Stapleton as part of his complex machinations.

These include another form of false identity (technically, personation) when he passes off his wife Beryl as his sister. This in its turn introduces very obliquely the notion of incest. But Stapleton also encourages a romantic liaison between Sir Henry and Beryl, since he himself has (illegally) proposed marriage to Mrs Laura Lyons. This complication produces an element that is difficult to name or categorise, but perhaps comes closest to potential bigamy..

This sexual and legal ambiguity is reinforced by Stapleton paying court to Mrs Lyons. She has a certain amount of money, and he has promised to marry her if she can obtain a divorce. This raises questions of either adultery or bigamy. However, Stapleton’s personal relationship with his wife also includes the sensation element of domestic violence. He bullies her and beats her into submission.

Sherlock Holmes makes the observation that “There can be no doubt that Stapleton exercised an influence over her which may have been love or may have been fear; or very possibly both, since they are by no means incompatible emotions”. When Stapleton beats his wife and ties her up in the house, she becomes a form of ‘madwoman in the attic’ – another stock figure from the sensation novel.

The Hound of the Baskervilles – study resources

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Penguin – Amazon US

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Wordsworth – Amazon UK

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Wordsworth – Amazon US

The Hound of the Baskervilles – 1939 classic DVD – Amazon UK

Sherlock Holmes – classics DVD box set – Amazon UK

Sherlock – 2014 DVD box set – Amazon UK

The Hound of the Baskervilles – chapter summaries

1. Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson analyse a walking stick left behind by a visitor, concluding that its owner is a medical man who has retired to a country practice. The man himself James Mortimer appears, confirming their views.

2. Mortimer reads from an old manuscript. A maiden is abducted by Hugo Baskerville, escapes, and is pursued by his hounds across Dartmoor. When his colleagues follow, they find Baskerville dead, with a huge beast tearing at his throat. His descendent Sir Charles Baskerville has been found dead at Baskerville Hall from causes unknown, and a next of kin is sought to take over the estate. Mortimer adds that Sir Charles was in good health and he saw the footprints of a gigantic hound on inspecting the body.

3. Mortimer believes in a supernatural explanation, but as executor of Sir Charles’ will he needs advice on the new incumbent Sir Henry Baskerville. Watson and Holmes compare notes on clues offered by the garden where Sir Charles was found.

4. Henry Baskerville arrives next morning with a warning note he has received at his hotel. Holmes analyses its text cut out from a copy of The Times. Henry Baskerville also has one of his boots stolen from the hotel. Holmes and Watson discover someone following Baskerville, then they send a messenger in search of Times cuttings in nearby hotels.

5. Henry Baskerville loses another shoe at the hotel. Dr Mortimer reveals the identity of those who have profited from Sir Charles’ will – including himself. The total value of estate is close to one million pounds. A boot suddenly reappears. Holmes interviews the cab driver whose bearded ‘spy’ claimed he was ‘Sherlock Holmes’.

6. Baskerville, Mortimer, and Watson travel to Dartmoor, where a convict has escaped from the prison. They arrive at the dark and gloomy Baskerville Hall., where the butler Mr Barrymore and his wife wish to leave following the death of Sir Charles. Watson hears a woman sobbing late at night.

7. Watson is somewhat suspicious of Barrymore. He meets the naturalist Stapleton who already knows all about Watson and Holmes. Stapleton points out the treacherous Grimpen Mire, which swallows up a Dartmoor pony. They hear a terrible sound which he claims is the Baskerville hound. Watson meets Stapleton’s sister Beryl, who warns him to go back to London immediately, but then retracts her warning.

8. Watson reports to Holmes by letter that young Sir Harry has taken a fancy to Beryl Stapleton, and that Mr Frankland is a litigious neighbour. Watson spots Barrymore making suspicious movements in the house at night.

9. Watson and Sir Harry decide to spy on Barrymore. Watson also observes a meeting of Sir Harry with Beryl which is thwarted by Stapleton who disapproves of the relationship. However, he later apologises and asks Harry to wait for three months in his romantic endeavours. Watson and Harry catch Barrymore making a signal at the window. Mrs Barrymore explains that it is to her brother, the escaped convict. They go out to catch him, hear the hound, and see a tall figure on a Tor. The convict escapes capture.

10. Sir Harry agrees with Barrymore not to pursue the convict Selden, who plans to leave the country. Barrymore reveals that Sir Charles was due to meet a woman on the night of his death. Watson learns that this could be Mrs Laura Lyons, Frankland’s daughter. Barrymore reveals that there is another man on the Moor.

11. Watson interrogates Mrs Laura Lyons, who reluctantly tells him about her movements and explains that she is in an unhappy marriage. Later her father Falkland boasts of his successful law suits and reveals that he has seen a boy delivering food to the convict. Watson finds the hut on the moor where the man on the Tor is hiding – and he turns out to be Sherlock Holmes.

12. Holmes reveals that Beryl is not Stapleton’s sister but his wife. There is a cry of horror, and they find the dead body of Sir Henry at the bottom of a cliff. But it turns out to be the convict Selden, who has been given Henry’s old clothes in which to escape. Stapleton appears, claiming he was disturbed by the cries.

13. Holmes spots that one of the Baskerville family portraits looks like Stapleton. They pretend to go to London but interview Laura Lyons, revealing that Stapleton is married. She is outraged, and reveals the details of her letter to Sir Charles. Lestrade arrives from London, summoned by Holmes.

14. Watson, Holmes, and Lestrade stake out Stapleton’s house whilst Sir Henry is there for dinner. Their plans are threatened when a fog begins to descend. Sir Henry leaves after dinner, and Stapleton unleashes the hound on him. Holmes shoots the hound dead. They then find Beryl Stapleton bound and gagged in an upstairs room of the house. Next day they go in search of Stapleton on the Mire, but do not find him.

15. Some time later Holmes outlines the background details to the case. Stapleton was the son of a rogue Baskerville. He married Beryl (a Costa Rican) stole money, and changed his name to Vandeleur. He opened a school in Yorkshire, and when it collapsed moved to Devon. Only two people stood between him and the inheritance. Posing as a single man he paid court to Laura Lyons. After frightening Sir Charles to death with the Hound, he tried to kill Sir Henry but his plans were exposed by Holmes.

1939 film adaptation

The Hound of the Baskervilles – characters

Sherlock Holmes	an amateur consultant detective
Dr John Watson	Holmes’ friend, a retired army surgeon
Sir Charles Baskerville	the aged and infirm owner of the Baskerville estate
Henry Baskerville	the legitimate heir to the title (from Canada)
Jack Stapleton	a Baskerville, alias Vandeleur, alias Stapleton, a naturalist
Beryl Stapleton	his attractive wife, masquerading as his sister
John Barrymore	the butler at Baskerville Hall
James Mortimer	a country doctor
Mr Frankland	a litiigious neighbour at the Hall
Mrs Laura Lyons	Frankland’s unhappily married daughter
Selden	an escaped convict

The Hound of the Baskervilles – further reading

Biography

John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, London: John Murray, 1949.

Michael Coren, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, London: Bloomsbury, 1995.

John L/ Lellenberg, The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

Andrew Lycett, Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008.

Pierre Nordon, Conan Doyle: A Biography, London: John Murray, 1966.

Hesketh Pearson, Conan Doyle – His Life and Work, London: Methuen, 1943.

Julian Symons, Portrait of an Artist: Conan Doyle, London: Whizzard Press, 1979.

Criticism

Don Richard Cox, Arthur Conan Doyle, New York: Ungar, 1985.

Owen Dudley Edwards, The Quest for Sherlock Holmes, Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1983.

Trevor Hall, Sherlock Holmes: Ten Literary Studies, London: Duckworth, 1969.

Michael and Mollie Hardwick, The Sherlock Holmes Companion, London: John Murray, 1962.

Howard Haycraft, The Art of the Mystery Story, Caroll & Graf Publishers, 1983.

Harold Orel (ed), Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Hall & Co, 1992.

Julian Symons, Bloody Murder, London: Faber, 1972.

Robin Winks, The Historian as Detective, London: Harper Collins, 1969.

Jaqueline A. Yaffe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Boston: Twayne, 1967.

The Hound of the Baskervilles – web links

Sherlock Holmes at Wikipedia
Comprehensive biographical notes on the detective, extracted from all the stories and novels.

The Sherlock Holmes Society of London
An active literary and social society with special events, a journal, meetings, newsletter, and shop.

Discovering Sherlock Holmes
Repository at Stanford University – includes facsimile reproductions of stories from the original Strand Magazine

More 19C Authors
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The House of Mirth

July 12, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, further reading

The House of Mirth (1905) was Edith Wharton’s first major success as a novelist. She had published short stories before, and even a best-seller on interior design – The Decoration of Houses (1897). Indeed she went on in her prolific career to produce travel writing, essays, journalism, and memoirs. But from The House of Mirth onwards, she regarded herself as a serious novelist – even though she claimed that her apprenticeship to the art of fiction only ended with the publication of her novella Ethan Frome in 1911.

Edith Wharton – portrait

She wrote about a subject she knew intimately – the upper echelons of ‘old money’ New York society and their amazingly clannish not-to-say snobbish notions of what was and was not socially acceptable. Everything rested on the appearance of respectability, no matter how far its remoteness from the truth of things.

Like other forms of upper class and aristocratic society its main impetus towards the preservation of power and influence via marriages based on wealth – preferably inherited. The possession of a family fortune means that a complete nonentity such as Percy Gryce is regarded as a desirable catch for any New York matron wishing to marry off a daughter, whereas even someone as beautiful and intelligent as Lily Bart has been unable to locate a husband, because she has no grand inheritance and has fallen in the social pecking order since the collapse of her father’s business. .

The House of Mirth – plot summary

Part I

Lily Bart is a twenty-nine year old New York woman who has been raised in an indulgent and well-to-do family. When her father’s business crashes and both parents die, she is taken in by her rather strict and old-fashioned aunt Julia. Despite her good looks and lively intelligence Lily has been unable to find a husband and fears that her times and chances are running out. She is attracted to the lawyer Lawrence Selden, but he feels that he does not have enough money to afford marriage.

The novel begins with a scene in which Selden invites her to afternoon tea in his bachelor rooms – an innocent enough gesture, but one which ultimately is to have a decisive influence on her destiny. She is spotted by two people leaving the building, and both of them seek to profit from their knowledge later in the story. Lily mixes amongst people who are much wealthier than she is, and she feel both financially and socially disadvantaged. She entertains the notion of attracting Percy Gryce, a boring but wealthy young bachelor. However, distracted by her interest in Lawrence Selden, she misses her chance to captivate Gryce, and he marries somebody else.

Having accrued gambling debts, and feeling that she cannot afford to keep up with the set with whom she mixes, she turns in desperation to Gus Trenor, a businessman who agrees to help her financially – but under rather vague terms that Lily chooses not to understand. She thereby puts herself under his influence, which includes being friendly to Simon Rosedale, a Jewish businessman who is buying his way into polite New York society.

One day a cleaner from Selden’s rooms (which Rosedale owns) blackmails Lily with some compromising letters she has salvaged from Selden’s wastebasket – thinking they are from Lily. They are in fact from Bertha Dorset, a married woman, but Lily pays them to protect Selden – and keeps them.

Enjoying newfound affluence as a result of Gus Trenor’s investment on her behalf, Lily is uncomfortable when he presses for reciprocal favours, but feels obliged to accept his ever closer friendship – even though he is married to one of her friends. In doing so, she develops something of an unfavourable reputation – which is reported to her aunt Julia by jealous rivals.

Gus Trenor eventually tricks her into joining him late at night in his town house where he is alone, and once again he presses her for reciprocity. Lily narrowly escapes his clutches, but is seen leaving the house by Lawrence Selden, who happens to be looking for her at the time.

Lily confesses her debts to aunt Julia, who refuses to help her. Finally Lily pins all her hopes on Lawrence Selden, who at one of their last meetings has declared that he could only help her by loving her. She has an appointment to meet him, but he doesn’t come. Instead, Simon Rosedale arrives with an offer to help her out of her financial problems, which she politely refuses.

Part II

Lily is invited on to a Mediterranean cruise by Bertha Dorset, and this distraction allows her to put her financial and social worries behind her. But the invitation is a ruse to keep George Dorset occupied whilst Bertha enjoys an affair with Ned Silverton, a young man with poetic inclinations. When a rift between the Dorsets threatens to become public, they close ranks and Lily is expelled publicly from the cruise.

She returns to America to find that her Aunt has died, leaving the bulk of her estate to her longtime companion Gerty, and Lily a legacy of $10,000 – precisely the amount she owes to Gus Trenor. Rejected by her former friends, she begins to mix with ‘new money’ people who are trying to climb into fashionable New York society. She is pursued by George Dorset, but rejects his advances, and finally offers herself to Simon Rosedale. But he will only accept her if she uses Lawrence Selden’s letters to bring about a truce with Bertha Dorset, which she refuses to do.

She goes to work as an assistant to a rich divorcee who is trying to gain entry into society, but Lily realises that this will once again tarnish her reputation, whether she is successful or not. So she then takes employment as a milliner, moves into a cheap lodging house, and begins to take comfort in drugs.

In despair, she finally sets out to reveal her possession of the letters to Bertha Dorset, but changes her mind when she realises that to do so will besmirch Lawrence Selden’s name. Instead, she calls on him to say goodbye and burns the letters on the fire whilst he is making tea for her.

Next day Selden has finally decided to act on his intention to help Lily instead of being merely a spectator to her life. But he arrives to find that she has died of an overdose, leaving behind a cheque to pay for all her debts to Gus Trenor.

The House of Mirth – study resources

The House of Mirth – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The House of Mirth – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The House of Mirth – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The House of Mirth – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The House of Mirth – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

The House of Mirth – Cliff’s Notes – Amazon UK

The House of Mirth – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The House of Mirth – audioBook version at LibriVox

The House of Mirth – DVD of 2007 Terrence Davie movie – Amazon UK

The House of Mirth – Kindle eBook edition

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The House of Mirth – characters

Lily Bart	a beautiful and intelligent woman – (29) an orphan, living with her Aunt Julia
Hudson Bart	her hard-working father, who is ruined financially
Lawrence Selden	a middle-class lawyer, sceptic, and bachelor who believes he doesn’t have enough money to marry
Percy Gryce	a rich, dull, bachelor and bibliophile
Mrs Gryce	a stern widow and matriarch, who controls her son
Simon Rosedale	a successful Jewish businessman who wishes to gain entry to upper class society
Gus Trenor	a coarse, gauche, and rich businessman
Judy Trenor	his snobbish and manipulative wife (40)
Gertrude Farish	Selden’s unmarried cousin who does charity work
Julia Peniston	Lily’s strict aunt, who looks after her following the death of her parents
Jack Stepney	Lily’s improvident cousin
Grace Stepney	his sister, companion to Mrs Peniston, who inherits her wealth
Bertha Dorset	a conniving socialite and flirt, who had a former relationship with Lawrence Selden
George Dorset	Bertha’s indulgent and cuckolded husband
Carry Fisher	an enthusiast for causes
Mrs Haffen	cleaner at the Benedick, who discovers the letters
The Wellington Brys	society would-bes
Ned Silverton	young hanger-on with poetic inclinations and an addiction to gambling
Little Dabham	society gossip columnist for ‘Riviera Notes’
Paul Morpeth	society artist who arranges the tableaux vivants at the Bry’s party
June & Ann Silverton	Ned’s sisters, who are trying to pay off his debts
Norma Hatch	young nouveau rich divorcee who employs Lily as a ‘secretary’
Nettie Struther	working-class young woman who is grateful for Lily’s help

The House of Mirth – film adaptation

2000 movie adaptation by Terence Davies

Manuscript page from The House of Mirth

Other works by Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome (1911) tells the story of a poor farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zeena, and her cousin, the enchanting Mattie Silver. In the playing out of this novella’s powerful and engrossing drama, Edith Wharton constructed her least characteristic and most celebrated book. In its unyielding and shocking pessimism, its bleak demonstration of tragic waste, it is a masterpiece of psychological and emotional realism. Every detail of the story contributes to a shocking and powerful conclusion you will never forget. This book is now regarded as a classic of the novella genre.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

The Age of Innocence (1920) is Edith Wharton’s most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War. It’s a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s. Newland Archer is charming, tactful, and enlightened. He accepts society’s standards and abides by its rules, but he also recognizes its limitations. His engagement to the impeccable May Welland assures him of a safe and conventional future – until the arrival of May’s cousin Ellen Olenska puts all his plans in jeopardy. Independent, free-thinking, and scandalously separated from her husband, Ellen forces Archer to question the values and assumptions of his narrow world. As their love for each other grows, Archer has to decide where his ultimate loyalty lies.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

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.

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

More on Edith Wharton
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

tutorial, commentary, plot, study resources, web links

The Defence – critical commentary

The Defence – study resources

The Defence – chapter summaries

The Defence – further reading

tutorial, study guide, web links, and critical commentary

The Doctor’s Wife – a note on the text

The Doctor’s Wife – critical commentary

The Doctor’s Wife – study resources

The Doctor’s Wife – chapter summaries

The Doctor´s Wife – principal characters

The Doctor´s Wife – further reading

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

The Europeans – critical commentary

The Europeans – study resources

The Europeans – plot summary

The Europeans – principal characters

Other work by Henry James

Henry James – web links

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

The Glimpses of the Moon – critical commentary

The Glimpses of the Moon – study resources

The Glimpses of the Moon – plot summary

Principal characters

Further reading

Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton – web links

tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

The Golden Bowl – plot summary

Study resources

The Golden Bowl – characters

The Golden Bowl – film version

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Good Soldier – critical commentary

The Good Soldier – study resources

The Good Soldier – plot summary

Principal characters

Further reading

Other novels by Ford Madox Ford

tutorial, commentary, plot summary, further reading

The Great Gatsby – commentary

The Great Gatsby – study resources

The Great Gatsby – plot summary

The Great Gatsby – characters

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

The Harp and the Shadow – commentary

The Harp and the Shadow – study resources

The Harp and the Shadow – summary

The Harp and the Shadow – characters

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and further reading

The Hound of the Baskervilles – a note on the text

The Hound of the Baskervilles – commentary

The Hound of the Baskervilles – study resources

The Hound of the Baskervilles – chapter summaries

The Hound of the Baskervilles – characters

The Hound of the Baskervilles – further reading

The Hound of the Baskervilles – web links

tutorial, commentary, study resources, further reading

The House of Mirth – plot summary

The House of Mirth – study resources

The House of Mirth – characters

The House of Mirth – film adaptation

Manuscript page from The House of Mirth

Further reading

Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton – web links

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