About Rohan
Rohan Maitzen is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her main teaching and research interests are the Victorian novel, gender and historiography, and ethical criticism. Her academic career is mostly an excuse to keep rereading Middlemarch.
Email Address: Rohan.Maitzen@Dal.Ca
Website: http://maitzenreads.blogspot.com
Posts by Rohan
Friday, December 19, 2008
Ring out, wild bells! Time to chime in on “The Chimes”!
To be honest, “The Chimes” has left me a bit at a loss, and so I’m looking forward to hearing reactions from others. My biggest confusion was over Trotty himself: what did he do to deserve these terrible visions of deprivation and depravity, and what is he supposed to do about them? His sin appears to be his loss of faith in humanity:
‘Unnatural and cruel!’ Toby cried. ‘Unnatural and cruel! None but people who were bad at heart, born bad, who had no business on the earth, could do such deeds. It’s too true, all I’ve heard to-day; too just, too full of proof. We’re Bad!’
He has to learn to blame nurture, rather than nature:
‘I know that we must trust and hope, and neither doubt ourselves, nor doubt the good in one another.’
But because he’s really such a kindly fellow himself, and so powerless that his error can hardly do any damage, while his redemption can hardly do any good, he seems a far more artificial device for this re-education project than Scrooge does. The story’s didacticism, in other words, seemed to overpower its aesthetic conception and thus blunted its emotional effects: it was always already about me (and you), not about Trotty, and unpleasantly so, as the underlying assumption about me (and you) is that we will blame and despise desperate mothers who make their terrible way towards the river to take “the dreadful plunge."* In short, I didn’t like it that much overall.
Still, it’s Dickens, and he can’t help being brilliant, at least fitfully. My favourite bit was definitely the opening of the third quarter--yes, the bit with the goblins:
He saw the tower, whither his charmed footsteps had brought him, swarming with dwarf phantoms, spirits, elfin creatures of the Bells. He saw them leaping, flying, dropping, pouring from the Bells without a pause. He saw them, round him on the ground; above him, in the air; clambering from him, by the ropes below; looking down upon him, from the massive iron–girded beams; peeping in upon him, through the chinks and loopholes in the walls; spreading away and away from him in enlarging circles, as the water ripples give way to a huge stone that suddenly comes plashing in among them. He saw them, of all aspects and all shapes. He saw them ugly, handsome, crippled, exquisitely formed. He saw them young, he saw them old, he saw them kind, he saw them cruel, he saw them merry, he saw them grim; he saw them dance, and heard them sing; he saw them tear their hair, and heard them howl. He saw the air thick with them. He saw them come and go, incessantly. He saw them riding downward, soaring upward, sailing off afar, perching near at hand, all restless and all violently active. Stone, and brick, and slate, and tile, became transparent to him as to them. He saw them IN the houses, busy at the sleepers’ beds. He saw them soothing people in their dreams; he saw them beating them with knotted whips; he saw them yelling in their ears; he saw them playing softest music on their pillows; he saw them cheering some with the songs of birds and the perfume of flowers; he saw them flashing awful faces on the troubled rest of others, from enchanted mirrors which they carried in their hands.
He saw these creatures, not only among sleeping men but waking also, active in pursuits irreconcilable with one another, and possessing or assuming natures the most opposite. He saw one buckling on innumerable wings to increase his speed; another loading himself with chains and weights, to retard his. He saw some putting the hands of clocks forward, some putting the hands of clocks backward, some endeavouring to stop the clock entirely. He saw them representing, here a marriage ceremony, there a funeral; in this chamber an election, in that a ball he saw, everywhere, restless and untiring motion.
OK, help me out: is “The Chimes” better than I think? What struck you most about it?
*A much better example of a ‘fallen woman’ story, just btw, is Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Lizzie Leigh.”
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Thursday, December 11, 2008
The Little Child Had Come to Link Him Once More with the Whole World
No, not that child, though there is a seasonal allusion. I’m rereading Silas Marner and finding it every bit as good a secular fable for the holidays as A Christmas Carol--better, even, as the inspiring transformation of a lonely and bitter miser in this case is entirely the result of human accident, agency, and love. Here’s poor Silas, bereft at the loss of his gold:
Silas spent his Christmas-day in loneliness, eating his meat in sadness of heart . . . . In the morning he looked out on the black frost that seemed to press cruelly on every blade of grass, while the half-icy red pool shivered under the bitter wind; but towards the evening the snow began to fall, and curtained from him even that dreary outlook, shutting him close up with his narrow grief. And he sat in his robbed home through the livelong evening, not caring to close his shutters or lock his door, pressing his head between his hands and moaning, until the cold grasped him and told him that his fire was grey.
It’s no supernatural visitor, but a golden-haired child who stirs “old quiverings of tenderness” in Silas’s bruised heart, animates his past, present, and future, and restores him to the human community:
[I]n this way, as the weeks grew to months, the child created fresh links between his life and the lives from which he had hitherto shrunk continually into narrower isolation. Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must be worshipped in close-locked solitude--which was hidden away from the daylight, was deaf to the song of birds, and started to no human tones--Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and living movement; making trial of everything, with trust in new joy, and stirring the human kindness in all eyes that looked on her. The gold had kept his thoughts in an every-repeated circle, leading to nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object compacted of changes and hopes that forced his thoughts onward . . . . The gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web; but Eppie called him away from his weaving, and made him think all its pauses a holiday, re-awakening his senses with her fresh life . . . and warming him into joy because she had joy. . . .
In the old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.
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Monday, December 08, 2008
Some Background on That Other Holiday Story
At the New York Times Book Review, Kathryn Harrison reviews Les Standiford’s The Man Who Invented Christmas:
Standiford, the author of four other nonfiction books, tidily explains the appeal of “A Christmas Carol,” its readership “said at the turn of the 20th century to be second only to the Bible’s.” Replacing the slippery Holy Ghost with anthropomorphized spirits, the infant Christ with a crippled child whose salvation waits on man’s — not God’s — generosity, Dickens laid claim to a religious festival, handing it over to the gathering forces of secular humanism. If a single night’s crash course in man’s power to redress his mistakes and redeem his future without appealing to an invisible and silent deity could rehabilitate even so apparently lost a cause as Ebenezer Scrooge, imagine what it might do for the rest of us!
According to Standiford (or is this Harrison’s independent conclusion?), Dickens’s subsequent Christmas books, including “The Chimes,” “couldn’t reproduce the alchemy of their prototype. Too grim, too redux, too calculated.” We’ll see what we think about that when we meet back here December 19. Don’t forget to invite your friends. If everyone tells two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on and so on, we’ll have quite a party, I hope.
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Sunday, November 30, 2008
An Invitation to Ring in the Holidays with “The Chimes”
It’s that time of year again--you know, the time for “paying bills without money,” for “finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer,” and, of course, for re-reading A Christmas Carol. But wait: we all know (or think we know) A Christmas Carol. What about Dickens’s other Christmas stories? I’ve actually never read them, and I’d like to. I thought I’d start with “The Chimes,” which is short and appears, promisingly, to involve goblins. It’s easily available in electronic editions (here and here, for instance); some contextual information and the illustrations are available here. What about a miniature version of the Adam Bede project we did in the summer? I’m thinking I’ll post a reminder here in a week or so, and then somewhere around December 19 or 20, post a few comments and/or questions and see who comes to the party. If you think the story will go down easier with a little “Smoking Bishop,” here’s the recipe.
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Monday, November 17, 2008
The Remains of Our Days, Dear Readers!
Over at my other place I do a regular series of posts on my teaching. There are some explanations over there about why I started doing this and what I’ve gotten out of it so far. One thing that I particularly appreciate is the opportunity to write about the part of my job I like the best, and that takes up by far the majority of my time and thought at least eight months of the year. This past week was a particularly fulfilling one for me because in both of my classes I was teaching books I am really passionate about, so I thought I’d bring a little of that experience over here. In my first-year class, Introduction to Prose and Fiction, we started Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and in my upper-level class on 19th-Century Fiction, we were finishing up Bleak House. It’s hard to imagine books more stylistically different: Dickens offers a teeming overabundance of words, characters, and plots, while Ishiguro at once models and thematizes restraint and understatement. Yet both are immensely moving and humane; their artistry is both intellectually and emotionally demanding, and their beauties are at once aesthetic and ethical. If, as Leslie Stephen said, we “measure the worth of a book by the worth of the friend it reveals to [us],” both offer us companionship of an inspiring kind. Wayne Booth proposes we consider what “kind of desirer“ we become if we cooperate with the implied author of a text: “Is the pattern of life that this would-be friend offers one that friends might well pursue together?” The best literary “friends” are identified by “the irresistable invitation they extend to live during these moments a richer and fuller life than I could manage on my own.” (These quotations are from Booth’s The Company We Keep: an Ethics of Fiction, the only critical work I’ve read in a decade or more that I know has had a profound impact on how I imagine and articulate the task of criticism.) By these standards, I think both The Remains of the Day and Bleak House are among the very best.
More specifically, here’s what we’ve been working on in class.
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Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Book Rebranding Contest @ BookNinja
It’s too late to vote, but not too late for some laughs: BookNinja invites ... creative ... new spins on familiar titles. (Winners announced here.)
(via)
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Thursday, October 16, 2008
Pedagogy, Evaluation, and What We Look for in ‘the’ Novel
(cross-posted from Novel Readings)
Recent threads at The Reading Experience (including this acrimonious one launched by Dan’s blunt denunciation of Dostoevsky’s “cheap tricks” and “unrelenting tedium") have had me thinking (again, and see also these posts) about the problem of literary evaluation. In The Death of the Critic, Ronan McDonald declared that “The first step in reviving [the critic] is to bring the idea of artistic merit back to the heart of academic criticism. . . . [I]f criticism is to be valued, if it is to reach a wide public, it needs to be evaluative.” As I’ve said before, I’m skeptical about this idea that aesthetic evaluation is the obvious fix for whatever ails academic criticism at the present time:
Once you’ve acknowledged the ‘problematics’ of literary judgment, how then are you supposed to answer what [McDonald] proposes is the common reader’s key question ("Is this book ... worth my attention and my time?")? For what it’s worth, I think most academic critics would in fact be quite happy to answer that question about any book, but first we would all want to develop the question further (along the lines I laid out here, for instance).
This time around, I’m particularly thinking about whether, or how far, my work as a teacher has committed me, not to relativism (which is where some people assume my reservations about ‘literary merit’ lead me) but to a kind of pluralism by which it’s not comparative measures of ‘worth’ that matter but seeking out the measures that fit the particular case. One of the key features of this approach is working with a text on its own terms--trying to understand how to read it so that it best fulfills its own potential. This means not holding it up to a particular, preconceived standard of excellence ("good novels do this“), whether that standard is formal or ideological. Now, depending on the occasion, there may be a second phase in which you move back from internally-generated norms and question them against external ideas; often, in teaching, this kind of questioning arises just from moving to the next book on the syllabus and discovering that its norms differ widely from--and thus, implicitly or explicitly, challenge--the ones we’ve just left behind (reading North and South right after Hard Times, or Jane Eyre soon after Pride and Prejudice, for instance, will certainly have this effect). But it’s difficult to see either a method or a reason for evaluating, say, Pride and Prejudice, as better or worse than Jane Eyre. It’s only if you have a set notion of what makes good fiction in general that you could fault either one for not measuring up.
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Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Happy Birthday, OED!
The OUPBlog alerts us to the 80th birthday of the venerable Oxford English Dictionary:
Eighty years ago, the “greatest work in dictionary-making ever undertaken” was completed. Begun in 1857, published in ten volumes in 1928, subsequently updated and expanded to 20 volumes in 1989, and now adapted to the electronic age, the OED has become the most venerated and most beloved English-language reference ever compiled.
Kirsty McHugh of OUP-UK (and the nice lit-blog ’Other Stories‘) takes this opportunity to let us know “some fascinating facts and figures about the OED“:
*There are currently over 600,000 words in the OED
*The OED costs over £4 million (or nearly $7 million) to run every year in editorial costs alone … and it has never, ever made OUP any money!
*As well as the addition of new words and senses to the Dictionary, the editors are also hard at work re-writing the historical information that is core to each OED entry for the first time
Those of you fortunate enough to be within reach of Oxford may wish to attend some of the festivities.
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Tuesday, September 30, 2008
CFP (ACCUTE 2009): LitCrit 2.0: Academic Blogging and Other New Forms of Scholarly Publication
The calls for papers for ACCUTE 2009 are now posted, including my own for a session on “LitCrit 2.o: Academic Blogging and Other New Forms of Scholarly Publishing” (scroll down this list). Panels like this are old news in other venues, but I haven’t seen much about it up here north of the 49th, at least not through ACCUTE (which, for any American readers who don’t know this, is our MLA-like thing). My own thinking about these issues was somewhat focused by the presentation I gave to my department on academic blogging last fall.
The version of the CFP I submitted actually had more apparatus, including hyperlinks that I had hoped would be retained in the posted version. For those who might be interested, here’s the full text with links.
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Monday, September 22, 2008
Vanity Fair: It’s All About You
I started work on Thackeray‘s Vanity Fair with my 19th-century fiction class today. There are many things I savor about this novel, from the brilliance of Becky “I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year” Sharp to the sharply satirical illustrations. I particularly enjoy the intrusive narrator:
[M]y kind reader will please to remember that this history has “Vanity Fair” for a title, and that Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions. And while the moralist, who is holding forth on the cover ( an accurate portrait of your humble servant), professes to wear neither gown nor bands, but only the very same long-eared livery in which his congregation is arrayed: yet, look you, one is bound to speak the truth as far as one knows it, whether one mounts a cap and bells or a shovel hat; and a deal of disagreeable matter must come out in the course of such an undertaking. . . .
And, as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a man and a brother, not only to introduce them, but occasionally to step down from the platform, and talk about them: if they are good and kindly, to love them and shake them by the hand: if they are silly, to laugh at them confidentially in the reader’s sleeve: if they are wicked and heartless, to abuse them in the strongest terms which politeness admits of.*
He’s everything you could wish for in a novelistic companion: wry, passionate, witty, acerbic--and surprisingly coy, considering he has every apparent reason to be, well, omniscient, seeing as how he is frank about having made it all up.
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Sunday, September 14, 2008
Book Order Bleg: If The Wire were a novel…
For some time I’ve been struggling with the question of what, if anything, to add to the reading list for my winter term course on ‘mystery and detective fiction’; it belatedly occurs to me that lots of smart, widely read people pass through The Valve who might be able to help me. Just to be clear, I know there are lots of good mystery novels out there, and I’m not asking for reading recommendations or names of people’s favourite authors (well, actually, I’m always happy to get these). I’ve been trying to bring my list more up to date and to see what type of novel I might assign that isn’t already represented on my list, what author or book models some kind of significant recent development rather than a modern twist on a familiar genre (such as the hard-boiled private eye, or the British police procedural). Here’s the core list (admittedly idiosyncratic, but also reasonably representative, I think, of key developments in the form):
The Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction (for short fiction including Poe, Conan Doyle, Hammett, etc.)
Collins, The Moonstone (first and best!)
Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Golden Age / puzzle fiction)
Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (hard-boiled, of course)
James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (English literary detection + feminist critique)
Grafton, ‘A’ is for Alibi (feminist revision of hard-boiled convention)
Ranking, Knots and Crosses (police procedural; Scots gothic / noir)
I’ve been reading around for new ideas, some old (Chester Himes), some new (Inger Ash Wolfe, The Calling), some international (Henning Mankell), but I haven’t been inspired by any of them. Here’s my most recent thought. I’ve just finished watching the last season of The Wire...
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Monday, September 08, 2008
Andrew Davies Interviewed
Laura Carroll writes up Jan Sardi’s interview with Andrew Davies here:
Jan Sardi asked just the right questions of Davies, drawing out his views and feelings about the novels he works with, his sense of exactly what his task is as an adaptor, and the cheerful confidence and aplomb with which he seems to make some extraordinarily difficult calls.
Before becoming a writer Davies taught English in schools and universities, and I got the sense that he still unashamedly thinks in terms of an educational mission – the basic value of opening up unfamiliar books for novice readers matters more to him than preserving all the superficially off-putting and remote dignity of books written hundreds of years ago in disused language.
It was extremely refreshing to hear him acknowledge the value of this unfashionable ideal, and he has done more than anyone alive to keep books like Middlemarch and Bleak House in front of readers. . . .
Asked why he does so many classic novel adaptations rather than modern ones, Davies gave an answer I liked: he simply prefers them. . . . In general, he suggested, modern fiction of the prize-winning, book-clubbing kind is thinly plotted, and airport novels have flimsy characters. The classics have both, and that’s why they have stuck around.
I’ve been OK with Davies’s adaptations most of the time, but I think he has yet to find an ingenious solution to the problem all screenwriters face when working with 19th-century novels: what to do about intrusive narration? In his Middlemarch there’s a short voice-over at the end, but of course that’s hardly enough, and stripped of the narrative commentary, even Middlemarch can seem a little “thinly plotted.” And I don’t think there’s anything in his Bleak House to compensate for the loss of either Esther’s own irritatingly coy voice or the prophetic third-person narrator who takes turns with her:
Then the active and intelligent, who has got into the morning papers as such, comes with his pauper company to Mr Krook’s, and bears off the body of our dear brother here departed, to a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed; while our dear brothers and sisters who hang about official backstairs--would to Heaven they had departed!--are very complacent and agreeable. Into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination, and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring our dear brother here departed, to receive Christian burial. . . .
Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon, or stay too long, by such a place as this! Come, straggling lights into the windows of the ugly houses; and you who do iniquity therein, do it at least with this dread scene shut out! Come, flame of gas, burning so sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned air deposits its witch-ointment slimy to the touch! It is well that you should call to every passer-by, ‘Look here!’
Or the best moment of all, because Dickens slips into iambic pentameter at the last, truly the poetic side of ‘familiar things’:
Dead, your majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us, every day.
Take that, Andrew Davies!
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Monday, August 11, 2008
Adam Bede: Conclusions?
This is the final installment of our Adam Bede reading project. In case anyone is inspired to go back and read through the posts and comments in sequence, here they are:
June 16: Chapters I-V
June 23: Chapters VI-XI
July 1: Chapters XII-XVI
July 8: Chapters XVII-XXI
July 15: Chapters XXII-XXVI
July 22: Chapters XXVII-XXXV
July 29: Chapters XXXVI-XLVIII
August 5: The Whole Novel
Was Adam Bede the best choice for a project like this? I don’t know, but clearly some people enjoyed it, or at least persevered with it, and probably we all know things we didn’t know before, whether about George Eliot, Dutch painting, fanfic, or just ourselves as readers. I don’t have any sense of how many people were reading along but not commenting. If there are any of you still lurking out there, I hope you’ll take this opportunity to say a few words about you and your experience of reading Adam Bede this summer. I’m sure the people who have been commenting all along don’t need any special prompting from me to add their own last words!
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Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Summer Reading Project: Adam Bede (Book VI & Epilogue)
And so we reach our final installment. As usual, George Eliot is one step ahead of us: “But no story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather, we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.” There are, perhaps, no real surprises in the basic plot: ever since her telling blush in Chapter XI, we’ve known about Dinah’s suppressed passion for Adam, and it seemed only a matter of time before he learned to love a less kittenish model. His revelation is a bit sudden as a personal matter, I thought, but as a matter of plot and theme, it seems inevitable. What about Dinah’s initial reluctance to give in to their love? And what about Lisbeth’s role as go-between? Also of interest, among other things, are Dinah’s giving up preaching, Hetty’s death, and Arthur’s return from the wars. The final scene mimics very closely the ‘waiting for father to come home’ sequence from the first part of the novel; as has come up a few times in our discussion, the structure of the book seems cyclical or circular, and yet isn’t it also moving forward, towards a new kind of “Victorian” domesticity, for instance? These and any other points of interest are open for your comments! And congratulations, by the way, to all of us who persevered to the end, with both reading and posting.
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Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Summer Reading Project: Adam Bede (Chapters 36-48)
This week’s installment of our summer reading project brings us to the emotional and moral climax of Adam Bede. This is a section full of pathos, suspense, and melodrama as we follow Hetty on her journeys in hope and despair, as we see the painful process by which Adam and our other friends at Hayslope are brought into knowledge and suffering by “the terrible illumination which the present sheds back upon the past,” and as we go with Dinah into Hetty’s dark cell. How far do the lessons we have been offered about sympathy and forgiveness move us past the horror of this moment:
‘I hadn’t got far out of the road into one of the open places, before I heard a strange cry. I thought it didn’t come from any animal I knew, but I wasn’t for stopping to look about just then. But it went on, and seemed so strange to me in that place, I couldn’t help stopping to look. . . . And I looked about among them, but could find nothing; and at last the cry stopped. So I was for giving it up, and I went on about my business. But when I came back the same way pretty nigh an hour after, I couldn’t help laying down my stakes to have another look. And just as I was stooping and laying down the stakes, I saw something odd and round and whitish lying on the ground under a nut-bush by the side of me. And I stooped down on hands and knees to pick it up. And I saw it was a little baby’s hand.’
How far, also, is the dramatic turn of events at the end of Chapter XLVII a break from the novel’s program of realism? I’m also interested in Bartle Massey’s role in this section as well as Mr. Irwine’s, and in the structural symmetries of many of the scenes here to earlier ones. As always, everyone is welcome to pitch in on these or any other topics.
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