There is no frigate like a book
“Your
‘Fave’ Is Problematic”: Victorians I [Have] [Re]Love[d][1]
That
otherwise ordinary August day almost eight years ago when I first opened Jane Eyre was my portal into intertextuality,
feminism, and the classics of the Victorian period. True, in contrast to
much of the Western Literary Canon itself, I was little lopsided in favor of
women writers. Yes, I read Vanity Fair
and Bleak House, but it was the
Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot whom I most devoured. (But
please don’t ask me about Anne Bronte’s novels now. It’s been a looooooong time
since I’ve read those.) However, I did balance things out a little with my love
for a variety of Victorian poets, especially Robert Browning. I may be the
worst kind of “fan” because I have yet to read “The Ring and the Book,” but
reading “Rabbi Ben Ezra” when I am depressed or repeating “My Last Duchess” on
my walk home from school are things I have done so frequently that they are a
part of my being.
Already
as I write I find myself revising, rolling back the tapestry I have constructed
of my story to see that my love affair with the Victorians is actually of
longer duration than eight years. When I was seven or eight I read my first
book about Florence Nightingale and thereafter read probably every book about
her in the Junior/Young Adult section of the Red Deer Library.
Looking back, it
amuses me that my fascination with her never led to a desire to be a nurse, but
perhaps that was actually fitting, since in Victorian Literature class this
semester I have been discovering that Nightingale’s talents and passion really
were not for nursing; rather, her
genius lay in administration and mathematics. Even as a child what fascinated
me about Nightingale was her fraught family dynamics, feelings of frustration
and even monstrousness, and the intensity revealed in her diaries and personal
relationships. Watching a documentary about Nightingale which took a rather revisionist
stance, I learned that she did not actually succeed in lowering the death rate
at Scutari, due to a fatal blind spot about sanitation.[2] The BBC documentary is
controversial because of its portrayal of Nightingale as scheming for power
rather than the maternal “Lady with the Lamp” of popular iconography; it is
ironic that a woman who so vociferously fought against the “angel of the house”
stereotype throughout much of her life—perhaps even being a difficult, ornery
killjoy—has been treated to such hagiography.[3] However, Nightingale’s troubled
personality and imperfect professional legacy have actually renewed my fascination with her. In “Cassandra”,
her self-identification with the doomed prophetess of The Iliad, her complaint that women are considered to be “by birth a
Tory”—staid and devoted to maintaining an oppressive status quo—and her call
for woman to be able make “a study of what she does,” are at once political and
personal, intellectual and emotional. A closer look at Nightingale’s life and
writings serves as an indictment of Victorian culture’s narrow opportunities
for women. (This feminist strain in her writings, however, did not cause Nightingale to openly align with women's suffrage in its ascendancy during her later years.) Yes, my ‘fave’ may be problematic and it is a shame for Nightingale to
be exalted while women of lower class or women of colour, like Mary Seacole,
were so long largely unknown, but my ‘fave’ still remains a woman who exercised
extraordinary strength in going against her family and culture and asserting herself
as an independent, individual.
 |
| The cover of one biography of Nightingale I would sometimes read during long baths |
Now
I pass to a ‘fave’ who is perhaps less problematic of personality despite being a white male,
but who seemed to delight in writing about
problematic characters. The problematic male narrators of “My Last Duchess” and “Porphyria’s Lover” are so chilling only a fellow-sociopath would admire or defend them. However, I think
part of the real interest in some of Browning’s other works is his choice to
put inspiring, quasi-religious statements in the mouths of less-than-perfect
characters. For years I’ve loved Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “Andrea
del Sarto” about the painter who, persuaded by his mercenary wife, defrauds the
king of France and speaks the dramatic monologue mostly in a state of
discouragement, looking back on the “strange” life “God made us lead” (50).[4] His musing that “a man’s reach
should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?” is a stirring, yet
comforting response to balked ambition. In addition, the intense subjectivity of the dramatic
monologue lends itself to sympathy with del Sarto whose wife is so easily
distracted by “the cousin’s whistle”--cousin here probably meaning lover (267). However, as I was reading an essay
entitled “Blues and Punishment: ‘Fra Lippo Lippi,’ ‘Andrea del Sarto,’ ‘The Heart
Knoweth its own Bitterness,’ and ‘Reflection’,” I was reminded that like so
many other men in Browning’s oeuvre, ‘the flawless painter’ also desires to
control women. The essay’s author notes that del Sarto’s “voice holds Lucrezia
hostage, and in appropriating her as his other half, he subverts her actual
existence as a physical person.”[5] She is his muse and he can
only suppose “that Lucrezia might
possibly be of the capacity to look back on others.”
As
we begin Middlemarch I find myself
making comparisons between it and other works we have been reading in class.
Although Dorothea’s “ardent [and] theoretical nature” might elicit comparisons
to Florence Nightingale, Pamela Erens notes that Nightingale herself finished Eliot’s
magnum opus and “was annoyed that Dorothea didn’t devote her post-Casaubon life
to social work.”[6]
The novel’s idealistic young doctor, Tertius Lydgate, is another fictional white
guy whom I consider a ‘fave’. However, as with Andrea del Sarto, it is easy to
valorize him and become implicated in objectifying or paternalistic sexism toward
the “spoiled” wife whom he accuses of having “flourished wonderfully on a murdered
man's brains.”[7]
Again, the problematic element is not so much in my love for this Victorian
epic, but in the culture of that time and
of our own that objectifies women while simultaneously blaming them for
men’s failures. My ‘faves’ are problematic, but exploring these problems and
one’s own problematic assumptions and biases is what makes the discipline of
English worthwhile and relevant.
[1]
Your Fave Is Problematic is a tumblr site that documents celebrities’ racist,
sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and ableist words and behavior: http://yourfaveisproblematic.tumblr.com/
This site and its aims connect to Victorian literature firstly because in the
literature we have read in this class we have seen many of these very issues
displayed, sometimes in more subtle ways like Roseanna Spearman’s “deformity”
in The Moonstone seeming
to invite ostracization
and suspicion, but also all too often in the utterly revolting racism of
works like the Mutiny
Ballads. Secondly, although the term “celebrity” may now carry the negative
connotations of prurient tabloid culture, authors and public
intellectual types
may achieve a kind of celebrity status in certain more literary circles,
just
as the two ‘eminent Victorians’ I discuss here both did later in life.
Such an example, of course, might be J.K. Rowling whose stereotypical
view of Native Americans goes beyond "problematic" precisely because she
is so well-respected and influential, as the blogger at Righting Red here
explains. I may have to write a follow-up post discussing this issue in
relation to J.K. Rowling and hopefully deconstructing my own biases as I
go. Thank you to Honorat Selonnet for highlighting the above blogger in
class.
[2] I
watched this documentary on Youtube and the details of producer, etc, are not
given: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBVX5s43_Ks
However, I think it is likely this one: Robinson, Jancis, and Clare Beavan.
Florence Nightingale: Iron Maiden. Great Britain: BBC, 2001.
[3] See,
for example, this article in which one of the documentary’s critics is
consulted: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/8792420/BBC-accused-of-belittling-Florence-Nightingale.html
No comments:
Post a Comment