Girl Detective

Sadie at Jezebel takes issue with the media’s habit of wondering what Jane Austen would do with modern problems:

This is not to disparage the scope or appeal of Austen’s work, which obviously owes a good measure of its brilliance to the natural universality inherent to all good writing, and all honest portrayal of emotion…but simply to question the weird “Austen is always applicable” notion that seems to have crept into our culture.

Apparently it’s turning into Austen week here at Girl Detective. More to come, I hope.

From Jane Austen’s Persuasion:

Anne to her sister Mary: You have had your little boys with you?

Mary: Yes, as long as I could bear their noise; but they are so unmanageable that they do me more harm than good. Little Charles does not mind a word I say, and Walter is growing quite as bad.

Substitute 5yo Drake for Charles, and 2yo Guppy for Walter, and you have a typical day in my house. I grew up with sisters. I did not foresee the noise, opposition, and chaos of boys.

One of my favorite scenes in Persuasion is when Anne is rescued from a disagreeable situation by Captain Wentworth:

[2yo Walter] began to fasten himself upon [Anne], as she knelt, in such a way that…she could not shake him off. She spoke to him, ordered, entreated, and insisted in vain. Once she did contrive to push him away, but the boy had the greater pleasure in getting upon her back again directly.

‘Walter,’ said she, ‘get down this moment. You are extremely troublesome. I am very angry with you.’…

In another moment, however, she found herself in the state of being released from him; someone was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much, that his little sturdy hands were unfastened from around her neck, and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it. (Chapter 9)

This scene follows the motif of a knight rescuing a princess from a villain, who in this case is a toddler. I suspect Austen didn’t much like the noise and mess of little boys, either.

From Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (Arden 1995, ed. Lothian and Craik):

Duke.

There is no woman’s sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart
So big, to hold so much: they lack retention. (ll. 94-97)

Viola.

We men may say more, swear more, but indeed
Our shows are more than will: for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love. (ll. 117-19)

From Austen’s Persuasion:

Captain Harville:

I will not allow it to be more man’s nature than woman’s to be inconstant and forget those they do love, or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe in a true analogy between our bodily frames and our mental; and that as our bodies are the strongest, so are our feelings; capable of bering most rough usage, and riding out the heaviest weather.

Anne Elliott:

Your feelings may be the strongest, but the same spirit of analogy will authorise me to assert that ours are the most tender. Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer lived; which exactly explains my view of the nature of their attachments.

In Twelfth Night, Viola is a woman dressed as a man, in love with the Duke, who is in love with Olivia, who in turn is in love with Viola’s male persona. Viola’s point is proved later, when the Duke learns that she’s a woman, and immediately appears to forget his “love” for Olivia, and instead declares for Viola.

In Persuasion, however, the love of woman (Anne Elliott) and man (Captain Wentworth) are portrayed as equally enduring. Interestingly, Captain Harville’s sea metaphor can refer both to his and Captain Wentworth’s naval experience, as well as to Twelfth Night’s shipwreck that separated Viola from her twin, Sebastian.

(I heart alliteration; you’ve noticed, no?) In my recent post on Austen’s Persuasion, I included Captain Wentworth’s letter, but wanted to do a few more, since the book is so replete with delicious, often politely nasty, passages.

***

Anne, with an elegance of mind and sweetness of character, which must have placed her high with any peopel of real understanding, was nobody with either father or sister; her word had no weight, her convenience was always to give way–she was only Anne. (Chapter one)

***

There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feeling so in unison, no countenances so beloved. (Chapter eight)

***

They were actually on the same sofa, for Mrs Musgrove had most readily made room for him; they were divided only by Mrs Musgrove. It was no insignificant barrier, indeed. Mrs Musgrove was of a comfortable, substantial size, infinitely more fitted by nature to express good cheer and good humour, than tenderness and sentiment; and while the agitations of Anne’s slender form, and pensive face, may be considered as very completely screened, Captain Wentworth should be allowed some credit for the self-command with which he attended to her large fat sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for.

Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will patronize in vain - which taste cannot tolerate - which ridicule will seize. (Chapter eight)

***

I noticed again the pattern in Austen that her main character is the only one in a family with sense. Note, not sensibility, since that is what characterizes Marianne, the flighty sister in Sense and Sensibility. Elinor is that novel’s character with sense. Persuasion’s is Anne; Mansfield Park’s is Fanny Price; Pride and Prejudice’s is Elizabeth Bennet. Austen grants sense to the other sex in Northanger Abbey to Henry Tilney, and in Emma to Mr Knightley. I think it’s clear which character in each novel is the one with which Austen most identifies, no?

As always, for more Austen geekjoy, visit Austenblog. I have a few more Austen-related posts coming, if only I (or my tech support, ahem, husband) can figure out how to do a table in html.

Crime and Punishment is often described as one of the earliest psychological novels. I found the descriptions of Raskolnikov’s state of body and mind interesting in light of recent increased awareness of depression disorders.

Symptoms are from the Mayo Clinic site, on Bipolar Disorder. Quotations from Crime and Punishment are from the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation; I’ve included a few examples from the text. There are many more.

Signs and symptoms of the manic phase of bipolar disorder may include:

* Euphoria
* Extreme optimism
* Inflated self-esteem
* Poor judgment
* Rapid speech
* Racing thoughts
* Aggressive behavior
* Agitation
* Increased physical activity
* Risky behavior
* Spending sprees
* Increased drive to perform or achieve goals
* Increased sexual drive
* Decreased need for sleep
* Tendency to be easily distracted
* Inability to concentrate
* Drug abuse

He had been walking for about six hours (p. 115)

It was as if he were not himself. He was unable to stay still even for a minute, unable to focus his attention on any one subjet; his thoughts leaped over each other; his speech wandered; his hands were trembling slightly. (p. 522)

Signs and symptoms of the depressive phase of bipolar disorder may include:

* Sadness
* Hopelessness
* Suicidal thoughts or behavior
* Anxiety
* Guilt
* Sleep problems
* Appetite problems
* Fatigue
* Loss of interest in daily activities
* Problems concentrating
* Irritability
* Chronic pain without a known cause

A strange time came for Raskolnikov: it was as if fog suddenly fell around him and confined hm in a hopeless and heavy solitude. Recalling this time later, long afterwards, he suspected that his consciousness had sometimes grown dim. (p. 439)

Severe episodes of either mania or depression may result in psychosis, or a detachment from reality. Symptoms of psychosis may include hearing or seeing things that aren’t there (hallucinations) and false but strongly held beliefs (delusions).

In the dark of evening he was jolted back to consciousness by terrible shouting. God, what shouting it was! Never before had he seen or heard such unnatural noises, such howling, screaming, snarling, tears, blows and curses…And then, to his great amazement, he suddenly made out his landlady’s voice…

“No one was beating the landlady,” [Natasya later] said…”No one was here.” (pp. 115-7)

I’ve lately read several Shakespeare plays, and Shakespeare-related books. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found several Hamlet parallels in Crime and Punishment, the book for my book group, one I’d thought would be a departure. Like Hamlet, Raskolnikov veers between mania and depression, hesitates over taking action, and contemplates suicide.

***

Crime and Punishment:

To take a false bank note, and where?–to a banking house, where they do know a hawk from a handsaw–no, I’d get flustered.

Hamlet:

I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.

***

Crime and Punishment:

“After all, it’s a way out!” he thought, walking slowly and listlessly along the embankment of the canal. “Anyway, I’ll end it because I want to…Is it a way out, though? But what’s the difference! There’ll really be the end?

Hamlet:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? … To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause…

***

Crime and Punishment:

I noted him, I noted him well.

Hamlet:

I did very well note him.

***

Crime and Punishment:

All in flowers, a girl was lying in it, in [the coffin]…her loose hair…was wet; it was twined with a wreath of roses…The girl was a suicide–by drowning.

Hamlet:

Therewith fantastic garlands did she make…
There, on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook…
but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death…
Drown’d, drown’d.

The Mall of America recently updated its theaters, which are now independently operated. They now serve popcorn with real butter, and apparently have a very swank VIP theater. Link from MNSpeak.

Pet peeve: Minnesota is in the US, folks. And here, we spell it “theater.” So drop the pretentious nonsense that makes googling and finding your THEATER harder (I’m lookin’ at you MOA and Parkway) and use the US, not the English, spelling. Sheesh.

The Minneapolis Heights Theater is screening a double feature of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons from Monday October 20 to Wednesday October 22, 2008. You can see one or both for $8. If you go, be sure to get their fabulous popcorn with REAL butter, or a treat from the Dairy Queen next door.

Is it wrong that I think the Pumpkin Pie Blizzard sounds really good? Even I, though, the mistress of overkill, think buttered popcorn and a blizzard is over the top.

Julie Taymor, who did a stunning adaptation of the harrowing Titus Andronicus, is set to adapt Shakespeare’s The Tempest for film. Russell Brand, of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, is set to play the drunken clown Trinculo.

You’ll never guess who’s going to play Prospero.

Can’t wait. Even if it’s a mess, it’ll be a gorgeous one. (Link from Entertainment Weekly)

At the Times Online, A.N. Wilson reviews the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams’, DOSTOEVSKY: Language, Faith and Fiction, a combination of literary criticism and historical theology.

Link from Arts & Letters Daily.

Bring your plastics to the Eastside Food Coop for recycling on Saturdays (today!) from 10am to 2pm, and on Thursday afternoon and evenings, 3:30pmto 7:30pm.

Rain Taxi’s Book Fest is today. I may head out to see Jess Winfield at 3:30 p.m., author of My Name is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare

Minx, a line of graphic novels from DC for teen girls, has been canceled. (Link from Blog of a Bookslut) I wasn’t a fan, and am not surprised. There are many better YA graphic novels. Check out Hope Larson, Hopeless Savages, Scott Pilgrim, Craig Thompson and Persepolis.

The Sorted Books Project takes a group of books from a library and groups them so their titles tell a story. (Link from Boing Boing)

Doesn’t this make you want to sift through the spines on your shelves?

My husband G. Grod, my friend Blogenheimer, our friend EJ, and I attended Neal Stephenson’s reading at the Barnes and Noble Galleria on Friday night. NS read from his new novel, Anathem, and signed books after.

NS seemed game to be there–not his favorite thing, but he was polite and funny. The question session went well; no one asked where he got his ideas, or told him how cool Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon were. He has no plans to write again about Enoch Root. He didn’t want to go back to the Baroque Cycle world because it would be like falling into “an event horizon.” And he chose to set Anathem on a fictional world, rather than Earth, because historical fiction is like “darning a sock” and making things up requires much less interpolation. He was stumped when a woman asked what the first bedtime book he remembered was. He said he couldn’t, but that he had great affection for D’Aulaire’s book of Greek myths, and found it funny how Zeus was always “marrying” other women.

For his signing, in addition to Anathem, I brought a copy of Quicksilver, the first novel in his Baroque Cycle trilogy. I handed him the trade paperback of Quicksilver, and explained that my husband had advised me to bring the hardcover copy, but I’d chosen the trade paperback instead. That was the copy I’ll read, and I want the inscription in the one I’m reading, not the one on the shelf.

“You must have interesting conversations in your house,” he responded, with only the slightest emphasis on “interesting.” Was it a compliment, or a polite way of saying he thought I was crazy? G. Grod and I both think the latter. And G. remains adamant that the hardcover was the way to go.

Esquire doesn’t even pretend to objectivity in its “75 Books Every Man Should Read“:

An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published.

That’s a good thing. And many of the books are pretty good too. For men AND women–I’ve read 12 of them, and many more are on my TBR shelves. But I think I only counted one female author–Flannery O’Conner–on the entire list. Come on. Only men can write great books for men? That’s just silly.

Link from The Morning News.

Several years ago I read Should We Burn Babar? by Herbert Kohl, and was surprised to find books I remembered so fondly from my childhood contained such objectionable stuff. (The book’s analysis of the construction of the Rosa Parks myth is fascinating, too). I went back to the Babar books, and the criticisms weren’t exaggerated; naked, African Babar’s mother is shot, he quickly gets over his grief with a move to Paris, where he is taken in by a lady who dresses him and civilizes him, so that when he returns to the elephants, he is quickly chosen as King.

Adam Gopnik’s piece in the New Yorker, “Freeing the Elephants,” doesn’t dispute this, but he works rather too hard to portray Babar as a comedy of the bourgeoisie rather than as an apology for colonialism. I agree with him about the art, though:

The completed Babar drawings, by contrast, are beautiful small masterpieces of the faux-naïf: the elephant faces reduced to a language of points and angles, each figure cozily encased in its black-ink outline, a friezelike arrangement of figures against a background of pure color. De Brunhoff’s style is an illustrator’s version of Matisse, Dufy, and Derain, which by the nineteen-thirties had already been filtered and defanged and made part of the system of French design.

Link from The Morning News.

Marmeladov to Raskolnikov, from Crime and Punishment:

But if that’s a lie,” he suddenly exclaimed involuntarily, “if man in fact is not a scoundrel–in general, that is, the whole human race–then the rest is all mere prejudice, instilled fear, and there are no barriers, and that’s just how it should be!…

Stefan Kanfer, at the City Journal, on films in black and white (Link from Arts & Letters Daily):

Gregg Toland, the greatest cinematographer of his generation, never shot in color. He and his A-picture directors, including John Ford, Orson Welles, and William Wyler, preferred to give audiences the sense that they were watching a suite of etchings. Who needed color when the haunting landscapes of Wuthering Heights materialized on screen, as if photographed in Emily Brontë’s nineteenth century? Or when Citizen Kane’s deep-focus montages breathed life into the story of a fatally ambitious press lord?

Those of us in the Twin Cities are fortunate to have a good cinema culture that screens many of the black and white films Kanfer mentions. If you don’t have access to film revivals, though, TCM and Netflix do an outstanding job of making these films easily available.

Is it me, or are photos of Claire Danes with her costar Zac Efron from the upcoming film, Me and Orson Welles, more than a little reminiscent of those of Angela and Jordan Catalano from My So-Called Life?