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Thursday, July 29, 2010

Deciphering Henry Tilney

I read Northanger Abbey for the first time slightly over a month ago in preparation for my senior thesis on Jane Austen and the form of the novel, and ever since then I’ve been going back and forth about what I think of the novel’s purported “hero” Henry Tilney. I find the protagonist Catherine to be simple in a cute sort of way—strong-minded and genuine in her opinions even when she’s not willing to speak up and assert them, young and a bit naïve but without it being really infuriating—but Henry is a mystery that I just can’t seem to wrap my mind around.

Part of this, I suspect, can be blamed upon the BBC. I hadn’t read Northanger Abbey a month and a half ago, but I had seen the 2007 TV movie starring Felicity Jones and J. J. Field. I’d found it to be much like its heroine (short, cute, fun), and almost like Pride and Prejudice lite (all the wordplay and banter but none of the ferocious arguments or long-held grudges). In the film, Field’s Henry Tilney is affable, and he delivers his character’s more questionable lines with a smile that makes you forget that he’s not making sense. I bought into Tilney’s silliness as a result of the film, and went into the novel expecting to find him, if nothing else, a good match for Catherine, willing to tease her and challenge her in such a way that would promote their developing relationship as well as the intelligence of both individuals.

I came away from my first reading of the novel with a pretty favorable account of him. He was a little more jokey, and a little more likely to cut others off for the sake of expressing his own intelligence, than I had expected, but his playful humor left me feeling that he was, in a strange way, a male prototype for Elizabeth Bennet. The language used to describe them is, in fact, incredibly similar. Henry is introduced as having “a very intelligent and lively eye,” “fluency and spirit,” and “an archness and pleasantry…which interested” (NA Vol. I Ch. III). In comparison, Darcy relates that Elizabeth’s countenance “was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes” (P&P Vol. I Ch. 6), with “a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody” (P&P Vol. I Ch. 10). Just as Henry teases Catherine by asking her a series of rote questions about her enjoyment of Bath, Elizabeth pursues conversation-by-formula with Darcy during their dance at the Netherfield ball. They are both witty jokesters who wouldn’t be able to stand having many acquaintances at whom they were not allowed to laugh.

But where Elizabeth’s mocking laughter is tamed (at least a little) by her increasing concern for Darcy’s feelings, Henry’s wordplay remains primarily unchecked, and herein lies my problem. Upon a second reading of key passages, I found myself running across instance after instance in which Henry’s wordplay, rather than seeming playful and ridiculous, began to appear authoritarian, a method to prevent others from speaking their minds rather than a way of encouraging light and easy conversation. Take, for example, a conversation between Henry and Catherine, in which Catherine speaks first:

“I do not understand you.”

“Then we are on very unequal terms, for I understand you perfectly well.”

“Me?—yes; I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”

“Bravo!—an excellent satire on modern language.” (NA Vol. II Ch. 1)

On a first reading, the English major in me saw those last two lines as a frankly brilliant satire on modern language, but upon re-reading, I realized that Henry is talking more to amuse himself than to enlighten or entertain his conversational partner, who honestly doesn’t understand what he means. When he interprets her confused (and possibly annoyed) remark as satire, he is applying his own reading to the situation, for his own sake. Henry Tilney certainly speaks well enough to be unintelligible.

But even when he’s intelligible, his manner of talking isn’t always agreeable. He calls his sister “stupid” to her face and seems to consider it as an endearment (or at least not an offense); Eleanor is clearly used to this kind of address, and therefore keen to make sure Catherine doesn’t take her brother too seriously. Frankly, under these conditions, I’m surprised that Catherine manages to take him seriously enough to fall in love with him. He takes over topics of conversation introduced by her and does his best to direct them toward his own experience and interests; when Catherine cuts him off from extolling himself for being so well-read, he retaliates by quarreling with her diction:

“But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?”

“The nicest;—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.”

“Henry,” said Miss Tilney, “you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is for ever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word ‘nicest,’ as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way.” (NA Vol. I Ch. 14)

Again, Eleanor must step in to assure Catherine that this man of her dreams isn’t really as rude and obnoxious as he seems—but even as she does so, she encourages Catherine to “change” her diction to suit Henry’s tastes. It’s obvious that Eleanor’s spent too much time with her brother, and has given up opposing him in these petty arguments. Some people might think this saintly of her, but I identify too much with the fierce and sprightly Elizabeth Bennet to find the idea of forbearance terribly appealing in this instance. (As a side note, when working on my thesis over the past few days, I’ve found my thoughts continually interrupted by a scene of Elizabeth Bennet and Henry Tilney meeting on the dance floor after their respective marriages and sharing an intriguing and flirty power-play of a conversation before going their separate ways. In case you were wondering, in my head it’s a power-play Elizabeth undeniably wins.)

All of this has left me asking myself a question I simply can’t answer: why does Catherine marry him?

The problem with this question is that it’s more a question of theme than of character. I can understand completely Catherine’s attraction to Henry Tilney; it’s one that I felt acutely the first time I read this novel, and in a world of limited options and minimal power for women, perhaps I would have made a similar choice. What I can’t understand is what their marriage means on a larger level—what Austen is trying to get at. I’m of the opinion that marriages in Austen’s novels pull a lot of thematic weight in addition to what they do for the plot and the form. I’m convinced that, on a metaphorical scale, the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy singlehandedly averts the French Revolution from happening again on English soil (there may be more about this conviction in a future post); Elizabeth herself suspects that her marriage could “teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was” (P&P Vol. III Ch. 8), and I don’t think this is an overstatement.

But what do Henry and Catherine have to teach us? Why should the admiring multitudes even give them a second look? Henry Tilney would probably be quite happy at the idea of teaching others; many of his interactions with Catherine are didactic in nature, intended as correctives to her overactive imagination or supplements to her aesthetic education. He seems destined to become the husband-as-teacher, with Catherine as a perfect and eager student, but their intellectual relationship seems sadly one-sided, a conversation in which one voice will always overpower the other. Perhaps, in time, Catherine will learn (as Eleanor has already learned) to stop speaking out, to laugh at her husband’s outlandish assertions rather than to challenge them. But I can’t help but think that she deserves a better future than this, and so I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t something I’m missing, about Henry or Catherine or the whole scale of the novel, that would set this all right.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Fanny Hill and the Modern Romance Novel: Age Before Beauty

In researching for my senior thesis on the impact of woman readers and writers upon the form and respectability of the novel from (roughly) the 1780s to 1810s, I've encountered a lot of eighteenth-century works that I never would have considered to have any relation to the novels that initially inspired this study. I've sifted through conduct books, printed in facsimile and with the dreaded 'long s' staunchly unmodernized; I've scanned treatises on female education; I've become familiar with the plots of several forgotten novels of the century simply because they show up so frequently in modern critical literature.

But perhaps the most surprising discovery has been the frequency of references to The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland. More frequently known as Fanny Hill, this unabashedly pornographic novel that, as its title suggests, follows the misadventures of a London prostitute, was considered so obscene that a year after its publication in 1748, both its author and publisher were taken to court, and it wasn't legally published again until the 1960s.

I actually read a portion of Fanny Hill for a class while studying abroad at Queen Mary, University of London. The class, entitled "Representing London: the Eighteenth Century," ran for the entire academic year and was organized around different topics in eighteenth-century London, ranging from empire to coffee-houses to, you guessed it, prostitution. Other readings for this week included both proposals to set up a charitable institution for the rehabilitation of repentant prostitutes and a list of "Covent Garden ladies" complete with names, ages, and special skills. (I almost wish I were joking.)

Personally, I don't see a problem with reading things like this in an English classroom -- on the contrary, I'm a firm believer in the significance of literary and cultural context, and that includes popular fiction. But the more I contemplate Fanny Hill and its strangely secure place in critical literature on the eighteenth century, the more I wonder why no space exists in the critical canon for its modern descendants.

That's right. I'm talking about romance novels. (And before you ask, yes, I've read a few of those too.)

When people started to argue for the republication of an authorized edition of Fanny Hill in the 1960s, one of the strongest arguments in its favor was that the text should be considered as a valuable historical document, significant for a reconstruction of eighteenth-century interests and fantasies. I can't disagree with this argument at all; I just can't see why this argument doesn't apply to any text, up to and including present-day works to which audiences might otherwise sport objections. If Fanny Hill is suitable material for university history or English classrooms, why not the modern romance? I can see two potential and interrelated answers to this question, but I don't give either of them much credit.

The first answer is, simply, that because of its age, Fanny Hill has been awarded that strange but unassailable status of "historical document," and that perhaps when modern romance novels are two hundred years old, they, too, will be treated to such academic attention. However, this centuries-long gap that stretches between the appreciation of a work as "popular" and its establishment within the literary/historical canon seems unfair at best, and snobbish at worst. Either way, the attitude that popular literature is only significant long after the period in which it was written results in the significance so many genres being overlooked by academia despite their outrageous popular appeal.

The second answer stems, I suspect, from a sexually conservative desire not to assign as coursework anything potentially titillating, as modern romance novels are universally understood to be. Fanny Hill, in contrast to these more modern novels, is (in this view) conveniently too "old" to have any of that sort of appeal for a modern reader, and can be assigned without comment. But somehow I don't think it survived in pirated editions on two continents for over 200 years because its readers found it too "old" to excite; on the contrary, it's this very sort of engagement with the text that must have kept it in print (even if only illicitly) for centuries. Overlooking evidence such as this seems, at best, slightly silly.

In the gap between Fanny Hill and the modern romance novel, I see a great deal of room for research. For example, what does it mean that sexually explicit literary material has gone from being written predominately by men for men in the eighteenth century to (at least from the popular perspective) being predominately written by women for women in the twenty-first? What effect do the genders of author and audience have upon the presentation of sex and sexuality in print? And why is it that reading and analyzing Fanny Hill is a valid, perhaps even respectable occupation for an academic of any gender, whereas providing a modern romance novel with a similar treatment (especially if you're a woman) is not?

Critics of my argument may be quick to point out that it's unfair of me to equate Fanny Hill and paperback romances, and I admit I've been a bit slipshod in instituting this comparison. Frankly, Fanny Hill is far more explicit than any modern romance novel I've ever personally encountered, and ultimately not as well-written. I'm not about to hazard a guess at the real modern equivalent to Fanny Hill -- but I will suggest that a lot of modern romance novels would probably seem tame in comparison.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Jenna Starborn: or, Jane Eyre and Gen Tanks

It is a truth universally acknowledged -- and, in the land of English majors, almost universally lamented -- that any sufficiently popular work of literature will be cannibalized and reworked from as many different angles as there are genres of fiction, provided its copyright is expired. Sometimes, the result is considered groundbreaking, or at least intelligent enough to receive critical acclaim on its own (Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea comes to mind, as does Gregory Maguire's Wicked). But sometimes, the result is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or any one of the hundreds of Austen spin-offs for sale at your local bookstore, in which Elizabeth and Darcy return as private detectives, range abroad as spies, or simply engage in sexual activities the likes of which could make even Wickham blush (or perhaps just start taking notes).

I must confess, I have in fact read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. In fact, there were moments when I rather liked it, because buried beneath all that zombified gore were the original words of Austen's text which had begun to captivate me the first time I read Pride and Prejudice. I had of course re-read the novel since then, but somehow returning to find my favorite passages within a different context made them stand out even more, and if I had any residual positive energy to spare for the spin-off, it was because it reminded me how fully I was in love with the original.

This and other examples have led me to realize two things about reading adaptations, updates, or spin-offs of favorite texts: 1) They will never be as good as the original, and 2) They will nonetheless surprise you by teaching you things about the original text you never really knew. The first point seems obvious; the second requires examples, and this is where Jenna Starborn comes in.

The idea of a science-fiction re-imagining of Jane Eyre might be enough to send many of the literary sort off to premature graves, but frankly, Jane Eyre and science fiction were probably of the two most significant forces in my life when I was seventeen-turning-eighteen. I was introduced to one around the same time that I was writing my International Baccalaureate Extended Essay on the other (in case you were wondering, "Images of Conformity and Individuality in Post-War Dystopia" got full marks), before I had ever entered a university English class and therefore before I discovered that most people disagreed with my assertion that Victorians and aliens were equally deserving of literary merit. I went through my senior year of high school blissfully ignorant of the prejudices harbored in many university English and creative writing departments against those who read or wrote the dreaded "genre fiction," and I'll never stop being thankful that I did, because I have a feeling that in the long run, being that kind of person would have diminished my ability to read and enjoy Jane Eyre as surely as it would have destroyed my ability to read and enjoy Jenna Starborn.

Sharon Shinn's novel might not live up to the source of its inspiration (see Rule 1 above), but reading it was an engaging experience in reading beyond the horizons of what the university deems "literary" and frankly gave me a deeper understanding of why Jane Eyre works on me in the way that it does (see Rule 2). The plot follows closely the basic narrative path of Jane Eyre: Jenna Starborn, grown in a gen tank by a woman who wanted a child of her body but could not conceive, becomes obsolete mere months after she is born when her "Aunt" Rentley (who has not yet legally adopted her) is one of the first women to purchase an artificial womb. She gives birth to her own son, and suddenly Jenna is left as a half-citizen member of a grand household in which her basic needs are cared for but she is ignored as something between a nuisance and a mistake. As a girl of eight, Jenna is sent off-world to a charity school that focuses on teaching its pupils useful mechanical trades, where she graduates with all the knowledge necessary to fill a post as a nuclear generator technician. After a few years spent teaching theoretical physics, Jenna, who has adopted for herself the surname "Starborn" common to many unclaimed children of the gen tanks, tires of her post and seeks employment as the personal technician on the estate of wealthy landowner Everett Ravenbeck, whose mining interests on a terraformed world with a hostile atmosphere require the constant protection of a generator-powered force field.

The extent to which Shinn's re-imagining relies on what I think of as "shorthand" -- the reader's implied previous knowledge of the source text -- made me realize the necessity of those portions of Jane Eyre which, dear readers, I must confess to occasionally skipping. When I began Jane Eyre as a girl of seventeen, I knew nothing of its plot; I empathized with Jane's childish tenacity, felt the indignity of her suffering at the hands of her aunt and cousins, and waited with baited breath to see the kind of woman she would become. But after the terror and defiance of the Red Room scenes, I was left with chapter after chapter of her experiences at Lowood, which, although certainly character-forming, were nonetheless dull. Even her first weeks at Thornfield did little to alleviate the boredom, so that by Chapter 11 I, too, began to long for "incident, fire, life, feeling" -- and in subsequent re-readings, conducted primarily for pleasure, I had a tendency to skim over everything until Jane's meeting with Rochester in Chapter 12.

It wasn't until I noticed that Shinn was attempting something similar in her retelling, by condensing the content of those first chapters so that they didn't get in the way of Mr. Ravensbeck's arrival, that I realized exactly how important those "boring" first eleven chapters really are to Jane Eyre. They subtly manipulate the reader into sympathy with Jane, so that Rochester arrives on scene only when the reader is as willing as Jane to accept his appearance as a positive change. Edward Rochester may be a deeply unlikeable character in many respects, but after the eight-year-long dry spell to which Jane (and the reader) has been condemned, it's no surprise that she falls for the first thing that makes an impact in her world, and takes us down with her.

Because I know Jane Eyre, I was ready and willing to fall in love with Jenna Starborn -- but it's precisely because I know Jane Eyre that I didn't. The abridgment of Jenna's childhood hardships made her less sympathetic to me than Jane has always been, but it also made me less eager for the Rochester-analogue to come onstage. In this and many other instances, I felt like Shinn was so bent upon delivering just what her readers expected, and getting it to them before they could complain, that she inadvertently overlooked the longing that is, for me at least, the motor of Jane Eyre's plot (and Jane's character) in volumes I and II.

This isn't to say that any change to basic plotting, style, or character in a spin-off or adaptation necessarily destine it for the worst. In fact, I frequently read adaptations just for these changes or additions, so I was quite pleased with Shinn's inclusion of the character of Janet Ayerson. With Jenna taking up the job of a nuclear technician rather than a governess, Shinn still needed someone to oversee Mr. Ravensbeck's Adele-analogue bastard child, and thus Janet Ayerson appears onstage as a necessarily less feisty Jane Eyre figure who must watch the child but will never win the love of the master. Instead, Janet runs off with a wealthy and attractive friend of Ravensbeck, who woos her with promises of marriage but installs her as nothing more than his mistress and disposes of her when he becomes bored -- a shocking and unexpected reminder of the danger that Jane Eyre and Jenna Starborn both face in loving men above their station who could so easily destroy these women's characters with no fault being returned to the men for doing so.

It was at about this realization that Jenna Starborn began to disappoint -- because, though Jane of course was trapped within the nineteenth century, Jenna maneuvers in a world of the future where one might be tempted to expect something closer to gender and class equality. Unfortunately, this isn't a possibility Shinn seems prepared to provide for; though she does concoct a reasonable backstory regarding the exploration and settlement of space by wealthy families who instigated an interplanetary class system as a means of retaining their power, doing so seems at times like an easy way out of dealing with what I consider some of the really interesting questions. For example, does the Jane Eyre plot, so concerned with the value of sexual virtue (for women, at least) and embroiled in concerns of marriage still play out the same in a future more sexually promiscuous and less traditionally bounded than the present? How would a clever author have to rearrange details of plot and character to conceive of a Bertha-analogue character who provided a significant plot impediment without the institution of marriage? At the very least, I expected Jenna and Ravensbeck to participate in a more explicitly sexual relationship than Jane and Rochester (by which I mean not that I expected them to jump each other after a relatively short acquaintance, but that I expected them to at least allow themselves to think about it, something the narrative conventions of the Victorian novel more or less forbade Charlotte Bronte to do). However, in this, as in my desire to see a retelling that managed to find a suitable replacement for the marriage plot, I was disappointed; the courtship aspect of Shinn's novel is nearly as Victorian in its sensibilities as the original. The wedding vows might require the characters to swear that neither of them are aliens whose interbreeding with humans has been forbidden, but beyond that, it's a ceremony like any other.

I could go into even more depth about the multiple minute differences of plot, style, and character between Jenna Starborn and Jane Eyre, but I think I've gone far enough now to prove my Rule 2 of retellings, and anything else I have to say will probably consist primarily of whining that should really have been silenced by Rule 1. Jenna Starborn isn't Jane Eyre, but it does manage to ask some interesting questions, whether intended by the author or not, and makes me see Jane Eyre in a newer, clearer light -- and is no less worth reading for the former than the latter.