Alexas and Ventidius: Hobbes and Locke Might Have Pointed With Pride

Hobbes’ Leviathan appeared in 1651. In it, to oversimplify, he said that each man is born a materialist, grasping and self-serving and privately practical. John Locke produced, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in 1690. In that work, he emphasizes not matter, but ideas. Ideas are “the whole material of our knowledge.” Politically, Hobbes felt that man’s inherent selfishness would cause society, if left unchecked, to run amok. Only an absolute monarch might control man’s crass ambitions. Locke had better faith in human rationality, and believed man could best rule himself by reasonable agreement. In these writers, we hear voices promoting reason over emotion as a tool for living (Locke), but warning that each ideate is apt to serve his private and selfish purpose only, if allowed free expression (Hobbes). In All for Love, which Dryden wrote in 1677, almost exactly midway between the publication dates of Hobbes’ and Locke’s philosophical treatises, we have a dramatization of just the forces those thinkers articulated for us.

Alexas, sometimes referred to as an embodiment of pure (scheming) reason in the play, is in fact a highly emotional man who operates out of fear and deep-seated anger. He controls his less rational inclinations by trying to “control” his immediate world: by making practical suggestions for survival to his queen; by wooing Antony and his commanders; by persuading Cleopatra to participate in a plot to make Antony jealous; and finally by perpetrating a private ruse that backfires. Ventidius, the practical man on Antony’s side, is no less emotional than Alexas, nor perhaps even than the two lovers. And his passion is not hidden. He comes to his leader with at least as many heart-rending arguments (including several in the flesh) as reasonable rebuttals. Both Alexas and Ventidius are Locke’s rational and fair-minded creatures of ideas, and each believes he is justifiably constrained to force his cause. Both men seem to be Hobbes’ hot-tempered and selfish seekers after personal gain, as well. We shall examine each one’s program of persuasion, noting in each case his principal emotional motivation, and determining to what extent each controls his ideas and feelings to achieve his goal.

At the opening of the play, all are threatened. The Romans are near, Antony has hidden himself, in dejection, from everyone including Cleopatra, and the priest Serapion has had a vision that portends destruction for Egypt. If Antony is defeated, he explains, or if he is reconciled with Rome. “Egypt is doomed to be / A Roman Province” (Act I, 1. 64). Alexas agrees, and tells us how he would have it instead if he could:

Had I my wish, these tyrants of all nature

Who Lord it o’er mankind, should perish,--perish,

Each by the other’s sword; but, since our will

Is lamely followed by our power, we must

Depend on one; with him to rise or fall.

                                                                        (I,  11,71-75)

To Alexas, both forces, far from controlling the situation to everyone’s benefit, are oppressive and so deserve to die. That is his broad political view, which includes everyone (“mankind”), but it is also an expression of personal frustration for being powerless; he is forced with the others to rely on Antony. It is clear from the next exchange that the counselor had other plans, but Cleopatra’s dotage has thwarted those too:

                        This changes my designs, this blasts my counsels,

                        And makes me use all means to keep him here,

                        Whom I could wish divided from her arms,

                        Far as the earth’s deep center.

                                                                        (I,  11.82-85)

Deep is Alexas’ center, we see already. He has thought out his own problem, and he obviously feels strongly about the whole situation.

            But he can handle it only his queen’s way—for now, Alexas’ first move is to order a celebration of Antony’s birthday city-wide, as a sure-to-be-noticed gesture of Cleopatra’s love. It is an honest act of conciliation. Ventidius, on the other hand, sees a party at a time like this, when Antony is in danger, as just another sign of Cleopatra’s and Egypt’s degeneracy. Alexas reminds the general that the celebration is an act of love, and that Antony would show more virtue by honestly returning the queen’s devotion. Ventidius’ emotions run high in this scene, while Alexas’ reasonable rebuttals level the tone. Persistent in his attack, Ventidius gives us his opinion of Alexas, and states his intention:

            Thou art her darling mischief, her chief engine,

            Antony’s other fate. Go, tell thy queen,

            Ventidius is arrived, to end her charms.

                                                            (I, 11. 191-193)

The personal battle line is drawn. Alexas is indeed Cleopatra’s agent, but by order of the queen herself. The savior Ventidius, on the other hand, is self-appointed. He will be the instrument of Antony’s better, as opposed to Cleopatra’s “other” fate, for him. He will neutralize her effect upon Antony and free the great man to follow his greater purpose. Why? Because Antony is too good to be lost:

            O Antony:

            Thou bravest soldier, and thou best of friends:

            Bounteous as nature; next to Nature’s God:

                                                            (I, 11.180-182)

Ventidius’ obvious intention is simple, and so is his rallying cry to Antony: “Up, up, for honour’s sake; twelve legions wait you, / And long to call you chief” (I. 11. 337-38). Ventidius is not wily and sophisticated like Alexas; his loyalty is clear and his values homespun. As Alexas puts it about his rival: “In short the plainness, fierceness, rugged virtue, / Of an old true-stampt Roman lives in him” (I. 11. 105-6). But the simple man has more complex feelings, and the indications of them are clear.

            After Antony describes during a rhapsodic soliloquy a “sylvan scene” of idyllic peace where he would prefer above all to be, the eavesdropping Ventidius admits having the same inclination: “Methinks I fancy / Myself there too” (I, 1. 240). It is a reverie of escape from all worldly cares. It is a longing for death, actually, but without pain; for the peace that passeth. Soon afterward, Antony confesses his feeling directly: “No I can kill myself; and so resolve” (I, 1.331), and Ventidius offers: “I can die with you too, when time shall serve” (I, 1.332). The death wish is selfish, the ultimate in self-condemnation, and the worst of sins, despair: all in all, a supremely egotistic notion. In the Roman code and in Cleopatra’s too, however, it is an honorable alternative—which all three choose. In the meantime, Ventidius will act as a delaying force, to bolster the languishing Antony and stave off the inevitable suicides. For now, urges Ventidius, we are “to live, / To fight, to conquer” (I. 1.333). The plain Roman is plainly a soldier first. He believes Antony to be practically a god, but is that reason enough, validation enough for Antony to rule the world? Octavius, that absent but haunting presence of relentless determination, is the proper heir to the Empire. Clearly, Ventidius is smitten.

            He attacks Cleopatra—even at the risk of incurring Antony’s wrath—and praises Antony extravagantly, to hear him at last declare: “Come, follow me:” (I. 1.428). The entire first meeting has been an emotional bath, and it ends with the highest feeling as Ventidius exults:

            Oh, now I hear my emperor: in that word

            Octavius fell. Gods, let me see that day,

            And, if I have ten years behind, take all:

            I’ll thank you for the exchange.

                                                            (I, 11. 429-32)

He would give up ten years of life, just to see Octavius defeated: He is so high now that he can’t help repeating himself in soaring praise:

                                                Me thinks, you breathe

            Another soul: Your looks are more divine;

            You speak a hero, and you move a god.

                                                            (I, 11. 435-37)

As Antony flexes and rhapsodizes about a past victory, Ventidius flies emotionally with him: “Ye gods, ye gods, / For such another honour:” (I, 1. 447). Another death wish. Another honor. For right? Or for self? So far, to die with Antony seems to be Ventidius’ fondest dream.

            Alexas, quite to the contrary, has been running for his life from the very start. From the beginning, he has recognized Ventidius’ effectiveness and different nature:

            This downright fighting fool, this thick-skulled hero,

            This Blunt, unthinking instrument of death,

            With plain dull virtue has outgone my wit.

                                                            (III, 11. 379-81)

Alexas here expresses, with anguish, exactly how he has been victimized, and why he must fight so hard to survive:

            Pleasure forsook my earliest infancy,

            The luxury of others robbed my cradle,

            And ravished thence the promise of a man.

Cast out from nature, disinherited

Of what her meanest children claim by kind,

Yet greatness kept me from contempt: that’s gone.

Had Cleopatra followed my advice,

Then he had been betrayed who now forsakes.

She dies for love; but she has known its joys:

Gods, is this just, that I, who know no joys,

Must die, because she loves?

                                                (III, 11. 382-92).

Alexas knows Ventidius is an agent of death, and that the general’s simple-minded persistence is winning for him. What he doesn’t know is that for Ventidius, death is a happy notion. Ventidius would die for love of Antony, and so another one who knows joy dogs Alexas’ footsteps. This is the second time he has cursed aloud his fate to be tyrannized by selfish leaders. He has had removed his very manhood, the right of even the lowest being to possess, which is an injustice quite enough to fill him with contempt. But his “greatness” of spirit has kept him honorable. Or has it been a simple sense of survival? But he has been so diligent in fact, that it comes to him, in the last hours, that he has thereby been promoting his on destruction, in effect. In a rage, Cleopatra lays the blame for her ruin upon Alexas and his failed schemes, and tries to attack him. Alexas cowers at first, but then stands to state his case:

            Yes, I deserve it, for my ill-timed truth.

            Was it for me to prop

            The ruins of a falling majesty?

            To place myself beneath the mighty flaw,

            Thus to be crushed, and pounded into atoms,

            By its o’erwhelming weight? ‘Tis too presuming

            For subjects to preserve that willful power,

            Which courts its own destruction.

                                                            (V. 11. 19-27)

If Cleopatra had followed his advice, Egypt would have survived, and if Alexas had not suppressed his contempt and pain, we may presume, perhaps he would not have lingered to be destroyed. But his plots, born of anguish and self-preservation, have served a power that labors inexorably toward self-destruction.

            Ventidius has been up against just as relentlessly self-destructive energies in Antony. But unlike Alexas, Ventidius is prepared, even eager, to die with his leader. His strategies—including his two most powerful ploys, Dolabella and Octavia—have failed, too, and for Ventidius as for Alexas, “Fate comes too fast upon [his] wit” (V, 1. 255). But this man of reason seems to have proceeded all along on a current of self-immolation. Whether Antony wins or loses, Ventidius can have his own victory—in death; and he seems to have anticipated that alternative. At the end, in the face of destruction, he is ecstatic, declaring to Antony:

            Now you shall see I love you. Not a word

            Of chiding more. By my few hours of life,

            I am so pleased with this brave Roman fate,

            That I would not be Caesar, to outlive you,

            When we put off this flesh, and mount together,

            I shall be shown to all the ethereal crowd,--

            Lo, this is he who died with Antony:

                                                            (V. 11. 178-184).

What greater glory than to be united in death with a god! Death seems always uppermost in both of their minds: “I could be grieved, / But that I’ll not outlive you: choose your death” (V, 11. 289-90); and the egos are startling in their selfishness:

            ANTONY: Wilt thou not live, to speak some good of me?

            To stand by my fair fame, and guard the approaches

            From the ill tongues of men?

            VENTIDIUS:                          Who shall guard mine,

            For living after you?

                                                                        (V, 11. 299-302).

For each warrior, his self-image will stay intact, with or without the Empire, even without life. And in the opposite camp, facing annihilation just as certainly, Alexas manages to have a moment of self-assurance, too:

            Some other, any man (‘tis so advanced),

            May perfect this unfinished work, which I

            (Unhappy only to myself) have left

            So easy to his hand,

                                                                        (V, 11. 53-56)

He tells Cleopatra (and himself) in the last minutes.

            Both men have succeeded. Each has applied his reason to control deep personal feelings, or, more accurately, to direct longings that might otherwise be self-defeating, toward the achievement of a private and pleasurable goal. If Ventidius cannot have victory and honor, he will take death and even greater honor. If Alexas cannot have his havens, Egypt and Cleopatra secured, and his personal safety guaranteed, he will settle for self-congratulation for an attempt well-made, and life in the midst of mass suicide. Locke would commend the soldier and the eunuch for their sense, and Hobbes might shout, ‘There, you see!’ at their selfish victories. Antony and Cleopatra escape defeat to achieve glory in death; Ventidius does, too; and Alexas lives—we may presume—to talk his way out of execution by the Romans. The Egyptians are terrified, but probably also relieved, to have a resolution at long last. And Octavius? His pure reason rules the day as surely as Dryden’s grace and economy, poetry and precision, rule us through the play.

Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

Daniel J. Travanti

ENG 598

Spring 1976

            Our distinguished author, who has made his reputation with previous works of travel, fable and adventure, here delivers us an admirable allegory which bravely combines the charms of all three in one narrative. The following is the notice prefixed to this noble work:

            Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative

            Will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral

            In it will be banished; persons attempting to find a

            Plot in it will be shot.

This apparently caustic caution is representative of the humorous tint with which Mr. Twain, with the skill of a painter, washes his landscapes. He has the need to gainsay any moral in his tale, yet its entire trend is to draw in detail a lesson of the troubles a young man is to draw in detail a lesson of the troubles a young man is bound to encounter when he attempts to abandon the rules and regulations of a civilized and ordered life for the cavalier truancy of directionless adventure. The author’s humorous cast is calculated to disarm the reader, appealing to his softer nature while it colors harder truths.

            Dealing entirely among the familiar scenes of life, the narrative brings to view characters which we see every day in nature. There is the central figure of the titled, who is always on the foreground, as in a Gainsborough portrait, living and moving against a backdrop of villages, river banks, fields and parlors. As our principal figure is simple, unstudied, and unadorned, so is his scenery. So is his speech, and each figure’s in turn, suited in simplicity to his station.

            As Dr. Johnson observes of Shakespeare in his distinguished Preface, Mr. Twain suits his characters’ discourses to their humors. As our author here promises in his Explanatory following his Notice, “a number of dialects are used” and carry patterns of thought peculiar to the speakers alone. Such is the writer’s accuracy in observance of natural forms of speech that he causes us to feel his personages are men and women of flesh, each a true representative of a sort all readers have encountered in life. And the variety Mr. Twain achieves in his endeavor, from the most light-hearted portraits to pernicious drawings of ruffians and rascals, bespeaks a fertile imagination.

            But though we find here passages of high emotion and detestable actions that threaten to horrify and tear asunder the passions of the reader, these are tempered by genuine touches of humor. Unlike those members of the common herd of novelists, Mr. Twain cares to appeal to our natural virtues, that clarify and help each reader understand better the true way that a light heart carries the good person. Through all of Huckleberry’s adversity, he remains loyal to his ebon friend Jim, demonstrating the stalwart camaraderie of a true friend. In a world seeking stability of thought and moderation in all things, our young adventurer shows himself capable of deep filial love, helping his less privileged companion to find a fuller and free life. It is a Christian duty of the highest rank to aid our oppressed brethren, and he who will go so far as to risk his own life and limb in the cause deserves the laurel. Jim is indeed a Noble Savage, who in his gentility and devotion to his protector proves the sublimity of the natural man. With exemplary tact, Mr. Twain, you have shown us the possibility of equality between two very disparate creatures of God, in a sometimes perilous, but ultimately benevolent world.

            There is more to recommend this tale which, though simple in narration, is rich as a tapestry in thought. On the whole, I can confidently assure the curious reader of a satisfying adventure in its reading, which will bring satisfaction to his head; and, what is still better, to his heart.

Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose

English 598

Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose

Spring 1976

Summary of Introduction, Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose

            This introductory view says that the eighteenth century was characterized by a movement in though back to ultra-simple, classic Greek and, especially, Roman ideals. Reason, that is, the mental process and common sense as opposed to emotion, was the proper tool with which to comprehend God and higher truths. Literature should instruct and amuse, according to the Horatian standard; it should express its criticism of society and men in clear, concise and entertaining language; and it should not only advocate moderation in all things, but express such thought moderately. In practice, however, satire was often the method, and its types varied between modest proposals simply stated and bitter attacks, exaggerated and detailed. The truths of which it spoke were universal and unchangeable. Art should imitate nature, its higher laws and its basic patterns. Man should, practicably, try to do only what was already known to be possible.

            But speculation was increasing. Man was looking more and more to his potential, through scientific discovery, and expressing himself more freely. Instruction and description were clear, concise and pointed. It was also witty and playful and close to regular speech, as some men were becoming more spontaneous. Along with simplicity and elegance and symmetry, some men manifested enthusiasm and was learning to respect his own “original genius” (p. xxiv). There was a throbbing progress from universal and timeless truths above man, toward newly apprehended, immediate and individual experience on a real level. The individual’s own personal comprehension was becoming proper and valid. By the end of the century that individualism was bringing about a more democratic view of mankind in general and evolving into the self-centered Romantic vision.

A Description

A Description

Across the way the park is gay, betimes

Especially when the strolling players come.

They play their parts using rolling carts, upon

Them some, behind them others, striding forth.

When fifth in line, some fret and pine and rave

To speed on through, and no one blinks or thinks

His pique less beneficial to his health,

Though tempers flare, trying not to care at all

Whether they hit the ball or fall behind,

Trudging deep in sand or wading in the pond.

Or blind behind a tree or knoll or stone

Playing gaily, resisting scaly scorn alone,

Each keeps his counsel, to keep his friends,

His eye on the ball lest his look wither all entire.

The scen’ry interests some; others sigh ho hum.

Each picks his sticks to take his licks in turn.

The hapless hooker tilts his frame to straight

The flight of his wayward orb, then blames

The elements, the wind or sunny glare

Or wisps of hair in driving eyes of steel

That ne’er apologize or admit the pain

That out to be a joy to man and boy.

A RESPECTFUL SUGGESTION

FOR RELIEVING TAX PAYERS OF THE BURDEN OF HAVING TO DETERMINE A REASONABLE DISBURSEMENT OF EARNED FUNDS AND CONCOMITANTLY TO EASE THE TREASURY’S ACE FOR THE PEOPLES’ PELF.

            It is certainly an acrimonious state, to those who view the nightly news in their parlors and dens, or who merely hear it after the daily toil in transit home, when they learn that their tax dollars are being spent to fuel and furbish foreign wars. These peaceful people instead of being proud of their work, are shocked and made to feel ashamed, that their private innocent efforts, which should bring them self-respect for honest labor and diligence, supply the means for furtive political schemes to aid and abet deadly combat.

            I’m sure that it is accepted by all parties, that this deplorable state is heightened by the lamentable fact that the tax levied by our avuncular government is so prodigious a percentage that it can hardly be viewed as anything less than robbery. A doting uncle does not rob his nieces and nephews. Especially could he not pilfer their small sums to finance heinous crimes or to perpetuate atrocities. Since it would not be reasonable on my own part to beg of a relation who acquaintance I have never had the dubious pleasure to make, that Uncle Samuel cease and desist, I shall suggest a way for him to have all the gold and a jolly game in the bargain.

            Upon every day of pay an armed representative of authority will place himself between the disburser of wages and fees and the weary worker, to bar his way to his justly earned funds. This intimidator will be a fortress, a bastion of Big Brotherhood, trained in the combative arts and well-enough-paid himself to be fervent and relentless in his preventative capacity. His purpose will be to challenge the citizen’s determination to recover his sack of salary. The wage earner will have one hour in which to distract, dupe, disable, disarm or dispatch his obstacle and grab the gelt. Once he has wrested away his rightful pay, he is free to spend his money, for a while.

            As each man or woman flees the wage station, orders are given that within one half hour doors will be locked and streets blockaded. Prices of al staple food items are raised tenfold and a cannon is sounded to signal the hike, warning the customer that he has now only ten minutes in which to discover a curiosity shop, tobacco dealer, or other such purveyor of incidental or luxurious items upon which to waste his hard-earned coin. At the close of the ten minute term, fifty muskets are fired, and a troop of cavalry will be dispatched down the street toward the frantic searcher, and without a qualm trample him into the cobblestones of the mire. They will then jostle the mangled corpse into the putrefactions effluvium in the way, while a team of six tarpaulin-clad retrievers, straddling the body-bearing stream at its narrows, snatch with fine nets at the careening coins as they spit and tumble from the victim’s flailing sack.

            The Nyah Nyah Chorus, all the while, strolls up and back sneering, spitting, and wagging bandage-bound forefingers. This distresses our careless citizen. He now confirms in himself a previously suspected unfriendly atmosphere, and mutters a muffled “Hold, please. You must be mistaken; I am an honorable man. I love my country and pay my share of taxes.” The Chorus smiles and replies

            Taxes, axes, spittle and dung,

            We want everything: body, heart and lung.

            Since you begrudge a percent of it,

            We disengage your wage without consent of it,

            Apply it to any battle ground we see,

            And leave you guttered, even though

            You gasped and uttered patriotically

            Fiscally fine intentions of

            Fairly following conventions.

            Taxes, axes, spittle and dung,

            We take it all: body, heart and lung.

            Now, having turned my thoughts, for many months, upon this crucial subject, and maturely weighed the proposals of other well-meaning innovators, I have concluded that my suggestion is not only the most practical (since it secures one hundred percent of a citizen’s income) but the most fun, for it provides free entertainment to onlookers, gay divertissements which are sorely needed in these troubled times.

            I myself am retired from active labor, and a small annuity keeps me in snuff and stockings. So I profess in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least wish of personal gain in promoting this pecuniary practice, having no other motive than the general welfare and the common good of my countrymen, and bringing wholesome and free fun into their stressful lives.

This Intimidator Will Be A Fortress

English 598

 Spring 1976

         This intimidator will be a fortress—a bastion of Big Brotherhood—trained in the combative arts, well-enough-paid himself to be fervent, and relentless in his preventative capacity. His purpose will be to challenge the citizen’s determination to recover his sack of salary. The wage earner will have one hour in which to distract, dupe, disable, disarm or dispatch his obstacle and grab the gelt. Once he has wrestled away his rightful pay, he is free to spend his money for a while.

            As each man or woman flees the wage station, orders are given that within one half hour, doors will be locked and streets blockaded. Prices of all staple food items are raised tenfold and a cannon is sounded to signal the hike. This warned the customer that he has now only ten minutes in which to discover a curiosity shop, tobacco dealer, or other such purveyor of incidental or luxurious items upon which to waste his hard-earned coin. At the close of the ten minute term, fifty muskets are fired, and a troop of cavalry will be dispatched down the street toward the frantic searcher, and without a qualm trample him into the cobblestones or the mire. They will then jostle the mangled corpse into the putrefactions effluvium in the way, while a team of six tarpaulin-clad retrievers, straddling the body-bearing stream at its narrows, snatch with fine nets at the careening coins as they spit and tumble from the victim’s flailing sack.

            The Nyah Nyah Chorus, all the while, strolls up and back sneering, spitting and wagging bandage-bound forefingers. This distresses our careless citizen. He now confirms in himself a previously suspected unfriendly atmosphere, and mutters a muffled “Hold, please. You must be mistaken; I am an honorable man. I love my country and pay my share of taxes.” The Chorus smiles and replies

Taxes, axes, spittle and dung,

            We want everything: body, heart and lung.

            Since you begrudge a percent of it,

            We disengage your wage without consent of it.

            Apply it to any battle ground we see,

            And leave you guttered, even though

            You gasped and uttered patriotically

            Fiscally fine intentions of

            Fairly following conventions.

            Taxes, axes, spittle and dung,

            We take it all: body, heart and lung.

Now, having turned my thoughts, for many months, upon this crucial subject, and maturely weighed the proposals of other well-meaning innovators, I have concluded that my suggestion is not only the most practical (since it secures one hundred per cent of a citizen’s income) but the most fun, for it provides free entertainment to onlookers, gay advertisements which are sorely needed in these troubled times.

I myself am retired from active labor, and a small annuity keeps me in snuff and stockings. So I profess in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least wish of personal gain in promoting this pecuniary practice, having no other motive than the general welfare and the common good of my countrymen, and bringing wholesome and free fun into their stressful lives.

A Character Comment In the Style of Joseph Addison of The Spectator Papers by

   “The late narcissus, and the winding trail

   Of Bear’s-foot, myrtles green, and ivy pale.

                                                     (Dryden)

            Nec sera comantem

            Narcissum, aut flexi tacuissem vimen Acanthi,

            Pallentesque hederas, et amantes, littoral myr-

           tos.—Virgil, Georgics, IV, 122.*

One of man’s first cares ought to be of his person, for it houses his soul, supplying that glorious essence with the warmth of its home’s heart. It might be supposed, accepting this view, that therefore a finely toned, well-proportioned, vigorous and, especially, a muscled and athleticized physique, would keep its soul particularly well. Therefore, looks to the athlete and, specifically, a champion, for the finest soul.

Our reigning paladin of fisticuffs is such an admirable houser. Of late he’s pitted his edifice against less than worthy opponents, to be sure, but the soul need not be threatened nor tested, to claim fullness. It flourishes within our champion and friend of the friendless. Muhammed Ali is not only at peace with himself, but attracts the favor, nay, the worship indeed, of a peaceable army of brothers and sisters. He has allied himself with the Muslim forces to help march his people to glory in a new Eden. Now, it may seem a contradiction to consider that out of personal combat our hero seeks to wrest not only the victor’s laurel, but peaceful co-existence; but the paradox is only apparent, not substantial. His body wars, but his soul merely marches on.

It measures its cadence in original and, sometimes, delightful style. For Ali has rhythm. He composes his own drumming doggerel, couched usually in heroic couplets that not only steady his soul’s progress, but edify his pantingly eager partisans with sharp and simple truths. And, always sure to gain advantage and fullest effect of even the merest gesture, Ali pricks his foes first from afar with his honed verses. Later, he stuns them at close range. He swaggers a bit. Or shall I say, dare I even think it, too much? Narcissus dared and over-did and suffered a transformation; which delights us now in woods and window boxes, on city lanes and in garden plots.

Muhammed’s swagger, lilting lines, crusading spirit, and proud soul come to us in another such delightful form. He preens and primps, but never seems to curry favor. He attends to his soul’s needs by keeping it stabled safe in God’s assigned home. That home is a fortress, yet is bears its weight as nothing when called to exercise its care upon its kin, those children housed in less sturdy ‘bodes. Borne by Ali’s faith, this fortress makes its genial way through town and country both; though ponderous, upon a light crusade; and, championing his subjects, his soul floats to victory like a butterfly, stinging from safe within its battlements, like a bee.

Ways of Surrender

 English 630B

Spring 1976

Ways of Surrender

            It is generally understood that George Herbert’s submission to the will of God brought him peace. At least, when we read Herbert’s surrender in his poems, we hear always at their conclusions sounds of serene acceptance. He struggled, but he found some ease. John Donne battled with his Maker and verified his tension. What we read of his struggles is agonized and heated. At the end of each bout, Donne is spent and surrendered, but somehow more sullen than serene.

            For both men, the basic conflict was between the demands of the flesh and those of the spirit. But there was a difference. It’s true that both sought profitable preferments in the church, but Donne’s war was more concentratedly between his desires for physical, especially sexual, satisfaction and a kind of purity of mind and body he felt necessary for full devotion to God. Herbert apparently was never tempted by a human body; at least he doesn’t mention any such conflict in his poetry. It occurs to him, however, and so he versifies, to be free of clerical duties and at least to consider the high life. Donne had his women. Herbert kept to his church. Both men lived with a sense of unworthiness while busy being worthy.

            I shall consider here each man’s expressions of surrender in their religious poems. I shall discuss the specific emotions each reveals. And I’ll comment on the nature or quality of each surrender as it is outlined in the poetry.

            There was a time, says Donne, before men had a Christian revelation to protect them from earth’s temptations. In “Satyre III” On Religion, he asks “Are you not heavens joyes as valiant to asswage / Lusts, as earths honour was to them? Alas” (11. 8-9). The pursuit of honor on earth was enough then, in Greece and Rome, to keep man virtuous, free from presumably awful lust. Asking the question at all now, whether the Church is enough, implies a serious doubt in Donne’s mind. He urges the troubled “desperate coward” (1. 29) to “seeke true religion” (1.43) because

            Flesh (it selfes death) and joyes which flesh can taste

            Though lovest; and thy faire goodly soule which doth

            Give this flesh power to taste joy, thou dost loath.”

                                                                                    (11. 40-42)

But by “true religion” he doesn’t mean just any man’s determination. There’s the rub. Donne astonishes himself, really, when he urges caution in listening to mere mortals’ view of God. Each man has true roots, which are necessary in God. Uprooted, he is lost: “So perish Soules, which more chuse mens unjust / Power from God claym’d, than God himselfe to trust.” (11. 109-10). The answer is within, and the quest is each man’s lonely journey.

            The soul gives flesh its very being, yet we will not celebrate it as we do the flesh. It is Donne’s dilemma. He knows, of course, that God governs all in the end of all:

            Foole and wretch, wilt thou let thy Soule be tyed

            To mans lawes, by which she shall not be tried

            At the last day? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

                                                                        (11. 93-95)

It is his willingness that will enable him to repent and thereby to be purified. But not smoothly. First, he must be punished: “I turn my backe to thee, but to receive / Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave” (11. 37-38) says Donne to the hanging Christ in “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward.” Donne wants to participate in Christ’s humiliation, immediately, not merely in distant contemplation of a dim legend:

            O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,

            Burn off my rusts, and my deformity,

            Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,

            That thou may’st know mee, and I’ll turne my face.

                                                                                    (11. 39-42)

Find me worthy of chastisement in the first place, then scourge me and make me worthy. In other words, Donne accepts the condition that it is God who causes him to want redemption at all, and then grants redemption, as well. Richard E. Hughes writes in The Progress of the Soul that “along with the primacy of faith, Donne believed in a prevenient grace, a preparation for faith; and he believed that man owes all his faculties to God: faith, for him, was no passive acquiescence” (p. 250).

            Donne has applied not only his emotion, but his reason, including his doubt and anger, to his contemplation of God in these poems. He is wholly committed, but he is not nicely comforted: “I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunne / My last thred, I shall perish on the shore;” (11. 13-14) cries he in “A Hymne to God the Father.” He is afraid, though he is trying; and even though he knows where peace abides, though fearful, he is able to pun, even dunning his Maker:

            Sweare by thy selfe, that at my death thy stonne

                        Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;

                                    And, having done that, Thou haste done,

                                                I fear no more.

                                                                                    (11. 15-18)

Donne knows all in all proceeds from God, by His grace; he wants His finest; but he is constrained to impatiently demand. He reasons his way into doubts, determined to resolve them with his mind while feeling his way into surrender. He intellectualizes his shortcomings and tries to give both his heart and mind in complete submission.

            In “The Alter,” on the other hand, George Herbert acknowledges in himself the same imperfections Donne admits, but Herbert thinks less:

                                                A Heart alone

                                                Is such a stone,

                                                As nothing but

                                                Thy pow’r doth cut.

Even more than sharing in Christ’s sacrifice, Herbert prays to be the sacrifice: “O let thy blessed Sacrifice be mine, / And sanctifie this Alter to be thine.” This doesn’t make Herbert more faithful. The differences between his and Donne’s expressions are in temperament and thought. Donne fulminates, but Herbert seems more purely emotional. Donne is angry, fearful and demanding. Herbert seems tranquil. He requests in “Easter-wings”: “Lord . . . O let me rise,” and with a light heart, “As larks, harmoniously,” imaging a happy surrender. At the end of the poem, he sees even the lowest fall as the means to the highest joy: “For, if I imp my wing on thine, / Affliction shall advance the flight in me.”

            Donne knows the Christian paradoxes as well. In number XIV of the “Holy Sonnets,” he accepts them: “That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, ‘and bend / Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.” Richard E. Hughes, commenting on “Good Friday, 1613. . . . ,” might just as well be speaking of this sonnet, or any of several others when he says:

            The emphasis on action, power, stress in all of Donne’s

            Comments on faith is seen in the poem’s energy, the

            Swift play of ideas, the stretched imagination, the

            Exercise of all the faculties; and this too springs

            From Donne’s attitude toward man’s cooperating in redemption.

                                                                                                (p. 251)

Donne cooperates by not following blindly, but reasoning first, then giving away. He participates by pleading, even demanding, that he be subdued and freed from himself:

            Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I

            Except you ‘enthrall mee, never shall be free,

            Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

Both Donne and Herbert suffered from egoistic assertions of self in their efforts to conform to God’s will. Such acts appear to be contradictory to their goal, but they are not. Herbert asserts his will to serve God, but ambition draws him, as he tells us in “The Collar.” But his most violent act was that he “struck the board, and cry’d, No more.” That’s all. He has felt bound in servitude and so missing the pleasures of the outside world. He lists his longings and finally in rebellion declares:

                                                I will abroad.

                        Call in thy deaths head there: tie up thy fears.

                                                He that forbears

                                    To suit and serve his need,

                                                Deserves his load.

                                                                                    (11. 28-32)

Herbert appears to sneer at those who, unlike himself, haven’t the courage to tear off their collars and escape to a wider existence. But there is another layer of meaning in the apparently rebellious lines. What Herbert finds out is that to serve his need is to be a clergyman. The sneer is hardly a smirk. The poet knows that true freedom for him is, indeed, devotion to his clerical duties. Herbert never does take the pleasures he claims to miss. In “The Pearl” he declares, “I know the wayes” of “Learning” and “Honour” and “Pleasure.” But he has foregone them. He says it has not been easy, but here as in “The Collar,” there is little flailing, and the temperature seems low and controlled. Herbert has modulated his submission carefully, even coolly, in retrospection. Perhaps it’s that he resolved these conflicts in himself before he presented them to us. His pain is “recollected in tranquility” and consequently not immediately as disturbing as Donne’s. In its sincerity and directness, however, it is equally affecting, for both mean love. Joan Bennett, in FiveMetaphysical Poets, tells us that “To reject God, for Herbert, would be to prefer the prizes and praises of the world to the act of loving, for God has no rival in his heart” (p. 55).

            It seems clear, as Herbert declares in “Affliction (I),” that he was indeed taken almost from the very start, out of himself and to his calling:

            Whereas my birth and spirit rather took

                        The way that takes the town;

            Thou didst betray me to a lingering book,

                        And wrapt me in a gown.

His poems then become a record of fairly certain surrender, so much so that in his metre “He recreates regular patterns of feeling,” says Joan Bennett (p. 61). There is little surprise in Herbert’s journey through the arguments of his poems, she is telling us. “Despite his use of logic, his poems rarely progress (as Donne’s do) to an unforeseen conclusion.” (p. 61) Herbert’s acceptance is usually, as we have seen, as regular as the refrain of “The Pearl”: “Yet I love thee.” He doesn’t stray far from his purpose of praising God and submitting, as he tells us in “Jordan (I)”:

            Shepherds are honest people; let them sing:

            Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime:

            I envie no mans nightingale or spring;

            Nor let them punish me with losse of rime,

                        Who plainly say, My God, My King.

Donne, however, had of course a whole body of work before his religious poems that chronicled his romantic and sexual passions. That is not the place for discussion of the love poems, except to say that the ardor expressed in them was to Donne the same ecstasy that fired his lust for God. His doubts, both secular and religious, were the same.

            Joan Bennett puts it this way:

            He expresses his love for God in terms of that of a

            lover for his mistress, or . . . a woman for her

            lover, he trusts and mistrusts God’s pity as the lover

            vacillates between the secure sense of being loved and

            the recurrent fear that love may yet be withdrawn;

                                                                                    (p. 26)

Out of that doubt Donne, in each poem, experiences an uncertain emotional course. There is plenty of surprise, as Donne seems to be revealing himself to himself. In Holy Sonnet XIV, he demands at first, submits, relenting a bit, but ends by asserting himself again:

            Take mee to you, imprision mee, for I

            Expect you ‘enthrall mee, never shall be free,

            Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

Always the paradox. Herbert accepts it quietly; Donne, however, wrestles with it. Herbert speaks of release from his church duties to greater freedom in the social world. Donne agonizes a prayer for release from bondage of self. Perhaps Joan Bennett’s comment reflects on Herbert, as well. She says of Donne: “In the religious poetry, as in the secular, profound emotion works upon Donne’s intellect not as a narcotic, but as a stimulant” (p. 27).

            Herbert’s acceptance does ultimately lull, while Donne’s stirs. Speaking of the torments of religious idealists of the seventeenth century and Donne’s specific channels of expression, Helen C. White, in The Metaphysical Poets says, “The first of these [channels] is the consciousness of his own instability, his changeableness, his incapacity for that steady equilibrium which is one of the great ideals of the spiritual life of his age.” (p. 127) Sometimes Donne attacks his subject railing, as in “Satyre III, On religion”: Kinde pitty chokes my spleene; brave scorn forbids / Those teares to issue which swell my eyelids;” and resentful of his confusion. Running hot then cold, ranting and prostrating himself alternately, he faces his duality calmly near the end of the poem:

            To adore, or scorne an image, or protest,

            May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way

            To sand inquiring right, is not to stray;

            To sleepe, or runne wrong, is . . . . . . .

                                                            (11. 76-79)

In the fifth of the “Holy Sonnets,” Donne lowers his voice, even using words of smallness: “I am a little world made cunningly / Of Elements, and an Angellike spright,” which apparently bespeak submissiveness. But he is neither calm nor really reduced. By number X he is defying death itself: “Death be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,” and in number XIV he begs of God, “Batter my heart,” with the same intensity. Donne is restless, and desperate to know himself through knowing God.

            For Herbert, says Helen C. White, the problem was a little different: “For the great thing in the religious experience of Herbert was that he wished to know his God for His own sake alone:” (p. 173). Herbert seems to know himself already: his calling, his duties, his place as God’s humble child: “Ah, my deare God, though I am clean forgot, / Let me not love Thee, if I love Thee not.” Thus does he give himself entirely in “Affliction (I).” In the same poem, Herbert speaks of sorrows, pains, and storms from which he was rescued by a loving God.   Always was he taken, held, and transformed, almost automatically overwhelmed. He speaks here of the same power mentioned in “The Altar,” that insists on reducing him: “Thus doth thy power crosse-bias me, not making / Thine own gift good, yet me from my wayes taking” (11. 53-54). He knows and accepts that he will be exactly what God wants him to be, despite any other fantasies:

            Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me

                        None of my books will show:

            I reade, and sigh, and wish I were a tree;

                        For sure then I should grow

            To fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust

            Her household to me, and I should be just.

                                                                        (11. 55-60)

Knowing himself already, Herbert accepts that God’s wish for him will be better than his own passing fancies for himself.

            In the end of all, both Herbert and Donne wanted the same thing: to be worthy of being received into God’s house. And similarly too, each capsulizes his distinctive attitude in a late poem. In Hymne to God My God, in My Sicknesse,” Donne is resigned, indeed sullen: “Since I am coming to that Holy roome,” is an appropriately drooping beginning. Some of its dreary tone has to do, of course, with the fact that Donne is ill and depressed, but even when Donne wasn’t so low physically, he often struck the same note. Besides, Herbert suffered as well, but wrote with a lighter sound. He ends his volume The Temple with “Love (III).” As a late statement of acceptance and surrender it is, typically for Herbert, cheerier: “Love bade me welcome:” seems a much happier prospect than Donne’s. Donne speaks of having come full circle, being now a map on which East meets West. It was his circle of confusion before, his stormy whirling, about to resolve itself now in the ultimate paradox: “So death doth touch the Resurrection.” He is flat and being worked on. Herbert is upright before a friendly host. Though he is shy, he is not really afraid. He is going to a banquet and takes himself willingly into God’s house. Donne, however, is fearful. Right to the end, he is pleading:

            Looke, Lord, and finde both Adams met in me;

            As the first Adams sweat surrounds my face,

            May the last Adams blood my soule embrace.

He allies himself with Christ and Adam as two supremely acceptable sons of the Father. Herbert shows his sense of unworthiness by averting his gaze from God. His God only smiles and forgives. But Donne’s God is sterner. At least, Donne feels he must offer physical affliction as Christ did, and a self-centered (if reverent) plug for his sermonizing as tickets to Paradise. Herbert’s God, on the other hand, reassures him that his sins are already forgiven, and bids him sit down. Through heated struggles and pain silently borne, through relentless reasoning and simple acceptance, through fear of final judgement and joyful realization of forgiveness both men brought themselves to the only home each knew for certain all along would offer peace.

Bibliography

Seventeenth Century Poetry.  ed.  Hugh Kenner.  Rinehart Editions, 1964.

Bennet, Joan.  Five Metaphysical Poets.  Cambridge, 1964.

White, Helen C..  The Metaphysical Poets.  Collier Books, 1962.

Williamson, George.  Six Metaphysical Poets: A Reader’s Guide.  Noonday Press, 1967.

Hughes, Richard E..  The Progress of the Soul, The Interior Career of John Donne.  New York,    1968.

Leishman, J.B..  The Metaphysical Poets.  Oxford, 1934.

Williamson, George.  The Donne Tradition.  Noonday Press, 1958.

Chute, Marchette.  Two Gentle Men, The Lives of George Herbert and Robert Herrick.  New       York, 1959.

Seventeenth Century English Poetry, Modern Essays in Criticism. Edited by William R. Keast.    Oxford University Press, 1961.

“Wakefield”: A Romantic Fable

English 576A

Literary Criticism

“Wakefield”: A Romantic Fable

            The American Heritage Dictionary defines a fable as “a concise narrative making an edifying or cautionary point.” Hawthorne’s story can be considered on several levels. It is a parable, an allegory, a psychological study of a “feeble-minded” or “crafty” man. It is assuredly one of Hawthorne’s very personal visions. He is preoccupied always with that “neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary”¹ meet. In such a place, all kinds of truths and fancies may exist. It is this condition of freedom and flexibility coupled with a certain suspension of disbelief, a specific “structure(s) of expectation”² that is fulfilled, a “happy” ending, and a promised moral delivered, that cause this story to form itself into one of Hawthorne’s expressions of “the truth of the human heart”³; that is, a Romance and, particularly, a fable.

            In a typically romantic opening, the narrator curries our favor and begs our indulgence while he tells a possibly “naughty or nonsensical” tale. He justifies at the outset what would otherwise be hard facts to follow, by tracing their source to “some old magazine or newspaper.” Hawthorne does the same thing in the introduction to his masterpiece of the American Romantic period, The Scarlet Letter.

            Another characteristic of the romantic work is that “at the broadest level of reading, we don’t ask what will happen. . . but how it will happen.”⁴ The narrator gives us a summary at the very beginning of exactly what is to come. He tells us in the second paragraph that there is likely to be a “pervading spirit and a moral done up neatly, and condensed into the final sentence.” The authors of Form in Fiction would say that the story has created for itself a “structure(s) of expectation” or, as Kenneth Burke would put it, initiated a certain “psychology of form”⁵ that it will fulfill. Our hero will return to his home and become “a loving spouse till death,” and his adventure will present us with a lesson.

            Wakefield is Hawthorne’s “hero,” but he is certainly not heroic in the conventional sense. In fact, he is rather ordinary, except for “a little strangeness.” Significantly, however, his personality traits are a catalogue so familiar and so broad that many, if not all, readers will identify with or at least recognize them, causing the story to have a wide personal effect. Besides the word “hero,” we read “his heart at rest,” “wandering heart,” and “the wife of his bosom”: all terms that would fit nicely, warmly, and would give comfort in a love story. We see Wakefield “bidding adieu” to his wife. “It is the dusk of an October evening.” How evocative, how romantic: In keeping with a certain romantic convention, Wakefield is off on a slightly mysterious journey. He “has no suspicion of what is before him.” But we do, though we will have to wait for the details. We are curious. The details spill out, sustaining the romantic tone: Wakefield holding out his hand, the matter-of-fact kiss, the closing door, and, above all, “a vision of her husband’s face, though the aperture, smiling on her, and gone in a moment.”

            Wakefield’s wife will recall that smile for years, imagining her husband dead. But the “crafty smile” will also, happily, cause her to keep the hope that her husband is still alive. Within the framework of the story’s expectation and slight apprehension, there is some feeling, arising out of the author’s promise at the start, that all will be well.

            The husband’s journey begins and ends, just like that. Wakefield has been roused out of a torpor. He has stepped out of “the matter-of-course way of a ten years’ matrimony,” but also out of his place in life. He hasn’t gone far, and the fact is he might just as easily (perhaps more) have done the same thing without withdrawing physically at all. Perhaps he did. Any of us can withdraw into himself at any time. The narrator urges Wakefield to “get. . . home to good Mrs. Wakefield” and “her chaste bosom.” Has our hero left God (good?) Has he abandoned purity for sin? Is he testing love? Hawthorne promises us a moral at the end, but he gives us a lesson to go right here: “It is perilous to make a chasm in human affections, not that they gape so long and wide—but so quickly close again:” It is the first warning note of the message that will round out the tale.

            Characteristically, the protagonist in a romance seeks “experience for its own sake,” as Edmund Wilson puts it in Axel’s Castle.⁶ One kind of romantic hero rebels against social strictures (marriage, in this case) and egotistically tempts rejections, and may even invite condemnation. Wakefield leaves home on an impulse and returns just as spontaneously. His is the rash, impetuous, self-assertive identity that can defy not only a spouse, but life itself. Nevertheless, our hero never quite completes his separation.

            The structure of expectation and the psychological (or emotional) form of the story are solid and persistent. Wakefield is “curious to know the progress of matters at home.” His concern comes out of “morbid vanity,” but that’s typical of the romantic hero and, specifically, consistent with the temperament that caused Wakefield to launch his great joke in the first place. At one point, he actually makes it to his old front door, but retreats in the nick of time. “Wonderful escape:” but is it?

            We read that “a great moral change has been affected” in Wakefield, but not even he knows what it is. There is no simple answer for his behavior. For Hawthrone’s characters, there are never simple answers. His people reflect a broad spectrum of behavior that generally seems aberrated, often, but which is always related to loneliness, isolation, and poignant. Wakefield is a “crafty nincompoop” who has pushed his luck too far, and has about as much chance of returning home as the dead have of coming back to life. But we know better.

            The night of Wakefield’s return is a perfect scene of Gothic romance. “It is a gusty night of autumn,” Wakefield passes his house and sees “the red glow and the shimmer. . . of a comfortable fire.” There is an “autumnal chill” in the air, and he sees a “grotesque shadow” of his wife cast by the flickering firelight, as he stands “wet and shivering,” trying to make up his mind. Hawthorne draws his story to a neat climax, fulfilling the expectation stated in the opening paragraph. “This happy event—supposing it to be such—could only have occurred at an unpremeditated moment.” The adventure began suddenly and has ended just as abruptly. The possibility of its being a happy conclusion, is enough.

            And there is a moral, all right, but it is not preachment. It may or may not be edifying. It is certainly cautionary, which is consistent with Hawthorne’s tone in general and, structurally, realizes his other direct promise. It is a word to the wise for every man” “Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe.” Hawthorne seldom (if ever) draws obvious conclusions. He has spun together filaments of fantasy, realistic facts, promises kept, and a warning lesson, into a romantic fable. Each man, he allows, may do with it what he will.

References

1. Porte, Joel, The Romance in America (Wesleyan University Press, 1969) p. 95.
2. Hayman, David and Rabkin, Eric S., Form in Fiction (St. Martin’s Press, 1974) p. 213.
3. Porte, Joel, p. 95.
4. Form in Fiction, p. 213.
5. Kenneth Burke, Criticism: The Major Statements, ed. Charles Kaplan (St. Martin’s Press, 1975), p. 487.
6. Wilson, Edmund, Axel’s Castle (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), p. 265.

Irony in The Miller's Tale

English 623

Seminar in Medieval Literature

October 27, 1975

Irony in “The Miller’s Tale”

            By comparison with some of Chaucer’s other stories, “The Miller’s Tale” ¹ is simple and straightforward. There are only four characters, the plot is contrived but logical, and the humor is obvious. But the proceedings, and especially the characterizations, are enriched by irony. Alison is a complex vision of contrasts, and both she and Absalom are studies in ironic action. Double levels of meaning in their depictions add depth and interest to the story and make it an experience richer than a merely ribald romp.

            Allison’s dual nature begins to be etched from the very first line of her description: “Fair was thing young wyf, and therewithal / As any wezele hir body gent and smal” (11. 3233-3234). By line 3264, she is “Long as a mast, and upright as a bolt.” Certainly, it is a rare creature who could be as graceful and slender as a weasel, and as formidable as a mast and a crossbow arrow, at the same time. It would take just such a complicated being, though, to “make game” (1. 3259) as she does with her husband and suitors. She is attractive enough, obviously, to be irresistible to her admirers and strong enough to manage the deception and emerge without so much as a reprimand for her shenanigans.

            Alison is a study in black and white, both saint and sinner, if you will. She wears an apron (“barnclooth”) “as whit as morne milk” (1. 3236). “Whit was hir smok” (1. 3238), but the embroidery on it and on its collar, “Of col-blak silk” (1. 3240); and “The tapes of hir white voluper” (1. 3241) carry the same black decoration. Chaucer goes one daring step further and gives Alison plucked eyebrows, arched “and blake as any sloo” (1. 3246). She is spiritual enough to do her duty:

                        Thanne fil it thus, that to the paryssh chirche,

            Cristes owene werkes for to wirche,

            This goode wyf went on an haliday.   (11. 3307-3309)

But does she? Perhaps she is truly devout. Maybe she goes just to keep up appearances. Whichever the case, Chaucer’s irony is clear and powerful, for seventeen lines earlier our black-and-white lady agreed to an illicit rendezvous with her relentless pursuer, Nicholas. He wooed so well “That she hir love hym graunted atte laste” (1. 3290), and she is off to pray with adultery on her mind. Prim and proper is her dress, but tainted her intent.

            There is humor in these contrasts, and part of the Miller’s intent in telling the sale is to make the pilgrims laugh. He also means to rankle the Reeve, who counterpart in the tale is Alison’s old husband. But Chaucer’s purpose still goes deeper. Man is naturally a dualistic creature, meaning well and believing in God’s will, in some cases, but sometimes subject to mischief in the pursuit of momentary pleasures. So subtle is the poet’s craft at times, that he makes his point about man’s perverse nature almost subliminally: “Hir forehead shoon as bright as any day / So was it wasshen whan she leet hir work” (11. 3310-3311). So clean a mental aspect, yet how foul a purpose; and circumstances, under Chaucer’s skillful control, take her into still another potentially lewd situation.

            “Now was ther of that chirche a parissh clerk, / The which that was ycleped Absolon” (11. 3312-3313). Absalom is a gay blade, a man-about-town who knows every “brewhous” and “taverne” (1. 3334) “Ther any gaylard tappestere was” (1. 3336). In physical aspect and in dress, he is colorful and daring; an amusingly reversed contrast with the young lady he is about to woo, and an incongruous figure in a church. What’s more, while performing his solemn and spiritual duty, he keeps a sharp eye out for attractive female prospects, married or not: “And many a lovely look on hem he caste, / And namely on this carpenteris wyf” (11. 3342-3343).

            The stage is set for a merry and mixed-up romp that will end in twin examples of poetic justice. In line 3337-3338, Chaucer sounds the first note of one of those ironies when he says of the lecherous clerk, “. . . he was somdeel squaymous / Of fartyng, and of speche daungerous” (11. 3337-3338). But Alison is not so squeamish about a contrived indiscretion with her first suitor:

            And thus lith Alison and Nicholas,

            In bisynesse of myrthe and of solas,

            Til that the belle of laudes gan to rynge,

            And freres in the chauncel gonne synge.  (11. 3653-3656)

Chaucer juxtaposes the sacred with the profane, as Alison and Nicholas make love while the monks go about their church duties. The ordered world outside proceeds despite, and concurrent with, unruly deception within…’Life is like that,’ says the poet. And that is neither good nor bad. Chaucer does not moralize. The reader may feel that such behavior is more or less acceptable, but Chaucer sees it simply as part of the Human Comedy, one of life’s true and therefore powerful ironies.

            Alison and Nicholas are tangled up with each other when Absalom comes to the carpenter’s window to woo his “trewe love.” He almost sings his lament:

            “What do ye, hony-comb, sweete Alisoun,

            My faire bryd, my sweete cynamome?

            Awaketh, lemman myn, and speketh to me:

            Wel litel thynken ye upon my wo,

            That for youre love I swete and swete;

            I moorne as dooth a lamb after the tete.

            Ywis, lemman, I have swich love-longynge,

            That lik a turtle trewe is my moornynge.

            I may nat eten a moore than a mayde.”  (11. 3698-3707)

It is the Song of Solomon. But though it sounds pure and sweet, it comes, of course, out of dissembling and lust. That is ironic enough, but the Biblical tone is followed by contemptuous rejection from Alison: “’Go fro the wyndow, Jakke fool,’ she sayde” (1. 3708). It is irony growing out of both character and situation. We feel that Absalom, for his deception, deserves his rebuke; and yet, we have the feeling that Alison might have accepted him if she weren’t already in an illicit embrace.

            The resolution of the complicated proceedings is swift. Absalom has made an ass of himself, so the trick played on him makes deliciously comic sense. Arming Absalom with a hot poker, Chaucer prepares him to become an instrument of poetic justice. But just as the clerk is about to strike, “This Nicholas anon leet fle a fart” (1. 3806). Chaucer thus tweaks Absalom’s “fastidious” nose, giving the tale’s comic twist yet another turn, and at last Absalom is ready with his weapon. Justice is served, as “Nicholas amydde the ers he smoot” (1. 3810).

            It is no exaggeration to say that what we have here at the end is a flood of ironies. And that of course is fitting. Nicholas’ literally burning cry, “’Help! water! help, for Goddes herte!’” (1. 3815), rouses the carpenter out of his slumber quite logically, and the old man shouts the two segments of the story together with his “’Allas, now comth Nowelis flood!’” (1. 3818). Thus misunderstanding in the final moments leads ironically to resolution, and out of seemingly endless chaos comes a sort of reconciliation; or at least an acceptance. The crowning irony is that the only innocent character, the sleeping carpenter, is blamed for the entire disturbance while Alison, the prime mover, utterly escapes detection, leaving us partially satisfied, surely perplexed, and perhaps a bit disappointed; having to admit that such is life!

References

¹ Robinson, F.N., e.d. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, second edition, Houghton Mifflin.

Sherwood Anderson's "Hands"

English 596

Literary Criticism

A Formalistic Analysis of Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands”

            The narrator of “Hands” is a detached and omniscient observer. He has a simple, direct voice that suits his homey view. He describes in a forthright tone a specific rural scene. But there is the sound of myth or of times long past or of some larger meaning in his use of the words “youths and maidens” (275) for the leaping and screaming boys and girls.

            The harshness of a “thin girlish voice” (275) taunts old Wing Biddlebaum. The speaker knows Wing’s mind. He knows that Wing is frightened, and he tells us that Wing feels apart from his neighbors. Wing has one almost-friend, though, and this day he “was hoping that George Willard would come and spend the evening with him” (275).

            The speaker explains, and we are made to want George to arrive, to help free this “shadowy personality” (276) who is isolated by fear and “submerged in a sea of doubts” (276). Wing is animated and expressive with George, “like a fish returned to the brook by the fisherman” (276). He talks excitedly with his hands, which become “like piston rods” (276) and “like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird” (276). “The hands alarmed their owner” (276). They begin to alarm us, too.

            The narrator has set up contrasts, images, a certain tone, and certain relationships which will reveal the meaning of the story. Wing Biddlebaum is a lone man who lives in a “small” house “near the edge of a ravine” (275), which is on the outskirts of town. He is old, watching a group of lively people pass by. He keeps his distance, though one of the girls makes at least verbal contact from afar. He has been nervous. When the wagon passed, he “peered anxiously” (276) after it, moved a bit closer to watch it go, but then retreated to the safety of his porch. It all bespeaks part-ness, with sounds of the past in the present, and age vs. youth.

            Wing is alone, frightened, and “a mystery.” The narrator refers to him in dehumanizing terms, in animal and machine analogues. Then we are told directly, “The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands” (276). We see deeper meaning in the non-human comparisons. Wing’s fluttering, pounding, gesticulating hands are his trademark, but they make him different from the others. They are “the source of his fame” (276), but “they made more grotesque an already grotesque and elusive individuality” (276).

            The narrator, however, is sympathetic to Wing. He even goes so far as to express regret that perhaps he, the narrator, has not a sufficiently poetic sensibility to do justice to the story. He says that not because he truly feels inadequate, but to underscore what he feels is Wing’s worth as a sensitive human being. Soon after, there is another loud contrast: Wing is grotesque again, “beating like a giant woodpecker” (277). But he is humanly and poetically a dreamer, too.

            From a dream, Wing Biddlebaum has made a picture in which “men lived again in a kind of pastoral golden age” (277). It is an echo of the myth-sound in the first paragraph. In that first scene, the young people are moving away from wing. But in his dream, “in crowds the young men came to gather about the feet of an old man” (277). Wing was once a part of his world; now he is separated from it.

            It is important to note that up to this point in the story, Wing has been shown in two actual scenes: on his porch in the present, and on a hillside with George in the past, and in one imagined place, “in a tiny garden” (277). But still, he has not actually moved from off his “decayed veranda” (275), and still he is alone. The effect of allowing an all-knowing speaker to reveal Wing to us is to increase the impact of Wing’s loneliness. And by keeping us out of Wing’s mind, the implied author emphasizes Wing’s separateness. Though Wing is in a specific time and place, he is also out of time and out of place.

            Once again, the narrator sounds a mythic and timeless tone. He might “arouse the poet who will tell the hidden wonder” (278) of his story. The speaker’s version is “but crudely stated” (278), says the narrator. The author chooses not to editorialize, nor to turn his folktale into a philosophical harangue, so he skillfully weds these phrases of regret—”It needs the poet there” (278)—with the narrator’s personality and style, causing us to accept the suggestion of something larger and deeper without distress. And he keeps his main character suspended while he moves us back and forth in time, guiding our sympathies.

            In the scene from Wing’s youth, we hear of “hands” and “dreams,” children seeming like “insects,” and Wing being called a “beast.” Later, his figure is “small, white, and pitiful” (279). Even his name is not his own, but “taken from a box of goods seen at a freight station” (279). He is reduced, useless, and even anonymous being.

            There was a time in his life when Wing wanted only to love his fellow man and to teach. He was once part of a sublime scheme. Driven off and terrified, he fades into anonymity. His new reality has been harsh. He cannot even bring himself to ask why, in order to free himself. In a limited sense, he is merely one of many different (“grotesque”) people who feel separated from mankind. In a larger way, Wing is a classical dreamer, a representative of brotherly love, and sensitivity trammeled by a grosser world.

            His impassioned plea to George is not to conform, not “to be too much influenced by the people about him” (277). Wing urges George to dream, not to give it up out of fear and because of public pressure, as he, Wing, has done. In the end, the hands that have mysteriously caused his isolation are busily giving him a bit of sustenance in what resembles an act of prayer. Wing is only one man, but he is every lonely soul passing “through decade after decade” (279) of penance.

            The story of Wing Biddlebaum is meant to “tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men” (276), and all its elements, of particular point of view, style and tone, and emotional sympathies, combine to achieve that effect.

Source

David Hayman and Eric S. Rabkin, Form in Fiction, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1974.

Katherine, by Anya Seton

Daniel J. Travanti

English 623

Seminar in Medieval Literature

Fall, 1975

Katherine, by Anya Seton

There are so many characters in Katherine who remind me of people in The Canterbury Tales: I found the Prioress, the Knight (Hugh), Alisoun (Katherine herself), and Constance (reflected again in Katherine, and in Blanchette as well). I liked the wry jokes about Chaucer’s “scurrilous verses” and his “perverse reading and scribbling.”

The quotes from Troilus and “The Knight’s Tale” at the beginnings of the Parts were particularly charming. I enjoyed the familiar elements of the courtly love ritual, and the customs of behavior that we’ve encountered throughout the Tales. Though I found the novel pleasant for all these reasons, I can’t quite formulate a coherent statement about it. Maybe just because I made so many fragmentary connections with our studied works, I’m unable to sum up my impressions.

Mostly, I felt the story was ordinary and the details cliché to me by now, after having seen so many period movies. Dwarfs and court intrigue and banners flying and steeds galloping and ladies swooning and love being deeper than deep and lasting longer than forever. . . well, all right. But I had such fun recognizing and connecting and exclaiming literally out loud for days, things like: “Right:” and “Yeah, sure the Clerk’s Tale:” and “That’s just like. . .”

I suppose that is a summation.

Edmund Wilson

            Edmund Wilson states in the first sentence of Axel’s Castle: “It is my purpose in this book to trace the origins of certain tendencies in contemporary literature and to show their development in the work of six contemporary writers.” ¹ Wilson is concerned with “origins”; that is, he views literature from an historical perspective. He also regards literature as a tool of civilization, and not just its product. Good writing can not only reflect currents of thought and social trends, but, indeed, it can influence and clarify and generally aid understanding.

            In his essay, “The Historical Interpretation of Literature,” ² he says that by tracing “certain tendencies” he feels he can find a certain order among disordered facts of life. By examining the “attitudes, the compulsions, the emotional ‘patterns’ that recur in the work of a writer,” he believes he can discern the meaning “embedded in the community and the historical moment,” and that they “may indicate its ideals and its diseases.” ³ In the same piece, Wilson sums up the value of literature: “In my view, all our intellectual activity, in whatever field it takes place, is an attempt to give a meaning to our experience—that is, to make life more practicable; for by understanding things we make it easier to survive and get around among them.” ⁴ Wilson is a practical man.

            For him, the writer is many useful things. Wilson says of the author of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu: “Proust is perhaps the last great historian of the loves, the society, the intelligence, the diplomacy, the literature and the art of the Heartbreak House of capitalist culture. . .” ⁵ Proust, in the roles of psychologist, social critic, humorist, satirist, and “host in the mansion where he is not long to be master,” chronicles his time; and that, for Wilson, is an important (indeed indispensable) function of the artist. The writer, particularly the great one, gives us a detailed portrait of his time, (as it is) filtered through his special consciousness. Often, he writes to us through very personal pain. He always explains his world to himself in his work as he conveys that world to us. Speaking of Charles Dickens’ boyhood hardships as a bootblack and the neglected child of imprisoned debtors, Wilson sees that “. . . the work of Dickens’ whole career was an attempt to digest these early shocks and hardships, to explain them to himself, to justify himself in relation to them, to give an intelligible and tolerable picture of a world in which such things could occur.” ⁶ Part of Wilson’s function as a critic is to analyze. Partly, he analyzes not only the psychology of a book, but the psychology of its writer, too. A writer’s body of work is himself, which he gives to his readers. “To understand it, we must go back to his life,” ⁷ Wilson insists.

            Besides being an historian, a writer ought to be a social critic. Dickens meant to communicate injustices in certain social institutions. It is important to Wilson that Hemingway’s work was more than the emotional outpourings of a disillusioned and alienated man. In the 1930’s, Wilson wrote: “Going back over Hemingway’s books today, we can see clearly what an error of the politicos it was to accuse him of an indifference to society. His whole work is a criticism of society: he has responded to every pressure of the moral atmosphere of the time, as it is felt at the roots of human relations, with a sensitivity almost unrivaled.” ⁸ By facing the problems, the emotions and the questions of his age, every writer enriches not only his private experience, but his artistic production. In order to know what is really going on “out there,” he must participate.

            Wilson appreciates the active aesthete more than the (essentially) private envisioner. He doesn’t insist that the writer (has to) be a political activist like Anatole France, or a participating patriot like Hemingway in the Spanish revolution, or a preaching patron of the theater like Yeats. But he asks the serious artist at least to face reality in his writing, and not to flee (instead) into a world of pure imagination. Wilson compares Paul Valéry’s introspection with Anatole France’s rationalism and social involvement, and his preference is for the active man: “And in general it may be said that the strength of Anatole France’s generation was the strength to be derived from a wide knowledge of human affairs, a sympathetic interest in human beings, direct contact with public opinion and participation in public life through literature.” ⁹ Social involvement, not merely art, should be the artist’s (serious) concern. It was Yeats’ strength, says Wilson, that he returned always, throughout his development, to the material world, to grapple with its pressures, no matter how visionary he had become at any step along the way. Because of that, Yeats remained a particular hero to Wilson.

            The Symbolist movement of the last part of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of this one is, for Wilson, the most significant literary force for our time. Its representative writers—among them Yeats, Valéry, Eliot, Proust, and Joyce—have given us “works of literature which, for intensity, brilliance and boldness as well as for an architectural genius, an intellectual mastery of their materials, rare among their Romantic predecessors, are probably comparable to the work of any time.” ¹⁰ Wilson is obviously not rigid in his view, nor is he ungenerous in his praise. But while he appreciates the strengths of these writers, he must make clear his objections. They fit snugly into his recurring theme of integration of the individual into society: “…it is true that they have tended to overemphasize the importance of the individual, that they have been preoccupied with introspection sometimes almost to the point of insanity, that they have endeavored to discourage their readers, not only with politics, but with action of any kind.” But Wilson prizes free expression, and points out, on the other hand, that these writers “have disintegrated the old materialism, and they have revealed to the imagination a new flexibility and freedom.” Best of all, ultimately they “…break down the walls of the present and wake us to the hope and exaltation of the untried, unsuspected possibilities of human thought and art.” ¹¹

            And that is what good writing is, the fusion of thought and art, expressed freely and flexibly. One Wilson biographer, Sherman Paul, in Edmund Wilson, A Study of Literary Vocation in Our Time, puts it this way: “The essential issue for him was that of art and politics, of an art become increasingly private and privileged at the expense of its responsibility to the public and larger world of thought and action for which politics was the covering term.” ¹² Wilson balks at the suggestion, for example, that poetry can be “some sort of pure and rare aesthetic essence with no relation to any of the practical human uses for which, for some reason never explained, only the technique of prose is appropriate.” ¹³ In fact, Wilson would eliminate entirely such artificial designations as “prose” and “poetry,” along with the notion that it “is possible or desirable” to have such a pure distillation, and “that distillation has nothing in common with anything possible to obtain though prose…”¹⁴ Though Wilson admires Eliot’s poetry extravagantly, and even praises his “infinitely sensitive apparatus for aesthetic appreciation” ¹⁵ in his criticism, he has to object to Eliot’s separation of thought from art.

            “Who will agree with Eliot, for example, that a poet cannot be an original thinker and that it is not possible for a poet to be a completely successful artist and yet persuade us to accept his ideas at the same time?” ¹⁶ Wilson points out that it is impossible to distinguish Dante’s philosophy, for example, from his “pure” poetry; just as foolish to try to discriminate between Plato the poet and Plato the scientist or metaphysician. Is poetry really only “superior amusement,” ¹⁷ as Eliot puts it? And is poetry really different from prose in its effect and usefulness? For Wilson, the answer to both questions is no. Eliot’s is “…an impossible attempt to make aesthetic values independent of all other values.” ¹⁸ Characteristically, Wilson refutes Eliot’s argument by turning it against the poet’s own works, lauding Eliot’s serious thought. Verse is not a rarefied, exalted literary form that has as its object only pleasure.

            Separate analysis, the New Criticism approach of close scrutiny of a work apart from historical, political, and psychological considerations, of a work as and of itself alone, is enough for Wilson. It “does not lead to anything beyond itself,” ¹⁹ and such critical evaluations, like some of Eliot’s, lead “finally,” regrets Wilson, “into pedantry and into a futile aestheticism.” ²⁰ Both poetry and prose should serve man and society, while of course preserving their artistic effect; both do that in virtually the same way. “Has not such a great modern novel as Madame Bovary, for example, at least as much in common with Virgil and Dante as with Balzac and Dickens? It is not comparable from the point of view of intensity, music, and perfection of the parts, with the best verse of any period?” ²¹

            It is part of the critic’s function to ask such questions, and to form at least understandable answers. What Wilson hopes to see every writer doing by way of improving his powers of communication is exemplified by his excited reaction to the change in Eliot, as expressed in a 1930’s essay: “But if Eliot, in spite of the meagerness of his production, has become for his generation a leader, it is also because his career has been a progress, because he has evidently been on his way somewhere when many of his contemporaries, more prolific and equally gifted, have been fixed in their hedonism or despair.” ²² Eliot, Wilson rejoices, has been growing. Eliot is seeing more clearly and realizing better all the time that art, besides being entertaining can elevate. Eliot still regards poetry as “superior amusement,” remarks Wilson, but he is delighted to note that Eliot reports, in The Sacred Wood, “an expansion or development of interests.” ²³ Eliot’s comments about his own progress please Wilson: “Poetry is now perceived to have ‘something to do with morals, and with religion, and even with politics perhaps, though we cannot say what.’”²⁴ Wilson is anxious, always, to see the writer grow more aware, of himself certainly, but even more importantly, of his world. Eliot the writer was doing that to Wilson’s satisfaction, in the 1930’s, as Yeats had been doing all along; and the result, Wilson believed, would be that Eliot the writer and Eliot the critic would see at last as clearly as he, Wilson, saw, that Bovary and Balzac, Dickens and Dante, were at one in their effect.

            What is the effect? What does Wilson believe a piece of creative writing can do? Generally, it orders. Specifically: “A lyric gives us. . . a pattern imposed on the expression of a feeling. . . and. . . has the thing orderly, symmetrical, and pleasing; at it also relates this feeling to the more impressive scheme, works it into the larger texture, of the body of poetic art.” ²⁵ First of all, literature is an activity of the mind. It tries to give meaning to our experience by ordering normally fragmented or confused emotions or conditions. That ordering helps us understand better, and that understanding makes it easier for us to live otherwise emotionally chaotic lives. As a critic, Wilson in turn orders literature for us, according to principles he learned from his teacher and friend, Christian Gauss.

            From Sherman Paul’s biography, we learn that Wilson acquired from Gauss “’the idea of what literary criticism ought to be—a history of man’s ideas and imaginings in the setting of the conditions which have shaped them.’” ²⁶ The effect of literature on its audience is implicit in all of the above, but in addition, Wilson felt that his best criticism was art. Paul observes: “In his best criticism one most often finds the ‘distinctive individual quality’ which he says in I Thought of Daisy is the precious stuff of art. . .” ²⁷ In other words, Wilson, too, artistically helps us to understand. His foreward to The Shock of Recognition states that effort clearly: He gives us in that volume “a collection of literary documents. It is an attempt to present a chronicle of the progress of literature in the United States as one finds it recorded by those who had some part in creating that literature.” ²⁸ Each piece of writing in the anthology is a document, which “can be used to furnish evidence or information,” ²⁸ which is Wilson’s precise intention. He goes on to clarify that of two kinds of criticism, “of literary principles and tendencies,” and that which deals “with particular writers,” he has space there to cover only the one, concrete examples. But that concentration, he knows, will by extension give “a fairly complete view of the larger backgrounds and movements.” ²⁹ So, he means to inform, to have us informed, of the “American genius,” and to help us understand a particular period of literary production by ordering its pieces for us. Ultimately, like the writer of a lyric, Wilson works specific essays, poems, letters and dialogues, etc., “into the larger body of. . . art.”

            In The Wound and the Bow, Wilson examines writers he felt weren’t appreciated enough by 1929. He titles one essay “Justice to Edith Warton.” Why did she deserve more attention? Wilson sums it up: “As the light of Edith Wharton’s art grows dim and at last goes out, she leaves us. . . in the large dark eyes of. . . the serious and attentive governess, who trades in worldly values but manages to rebuff these values;. . .and who, child of a political movement played out, yet passes on something of its impetus to the emergence of the society of the future.” ³⁰ She has informed us of the past through her art, and propels her information into the future. That’s important to Wilson, that progression and continuity of politics and ideals passed on through the generations. The creative writer is a herald, and his work can be crucially edifying. “Hemingway has expressed with genius the terrors of the modern man at the danger of losing control of the world, and he has also, within this scope, provided his own kind of antidote.”³¹ Hemingway meant to do just that, and his worth, in Wilson’s view, is that he achieved that effect. Besides Dickens’ storytelling powers, his character delineation, and his technical skills, Wilson appreciates his power as a “social critic” ³² and seeks “to give him his proper rank as the poet of that portiered and upholstered world who saw clearest through the coverings and the curtains.” ³³

            Gauss once wrote Wilson: “’If I started a philosophy of my own, . . . I would call it integralism, which involves the fundamental concept that man and his historical and ethical environment are one and that to a certain degree he may make himself master of it.’” ³⁴ That is the critical point of view with which Wilson began in the twenties. All good literature orders and elevates. It originates and grows; it develops and improves. It informs and clarifies and increases both intellectual and emotional understanding. The writer shares himself with us, and the critic helps us share in the writer’s experience, all of which effort ought to tend toward integration of man with his environment and other men. As biographer Paul puts it: “Axel’sCastle ends with the hope that are and science may someday constitute one system.” ³⁵ Wilson himself says it this way: “The most, apparently, we can say of language is that it indicates relations, and a Symbolist poem does this just as much as a mathematical formula: both suggest imaginary worlds made up of elements abstracted from our experience of the real world and revealing relations which we acknowledge to be valid within those fields of experience.” ³⁶ The creative writer and the critic, himself an artist, are thoughtful and useful beings.

            Ironically Wilson, the promoter of involvement and a participator, retired from the world by age sixty; “I do not want any more to be bothered with the kind of contemporary conflicts that I used to go out to explore. I make no attempt to keep up with the younger American writers; and I only hope to have the time to get through some of the classics I have never read. Old fogeyism is comfortably setting in.” ³⁷ No matter, Wilson’s influence is true and strong. He says that he feels “more or less in the eighteenth century.” ³⁸ But he still cares to communicate, and concludes his brief reminiscence with a question and an answer pertinent to and true for the writers he wrote about, as well as for himself: “Am I, then, in a pocket of the past? I do not necessarily believe it. I may find myself here at the center of things—since the center can be only in one’s head—and my feelings and thoughts may be shared by many.” ³⁹ It has been a pleasure to share both.

Pandarus Failure

Daniel J. Travanti

English 623

Seminar in Medieval Literature

Fall, 1975

Pandarus’ Failure

            Pandarus is charming, helpful, loyal and effective…for a time. He loves his niece and probably loves Troilus even more. But I have the feeling that he is motivated not entirely unselfishly. I shall show in this paper that Pandarus promotes and pursues Troilus and Criseyde’s affair partly out of frustration over his own unsuccessful pursuit of a lady.

            When Pandarus offers his help, Troilus is amazed: “’This were a wonder thing,’ quod Troilus. / ‘Thow koudest nevere in love thiselven wisse! / How devel maistow brynge me to blisse?’” (I, 621-623) ¹ Pandarus does not deny the charge. In fact, he argues persuasively for the powers of an experienced, if unsuccessful, man:

                        “Ye, Troilus, now herke,” quod Pandare;

                        “Though I be nyce, it happeth often so,

                        That oon that excesse doth ful yvele fare

                        I have myself ek seyn a blynd man goo

                        Ther as he fel that couthe loken wide;

                        A fool may ek a wisman ofte gide.” (I, 624-630)

That is not only good and generous advice, it is a clear indication of how much Pandarus thinks about his own unhappy affair. And he doesn’t stop there. For three more stanzas he wails, and couches aphorisms at his own expense: “’A wheston is no kervying instrument, / But yet it maketh sharpe kervyng tolis.’” (I, 631-632); “’For how myghte evere swetnesse han be knowe / To him that nevere tasted biternesse?’” (I, 638-639). But his most persuasive argument is his last; and it applies to both men: “’Men seyn, ‘to wrecche is consolacioun / To have another felawe in his peyne.’’” (I, 708-709) So far, he has pledged his love to Troilus, and has offered not only his friendship and loyalty, but to help bear Troilus’ burden for him. But Pandarus would help Troilus obtain any woman at all, even his brother’s, Helen (I, 677), if he could. It seems to me that a man who would go that far is motivated by more than camaraderie. Pandarus seems desperate to help, operating largely out of the pain of his own unrequited love: “’So ful of sorwe am I, soth for to seyne, / That certainly namore harde grace / May sitte on me, for-why ther is no space.’” (I, 712-714)

            There is the suggestion, over and over again, that Pandarus is trying to heal himself, or at least to be healed. In Book I he uses Phoebus, “that first fond art of medicyne” (659), as an example of one who could not help himself out of the pain of love; and at the end of the book the narrator speaks of “…an esy pacyent, the lore / Abit of hym that goth aboute his cure;” (1090-1091), meaning of Troilus. Earlier, Pandarus had revealed himself in as close a personal account of his own affair as the narrator ever gives us:

                        “Thow mayst allone here wepe and crye and knele,--

                        But love a woman that she wot it nought,

                        And she wol quyte it that thow shalt nat fele;

                        Unknowe, unkist, and lost, that is unsought.

                        What: many a man hath love ful deere ybought

                        Twenty wynter that his lady wiste,

                        That nevere yet his lady mouth he kiste.” (I, 806-812)

It is only a suggestion, but I can presume that Pandarus is anxious to have Troilus reveal himself partly because he, Pandarus, never did confess to his own lady. Indeed, Pandarus is still in the throes of that love:

That Pandarus, for al his wise speche,

Felt ek his part of loves shotes keene,

That, koude he nevere so wel of loving preche,

It made his hewe a-day ful ofte greene.

So shop it that hym fil that day a teene

In love, for which in wo to bedde he wente,

And made, er it was day, ful many a wente. (II, 57-63)

Despite his own pain, he pursues Troilus’ problem, and not out of uncommon generosity. It sounds as if Pandarus has accepted that if the great Apollo could not heal himself, neither could he solve his own problem. He seems to take his own advice now, about sharing his pain with another, in order to lessen it. And we feel that his passion to have Troilus and Criseyde couple will help him vicariously relieve his own frustration. (I’ve not gone into lechery and voyeurism as possible sub-motives, so to speak, because those subjects warrant separate and equally long consideration, for which I have no room here).

            Pandarus plots an assignation and presses Troilus’ suit to Criseyde. Though it is a convention of the ritual of courtly love for the man to languish and fear literally dying, Pandarus seems to exaggerate Troilus’ condition. He does it to gain Criseyde’s sympathy, certainly, but Pandarus’ own pain shows though his pleading:

“Wo worth the faire gemme vertulees!

                        Wo worth that herbe also that dooth no boote!

                        Wo worth that beaute that is routheeles!

                        Wo worth that wight that tret ech undir foote!

                        Andye, that ben of beaute crop and roote,

                        If therwithal in yow ther be no routhe,

                        Than is it harm ye liven, by my trouthe!” (II, 344-350)

Pandarus might just as well be saying that to his own lady love! Though we do not know the details of his affair, we have enough information to see that these sentiments could apply to his own state. There is undeniable bitterness in lines 349 and 350, which could come only from experience. Considering that Pandarus’ plea is all for love, the remark seems a bit excessive and risky at this early stage. I can only think that it is his own pain that prompts it.

            From the moment Pandarus instigates the tryst he is one with the lovers. He is in control of every detail:

“For he with gret deliberacioun

Hadde every thing that herto might availle

Forncast and put in execucioun,

And neither left for cost ne for travaile.” (III, 519-522)

His efforts are uncommonly strong, almost fanatical. Criseyde notices: “so wis he was, she was namore afered, -- /  I mene, as fer as oughte ben required.” (III, 482-483) Pandarus is indeed inspired, and it is not only Troilus’ will, nor God’s alone that he implements. Criseyde sees a truth:

                        “Fox that ye ben! God yeve youre herte kare!

                        God help me so, ye caused al this fare,

                        Trowe I, “quod she, “for al youre words white.

                        O, whoso seeth yow, knoweth yow ful lite.” (III, 1565-1568)

While seeing to every detail, Pandarus stays almost embarrassingly close to both lovers:

                        “With that she gan hire face for to wrye

                        With the shete, and wax for shame al reed;

                        And Pandarus gan under for to prie,

                        And seyde, “Nece, if that I shal be ded,

                        Have here a swerd and smyteth of myn hed!

                        With that his arm al sodeynly he thriste

                        Under hire nekke, and at the laste hire kyste.” (III, 1569-1568)

He seems to move in unison with Troilus. He even helps him undress! “And of he rente al to his bare sherte;” (III. 1099). He attends to every need! “And with that word he for a quysshen ran, / And seyde, ‘Kneleth now, while that yow leste, / There God youre hertes brynge soone at reste!’” (III, 964-966) Pandarus’ own happiness depends on Troilus and Criseyde. He literally puts Criseyde into position for the next move in the trysting game, and rhapsodizes about the possibilities: “’For soone hope I we shul ben alle merye.’” (III, 952) There is no question that he is living vicariously, needing to repair, through his friends, a broken affair of his own. He stays close to the end: “And with that word he drow hym to the feere, / And took a light, and fond his contenaunce, / As for to looke upon an old romaunce.” (III, 978-980)

            Throughout the rest of the affair, Pandarus experiences every emotion lovers feel. He hurts, hopes, cheers and makes excuses to help. He has been effective, no doubt, and Troilus is grateful. And Pandarus seems pleased with his own efforts. But when Criseyde is exchanged for Antenor and Troilus plunges into despair, Pandarus cannot hold back his previously private self-interest:

                        “But telle me this, whi thow art now so mad

                        To sorwen thus? Whi listow in this wise,

                        Syn thi desir al holly hastow had,

                        So that, by right, it oughte ynough suffise?

                        But I, that nevere felt in my servyse

                        A friendly cheere, or lokyng of an eye,

                        Lat me thus wepe and wailen til I deye.” (IV, 393-399)

Suddenly it is his pain that matters. And just as suddenly, Pandarus is ready to have Troilus abandon Criseyde: “If she be lost, we shal recovere an other.” (IV, 406) For a man who cares deeply about his niece and loves these two people specifically, Pandarus is startingly objective about Troilus’ predicament! I can only believe that Pandarus wants above all to have Troilus have someone, anyone, and to realize a relationship, any relationship—to help satisfy Pandarus’ own longing for fulfillment.

            His final flurries of reassuring words and frantic activity avail Pandarus nothing. The lovers are doomed, and Troilus’ sadness is complete. So is Pandarus’ grief. In his last scene he is at first silent, unable or unwilling to speak. But at last he must: “’What sholde I seyen? I hate, ywys, Cryseyde; / And, God woot, I wol hate hire evermore!’” (V, 1732-1733) There is a note of reluctance in these harsh words that reveals Pandarus’ personal pain. He knows that such a hateful sentiment cannot help Troilus, yet he cannot resist speaking it. He has failed in his personal suit, and circumstances have destroyed this surrogate relationship despite his best efforts. His last words are indeed “the last almighty God I preye / Delivere hire soon! I kan namore seye.’” (V, 1742-1743) And may Pandarus soon be delivered from his pain.

Ode to a Nightingale

“Ode to a Nightingale”

An

Explication

and

Commentary

By

Daniel J. Travanti

English 540

Summer 1975

After a first reading, “Ode to a Nightingale” seems to be a depressing lament and a negative statement. But after studying it carefully, I’m convinced that the poem is a delicate balance of contrasting views. Its message is certainly not a joyful celebration of the immortality of the nightingale’s song, but neither is it a despondent expression of melancholy. In these eight stanzas, Keats builds a case for the claim that the song, symbol of all art and natural beauty, lives forever, while its producer and individuals who hear it must eventually die. The immorality of the song is happy thought, but man’s temporality is regrettable—perhaps.

            Immediately, Keats catches us up in an irony. He begins,

            “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

                        My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk…”

There is pain, but it is not out of regret or envy of the song he hears. It comes from sheer ecstasy, from, he tells the nightingale, “being too happy in thine happiness,--“. The listener’s joy is not pure. It hurts so that it even reminds him of death: “as though of hemlock I had drunk” and “Lethe-wards had sunk.” Clearly, this is an expression of one of Keats’s favorite views. Good and evil, pleasure and pain, joy and melancholy in the real word always go hand in hand. In “Ode to Melancholy” Keats sums up:

            “Ay, in the very temple of Delight

                        Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine….” (11. 25-26)

The nightingale is a “Dryad”; that is, a wood nymph and therefore a divinity and immortal; and so beyond Keats. He longs to be able to join the happy bird:

            “In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless…”

Such a union in such a place would release the speaker, but he doesn’t know how to get there. He can think only in simple earthly terms of the way to achieve forgetfulness and to get to a better place. At first he calls for wine, the traditional vehicle to mental oblivion:

            “O, for a draught of vintage: that hath been

                        Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth. . . .”

It must be the finest, and have in it the taste of all that is joyous and rejuvenating, of “Flora and the country green” and laughter and song. The wine is a symbol of that swooning or slumbering state wherein the poet comprehends inspired visions. In “Sleep and Poetry,” Keats acknowledges the debt:

                        “yet I must not forget

            Sleep, quiet with his poppy coronet:

            For what there may be worthy in these rhymes

            I partly owe to him . . . .” (11. 348-50)

Precisely what it is about this condition that gives the poet deep insight is a mystery, so Keats stretches the metaphor by attaching symbol to symbol. The wine must be full of “the blushful Hippocrene,” of the waters of that fountain which was held sacred by the Muses and which they regarded as one of their sources of inspiration. The mystery is identified in mythology—another of the contrasts of which Keats was fond. An earthly brew is combined with an imaginary opposite, the real and the imagined existing simultaneously to remind us of our dual natures.

            The speaker thinks still, to this point, that he would like to drink and disappear with the nightingale “into the forest dim.” To what purpose? To drown utterly in his ecstasy. He realizes that he can feel only to a certain degree as long as he is actually in time on earth. But if he can fade out of time into another realm, perhaps he will reach the heights of joy and sublime awareness—and immortality—that the nightingale attains. Perhaps, too, he can thereby escape earthly woe, “The weariness, the fever, and the fret” of human existence. Men live in pain, grow old and die, and mere thinking is sorrowful. Worst of all, Beauty and Love fade and pass—too quickly…Having lapsed in reason for a moment, the poet reconsiders.

            He will not seek this transcendence with wine, after all, because he knows that won’t work. He will fly instead “on the viewless wings of Poesy,” viewless because his flight now is strictly a fantasy. Just by having the thought, he realizes, he is already with the nightingale and “tender is the night” just because he is there. Though it is dark and he cannot see, he can imagine everything. Through his sense of smell incense, flowers, and the night itself can be anything he wants them to be. By distilling essences in poetic musings, Keats re-creates for us the spell that is cast upon him.

            Through the fifth stanza, the poet has been moving steadily out of the real world and out of the light, into the fantasy world of the nightingale and darkness. But even though he is now in darkness (“Darkling I listen”) and is “half in love with easeful Death,” his wish to die at this point is not morbid or even sad. It seems to Keats that to reach the state of bliss to which the nightingale’s song can transport him as far as the living soul can soar “In such an ecstasy.” At that point, all that is left for him to do is to round out the experience by taking it to the only absolute conclusion, death. Death becomes a welcome escape, not a fearful torment, for then the experience would be complete and stay that way. If, on the other hand, the poet was to come back from such a fanciful flight, the ecstasy would fade and the excitement be lost. The expression is an acceptance of death as a part of life, instead of as its eliminator. None of this means that Keats is saying that it is better to die.

            He has been “half in love” with the notion, only partly taken with the idea. By living on, the poet can experience the same ecstasy again, as I believe Keats means to suggest in the final stanza. Here in the sixth it is midnight, the end of the day and symbolically the culmination of the present quest in the ode. In the next to last stanza, Keats himself sings of the nightingale’s good fortune to be immortal, suggesting that he, Keats is not: “No hungry generations tread thee down.” He tells us that the nightingale’s song has been heard “In ancient days” by the highborn and the low (“emperor and clown”); by Biblical figures (“the sad heart of Ruth”); and by strictly imaginary characters “in faery lands forlorn.” The poet’s effort so far has been to join the nightingale in immortality, to escape earthly woes and restrictions, and to soar into that rarefied place of the imagination where one never withers, fades, or dies. The suggestion is that all those listed here who have heard “The voice I hear this passing night” die and are gone forever, but that the song lingers on.

            That’s not strictly true, of course. Just as the memory of a certain song keeps it alive in the mind of the listener, so does the reader remember certain emperors and clowns, Ruth, and fairy tale folk. Indeed, Keats’s poetry keeps all those and more alive. Here in the seventh stanza, the poet reaches the climax of his rapturous flight. It is the height of his reverie or its deepest plunge into melancholy. I’m not sure whether the tone is positive or negative. I am fairly certain, however, that Keats meant to be telling us that both sensations are brought about by such contemplations of beauty and such imaginative speculation.

            It might be depressing to realize that man can never, in life, enter that realm of perfect ecstasy and bliss where, symbolically, the nightingale lives. On the other hand, it is reassuring—as the poet’s experience in the ode attests—to know that one can fly to such a place in imagination, even if he does have to return to earth. The faery lands are forlorn (but only for a moment) because he cannot enter them truly. But the real world calls the poet back:

            “Forlorn: the very word is like a bell

                        To toll me back from thee to my sole self.”

The return is not fearful. And not only is it to reality, but to his separate self, which bespeaks a willingness to face the real world courageously. Keat’s energy is up here:

            “Adieu: the fancy cannot cheat so well

                        As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.

            Adieu: adieu: . . . .”

He is elevated in spirit and almost bemused by the word “forlorn.” On the contrary, it rings him onward, not out, and he is charged to return to common earth and to bid the nightingale goodbye.

            The bird flies on, and it is the song that diminishes, that “plaintive anthem” or mournful hymn of praise or loyalty. Those words suggest that the poet regrets the passing of the song, but also that it will float on to cause others to long and wonder. It is an intractable duality of man’s nature that he is finite and mortal, but strains to feel or be beyond earth’s strictures and immortal. For Keats, all this has been a passing fancy.

            He has felt the ache and “numbness” from being “too happy” in the nightingale’s happiness. He has longed for oblivion through wine, that he “might drink, and leave the world unseen.” He has tried to “quite forget” this earth where “Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes.” By longing and imagining, he does indeed attain the heavenly sphere, despite that “the dull brain perplexes and retards.” And though he cannot see in the physical sense, he feels through sound and smell, and there “more than ever seems it rich to die.” But in the end of all, the poet opts for life.

            He realizes and accepts the contrariness of wishing while in reality, that fancy (fantasy) is a “deceiving elf.” Was the song “a vision, or a waking dream?” Was it only an illusion? Is illusion all we have, after all? Was it a wish only? Was the ecstasy real, or is the present state of moderate emotion reality? Simple awareness is answer enough to any of those questions. Life means sleeping and waking, pain and joy, surety and doubt, ugly truth and beauty, evanescence and immorality and, for Keats, the creation of his own special kind of perfection.

Orphans in Search of Understanding

            In “The Zoo Story”, Jerry is trying to communicate with another human being. He has reached a point in his life where words as conveyors of thoughts alone are no longer effective. He must use words now to affect Peter emotionally. He’s not looking for acceptance, however; it’s understanding he needs. If Jerry can convey to Peter his agony of separation and loneliness, he will have succeeded and is willing to die for the achievement. Todd Andrews, in The Floating Opera, wants to communicate his lack of feeling. He has succeeded so well in donning masks along the way whenever his emotions threatened to overwhelm him, that he is terrified of having totally isolated himself. He is de-sensitized to the point of despair. Like Jerry, he thinks he would rather die now than face a lonely and uncertain future. He pursues a written “Inquiry” for years, in an attempt to understand the meaning of his father’s suicide and the reasons for their “imperfect communication” all of Todd’s life. If he can uncover the reasons, he feels, he may want to go on living. Better than that, if he can make us understand too, he may feel confident enough to rejoin the human race. He writes his book to us in an effort to make contact in a way he never could before. Quentin, in Act II of “After the Fall,” laments: “It made me wonder why I seem so unable to mourn. So disconnected.” It’s his mother’s death that fails to move him at that moment. He feels the same detachment when Maggie commits suicide. He is shut down emotionally; isolated in his mind. And like Jerry and Todd, he is struggling to correspond with the rest of the world.

            Somewhere in his life, each of these men has been made to feel abandoned, so each one has repressed his sensibilities along the way for fear of being rejected again. Two choose life in the end; one opts for death. I care enough to examine why and meaning of their choices. Jerry has two empty picture frames in his room. He tells the sordid story of his parents’ deaths and says that is why “good old Mom and good old Dad are frameless.” But he suggests that Peter (and we) can perhaps see deeper meaning in the empty frames. He’s hinting, but he’s afraid. He reveals himself, however, when he allows: “I have no feeling about any of it that I care to admit to myself.” It’s an admission of a refusal to face reality. Or is it that he cannot bear to face the truth? Obviously, Jerry has been deeply hurt and suppressed the pain.

            For Todd Andrews, the turning point from mere skepticism to hard cynicism came on the day he found his father hanged in the basement. That was the beginning of his inquiry into the meaning of communication in personal relationships and the onset of his despair. When Quentin was a boy, his parents tricked him by sending him out for a walk and then leaving him behind while they went on vacation. When they returned with presents and an apology, the boy refused to be comforted. There is even a suggestion, in Act II, that he tried to kill himself because of the pain of that rejection. Later, when his mother dies, Quentin cannot weep. And when Maggie threatens suicide, he reacts defensively: “It isn’t my love you want any more. It’s my destruction! But you’re not going to kill me, Maggie!” (end Act II).

            Jerry’s parents were self-destructive and died recklessly. He went to live with his aunt and she “dropped dead” on the day of his high school graduation. He buries his heart; Todd dons his third mask, of cynicism, to hide his feelings from himself; and Quentin will try to mold his world to his own emotional specifications. Death could be called the supreme betrayal and suicide can seem to be the ultimate treachery; the final rejection. It’s enough to prevent some from ever committing their hearts again.

            Jerry says that he has tried to communicate with the tenants in his building. But has he? When he is young, he has a homosexual encounter that leaves him doubting his masculinity. He tries to love women and does, in each case “For about an hour.” He trusts no one, claims his landlady spies on him, sneaks in and out avoiding his neighbors, and finally goes on a campaign to make meaningful contact with the landlady’s dog. Jerry tells us that he went to the zoo “to find out more about the way people exist with animals, and the way animals exist with each other, and with people too.” He is not surprised to find a perfect parallel between his building and the animal quarters in the zoo: “It probably wasn’t a fair test…But, if it’s a zoo, that’s the way it is.” The animals are indifferent to each other in their cages, and people ignore each other in the world. Jerry longs to break out of his emotional cage, to touch another human being.

            “He learned from his experience with the dog

That neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves, independent  of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves; and I have learned that the two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion.”

He applies the technique to Peter, first by appealing to his kindness, then to his baser instincts: “You’re a vegetable: Go lie down on the ground.” He demands Peter’s place on the bench, and there follows a primitive battle. The victory is Jerry’s, as Peter is reduced from cool, rational, ordered, and vapid man to an angry, sweating, aggressive and more animalistic being. Peter directly experiences Jerry’s hostility and confusion, and ultimately, after the killing, I am sure the same frustration and loneliness. Because Peter feels what Jerry has felt, Peter understands, and what’s more, will carry the message of Jerry’s agony to others.

            Todd Andrews writes his message directly, in bitterness and irony, but with floating humor. At the beginning of his story, he is convinced that suicide is the only solution to his problem. He is not unlike Jerry in that respect, except that he must intellectualize his pain, to try to find answers that he can verbalize. He reasons too much, perhaps which is what keeps him isolated emotionally. He explains at the end of chapter XV: “Things that are clear to me are sometimes incomprehensible to others—which fact occasions this chapter, if not the whole book.” Not that Todd was always more cerebral than visceral. Once in that foxhole in the Argonne, he had felt “intense intimacy” and “the purest and strongest emotion” he had ever experienced (Ch. VII).

            It was with the German soldier who had become a companion in the confusion of hand-to-hand combat. He was emotional, personal, and even intimate with the man, but finally doubt and fear drove him to bayonet the soldier. From then on, Todd could not regard people as higher beings. In fact, he would never again be able “to oppose the terms man and animal” nor “to regard their accomplishments except as the tricks of more or less well-trained beasts.” If a man can understand his own emotions, he has a chance of understanding his existence. Todd’s problem becomes his inability to feel freely; to be involved emotionally. Perhaps he would like to recapture what he had for a short time in that foxhole: “For the space of some hours we had been one man, had understood each other beyond friendship, beyond love, as a wise man understands himself.” He had found himself there and left himself behind. It’s not surprising, then, that when he discovers his father’s body hanging in the basement, Todd remains objective. He is aware above all that Dad’s hair is neatly combed and there is “not a smudge of dirt anywhere on him.” That day marks the beginning of his reasoned inquiry, a cool and lifeless exploration of the ultimately vital and burning question: ‘What is the value of life?’

            Todd never finds the answer. His father’s death was meaningless, therefore “Nothing has intrinsic value” (Ch. XXV) and no one and nothing is to be trusted. From the day of his mother’s death, Quentin has had a similar problem. Remembering their desertion of him when he was a boy, he muses: “I see, yes—to break through, to truth” (Act II). He trusts no one, not even himself. He is unfaithful to his first wife, confesses, and then never hears the end of it: “Maybe I don’t speak because the one time I did tell you my feelings you didn’t get over it for six months” (Act I). He has never really communicated with her: “Quentin, you think reading a brief to a woman is talking to her?” (Act I). She is painfully aware of his inability to relate, and pinpoints one barrier: “But I think now that you don’t really see any woman. Except in some ways your mother.” (Act I). Later when he marries Maggie, he knows he is wanting her for the wrong reasons. He thought he could change her and strives for the power “To transform somebody—to save!” (Act II). And toward the end of their relationship, he weeps: “Maggie, we…used one another!” (Act II). At least he is trying. “Maggie, a human being has to forgive himself! Neither of us is innocent!” (Act II). Nothing is certain, but we can choose to live with doubt, at least wanting to, if not being able to love: “And I wanted to face the worst thing I could imagine—that I could not love” (Act II). Acceptance is the answer for Quentin: “To know, and even happily, that we meet unblessed.”…but that we can forgive each other our worst faults.

            Three lonely men. Three orphans. Three people incapable of loving, but trying to understand and to be understood. Jerry’s plight seems hopeless. His is a crusading self-destruction that spreads its own news. At least he’s made contact. Todd is self-centered enough to want to publish his purpose. He leaves us with a sense of futility, a ‘What’s-the-use?’ attitude that will keep him alive, but hardly living. Quentin may be fine. He’s faced his guilt and separateness and confessed to those closest to him, which proves that he cares to try to work out his dilemma instead of to run from it. He enlists our sympathy, but he does not beg pity. It’s mutual understanding he craves, and with Holga, he has a chance.

Isolation

Isolation in Gatsby, Elizabeth Willard, and Frederic Henry

Daniel J. Travanti

English 556b

            Elizabeth Willard sought “what could be for her the true word” (p. 224) from the men with whom she went. Frederic Henry discovers painfully that his attempt to find universal meaning in a limited personal relationship is futile. Jay Gatsby is sure that Daisy is his answer and dies because of that. All are lonely, all isolates. Personal isolation has been a major theme of American novelists since the early nineteenth century, and in these works of Anderson, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, it is still a valid preoccupation. Our three authors, in Winesburg, Ohio, A Farewell to Armsand The Great Gatsby, see their people as Hawthorne did; struggling in time to transcend it, constrained by society’s rules and fighting to escape its structures, and maddened by their hearts’ desires unto death or despair. What I find particularly interesting and significant is Elizabeth’s, Frederic’s, and Jay’s experiences is that—though the details vary markedly and they live in different sized worlds—each seeks answers in the same small place; the bosom of another human being. That connection is important. Perhaps, it is a reflection of the American temper between 1900 and 1925; a time of post-Victorian confusion for small town women and determined dreaming born of cynicism for the post-War young men; or it may simply be the human condition.

            Hawthorne knew better than to offer excuses or solutions. Our writers believed as well that the meaning of loneliness seems to be in the experience itself; in the way it works, not why. Still, in these three examples, there are similarities that bespeak universality. So for me, the interest in their lives is not in whether or not any one of them will find satisfaction, but merely in how the process unfolds.

            Elizabeth’s first dreams for glamour and adventure among theater people. They might take her away and give her a life full of excitement and meaning. They are honest with her, though, assuring her that their lives are not essentially different from hers, and that their world is the same. “’It’s as dull and uninteresting as this here. Nothing comes of it.’” (p. 46). But Elizabeth cannot accept that. It is the truth and it is honorably given, but to her it means only that they don’t understand her—because they don’t give her the answer she wants to hear; and so she finds other comfort. She makes love to the traveling men because “Always they seemed to understand and sympathize with her” (p. 46). The point, for me, is that Elizabeth’s restlessness is unappeasable. Always after one of these encounters, she weeps, is penitent, and weeps. Her imagination runs free, she allows herself sensual pleasure, she knows enough to give her son sound advice about bettering himself, yet she is helplessly bound by the myth that “the fact of marriage might be full of some hidden significance” (p. 224). Anderson seems to be suggesting that escape is impossible, which is at best pessimistic and at worst, perhaps tragic. I think it doesn’t matter. What does count is that Elizabeth is trapped—by herself. On the night before her marriage, her dying father offers her a sum of money and the entreaty to “Take it and go away” (p. 225). He tells her not to marry Tom, that she can do better. But Elizabeth Willard insists upon assurances. She calls herself an adventurer, but she has only part of that spirit. During the spring drive described in “Death,” she says for me what has been the key restraint in her psyche from the start. “I want to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too. Don’t you see, dear, how it was?” (p. 227). I hear apology in those last words, and regret. And I sympathize with her.

            Probably, if he had understood the dichotomy in himself, Frederic Henry too would have identified with Elizabeth’s dilemma. He is alone mainly because he doesn’t have any real feeling for anything except his own comfort. He is neither for the war nor against it. He is an officer indeed, but he says his small command “seemed to run better while I was away” (p. 17). He is ashamed to carry a pistol, but later he shoots a deserter. He is an alien emotionally and an American in a foreign army: He is apparently an adventurer, but I wonder. Like Elizabeth, Frederic takes a path of lighter resistance. For her it is to stay, for him it is to chuck it all and bury himself in romantic bliss, away from the war, the world, and himself. While awaiting the birth of his child, he is out near the hospital. On the way back from a restaurant, he encounters a dog nosing at a refuse can. His reaction to the cur is a mirror of his innermost view of his struggle.

                        “What do you want?” I asked and looked in the can to see if there

was anything I could pull out for him; there was nothing on top but coffee-grounds,

dust and some dead flowers.

“There isn’t anything, dog,” he said. (p. 315).

Later, he sums up Catherine’s death and their adventure.

                        So now they got her in the end. You never got away with anything.

            Get away hell: It would have been the same if we had been married fifty times. (p. 320).

From the start, he has felt there is nothing, and so he hides, runs, and denies. Elizabeth declares, “It wasn’t Tom I wanted, it was marriage” (p. 226). For both, there seemed to be some secret meaning in promised coupling. For Elizabeth, it was a vague and even mystical relief she imagined. For Frederic, it was definitely sensual pleasure, but just as assuredly an indefinable release. Both attempts were doomed from the start.

            I could explore that surety in detail and label it among many things, Fate or Destiny. That’s another subject. But a view that applies to the correlations I have been able to make here is that all three of our characters opt for escape rather than encounter. To the extent that they do this, they pull themselves out of the stream of chance and muscle the Fates.

            It could be said that both Elizabeth and Frederic suffered from self-generated notions of themselves that couldn’t possibly be realized in life. Jay Gatsby went them one better by actually living his vision and almost realizing it.

The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. (p. 99)

He makes his surroundings beautiful in every detail, sparing no expense, not even his soul. As a boy, he planned a regimen of self-improvement based on honest standards: exercise, diction, reading. That effort seemed to be an attempt to prepare James Gatz for deeper, more meaningful involvement with the world. But all the whole, he was charting a course of separatism. Elizabeth felt threatened by the outside world and took refuge in a social institution. Frederic felt alienated from everything and so plunged himself under the waters of his senses. Jay Gatsby hid himself most completely, “in his overwhelming self-absorption” (p. 99). Like Elizabeth, Gatsby had a dream, but his was not vague.

            The vision was Daisy. But the dream was grander still. Jay Gatsby was not content with struggling to win Daisy Buchanan in the future; he had to try to change the past that had eluded him, as well. He begs her to swear that she had never loved her husband, but only himself. Both those efforts put Gatsby completely out of time, lost in illusion—as distantly isolated as it’s possible to get. He used his boyhood “SCHEDULE” not to honestly earn an influential place in society, but as a shortcut to make himself appear to be legitimate after he’s gained wealth by criminal means. That makes him a solid and separate hypocrite.

            Elizabeth would like to erase the past, too. “I didn’t want to be a bad woman. The town was full of stories about me.” (p. 226). Marriage would legitimatize her. When Frederic emerged from his plunge into Tagliamento “Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation” (p. 232). They would all have the slate wiped clean. But they all share the nature if not the essence of Gatsby’s disappointment. Daisy falls short of his dreams “—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion” (p. 97). Isolation born of striving seems an ironic notion, but it is a real condition, and all of us, I am sure, live that contradiction to some extent.

            The old man in “The Book of the Grotesque” says: “It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood” (p. 25). That is Elizabeth’s entrapment. Frederic’s truth says all is nothing, so seize the moment. Gatsby’s vision is compared to the wonderful anticipation of the Dutch settlers of America. Their dream was the last grand illusion that could even possibly be realized. He is as visionary and relentless, but the dream, of course, is long past and irretrievable. But nothing could have turned him from his course because “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart” (p. 97). He, Elizabeth, and Frederic cling to their truths with what Robert Penn Warren calls in his introduction to A Farewell to Arms, “lonely fortitude” (p. xxxvi). Grotesques, heroes, or truth seekers, they remind me of myself.

EMERSON and POE

            In “The Philosophy of Composition” Edgar Allan Poe says, “It is the excess of the suggested meaning—it is the rendering this the upper instead of the undercurrent of the theme—which turns into prose the so called poetry of the so called transcendentalists.” I read that opinion after I had found Emerson’s “Nature,” the essay in which the Transcendentalist credo is detailed. Either Poe was totally unaware that in parts IV and V of the essay, respectively entitled ‘Language’ and Discipline,’ Emerson exampled the basic principles and origins of poetic language; and that those dicta were precisely and even startingly the method of Poe’s own poetic prose, especially in “Ligeia;” or Edgar Allan’s barb left a smarting hook or two in his own hand when he tossed it. Blindness? Stubbornness? No matter, what.

            Emerson writes, “Words are signs of natural facts.” He elaborates and then adds, “As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols.” Poe might have been Emerson’s pupil, for of Ligeia he rhapsodizes, “…I derived, from many existences in the material world, a sentiment such as I felt always aroused within me by her large and luminous orbs. Yet not the more could I define that sentiment, or analyze, or even steadily view it.” That’s Emerson’s own perfect and precise premise.

            Now Poe details it. “I recognize it, let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidly-growing vine—in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water.” Satisfying, that: to see two consciously opposing minds unconsciously(?) concur, to produce satisfying literature. It is the excess of Poe’s suggested meaning here, I think, that turns into poetry the so called prose of the so called short story writer.

The American Romantics and Isolation

                                                                                                                                    Spring 1974

The American Romantics and Isolation

            The works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville are called romantic. Some critics speak of “the opposing claims of novelistic ‘good sense’ and romance ‘wildness’.” ¹ It is perhaps no so much that the novel is more realistic, but that a romantic work has in it more of the supernatural and purely imaginative spun around real objects, events, and people. It is a blend of the sensible and wild. All three of our authors wrote with powerful imagination, fantasy, and wonder. Above all, they were concentratedly and specifically concerned with psychology, and one of their common ties is focus on the individual. No man lives totally alone of course (not many a one, anyway), but in these tales, the conflicts are always contention among divergent mental processes all within the confines of individual psyches. In the outward action, the people with whom the principal characters interact are embodiments of their internal forces.

            That preoccupation can be labelled. It can be called “Search for Self”; “What Makes Man Tick?; or, as Poe suggested, “My Heart Laid Bare.” ² They all question and search. What Melville said of Hawthorne could be said of them all: that he is “a seeker, not a finder yet.” ³ That expression means to me that Hawthorne sought continuously, and the finding was simply the writing. The work of art is the answer, each time. He knew there were many answers, and that the moral, if one emerged, was not the thing. There was no use in trying to pin it down “as by sticking a pin through a butterfly. . . and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude.” ⁴ That would be to kill it instead of to give it artistic life.

            In specific instances in the works of all three men, we get certain emotional and mental patterns that lead to particular behavior. There is always sense in the consistency and inevitability of the pattern, in light of the psychological process in each case. For them, “The art of the romancer is no longer, and is not intended to be, an imitation of nature, but rather an expression of the secret self.” ⁵ Through wide-ranging imaginative effects, there is always this human truth. “Hawthorne is perpetually looking for images which shall place themselves in picturesque correspondence with the spiritual facts with which he is concerned, and of course the search is of the very essence of poetry,” said Henry James. ⁶ What may be called ‘wildness’ in all of these stories is that poetic sensibility. Ordinary things, settings, people, and entire situations are draped in metaphor and symbol. They are deliberately placed in certain lights and shadows. There is a dream-like ethereal air about them, but they are always grounded in reality.

            It has been said of Poe that in his works, he gives us a detailed dissection of his psychic self. Consequently, though I have found some of his truth morbid, it is often compelling. The compulsion of the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” is interesting. There is no reason for the man to want to kill. “Object there was none. Passion there was none.” There is no answer. Why doesn’t matter. What keeps our attention is the progress of obsession. “I [even] loved the old man.”! That may be depraved, but it’s even more arresting. We can speculate that the victim’s “Evil Eye” frightens the killer because he is harboring some guilt, or simply that he is insanely fearful, because there is no earthly reason why he should be. What concerns Poe, however, is what the given mental state can lead the man to do. What happens is inevitable. And it all proceeds without interference. It is solitary, indeed isolated, process. It is relentless and all-consuming. The murderer is not content with just killing. He has to let his victim know both that he is about to die and who is killing him.

            One observer says of Poe that his theme “is alienation; his plot, survival; and his character, anxiety personified.”⁷ That is a capsule description of Poe’s own life, and it underscores the notion with precision, of the author’s despairing exploration of self as pictured in his writings. The achievement of the works, however, is itself the strongest evidence of the power of survival. And the force of the tales is in this determined expression of the individual identity. The hopeless man sometimes turns his undefined fear onto another human being. But it is self-loathing led to murder, and of course it is simultaneously suicide. The same self-destructive process is seen in “William Wilson,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and in “The Black Cat.” Poe seemed to be chronicling his own deterioration in an attempt to communicate. These may have been the only ordered fragments in his life, these carefully constructed plots born of wild and wonderful imaginings.

            The settings and the props are real enough. But the atmosphere is usually a nightmare, both actual and fantastic. The action is apt to be realistic and equally strange. The overall effect is to heighten and expand sense impressions common to us all. There is hard-driving suspense in all of Poe that by its evocative force boils up the reader’s emotions; and by its resolution, means to leave his sensibilities throbbing. Hawthorne and Melville are kinsmen in the use of these same processes in varying degrees. Sometimes their effects are muted, muffled, or veiled. Often they’re sublime.

            Bartleby, like Poe’s killers, is isolated too. It may be that he is too sensitive to bear workaday pressures. It could be that he is too idealistic to accept society’s crass commercial dicta. Or he might just be stubborn. He is certainly alone. He persists unto death in being “stationary.” That seems to me both perverse and noble. It doesn’t matter much here, either. What is told is believable; what is left unsaid makes one wonder. “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” The wonder of it all! That may be a double Amen. There is some futility in the sound. But it’s not hopelessness; more of a sigh than a whimper. In a sense, Bartleby was one of those dead letters he handled. He won’t write anymore at the end, and he himself has barely been written upon while he lived. He may be Locke’s “tabula rasa.” We wonder if it’s worth feeling and acting if the result is to end up merely “an eminently safe man” whose greatest virtues are being prudent and methodical. Bartleby thinks not. He “Lives without dining.” He dies in the Tombs. Having incarcerated himself amid society, he dies a dual prisoner in its actual jail.

            Locked in. Alone. Isolated. Symbolically and literally, it is a familiar condition repeated frequently in these stories. Sometimes society seems to blame. But over and over we are shown people in the same situations choosing opposites attitudes: participation instead of retirement; struggle instead of resignation; life instead of death. The forces are strange and marvelous; often they’re unaccountable. That they obtain and that we care to try to understand are all that matter. Poe had a theory of the self-destruction process. He writes that “perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties  or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.” ⁸ Melville may have agreed to a point, if Bartleby is any indication, but he is less nihilistic and certainly more touching when he says that “Sometimes sweet sense of duty will entice one to bitter doom.” ⁹

            He suggests that of Jimmy Rose. It might apply to Arthur Dimmesdale as well, or even to Melville himself. There is no telling why Jimmy choose to continue. He once had fame and wealth, and enjoyed it. Bartleby was always obscure, had nothing, and enjoyed not at all. But just as relentlessly as the scrivener shunned life, Jimmy pursues it. It can be argued that it’s more painful to be bereft after having had than never to have had at all. Moreover, Jimmy may have been as isolated when he was attracting jolly company as was Bartleby the complete loner. Still, in the one being the center of his universe leads him to destruction. In the other there is an indomitable force of survival. Both affect the people around them, but most deeply the reader. Each colors his surroundings like Melville’s Drummond light:

            . . . raying away from itself all around it—everything is lit by it,

            everything starts up to it. . . so that, in certain minds, there follows . . .

            an effect, in its way, akin to that which in Genesis attends upon

            the beginning of things. ¹⁰

Bartleby’s rays are “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlon!” Jimmy’s, on the other hands, are bright even after his death. His chronicler will always remember “those undying roses which bloomed in ruined Jimmy’s cheek.” So will we. Though one bespeaks gloomy resignation and the other smiling survival, both have been isolates and each, in his choice, “a strange example.” ¹¹ Melville himself lived both ways, I’ve read.

            Hawthorne cared to try to strip away despair and ugliness in order “to open an intercourse with the world.” ¹² He saw the noble as well as the mean and the trivial, just as Melville did. But his vision was perhaps brighter, at least in execution. “What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.” ¹³ Arthur Dimmesdale’s vestments were black and white; there is no such judgement of motives for Hawthorne. The prism of The Scarlet Letter is small but many-faceted. Its colors range from deepest red through moonlight silver and gold, to black, and sunshiny brightness. Arthur’s psyche runs the gamut. It may be his “sweet sense of duty” that compels him to his doom. Or it could be moral cowardice. It is surely inordinate fear, which festers to madness and physical agony as well, living as it does in solitary confinement. Perhaps he needs to overwhelm his monster guilt with an even larger suffering. Considering who and what he is, his personal epic of sin, penance, retribution and death is inevitable. The battle raging in his soul is realistically and picturesquely reflected in his immediate society. Or is he the mirror?

            On the night of his attempted confession, the combatants within his breast are present all around him in the moonlight and shadows. Governor Bellingham, representative of civil law, appears at his window to investigate the mysterious cry in the night. His sister Mistress Hibbins, the Devil’s disciple, hears the lament too. The Reverend Mr. Wilson passes by returning from a death vigil at the bedside of another temporal leader, Governor Winthrop. And finally Hester herself and Peal appear. The symbolism may be obvious, but it’s sketched with fine detail as well. Arthur sees the figure of the Governor, but he makes out the very “expression of her [Mistress Hibbins’] sour and discontented face.” His fellow clergyman comes close enough to speak to him. And Hester and Pearl join him on the scaffold. The proximities of these figures tell the degrees of their effects in the minister’s mind and heart.

            Later, with Poe’s “primitive” and “primary” perverseness rising in his soul, several times he comes close to revealing himself in degrading action toward his parishioners in the streets. He resists once again, but his expiation is imminent:

            Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him

            other evidence of a revolution in the sphere of thought and

            feeling. In truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty

            and moral code, in that interior kingdom, was adequate to

            account for the impulses now communicated to the

            unfortunate and startled minister.

Hester Prynne is exiled, too. But she comes to terms with her inner self just as she reconciles in her outer life conflicts between herself and the community. Through acceptance and positive and helpful action, Hester is redeemed. There are too many variations on the theme to detail here. The common preoccupation in all of these works is unmistakable.

            There are primal forces throughout, and symbols always, that have meaning for every one of us. We may learn something more about ourselves by reading these stories, or we may be reminded in powerful ways of what we already know is in us. But their truths needn’t be larger than an individual, except insofar as they are applicable to many men. Hawthorne says,

            A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skillfully wrought out,

            brightening at every step, and crowning the final development

            of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any

            truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first. ¹⁴

Intrinsic in that expression is the principle of total effect. All of our authors’ works have that in common. Poe insists that a story convey its intended impression from the first word to the last. The truth must be consistent and coherent. The teaching, if there is any, is “a far more subtile [sic] process than the ostensible one.” ¹⁵ The truth each time is in the sense the story makes in light of the psychological condition given. If there is ever a high or higher truth, it is in the broad application of that force, its possibility in all of us. Much of the charm is in the rendering: in the setting; in the tone; in the lights and shadows; in the coloring; and in the pervading mood, to which all the details contribute. These are fascinating fragments, dreamy but seriously considered pieces of the grand puzzle of personal identity.

            There is something legendary in these characters. Melville’s people feel like humble folk heroes. Hawthorne’s do, too; or like colorful figures in an early American pageant. And Poe’s men and women seem like Gothic ghosts. The symbolism is sometimes overdone. The red streak in the sky above Arthur and the congregation is perhaps too much. Poe’s relentless horror and repeated types and symbols can be galling. Melville abstracts so that sometimes his people are little more than representative profiles, instead of full human beings. But the results are affecting and often surprising. Even the most abstracted characters emerge with the force of archetypes. By their very narrowness they can be especially compelling. When they are more carefully detailed, the effect is immediately touching, as when, for instance, Peal tearfully kisses her father; or when Jimmy Rose wolfs his alms through a smoke screen of chatter. Poe’s dark visions and nightmarish journeys are titillating because we can come back from those vaults and strange rooms and limbo lands. I like Joel Porte’s view that

            In the works of Hawthorne and Melville, as in those of Poe,

            the dream becomes the type of romance art: a surrealistic

            distortion of experience that manages to distill essential

            meaning from events and actions. ¹⁶

They are moving and meaningful dream-myths, these tales, that have enriched my life.

REFERENCES

1. Joel Porte, The Romance in America, “Poe,” p. 60.
2. Poe, “The Impossibility of Writing a Truthful Autobiography,” The Portable Poe (The Viking Portable Library), p. 651.
3. Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” The Portable Melville (The Viking Portable Library), p. 416.
4. Hawthorne, Preface to The Blithedale Romance, The Portable Hawthorne (The Viking Portable Library), p. 563.
5. Joel Porte, The Romance in America, “Poe,” p. 58.
6. Henry James, Hawthorne (Collier Books, New York), p. 105.
7. Stephen L. Mooney, “Poe’s Goth Waste Land,” reprinted in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe (Edited by Eric W. Carlson), p. 280.
8. Poe, “The Black Cat.”
9. Melville, “Jimmy Rose.”
10. Melville, Chapter XXIV, “Quite an Original,” The Confidence-Man.
11. Melville, “Jimmy Rose.”
12. Hawthorne, Preface to the Third Edition of Twice-Told Tales, The Portable Hawthorne (The Viking Portable Library), P. 285.
13. Hawthorne, “The Little Shop-Window,” Chapter II, The House of the Seven Gables, The Portable Hawthorne(The Viking Portable Library), p. 561.
14. Hawthorne, Preface to The Blithedale Romance, The Portable Hawthorne (The Viking Portable Library), p. 563.
16. Joel Porte, The Romance in America, “Poe,” p. 57.

“The Tell-Tale Heart”

“Bartleby the Scrivener”

“Jimmy Rose”

The Scarlet Letter

JANE AUSTEN

JANE AUSTEN

A Consideration of Her Characters

as Revealed Through Comedy

by Daniel J. Travanti

Spring 1974

for

English 542, The Nineteenth Century English Novel

It was startling to me to learn that Jane Austen wrote with so nearly perfect precision, purpose, and order. That is surprising because she wrote during the early years of the development of the English novel. That means that she had not a large body of work through which she might discern the thought and technique that give a writer of fiction the power to translate imagination so affectively to the printed page. She has no primer, no “Poetics”.

            E.M. Forster, in his Aspects of the Novel, introduces these published lectures with a suggestion to the student of literature that he try to imagine writers existing together in the same time—any time—sitting at a round table and creating for a single purpose. He is saying, of course, that chronological study, category of period and meaning it in its own time, are not very helpful tools for understanding and appreciating the novel. I have to quibble with that point of view.

            For me, it has been a joy to begin to learn what a novel is; what makes it satisfying or not, why, how well it realizes itself, and which ones sustain interest through time. Forster suggests that the answers to all these questions are the same for all writers. I agree, I can learn how to better understand one novelist’s work and thereby, I can have better enjoyment of all novels. I understand Jane Austen’s works better because I know now what it is in her technique that, for instance, gives her characters fullness. To know that she had the gift for delineating believable people who exist only in a book, with a completeness and in a variety never before realized, helps me to appreciate not only her success and her characters, but to read and react more discerningly; not only characters who appeared before hers, but characters in later works as well.

            But even more than that, Jane Austen’s work in this aspect becomes a standard of evaluation of all novels. As F.R. Leavis puts it: “She not only makes tradition for those coming after, but her achievement has for us a retroactive effect: as we look back beyond her we see in what goes before, and see because of her, potentialities and significances brought out in such a way that, for us, she creates the tradition we see leading down to her. Her work, like the work of all great creative writers, gives a meaning to the past.” So for me, the fact that she wrote when she wrote is, if you will, a scholarly but significant one. As Forster continues in the introduction to his book: “All through history writers while writing have felt more or less the same. They have entered a common state which it is convenient to call inspiration, and having regard to that state, we may say that History develops, Art stands still.” Art is art, is art, is art: yes, I suppose so. But the art of the novel did not spring full-blown out of the head of a Muse. It developed. It is developing.

            What is that Jane Austen’s inspiration and expertise succeeded in realizing fully? Among many things, she was able to write true human beings; looking, acting, feeling, and growing on a page as believably as people do in life. To some critics, that is the highest accomplishment a novelist can attain. Virginia Woolf has even gone so far to say, “I believe…that it is to express character…that the form of the novel…has been evolved.” I think that is an extreme point of view, but I shall not take time to debate it here. Jane Austen’s characters are admirable constructions, and I shall consider them here in some detail.

            How did she do it? One observer puts it this way: “…such is her genius that she was able to set her characters on the stage instantly and wholly formed…” It takes talent to do that. I call it a gift. For if it were simply a matter of studying how writers who came before do it, anyone

could. So Jane Austen’s characters were set down “instantly and wholly formed.” More deeply, how, again? The same critic suggests: “Careful examination of such passages shows that they change their perspective line with every character, and that they are always in keeping with the nature of the characters concerned, as we can judge from their conduct and the more immediate revelation of the dialogue. Nothing like this has occurred in English fiction before.” More deeply, there is no way to explain logically how she did this. She just did. The most I can do is to show examples and to probe with some specificity moments, lines and threads. Through this detailed study, I expect to understand more. Through better understanding, I hope to enjoy more.

            Jane Austen wrote with enjoyment, I am sure. I know that because she wrote with humor. Humor at its best is bright and clear, and Jane Austen wrote with such clarity always; even when she wasn’t being funny, that her humor sparkles with especial brightness. There are obvious examples in her works; there are subtle instances, too.

            There are different kinds of comedy, and Jane Austen finds many sources of humorous effect. One classic example is irony. To be particular, there are—in turns—kinds of irony. In Emma, for instance, there is the situation of Mr. Elton’s behavior in Emma’s and Harriet’s presence. He is thrilled to be with them, Emma supposes, because he is enamored of Harriet. As Emma sees it, his behavior shows him to find Harriet physically attractive, charming in conversation, and accomplished; in short altogether suitable to him to be his wife. But Mr. Elton wants Emma, not Harriet.

            The important thing about making this believable, I think, is that on the face of it Emma—in all her efforts to bring about a union between her friend and Mr. Elton—is successful. She is pleased with herself because she has, she thinks, effectively led Mr. Elton to see Harriet’s charms. And Mr. Elton reacts appropriately. He is smiling, energetic, eager in their company. Emma is proud of her match-making schemes. Mr. Elton is thoroughly delighted. But all three are in for a shock. We see it and believe it. Knowing enough to suspect Jane Austen of trying to take me in, I naturally smelled a twist. But all the details pointed to Emma’s conclusion. What was happening, however was not what it appeared. Irony.

            The tables begin to turn, and up comes confusion and humor. Mr. Elton makes his first recognizable advance to Emma in the carriage. At first, she is shocked: “ am very much astonished, Mr. Elton. This to me! You forget yourself; you take me for my friend; any message to Miss Smith shall be happy to deliver; but no more of this to me, if you please.” She still doesn’t get it. Mr. Elton is confused. “Miss Smith! Message to Miss Smith! What could she possibly mean!” The incongruities continue. Emma is sure Mr. Elton is drunk. He isn’t. Mr. Elton is sure Emma has seen how much he likes her. She hasn’t. Even in the pauses, there is irony. Emma is momentarily too overpowered to speak. “Charming Miss Woodhouse! Allow me to interpret this interesting silence. It confesses that you have long understood me.” The use of the adjective “interesting” in that second sentence is—I can’t help feeling—droll and deftly chosen.

            “’No, sir,’ cried Emma, ‘it confesses no such thing. So far from having long understood you, I have been in a most complete error with respect to your views till this moment.’” He persists. He has one last proof that Emma cares for him. “…and the encouragement I received—” Emma is writhing, and it’s funny.

            “Encouragement! I give you encouragement! Sir, you have been entirely mistaken in supposing it. I have seen you only as the admirer of my friend.” There is self-deception in that, I think. Lying, perhaps; irony, if you will. The entire situation and consequent misunderstanding came about because Emma saw Mr. Elton as the main for Harriet. She hardly thought of him merely as the admirer of her friend. She was a huntress, and he had been the prey.

            The underlying prerequisite for the success of this scene is, I think, that each character is separate and whole. Mr. Elton behaves throughout in his own consistent manner. All of his actions are bent toward one end; to please Emma. His words are sincere and direct, but all born of his private motive, though he presumes that Emma knows they are meant for her. But Emma’s mind is playing another scene. What she sees and hears she naturally applies to her own intention. Her private motive is opposite to Mr. Elton’s, but both are consistent with the circumstance. And Harriet, of course, is separate and perfect in her manipulated role. She reacts according to Emma’s script, but always in her own personal manner. Each is wholly formed, and distinct from the other two in action, emotion, and words. The irony is sure and believable.

            But here is certainly more than just an awkward situation. For us, it is ultimately funny. For Jane Austen’s heroine, however, it becomes a lesson. At least, it should. She is beginning to grow, but she doesn’t know it yet. So it’s more than just fun. I see more deeply into Emma’s character. I understand better how seriously her willfulness and pride overpower her reason. She is aware that she’s blundered, but she still needs to rationalize her conduct and especially her obtuseness. “She had taken up the idea, she supposed, and made everything bend to it. His manners, however, must have been unmarked, wavering, dubious, or she could not have been so misled.” Here again I am impressed with Jane Austen’s skill.

            Her taste is impressive. She doesn’t say that she herself knows that Emma has learned a lesson from the experience, nor does she even give us Emma’s direct thought.  The writer gives us a surmise, that “she supposed,” which is a hedge. There is no sudden illumination. There is no miraculous change of heart. There is instead a gradual admission, reluctant and thoroughly human, of error. The reality of Emma’s condition is not disturbed by Jane Austen’s intrusion. Emma is still directly before us, the character off the page straight to the reader. A critic I have already mentioned said: “Jane’s mirror remained cold and clear. She stood aloof from it, noting every blemish which it revealed in its quicksilver reflections.”

            Emma is beginning to feel remorse, but she has growing to do. Another lesson will come to her soon. It comes through humor again. This time, Jane Austen shows us another source of comedy. Miss Bates is a funny lady. She doesn’t mean to be, and that’s part of the reason she is. She’s a bit giddy and she rambles. Her speeches are full of trifles, and she strings them together interminably, at times, so that she wearies her listeners. But she amuses us. It isn’t merely that personality trait affects us, however. Miss Bates’s verbiage reveals a warm heart. She cares for other people and worries about their problems. What might be pathetic about her is that she has almost no power to help anyone, except her mother. So we sympathize with her. Once we like her, we can be interested. As soon as we attend her, we find her amusing. Jane Austen helps the humor along with some exaggeration.

            Emma, Harriet, Mrs. Weston and Miss Bates are on their way to the Bates’s cottage. Miss Bates is excited about having visitors, and when she is excited she talks. For almost two pages’ length, she asks questions and either answers them herself or continues without pause; about the apples sent by Mr. Knightley; about her mother’s health; about the broken spectacles; about the piano; about Mr. Perry and Mrs. Wallis; about the apples, again. It amount to a monologue that sets the whole tone of the character. Emma’s impatience begins. “Emma wondered on what, of all the medley, she would fix.” And Miss Bates proceeds, for almost another two pages’ worth. It is comic invention of the best sort, I think. It is exasperating, but funny for us, and it is revealing.

            Miss Bates is solicitous, because she is lonely. Visitors please her, and she is unabashedly thrilled. To me, that is childlike and charming. She does her best to please her guests. She moves quickly, at least that’s how I see her. Her speech style is peculiarly her own here, and the pattern conveys her agitation, her fretting, and her sometimes annoying repetition. “Pray, take care, Mrs. Weston, there is a step at the turning. Pray, take care, Miss Woodhouse, ours is rather a dark staircase—rather darker and narrower than one could wish. Miss Smith, pray take care. Miss Woodhouse, I am quite concerned, I am sure you hit your foot. Miss Smith, the step at the turning.”! She is even self-deprecatory. The sentences are tight, terse, anxious.

            Later on, Miss Bates is leaning out the window shouting at Mr. Knightley. The sight is comic, I think, and the manner of communication is even funnier. She titters trifling questions at Mr. K., she begs him to enter (She can’t have too much company), she fishes for compliments from him for Emma and Frank, then she raises her voice so far that they might hear her own compliments for them. She even goes so far as to hope, out loud, for Emma’s and Frank’s approbation of her in return. Miss Bates had left the sitting-room so as not to disturb her guests while she hailed Mr. K., but all the while she was doing that, she kept raising her voice to let them hear. When she returns to the sitting-room, she is voluble as ever. “’Mr. Knightley cannot stop. He is going to Kingston. He asked me if he could do anything—’

            ‘Yes,’ said Jane, ‘we heard his kind offers; we heard everything.’

            ‘Oh, yes, my dear, I dare say you might; because, you know, the door was open, and the window was open, and Mr. Knightley spoke loud. You must have hear everything, to be sure.’” Emma, we hear, is still impatient. Miss Bates could be insufferable, but she’s a dear and she means well, so we like her. There is, in Emma and Miss Bate’s relationship, another lesson for Miss Woodhouse.

            Sometime afterwards, the group is out picking strawberries. Frank announces that Miss Woodhouse demands one thing clever from each of them, or two things moderately clever, or three things, “very dull indeed.” “’Oh, very well!” exclaimed Miss Bates. ‘Then I need not be uneasy. Three things very dull indeed. That will just do for me, you know. I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan’t I?’ (looking around with the  most good-humored dependence on everybody’s assent). ‘Do not you all think I shall?’

            Emma could not resist.

            ‘Ah: ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me, but you will be limited as to number—only three at once.’” The moment is awkward and almost vicious.

            Emma, we see, can be so self-obsessed as to be cruel. Miss Bates is revealed to us further, too. She is not stupid. Her enthusiasm overpowers her, as Emma’s preoccupation dictates her own behavior. But Miss Bates knows how she strikes people. Though she diminishes herself, she has self-awareness. And she has depth of feeling. “Miss Bates, deceived by the mock ceremony of her manner, did not immediately catch her meaning; but when it burst on her, it could not anger, though a slight blush showed that it could pain her.” Emma seems not to have seen that. Miss Bates makes allowances for her. “’Ah: well—to be sure. Yes, I see what she means’ (turning to Mr. Knightley), ‘and I will try to hold my tongue. I must make myself very disagreeable, or she would not have said such a thing to an old friend.’” The stage is set, but logically and believably, for Emma to see her folly.

            Mr. Knightley, her friendly conscience, expresses his displeasure. “How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation? Emma, I had not thought it possible.” Emma’s reaction is realistically defensive. “Emma recollected, blushed, was sorry, but tried to laugh it off. ‘Nay, how could I help saying what I did? Nobody could have helped it. It was not so very bad. I daresay she did not understand me.’” Mr. Knightley assures Emma that Miss Bates did understand and was hurt. But she defends herself further, exposing her snobbism. It had been the Bate’s station in life that had kept Emma from visiting them more frequently. They had wished for her courtesy and were especially pleased with her attentions. What Emma has never seen is that Miss Bates is in a particularly vulnerable position because of her social status and her spinsterhood. Mr. Knightley reminds her. “Were she your equal in situation—but, Emma, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to, and if she live to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion.” Mr. K. continues, the point is made, and Emma is chastened on two scores.

            “How could she have been so brutal, so cruel, to Miss Bates! How could she have exposed herself to such ill opinion in any one she valued!” There is too much pride in the second regret, I think, but it is deeply felt about Mr. K., and whether Emma knows it or not, she is beginning to be aware of how much he means to her. And that’s just it again, we learn by degrees. “Time did not compose her.” She remembers and suffers. “…Emma felt the tears running down her cheeks almost all the way home, without being at any trouble to check them, extraordinary as they were.” Ultimately, it is Emma’s growing realization of how much she cares for Mr. Knightley’s opinion of her that shows her how fond she is of him. Indeed, she is beginning to know she loves him.

            Later still, at the ball supper, Miss Bates is at her vociferous peak. “Supper was announced. The move began, and Miss Bates might be heard from that moment without interruption till her being seated at the table and taking up her spoon.” There follows over a page’s length of conversation, but it is Miss Bate’s monologue. She fusses about everything and everyone. She asks questions of others and answers them herself. She wavers and quavers and flits. When she’s finally out of breath (I presume), she speaks shyly but loses no momentum. “Soup too! Bless me! I should not be helped so soon, but it smells most excellent and I cannot help beginning.” The chattering, the trifling, the manner and length of speech, and the action suggested by the dialogue, gives us a vivid character in Miss Bates, uniquely herself. And through her personality comes an important influence in Emma’s growth.

            In Pride and Prejudice, of course we find irony too, and comedy of manners and personality. But for now, I want to consider Jane Austen’s wit. I should say her characters’ wit, for it is one of her admirable traits that she draws her characters so assuredly that we feel always that they do indeed speak themselves, without help from the writer. Elizabeth Bennet, besides being vivacious and intelligent, is witty. That’s not her role in life, she doesn’t work at it to find how she can be clever. She doesn’t even regard herself as a witty person, I think. Her humor is effective, partly, because it is not self-conscious. That quality in the character makes her especially believable to me, and that characteristic in the woman makes her especially appealing.

            Mr. Bennet particularly likes that trait in Elizabeth. He has a sense of humor which is sometimes wry, and which escapes his wife and his other daughters. Part of the strength of his relationship with Elizabeth, however, lies in their sharing an often ready tongue. Mr. Bennet uses it sometimes with irony, to draw out the pretentious and obtuse Collins, for instance. After Collins passes presumptuous judgement and thereby pays an awkward compliment, Mr. Bennet responds. “’You judge very properly,’ said Mr. Bennet, ‘and it is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are the result of previous study?’” The fatuous Collins is so full of himself that he answers with pleasure. “They arise chiefly from what is passing at the time, and though I sometimes amuse myself with suggesting and arranging such little elegant compliments as may be adapted to ordinary occasions, I always wish to give them as unstudied an air as possible.” Mr. Bennet wins his point, and he wins us. Finally, he shares his joke and satisfaction with the kindred spirit of Elizabeth. “Mr. Bennet’s expectations were fully answered. His cousin was as absurd as he had hoped, and he listened to him with the keenest enjoyment, maintain at the same time the most resolute composure of countenance, and except in an occasional glance at Elizabeth, requiring no partner in his pleasure.” If Mr. Bennet has failed in some judgements, he is sensible and aware in others. Here is another quality that unites father and daughter. Later, though Elizabeth has herself erred in judgement, she takes advantage of her close ties with her father to lecture and even to rebuke him.

            The scene opens with Mr. Bennet’s defending Lydia’s proposed trip to Brighton. Elizabeth is heated, but her father’s humor is irrepressible. “’If you were aware,’ said Elizabeth, ‘of the very great disadvantage to us all which must arise from the public notice of Lydia’s unguarded and imprudent manner; nay, which has already arisen from it, I am sure you would judge differently in the affair.’

            ‘Already arisen.’’ Repeated Mr. Bennet. ‘What, has she frightened away some of your lovers? Poor little Lizzy: But do not be cast down. Absurdity are not worth a regret. Come, let me see the list of the pitiful fellows who have been kept aloof by Lydia’s folly.’” Elizabeth states her case. In her list of arguments she includes a criticism of her father’s lack of parental guidance. “If you, my dear father, will not take the trouble of checking her exuberant spirits, and of teaching her that her present pursuits are not to be the business of her life, she will soon be beyond the reach of amendment.” Mr. Bennet knows she is serious, but he closes his side of the debate on a light note. “Let us hope, therefore, that her being there may teach her her own insignificance. At any rate, she cannot grow many degrees worse, without authorizing us to lock her up for the rest of her life.” Elizabeth hasn’t change her mind, but she gives up.

            She is bright and aware. She sees her sisters’ foolishness, her father’s charms, and weaknesses, too; and she marvels at Mr. Collins’s presumption and gaucherie. In drawing the character of the self-seeking and servile but arch clergyman, Jane Austen gives us a satirical representation of the snobbishness of the upper classes. Even penetrating wit can be stymied by the pomposity as full blown as the reverend’s. He proposes marriage. “’Almost as soon as I entered the house I signaled you out as the companion of my future life. But before I am run away with by my feelings on this subject, perhaps it will be advisable for me to state my reasons for marrying—and moreover coming into Hertfordshire with the design of selecting a wife, as I certainly did.’” This pompous sermonizing is a reflection, of course, of Collins’s stilted mind. He is the exaggeration product of the world of the landed aristocracy. His motives are practical, but they’re dehumanized. He gets his energy from Lady Catherine, a tyrannical, arrogant, totally self-obsessed woman of property. He is a toady to her system, and here his shortcomings are magnified, but they’re real. The speech and sentiments and the stiffness are peculiarly his. Elizabeth responds, but only in thought. “The idea of Mr. Collins, with all his solemn composure, being run away with by his feelings, made Elizabeth so near laughing that she could not use the short pause he allowed in any attempt to stop him farther, and he continued: ‘My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony in his parish. Secondly, that I am convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness; and thirdly, which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honor of calling patroness.’”

            His excesses are incredible, but they ring true because they are consistent with his nature throughout. The satire is heightened by his values, his sense of priorities. He is marrying firstly to “set the example.” That is poor enough taste. But finally, he owns that a better reason is to satisfy Lady Catherine’s wish! No wonder Elizabeth is speechless. When she can stand it no longer, she tries to convince him that she is not interested. She is convincing, but Collins is too insensitive to believe her. “You must give me leave to flatter myself, my dear cousin, that your refusal of my addresses is merely words of course.” She speaks even more plainly (as if that were possible), but he is determined. “’You are uniformly charming!’ cried he, with an air of awkward gallantry; ‘and I am persuaded that when sanctioned by the express authority of both your excellent parents, my proposals will temporarily too much for her,’” and Elizabeth leaves, confident that her father will aid her in getting through to her suitor.

            Mr. Bennet does not disappoint her. Though Mrs. Bennet thinks the marriage is a good idea, Mr. Bennet’s sense and his  humor won’t allow it. “’Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?’

            ‘Yes, or I will never see her again.’

            ‘An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents—Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.’

            Elizabeth could not but smile at such a conclusion of such a beginning…” And neither can I. It is comedy, but it is drama as revealed through their dialogues, we know three people. For both father and daughter, humor is a refuge from pressing cares. It is also that playfulness keeps her sensible. Sometimes.

            Elizabeth thinks she knows her own mind. She is preceptive, so she believes she knows her sister’s, for instance, as well. Earlier, she had used her wit and comic games to defend herself from Darcy. Her awakening to the facts about others and the truth about her own emotions is the central psychological drama of the story. Along the way to enlightenment, however, she can’t help imposing her confident views, usually with humor. Elizabeth is convinced that Jane is in love with Bingley. After dinner, attended by the Bennets and Bingley, the sisters talk. “’It has been a very agreeable day,’ said Miss Bennet to Elizabeth. ‘The party seemed so well selected, so suitable one with the other. I hope we may often meet again.’

            Elizabeth smiled.

            ‘Lizzy, you must not do so. You must not suspect me. It mortifies me. I assure you that I have now learned to enjoy his conversation as an agreeable and sensible young man, without having a wish beyond it.’” She goes on to praise Bingley largely. Elizabeth teases. “’You are very cruel,’ said her sister, ‘you will not let me smile, and are provoking me to it every moment.’

            ‘How hard it is in some cases to be believed.’ ??

            ‘And how impossible in others.’ ??

            ‘But why should you wish to persuade me that I feel more than I acknowledge?’

            ‘That is a question which I hardly know how to answer. We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing. Forgive me; and if you persist in indifference, do not make me your confidante.’” Here we have an example of Elizabeth’s breadth of understanding and, at the same time, of its limits. She sees her sister’s situation well enough and even goads her. Her playfulness is irrepressible. But she is kidding Jane about Jane’s lack of self-awareness, while she herself is guilty of the same shortcoming with regard to Darcy.

            Later though, having grown some, Elizabeth can kid her own situation in return. Jane presses for an explanation. “’Will you tell me how long you have loved him?’

            ‘It had been coming on so gradually that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.’” It is her humor about herself that helps to free Elizabeth to accept more easily what might otherwise have been a hard lesson. She realizes her fault in judging Darcy too harshly. It is her strength that has been her failing. But in the end, of all her ego, her playfulness, and her wit are endearing qualities that are allowed to grow. When they finally exchange expressions of love, neither Elizabeth nor Darcy are undone.

            “Elizabeth’s spirits soon rising to playfulness again, she wanted Mr. Darcy to account for his having ever fallen in love with her. ‘How could you begin?’ said she. ‘I can comprehend your going on charmingly when you had once made a beginning; but what could set you off in the first place?’

            ‘I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew what I had begun.’” In response, Elizabeth is charmingly self-effacing. “My beauty you had early withstood, and as for my manners—my behaviour to you was at least always boarding on the uncivil, and I never spoke to you without rather wishing to give you pain than not. Now be sincere; did you admire me for my impertinence?” Darcy is gracious in return. “For the liveliness of your mind, I did.”

            Jane Austen’s liveliness and intelligence are impressive, certainly. As they are expressed in the delineation of her characters, she takes us willingly to find delight. In Northanger Abbey, for the purpose of parody, she choose to speak to us directly, sometimes. Though all of her novels deal with romance of a specific order, Jane Austen was a realist. Her emotional conflicts and their resolutions are always reasonable, as we have seen in part, from the encounters mentioned so far. She deplores insensitivity that leads to rude behavior. She spurns flighty and shallow romanticism, as well.

            At the outset of her “little novel”, she debunks the traditional heroine. “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her.” Jane Austen is being more than just cute here. She doesn’t mean, on the other hand, that she is about to give us a heroine from the ranks of peasants, the simple country folk of, say, Scott or Eliot. Catherine is upper-middle class, like Elizabeth Bennet and Emma, and the daughter of a clergyman, like Jane herself. In fact, Catherine does have all the characteristics of the stock heroine save one. There is nothing dramatic in her situation. She wants her life to be “horrid” as it is in Gothic novels, but it isn’t. So she is going to make it so.

            Her chief accomplice is her imagination. That is easily fed because of her naivete, and by her favorite books, especially romantic tales, and specifically Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. What Jane Austen attacks in her story is the cult of Sensibility of the eighteenth century; that attitude of moving and responding to life almost exclusively through the senses, without much common sense. She obviously considers uncontrolled flights of fancy folly. Jane Austen is sensible, and though she regards imagination as a reasonable quality when it is used to brighten a life, she finds it regrettable in a young woman that she would rather exist in fantasy than face reality and find there the joys of existence.

            The intention is parody. But the method is realism, and the motive is moral. Catherine is a real person living in recognizable circumstances, going on a familiar trip, at a well-understood time of life, there to find ordinary problems for a young lady of her class. Like all of Jane Austen’s leading ladies, Catherine Morland has lessons to learn; about friendship, selfishness, courtesy, integrity, and love.

            What she hopes for are: a dramatic chance encounter signaling love at first sight; mysterious behavior; a beautiful, vivacious and devoted new friend; perfect union when James and Isabella declare for each other; unqualified acceptance and kindness from the Tilneys once she gets to know them; forbidding weather; and dank and labyrinthian old castles harboring terrible secrets in hidden rooms. Catherine comes well equipped for disappointment.

            Speaking of Catherine’s early predilections, Jane Austen tells us: “…and it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, baseball, riding on the horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books…for, provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all. But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine; she read all such works heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives.” There is the key word, “eventful.” Catherine has already made up her mind that her life is dull. She sees “events” as dramatic and exciting occurrences. As we shall see, her mind is so often so far away from actual happenings that she fails to recognize the meaning of what is going on around her. She dreams of qualities and situations that she is sure are more interesting than her own.

            As in the other novels discussed, Jane Austen is consistent in giving us believable characters “instantly and wholly formed.” And she keeps her objective distance from the reader when she thinks it necessary to present dramatic scenes in which her people reveal themselves. But she is writing here in imitation of a style in which the author typically speaks directly to the reader. In one section, Jane Austen pokes fun at the convention of the romantic novel of detailing ad nauseum a character’s past; then she uses the method herself, doubling the humor. Catherine’s past will catch up with her!

            The supreme irony is that she already has all the good character traits any girl could wish for in order to help herself to a happy and satisfying life. We learn of Catherine “…that her heart was affectionate, her disposition cheerful and open, without conceit or affection of any kind—her manners just removed from the awkwardness and shyness of a girl; her person pleasing, and, when in good looks, mind at seventeen usually is.” Even ignorance, at that age, is forgivable.

            In the countryside near Bath, Catherine doubts her charms. “But Catherine did not know her own advantages—did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward.” There are some things about which Catherine knows not much, but she tends to equate lack of knowledge or experience with stupidity in herself. What she is sure about is she knows nothing about it landscape composition. Her friends are discussing the relative merits of the view before them. Knowing nothing of drawing (every true heroine draws), Catherine concludes she has “no taste,” that her idea of a beautiful view, since it is untutored, is questionable. She doesn’t trust her natural taste, but Henry moves to instruct her, and she is reassured that her opinion is as good as anyone’s. The scene is a swipe at the cult of the picturesque that accompanied the vogue of Sensibility. Emotional reaction to a vista is legitimate, and so is a bit of objective analysis. Since Catherine is too inexperienced to trust either faculty in herself, she is temporarily at sea. On the face of it this may seem a trivial concern, but it is a good illustration of Catherine’s naivete; of the serious lack of self-awareness in her that will later cause her serious pain.

            Catherine’s parents are certainly not to blame for their daughter’s imaginative flights, nor her undervaluation of herself. The Morlands are reasonable people. Catherine is off to Bath: “Everything indeed relative to this important journey was done, on the part of the Morlands, with a degree of moderation and composure, which seemed rather consistent with the common feelings of common life, than with the refined susceptibilities, the tender emotions which the first separation of a heroine from her family ought always to excite.” Jane Austen’s tongue is in her cheek here, but the important truth of the Morlands’ existence is apparent. The way of the world is often simple and straightforward. There is a little drama in the trip itself. “Under these unpromising auspices, the parting took place, and the journey began. It was performed with suitable quietness and uneventful safety.”

            What Jane Austen is getting to is that the “horridness” in Catherine’s melodramatic fantasies is nothing compared to the simple and basic human folly that wounds the normal heart. All of the difficulty, it seems, is based on appearance versus reality.

            The class system under which Catherine and her friends live dictates certain behavior. Mrs. Allen, Catherine’s chaperone, is ordinarily proper. Jane Austen reassures us of the lady’s integrity by way of a pointed criticism aimed at another convention of the romantic novel. “It is now expedient to give some description of Mrs. Allen, that the reader may be able to judge, in what manner her actions will hereafter tend to promote the general distress of the work, and how she will, probably, contribute to reduce poor Catherine to all the desperate wretchedness of which is last volume is capable—whether by her imprudence, vulgarity, or jealousy—whether by intercepting her letters, ruining her character, or turning her out of doors.” With slick precision, the writer has speared a half dozen romantic conventional culprits.

            Appearance, in its most obvious sense, is Mrs. Allen’s preoccupation. “Dress was her passion.” She instructs her young charge as to proper dress and latest fashion, and spends so much time at it that they are late entering the ballroom. Catherine is on her guard: “…and hence Miss Morland had a comprehensive view of all the company beneath her, and of all the dangers of her late passage through them.” The dangers anticipated may be her imagined dramas. They are certainly those apprehensions of introductions, acceptable discourse, and suitable opportunities to dance. It hurts out to be a dull evening. There were plenty of young men. “Not one, however, started with rapturous wonder on beholding her, no whispers of eager inquiry ran round the room, nor was she once called a divinity by an body.” No magic moment.

            One by one, Catherine’s anticipations are frustrated. She’s learning. She is attracted to Henry Tilney, but she makes a date with John Thorpe. At the next dance, she is woeful; waiting alone for her tardy partner. But it is not loneliness that distresses her; it’s her dignity that suffers. “To be disgraced in the eye of the world, to wear the appearance of infamy while her heart is all purity, her actions all innocence, and the misconduct of another the true source of her debasement, is one of those circumstances which peculiarly belong to the heroine’s life, and her fortitude under it what particularly dignifies her character.” And so she remains calm. Catherine is a true heroine and she knows it. But there is more to suffer. John Thorpe shows up with Henry Tilney. In short, the evening is another bust. She’s learning. “…from the whole she deduced this useful lesson, that to go previously engaged to a ball, does not necessarily increase either the dignity or enjoyment of a young lady.”

            Of course, Catherine’s difficulties have come of merely trying to do “the right thing.” The catch is that she must know her own heart first, and then how to act according to her honest inclinations. Her fancy overpowers her too often, however. The prospect of seeing Blaize Castle is too tempting. She can’t resist “…the happiness of a progress through a long suite of lofty rooms, exhibiting the remains of magnificent furniture, though now for many years deserted—the happiness of being stopped in their way along narrow, winding vaults, by a low, grated door; or even of having their lamp, their only lamp, extinguished by a sudden gust of wind, and of being left in total darkness.” It’s all in her hapless head. In the end of all, she never even reaches the castle. Jane Austen, gentle but still with tongue in cheek, at least gives poor Catherine solitude. “And now I may dismiss my heroine to the sleepless couch, which is the true heroine’s portion; to a pillow strewed with thorns and wet with tears. And lucky may she think herself, if she get another good night’s rest in the course of the next three months.”

            The following weeks pile injuries upon her. By now, she has realized “…that John Thorpe himself was quite disagreeable…”; that the progress of her and Henry Tilney’s relationship is openly and ordinarily slow; that the weather, except for a bit of rain, is sunny at Bath; and that if Gothic castles exist, they are not meant for her to see. But she hasn’t seen yet that certain people find it expedient to dissemble.

            Isabella Thorpe has seemed a perfect friend and an honest person. Her flirtations escape Catherine’s notice, until Isabella’s inconstancy hits home. Even then, Catherine’s gullibility is boundless. She asks the advice of Henry Tilney, Jane Austen’s voice of reason. “’Is it my brother’s attentions to Miss Thorpe, or Miss Thorpe’s admission of them, that gives the pain?’

            ‘Is not it the same thing?’

            ‘I think Mr. Morland would acknowledge a difference. No man is offended by another man’s admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.’

            Catherine blushed for her friend, and said, ‘Isabella is wrong. But I am sure she cannot mean to torment, for she is very much attached to my brother. She has been in love with him ever since they first met, and while my father’s consent was uncertain, she fretted herself almost into a fever. You know she must be attached to him.’

            ‘I understand: she is in love with James, and flirts with Frederick.’

            ‘Oh: no, not flirts. A woman in love with one man cannot flirt with another.’

            ‘It is probable that she will neither love so well, nor first so well, as she might do either singly. The gentlemen much each give up a little.’” But Catherine is disposed to think well of everyone. “Henry Tilney must know best. She blames herself for the extent of her fears, and resolved never to think so seriously on the subject again.”

            Until she can no longer deny the facts, Catherine trusts Isabella. She trusts General Tilney as implicitly. Father Tilney, usually reserved, has taken an uncommon liking to Catherine. He invites her to spend some time at the Abbey, and Catherine is overjoyed to have another go at a genuine Gothic monstrosity. But of course it turns out to be a perfectly ordinary place of perfectly pleasant appearance. And the weather is fine. While there, Catherine’s imagination flies full tilt at every possibility of mystery and horror she has stored in her mind from the books she’s read. She ransacks a promising cabinet for secret writings, she imagines voices and movements in the night, and she sneaks down to uncover the terrible secret of “the hidden room.” All she accomplishes, however, is to frighten herself half out of her wits.

            Though the dramas in her mind turn out to be mere imaginings, the dramas of real life inevitably reach her. A letter from Isabella erases some illusions. “Such a strain of shallow artifice could not impose even upon Catherine. Its inconsistencies, contradictions, and falsehood, struck her from the very first. She was ashamed of Isabella, and ashamed of having ever loved her. Her professions of attachment were now as disgusting as her excuses were empty, and her demands impudent. ‘Write to James on her behalf:--No, James should never hear Isabella’s name mentioned by her again.’” Following soon comes the firmest blow. Catherine is asked to leave Northanger Abbey. The General’s solicitude, it turns out, came from his belief that her dowry was large, large enough to make her acceptable to him as a daughter-in-law. The horridness of real life. “That room, in which her disturbed imagination had tormented her on her first arrival, was again the scene of agitated spirits and inquietude from what it had been then—how mournfully superior in reality and substance:”

            Facing reality, however painful, can be a growing experience, and Catherine’s maturity is near completion. “Her anxiety had foundation in fact, her fears in probability; and with a mind so occupied in the contemplation of actual and natural evil, the solicitude of her situation, the darkness of her chamber, the antiquity of the building were felt and considered without the smallest emotion; and though the wind was high, and often produced strange and sudden noises throughout the house, she heard it all as she lay awake, hour after hour, without curiosity or terror.”

            David Daiches, in The Novel and the Modern World, specifies two basic techniques of character presentation. There is that character who is set down complete from the star and whom we follow through certain conditions, to see how preannounced traits serve him; how he reacts; and whether or not he responds as his personality has predicted he will. Another primary technique is to have a character reveal himself to us gradually, incident by incident, so that the delineation is complete only after he has lived through all of the conditions the author has chosen for him. Jane Austen employs both methods. I have tried to show, in limited detail, where and how some of her characters are specifically and distinctively drawn. Hers is a process of familiarization, and we know her people on sight. But of course it is more than immediately complete portraits that Jane Austen gives us.

            In all three of the novels discussed here, at the end there is the completion of another process. At the star, we meet Jane Austen’s people within a circumscribed world, facing problems that could lead to tragedy. She takes them, however, along with the other way of serious concerns which is open to all of us in time of trouble. Her characters have humor, and she has a comic eye. Good natured humor can recommend almost anyone for approbation. At the least, it entertains us. At most, it is a quality that attracts attention and clarifies personality and character, and so deepens understanding. It is a process of moral growth that appeals to the serious mind, but it is never didacticism or sermonizing. Jane Austen’s characters are clearly delineated, entertainingly dressed, and always pervasively human in detail. I have deep satisfaction in getting to understand better her creations; but more than that, I am now better equipped to appreciate characters in other novels and other worlds.

References

Page 2:     F.R. Leavis,  The Great Tradition  (N.Y. University Press, 1963),  p. 5.

Page 2:   Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, reprinted in Approaches to the Novel,     collected and edited by Robert Scholes, Chandler Publishing Company

Page 3:    Richard Church, The Growth of the English Novel (University Paperbacks), ch. 8;   “such is….formed”; “Careful…before.”

            E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

            Jane Austen, Emma

            Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

            Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Page 25:  David Daiches, The Novel and the Modern World