Classics

Moby Dick

| ruthpelletier

By Herman Melville

All Posts Contain Spoilers

Classics are tricky. The truth is, some of them just don’t hold up. Whether they are mired too much in their time and context, and simply cannot translate centuries after their conception, or whether they were never really that good to begin with, is impossible to say. It’s just a fact, though, that it is not uncommon to roll up on a Great Book and find oneself disappointed.

You can’t ever tell, though, in advance which books will live up to their reputation and which will leave you cold. ‘Moby Dick’, for example, I was sure was going to underwhelm. It sounded boring, frankly: too much whaling, too much esoterica, too much rigging. It also sounded obvious, you know? One loony guy’s obsession with an uncatchable thing? The futility, the mortality, the what’s-the-point-of-it-all-ness – it all seemed a little on the nose. If I’m being totally honest, I sort of assumed that it was one of the books that people claim is good because it’s hard to read and they want to flex that they got through it.

I was wrong. ‘Moby Dick’ is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. It is a novel of grand, human scope, of despair and madness and hope. And it isn’t about what I thought it would be about: it’s not about existential futility – it’s about existential rage.

In the years since I first read ‘Moby Dick’, two passages have stayed close by me. These two passages are about the same thing, the whale itself, and Ahab’s pursuit of it. The first occurs only about a hundred pages into the novel, when a crewman challenges Ahab’s obsession with Moby Dick, the whale that took his leg, and Ahab answers him.

“‘Vengeance on a dumb brute!’ cried Starbuck, ‘that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.’

‘Hark ye yet again, – the little lower later. All visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If a man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations.'” (p. 166)

The second passage happens only a few pages later, and it is Ismael’s description of Ahab’s obsession.

“And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in that his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperation. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest has been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.” (p. 181)

Ahab has become known in literature as a man on a single-minded mission of revenge. He has become a symbol of a man in quixotic pursuit, of fruitless obsession. The ‘white whale’, of course, has entered common parlance as the thing that can never be caught. Because Ahab is in pursuit of an animal, he is considered mad; even within the confines of the novel, even by his crewmates, he is treated as insane.

And perhaps he is, but not in the way you might think. 

Ahab’s obsession is not with a whale per se, I think, but with the malice of the universe. Behind the reality that we know, behind the world that we see, Ahab sees a vast malevolence. A malign, active intelligence, which erupts into our world (which is the pasteboard mask) and does us harm. It is what Ismael describes as “that intangible malignity which has been from the beginning”: evil.

Questions of cosmic unfairness (why do bad things happen to some people and not others?) have animated all cultures, all systems of religion and moral philosophy. We might think of misfortunes as accidents, as bad luck. We, perhaps, are not inclined to ascribe to the universe hostility against us, and we accept unhappy accidents as bad roles of the die.

But Ahab does not. He has lost his leg in an accident – why, he asks, should he not seek recompense against whatever force marked him for misfortune? That he does know what force it is that animated the whale will not stop him: “That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white while agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

Herman Melville

Ahab is insane not because he wishes to revenge himself against the whale; Ahab is insane because he believes that he can revenge himself against the universe, that he is owed recompense for an accident of fate. He is searching not for a whale, but for a meaning, a coherence, which will give his suffering a context. He is railing not against the injury itself, but against the idea that he lives in a universe without justice.

“How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?” For Ahab, his misfortune has shown him that the world he inhabits is a prison, a prison of unreasoning pain, where terrible things can happen without recourse for the victims. He refuses to be trapped in that kind of world; he will “strike through the mask”, break outside the boundaries of the world. And he will do that by striking not the whale itself, but by striking through the whale, to the intelligence he believes must exist outside it.

That Ahab is mad undeniable, but there is a grandeur in his madness. He is mad for his refusal to suffer dumbly the blows of fate. And I think that I have loved these passages for so long because, in a way, I cannot fault him. Why shouldn’t we rise up and strike back at fate, if we can find a purpose which persuades us? Why should we be content to suffer unfairness? Isn’t destiny, when viewed with clear eyes, enraging?

It is possible to see bravery in Ahab’s refusal to obey accident; it is equally possible to see cowardice. We all live with misfortune in some way or another; isn’t it narcissistic for one man to demand redress? Is Ahab strong, or is Ahab brittle? But I think that to love ‘Moby Dick’ is, in the end, to love Ahab himself, for his rage and for his pain (ultimately, they are the same thing). I love him – I have loved him for a long time now.

And, sometimes, I can see the world through his eyes. Everyone once in a while, when something terrible happens, some senseless accident which mutilates and crushes the innocent, I see a flicker in the fabric of the world. For a brief moment, I see the mask, and I sense the cruelty behind it, and I feel the sort of rage that might propel one to strike through it.

And in those moments, I see something else: that it isn’t Ahab who’s insane. It’s the rest of us.

The Age Of Innocence

| ruthpelletier

By Edith Wharton

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

I’ve reached a point in my life when I have probably forgotten most of what I’ve read.

I estimate that I have read, on average, seventy-five books a year for the past twenty years. Some of those books have been, basically, wiped from my working memory. I will read back over my reading list and think, “Oh yeah, I did read that.” There are classics, Great Books, which I have read and about which I can recall absolutely nothing at all (‘The Adventures of Augie March’, for example – I couldn’t tell you what that book was about with a gun to my head). Many of the books I’ve read live in my memory as ghosts, barely discernible but definitely there (‘On Human Bondage’: I’m pretty sure someone falls in love with a waitress).

On the other hand, some books stay with me with extraordinary vividness. More than that, there are passages that I can recall almost word for word, decades after I read them. These passages have meaningfully changed me, and I carry them through my life, using them to understand myself and the world around me.

There is no rhyme or reason to what lodges in my heart in this way. Sometimes, it’s not even a passage in the traditional sense: it is a moment, or a single sentence. But they have shaped me, these passages, informed my ideas of love and honor and grief.

The end of ‘The Age of Innocence’ is one of those moments. I have carried the end of that book with me for years; I remember it, I’m haunted by it. I love it, and I think it is one of the most beautiful, poignant, humane moments in literature.

‘The Age of Innocence’ is the story of Newland Archer. Newland is a child of one of New York City’s most prominent families, the oldest blood in the New World. He is engaged to, and marries, May Welland, a young woman from an equally illustrious family. May is kind and lovely but utterly proper – everyone agrees that he has made a great match.

However, one night, Newland is introduced to the Countess Olenska. The Countess, who is May’s cousin, has fled her marriage to a wicked European count. She is living in New York, a woman separated from her husband, an object of pity and mild scandal. She is different from any woman Newland has ever known: independent in thought, unconventional, and interesting. Certainly, she is quite different from the entirely conventional May. As Newland falls more and more desperately in love with Olenska, he begins to chafe at the restraints of New York high society, and the norms which circumscribe his life.

Eventually, he and the Countess Olenska determine that they will run away together. On the eve of their flight, though, May comes to him and tells him that she is pregnant. Newland is unwilling, or unable, to abandon his young family, and Countess Olenska leaves New York City.

The very last, short section of the book takes place decades later. Newland Archer is a well-respected widower, a New York City fixture, taking a trip with his adult son, Dallas, to Paris. He learns that the Countess Olenska, now a widow herself, is also in Paris. Newland, finally free of the wife with whom he stayed out of obligation, decides to visit her one afternoon. On his way, though, he has this conversation with his son:

“‘…But mother said-‘

‘Your mother?’

‘Yes: the day before she died. It was when she sent me alone – you remember? She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing you most wanted.’

Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: ‘She never asked me.’

‘No, I forgot. You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath…’

Archer did not accompany his son to Versailles. He preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris. He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an unarticulate lifetime.

After a while he did not regret Dallas’s indiscretion. It seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, someone had guessed and pitied…And that it should have been his wife moved him indescribably.”

Newland decides not to visit the countess. He will never see her again.

We live in a romantic culture. Most of us would be sympathetic, I think, to the idea that Newland should have pursued romantic love. We conflate romance and actualization: we feel, instinctively, that Newland was denied something fundamental when he was denied his chance to spend an unconventional life with the woman he loved.

Newland chooses duty over romance – this is a choice we understand. But we expect, at the end of his life, when his wife is dead and his duty is discharged, that Newland will choose to see his countess, to be reunited with her. His decision not to changed the way I think about the world.

Edith Wharton

I have pondered this passage for years. Not at all dramatic, is it? You could drive right past it without noticing, if you were sprinting for the end. I cannot articulate what it means to me. It is that sentence, “It seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, someone had guessed and pitied…”, the suffering it implies, which moves me. The idea of a life so lonely (“the packed regrets and stifled memories of an unarticulate lifetime”) that even the knowledge of a witness, the knowledge of not having been invisible in your sadness, could be so powerful.

Or perhaps it is the quiet, desperate dignity of a man choosing to honor the life he had instead of the life he wanted. Of the understanding that we cannot have all things, and perhaps it is best simply to be what we are.

I think, when I was younger, I became obsessed with this passage because I didn’t really understand Newland’s choice. But, as I have gotten older, I understand better that life is often full of grief for what we did not have, did not do. Very few of us make it through our lives without wondering after, longing for, another path, at least for a time. It is too late to chase what might have been – all that remains is to honor and enjoy what was. And the silent, loving witness of his wife reminds Newland that what was, while not perfect, while not romantic, was worthy.

I understand, in a way I could not before, that Newland, at the end of his life, chooses himself. Newland’s dearest wish had been taken from him by the inopportune pregnancy of his wife. Only, in the end, by renouncing the Countess again could Newland claim the choice as his own. It was the only way to make his peace, I think, with the life he had.

There comes in a time in our lives when what we wish, most dearly, is not to regret any longer. The time is spent – the only choice that remains is whether or not to be at peace with what has happened. What ‘The Age of Innocence’ taught me is that, while the price of that peace might be high indeed, it is worth paying.

1984

| ruthpelletier

By George Orwell

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

In general, I’m not a huge fan of banning books. I think that people should get to read pretty much anything they want. Books can contain ideas or information, and we should have the right to encounter both. Be they counter-productive, perverse, even wrong, the right to consume them or not should lie with the individual. And, again in general, I believe that this is a universal right: if you can read about an idea, I don’t think anyone should have the power to stop you.

However (and perhaps this is breathtaking hypocrisy, I don’t care), I don’t think teenagers should read ‘1984’. And I definitely don’t think it should required of them.

Unfortunately, it often is. ‘1984’ is required reading in many high school curricula – it certainly was in mine. I read it the first time years ago, as a ninth grader, and I believed that I understood it. I thought it was about the natural culmination of the authoritarian state, about surveillance and propaganda, Big Brother and Thought Crime and 2 + 2 = 5. I dismissed the human story as irrelevant. I thought Winston and Julia and their love story were merely props upon which Orwell was resting his polemic; I thought those set-pieces of authoritarianism were the point of the novel.

And because I thought it was merely about those set-pieces, because I ignored the human story entirely, I thought ‘1984’ was very simple, and I wasn’t at all impressed by it. I thought it was obvious. 2 + 2 does not = 5, clearly, I already knew that; Big Brother is sinister, duh. It seemed like an awful lot of words to make an unoriginal point: Authoritarianism is bad – yes, thank you, I know all about the Nazis, I get it*.

*I was such an asshole.

Many years later, I reread ‘1984’. I didn’t want to, by the way – that’s how alienated I had been from the text when I was a kid. But my father gave me Orwell’s collected non-fictions, and I decided to reread a few of his most famous works as prep. That was when I discovered that I had completely missed the real point of the novel. And I had missed it because I was a teenager, and there are certain things that most teenagers can’t understand yet.

The surveillance state isn’t the point of ‘1984’ – it’s the premise. When Winston is taken into custody, and tortured for months, as his will breaks, he begins to believe the lies Big Brother tells him. He tells his torturers, swears to them, that 2 + 2 = 5, and he really believes it, and I thought that that was the moral of the book: that eventually, under enough duress, we can believe anything.

But the important part actually comes next. As he is being tortured, even as his sanity breaks down, as he begins spouting Big Brother’s propaganda back at him, Winston keeps something back.

“For what was there that they had not screwed out of him under the torture? He had told them everything he knew about her [Julia], her habits, her character, her past life; he had confessed in the most trivial detail everything that had happened at their meetings, all that he had said to her and she to him, their black-market meals, their adulteries, their vague plottings against the party – everything. And yet, in the sense in which he intended the word, he had not betrayed her. He had not stopped loving her; his feelings toward her remained the same.”

And for this last reluctance, he is taken to Room 101. Room 101 reveals, of course, the real purpose of the surveillance state. Because They have been watching you every moment of your life, They know your every hope, your every fear. They know what scares you the most. And in Room 101, They can inflict it on you.

Winston’s worst fear is rats, and in Room 101, the state has devised an apparatus that will allow rats to eat off his face while he is still alive (as a side note, this is one of the very few choices that Orwell made in ‘1984’ I don’t agree with – it’s a little too outlandish, too dramatic, for me). That moment, as Winston is facing down the rats, is the real point of the book:

“The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then – no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment – one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over.

‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you to do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!'”

The rats are stopped, and Winston is released. He is allowed back into the outside world; he is not even monitored. Because he has sacrificed his love to the torture, because the state has destroyed his capacity to love, and the state knows that people who cannot love are not a threat to anyone.

The power of this moment can only really be understood by someone who has loved another person more than they love themselves. That’s the only way to feel what it would mean, in a moment of danger, to offer up that loved person in your place, to want them to suffer instead of you. If you have not cherished someone else’s happiness and safety more dearly than your own, it is impossible to imagine what would be required to wish them harm of that magnitude. If you have, this moment is horrifying, because you know that it would require the denaturation of your very self, your entire being.

That is the point that Orwell was trying to make, I believe. That terror, sustained terror, deprives us of our ability to love other people. And that the ability to love other people is a necessary part of our humanity. Without it, we are not fully human.

And the State, the modern, industrial state, is one of the few entities able to exert the force you need to instill that level of terror, that loveless, dehumanizing terror, in a large population of people (the Church being another). The ultimate tragedy of the terror state is not that it tortures and kills – it isn’t even that it warps reality for the purpose of control – it’s that it deprives its citizens of their ability to truly love each other. It reduces them to crouching and fearful animals, capable of caring about nothing besides their own survival.

Teenagers, with some exceptions, have not had the opportunity to love something else more than themselves. They are incubating the personalities they will roll out as adults, and that requires most, if not all, of their attention. They are the center of their own worlds, and perhaps rightly so. But that means that the visceral horror of Winston’s capitulation – the fear you feel as an adult imagining what it would take to make you turn on your own – that is probably not accessible to most teenagers.

George Orwell

It certainly wasn’t accessible to me as a teenager. And while I obviously don’t think people should be kept from reading books simply because they might misunderstand them (I think now that perhaps I have never really understood any book the first time I read it), it does hurt my heart to think about all those teenagers walking around believing that they have read and understood ‘1984’, when in fact they missed it completely. If it were not required reading, some of them might have found their way to it, as adults, understood it then and been moved by it, but they don’t, because they think, as I did, that they’ve already it.

It’s too good a work to be missed in this way. It’s too good to be forced onto an audience who cannot really grasp it. ‘1984’ is one of the most powerful, brutal, prescient novels ever written. When I read it as an adult, it devastated me, and my respect for it became the foundation of my relationship with George Orwell, the writer I love most in the world. I admire ‘1984’ deeply, and I regret bitterly all those years that I misunderstood it.

Middlemarch

| ruthpelletier

By George Eliot

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

It’s always stressful when you fail to love a Great Book. It’s disappointing – you know something is askew, and the consensus critical opinion suggests that it is you.

I don’t love ‘Middlemarch‘. I know that I’m supposed to love ‘Middlemarch’ – everyone loves ‘Middlemarch’, especially women. Women seem to love ‘Middlemarch’ to an almost uncanny degree – the ubiquity of the appreciation is rivaled, in my opinion, only by love of ‘Pride and Prejudice’.

But I’m a woman, and I have never loved ‘Middlemarch’.

I’ve read it three times in the past twenty years. I’ve never liked it, but I keep rereading it, partly because everyone loves it and I’m trying to figure out why, and partly because I can’t ever seem to remember what happened in it.

So it’s time to tackle ‘Middlemarch‘, fresh from this latest rereading and before I forget it again.

Let me begin with the obvious: it is beautifully written. My copy of ‘Middlemarch’ bristles with flags from all the passages that I’ve marked. The language is gorgeous, the insights profound.

“To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul. Mr Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying.” (p. 266)

“Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best.” (p. 229)

“Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear.” (p. 349).

That I am in the presence of a great mind as I wade yet again through this book is obvious to me – Eliot is a magnificent writer. With her writing, I have absolutely no quarrel. But, alas, I loathe every single one of her characters, and I don’t care at all about what happens to any of them.

For what it’s worth, I am aware that this is the shallowest possible level of analysis. Characters in novels aren’t your friends – it is not their responsibility to be likable to you. The idea that the merit of a book is how much you root for the characters, or how much you see yourself in them, how much you connect with their situation, is, in my opinion, sophomoric garbage, weak thinking for weak minds.

Partly, this approach to novels offends me because it doesn’t even apply to life. People have many paths to demonstrate worth: they might be brilliant, or funny, or brave, without being at all likable. Plenty of people have accomplished great things, lived interesting lives, without being the sort of person you can relate to, with whom you’d like to grab a beer. Often in the world, the best lives, the most moving or interesting ones, are lived by weak, repellent, or wicked people. Novels, which are essentially just stories about people, shouldn’t be held to a narrower standard than the people themselves.

But, in my defense, I don’t loathe the characters in ‘Middlemarch‘ because they are weak, repellent, or wicked. I loathe them because they are boring. In all likelihood, I wouldn’t loathe them in real life – in all likelihood, I only loathe them because I am being forced by consensus opinion to read an 800-page book about them. Again.

The plain, embarrassing truth is that I don’t really understand why people love this book. But I have a sneaking suspicion that loving ”Middlemarch”, rather like hating ‘Middlemarch’, is really all about Dorothea. I don’t think anyone loves ‘Middlemarch’ for Fred Vincy, or for Will Ladislaw – Dorothea is fulcrum upon which the novel pivots and turns – it is Dorothea, rather like Elizabeth Bennet, upon whom readers pin their attachment.

Certainly, Dorothea is the obstacle which I cannot get past. Much of my irritation with her, I think, stems from my sense that I am supposed to like her, my sense that George Eliot liked her. She is not drawn as a perfect character, but her flaws, stated clearly in Eliot’s beautiful, precise prose, have the aspect of Trojan flaws: putatively added to give realism and depth, but actually draped across a character to flatter them, make them more lovable. The novelistic equivalent of being asked your weaknesses in a job interview and saying, “I care too much about my work.”

George Eliot tells us that Dorothea is idealistic, lofty in aspiration and naive in execution, and earnest to a fault, as befits a person pure of heart. But that is not who I see. The character I see is a fatuous twit: a stupid, pretentious woman who’s virtue is driven as much by her own vanity as anything else. And while I think it is entirely possible to love a stupid, pretentious character, I think it is very difficult to love a stupid pretentious character whose author doesn’t see her the same way.

As I write that out, it suddenly occurs to me that it is obvious. Of course my problem with ‘Middlemarch’ isn’t that I don’t like the characters – very few books are peopled by characters I actually like. The problem is that I don’t like them, but everyone else, most importantly George Eliot, does.

Maybe it’s not possible to really love a book when you substantively disagree with the author about its characters – I don’t know, I need to give it some more thought. But it is the problem here: George Eliot is charmed by her characters, and I am not.

George Eliot, portrait by Samuel Laurence

A story needs something to justify itself to readers. All stories are acts of persuasion: the readers are offering their time; the story must provide a continued justification for that time. Different kinds of stories provide different justifications: action heroes aren’t well-developed characters because they don’t need to be, no one is there to watch them grow and mature. Hero’s journeys are the opposite: if the hero doesn’t justify the story, nothing will. Likewise, when a character is meant to be disliked, the story is built to accommodate that repulsion. Repellent characters are often charming, but they are made to be – effort is made to attract readers to them despite themselves.

In this context, a mismatched justification is no justification at all. George Eliot wrote a hero’s journey: good and lovable, though imperfect, people find happiness through tribulation. The virtuous are rewarded; sinners are punished.

But I don’t find her heroes heroic – I find them pointless. And pointlessness doesn’t work in a hero’s journey; in a hero’s journey, it’s hero or bust. Worse, when the hero is pointless, all the apparatus of their journey becomes burdensome, and you, as a reader, resent it.

Or at least I do. And I know that it’s just me, it’s my problem. Everyone in the world seems to find Dorothea enchanting, worth journeying with – I’m clearly the exception. And I wish it weren’t so; I don’t feel superior when I fail to love something everyone else does. I feel…unsettled, as though I am missing something obvious.

I would love to love ”Middlemarch‘. But if we could choose to love, the world would look very different. And I have read this book three times now, and I don’t like it any better for it. It might be time give up, agree to disagree, and move on from ‘Middlemarch’.

Wuthering Heights

| ruthpelletier

By Emily Bronte

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

Sometimes I wonder why we even bother to make teenagers read.

Specifically, I wonder why we make teenagers read the classics. In middle and high school, we drag them, mostly unwilling, through the Great Books before they have had most of the experiences which would allow them to connect with the material therein, and insist to them that these books represent the best of human literary effort.

I understand the arguments in favor: we are using these books to teach children how to think critically about literature, teaching them how to approach and, hopefully, to love it. Of all the teenagers alive, I was perhaps the one most likely to approach the material with reverence; if I was not smarter than anyone else, certainly I had a character inclined, even at that age, to love great books, to embrace them with an open heart.

But even I misunderstood most of them. So often, in my adulthood, I have picked up again a book I read in high school only to discover upon rereading that I have completely misremembered it. That the book that I thought I loved all these years bears little to no resemblance to the actual book.

I did not love ‘Wuthering Heights‘ in high school. I remembered it as a great love story, and I was not often moved by love stories in high school. I remembered it as tragic, overwrought, but essentially romantic: ‘Romeo and Juliet’ on the moors. Catherine and Heathcliffe loved each other cleanly, I thought, were kept apart by their families, died. There was much lamenting, I thought, and Healthcliffe I remembered as dark, and brooding, but essentially appealing.

I don’t know why I decided to reread it now, decades later. I found a lovely old box set of ‘Wuthering Heights‘ and ‘Jane Eyre’ (by far my favorite of the two) at Second Story Books years ago, and I picked it up on impulse last week. And, upon rereading, I have discovered something interesting, something which completely eluded me in high school:

‘Wuthering Heights‘ is batshit crazy.

‘Wuthering Heights‘ is romantic only in the technical sense: it is about two people who experience a romantic impulse toward each other. It is not romantic in the actual sense: it is not about love.

It is about hatred, and rage, and madness: it is about obsession and the warping of the human soul. It is about perversion of the human heart, not in the sexual sense, but in the original sense of the word: it is about hearts which have been twisted from their original purpose. Corrupted by something else and made into something so ugly that violence is the only possible expression of the original human capacity for caring.

It is, famously, the story of the bond between Catherine Earnshaw and Healthcliffe. I remembered this about it: it is the story of two souls, facing obstinately towards each other but kept by circumstances apart in marriage. Lonely, therefore, and tortured, doomed to wander until they find each other, finally, in death.

What I did not remember is that both our protagonists are tortured, not by unrealized love, but by rage and spite. A terrible, driving, defining urge to hurt everyone around them. They are both unrelentingly vile, and in their vileness they torment not only every single other character in the book, but each other. ‘Wuthering Heights’ is a novel of vengeance.

“Are you possessed with a devil,” he [Heathcliffe] pursued savagely, “to talk in that matter to me when you are dying? Do you reflect that all those words will be branded on my memory, and eating deeper eternally after you have left me? You know you lie say I have killed you: and, Catherine, you know I could as soon forget you as my existence! Is it not sufficient for your infernal selfishness, that while you are at peace I shall writhe in the torments of hell?” (p. 101)

I suppose, when I was fifteen, I assumed that, if characters in a novel were loved deeply, they must have been deserving of that love. If they were protagonists, they must therefore be sympathetic protagonists. I was not, I suppose, as a teenager capable of understanding that sometimes literature asks us to empathize with characters we are not supposed to admire. As a teenager, I must have thought that protagonists are only meant to reflect our better selves, whether they are true or total or not.

Emily Bronte

I was wrong, obviously, and I am particularly distressed to discover my mistake because I didn’t need heroic, sympathetic protagonists, not then, not now. I needed exactly the kind of protagonists that ‘Wuthering Heights’ was offering me: angry, tormented souls, souls who, in desperate reaction to their own psychic pain, would lash out at the world around them. Souls whose own agony would make them destructive, who carried their own suffering inside themselves, as part of themselves, but who nevertheless longed for a happiness that was an impossibility for them.

I mean, we all do, right? That’s what literature is for! I think, if you live long enough, you learn, inevitably, that heroes are thin on the ground, and literature is one of the ways that we cope with this. We need our flawed protagonists to help us play out our own worst traits, to see ourselves under different lights, from different angles. Literature is how we run experiments with aspects of our characters, how we try out different lives without paying the price for them.

There are moments of real poignancy for me in ‘Wuthering Heights‘, moments of sad human beauty. One moment, in particular, has stayed with me. Early in the novel, when Heathcliffe is told by the narrator that Cathy’s ghost (Cathy has been dead many years at this point) has been to visit her old room:

“He [Heathcliffe] got onto the bed, and wrenched open the lattice, bursting, as he pulled at it, into an uncontrollable passion of tears. “Come in! come in!” he sobbed. “Cathy, do come. Oh do – once more! Oh! my heart’s darling: hear me this time, Catherine, at last!” The spectre showed a spectre’s ordinary caprice: it gave no sign of being.” (p. 18).

It is a reminder that even wicked people are capable of genuine grief in loss, a fact which, as a wicked person myself, I was going to discover.

‘Wuthering Heights‘ and I missed each other, in time. It is too melodramatic for me, as I am now. I have become more placid in my adulthood, my dramas are adult dramas, I do not draw emotional sustenance from unquiet spirits raging without each other.

But when I was a teenager, I did, and I am grieved that I did not see the lesson when it was in front of me, then. The lesson of ‘Wuthering Heights’, that real love is not possible for creatures who are animated by hatred, no matter how much they want, or need, it, not in this life – that real love and hatred are antitheses – that was a lesson I would have to learn for myself, the hard way. I could have used a book or two to teach it to me – it might have shortened my sentence.

The Thorn Birds

| ruthpelletier

By Colleen McCullough

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It’s always slightly disorienting to hear a book you’ve never heard of described as a “classic”.

It’s even more disorienting to read that “classic” and discover that it is absolute trash.

I’m not sure what called ‘The Thorn Birds‘ to my attention after all these years. I suspect I started noticing it on bookstore shelves – it is a great title, after all, and a big honking book, and I love big honking books. I certainly did minimal research into the plot before I bought it, but buy it I did.

‘The Thorn Birds‘ is, apparently, the best-selling novel in Australia, ever. It is also the source material for the most-watched mini-series of all time, and it has been re-released as a ‘modern classic’. Only this last achievement surprises me: ‘The Thorn Birds’ is pulpy and plot-driven, perfect mini-series material, but only a classic if classicism is a measure of popularity and not of critical merit.

It is, at its heart, the story of Meggie Cleary and her family. Meggie is born in New Zealand, the only daughter of Fee and Paddy Cleary. Paddy is a sheep-shearer and the family is poor; however, Paddy’s estranged sister, Mary Carson, is the richest women (nay, person) in Australia, the owner of Drogheda, a sheep and cattle ranch as big as Ireland. When Maggie is a child, her aunt calls her father to Drogheda to come and run the ranch, promising to leave it to him when she’s done.

On Drogheda, Meggie meets Father Ralph de Bricassart, the astonishingly fit, astonishingly handsome, astonishingly suave local priest. Ralph and Meggie, the priest and the little girl, love each other on sight, he with a strange, protective, fatherly instinct for a lonely little girl, and she with the adoration a child feels for the only being that has ever loved it.

But Meggie will, of course, grow up and, of course, become very beautiful, and the love between them will change, mature, and, of course, become lustful and forbidden. ‘The Thorn Birds’ is the story of the way in which this deep and forbidden love will shape and deform not only their lives but the lives of the entire Cleary family, Meggie’s parents and brothers, and the two children she will eventually bear, one with the irresistibly sexy Father Ralph.

It’s really not a great book. The plot alone should give that away: it’s overwrought and creepy all at the same time: the fated and forbidden love between a devastatingly attractive, yet ambitious, priest and a lonely young girl, a young girl to whom he is both masculine ideal and father-figure? It’s wildly implausible and super gross.

Colleen McCullough

From McCullough’s New York Times obituary: “Ms. McCullough’s fiction was prized by readers for its propulsive plots, sympathetic characters and sheer escapist potential. Its critical reception was mixed; reviewers took the author to task for sins ranging from stilted dialogue to the profligate use of exclamation points…Negative reviews did not appear to faze Ms. McCullough, whom The Philadelphia Inquirer, in a 1996 profile, described as “a woman supremely unafflicted by self-doubt.”

“I think in their heart of hearts all these people know that I’m more secure than they are, more confident than they are and smarter than they are,” she said of her critics in a 2007 interview on Australian television.”

Germaine Greer wrote a very satisfying re-examination of ‘The Thorn Birds’ in the Guardian when it was reissued as a Virago Modern Classic, in which she says, “It would probably be over the top to denounce ‘The Thorn Birds’ as a sneakily racist and sectarian book, but it is definitely contrived and insidious. Let’s just leave it at that.”

Germaine Greer is exactly correct: ‘The Thorn Birds‘ is contrived and insidious. ‘Insidious’ is a very good word for what it is: it is possessed of a deeply fucked up world view which it hides with plot, and then uses the outcome of that plot as an argument in favor of that worldview.

But what is the worldview? Great question, and the answer is: I’m not entirely sure, but I know it’s bad.

And, yes, I know that that is a bullshit thing to say, but it is nevertheless true. It is possible to know that something is corrupting without understanding its exact designs.

The world of ‘The Thorn Birds‘ is an all-white world. It is one in which the gigantic estates of the white landed gentry which locked aboriginal peoples out of the Australian economy for generations are remembered with nostalgia. It is one in which the sexual conquest of a young girl, a young girl in his charge, over whose family he has complete financial power, can be considered part of a priest’s spiritual deepening. And that the young girl is probably the seducer anyway. It is a world in which deferred sexual or maternal impulses curdle inside women and cause them to become frigid, deranged, spiteful, unnatural. Men, on the other hand, become even more dignified. And handsome.

If I am being completely honest, though, it is not this worldview, noxious though it is, which informs my primary objection to ‘The Thorn Birds‘. The truth is, if you read books written in different times and places, you encounter many noxious worldviews. They are a characteristic of almost every age and place except your own (and you will find that many of your own compatriots possess them, if you ask). You learn to hold the worldview in some remove from other assessments of artistic merit.

My primary objection to ‘The Thorn Birds‘ is that it is deeply mediocre. It is poorly written; the characters lack subtlety. The plot is appalling, not only from a moral point of view, but from a human point of view, from the point of view of a person who thinks and cares about how other humans behave, in real life. It is bad, merely bad. It is not a classic.

“He took the half-open bloom from her, his hand not quite steady, and stood looking down at it. “Meggie, I need no reminder of you, not now, not ever. I carry you within me, you know that. There’s no way I could hide it from you, is there?”

“…Please take it, Father.”

“My name is Ralph,” he said…”Do you want a keepsake from me, Meggie, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“I won’t give you one. I want you to forget me, I want you to look around your world and find some good kind man, marry him, have the babies you want so much. You’re a born mother. You mustn’t cling to me, it isn’t right. I can never leave the Church, and I’m going to be completely honest with you, for your own sake. I don’t want to leave the church, because I don’t love you the way a husband will, do you understand me? Forget me, Meggie!”

“Won’t you kiss me goodbye?” (p. 268)

Garbage.

I really doubt that ‘The Thorn Birds‘ is popular among Aboriginal Australians, but I do not know why the white people of Australia have decided to embrace this glorified romance novel to their collective bosom. If I had to guess, it is because of the loving, lengthy descriptions of its landscape. They are loving, and they long – Australia is almost a character in this novel, and national pride is a powerful thing.

Which, fine, but it doesn’t redeem this trash-ass novel. Bad characters, ludicrous plot, white-washed world. Not a classic, bad book. Bad book all around.

Against The Day

| ruthpelletier

By Thomas Pynchon

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When I was little and had just started reading books for grown-ups, I asked my father if he had ever encountered a book so difficult that he had not been able to finish it. There was one, he answered, a book called ‘Gravity’s Rainbow‘, which was so long and hard that he had given up part-way through.

I asked him what was so hard about it, and he told me that he didn’t know how to describe it because it didn’t make any sense to him. It was just impossible to get through. I asked why he had tried to read it in the first place (he never was a great one for novels) and he told me that it was considered one of the great novels of the 20th century. I told him I bet that I would be able to get through it, and he bet me I would not. He bet me $50 dollars (a huge amount of money to me at that age, when my allowance was $8 per week) that I would not be able to read ‘Gravity’s Rainbow‘ all the way through.

I won that $50, some years later, with the help of a companion gloss, but it was reading by brute force. My father was exactly right: it didn’t make any sense, and, to this day, I don’t really know what ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ was about. But I was left with an impression of greatness which I am still unable to justify: I didn’t understand it, at all, but I liked it.

And so, over the years, I have come back again and again to Pynchon, reading a number of his books. In his defense, none have had quite the zany incoherence of ‘Gravity’s Rainbow‘, though they are all clearly products of the same mind. Nor have any had the length.

Until now: ‘Against the Day‘, which was published in 2006, clocks in at almost 1100 pages. It is a historical epic, following dozens of named characters from the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 to the global eruption of World War I. The gravitational center of the novel is the three sons of the anarchist bomber Webb Traverse. Traverse is tortured and killed by two assassins in the hire of anti-union interests; his death will torment and mutilate his offspring, will pursue them in their flight over the surface of the planet.

As so often with Pynchon, there is no plot, per se, uniting these characters and episodes; rather, they are united by a moral and stylistic point of view. ‘Against the Day‘ is a long fever dream laboring under a cloud of foreboding: World War I, the death of innocence, the blood and machines which will devour and destroy mankind’s ability to believe in its own civility, is coming, bearing down on Pynchon’s mind and clouding his world with unnameable, or maybe just unnamed, fear. ‘Against the Day’ is a novel about a civilization, a whole world, gone mad, and the creeping evils, capitalism, greed, technological progress, which drove it there.

In my years of making attempts on his novels, I have learned that one doesn’t read Pynchon’s books so much as one experiences them. There is a trick to this, a sort of mental relaxation which is counter-intuitive to all one’s instincts as a responsible reader. You have to relinquish your need to understand what’s happening, to remember details and to track events, and just let the novel happen to you. I believe, and I may be wrong about this, that the point of Pynchon’s novels happens in a sort of gestalt-absorption of the prose-tone, which I recognize doesn’t make any sense, but, then again, neither does he.

If you can let go of the idea that prose is supposed to make sense, you begin to understand that Pynchon’s writing is totally fucking sublime, I mean really, really good. And it’s not incoherent in the Joycean way of ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, not gibberish – that would make me furious – it’s world-class writing, but it’s not being deployed to communicate a story to you. And so reading him is not like taking in a story at all – it is like taking in a busy scene: chaotic, overwhelming at first, but punctuated by moments in which your eye comes to rest on something beautiful, small points of lovely focus:

“Fire and blood were about to roll like fate upon the complacent multitudes. Just at the peak of the evening rush-hour, electric power failed everywhere throughout the city, and as the gas mains began to ignite and the thousand local winds, distinct at every street-corner, to confound prediction, cobblestones erupted skyward, to descend blocks away in seldom observed yet beautiful patterns. All attempts to counter-attack or even avoid the Figure would be defeated. Later, fire alarms would go unanswered, and the firemen on the front lines would find themselves too soon without reinforcement, or the hope of any. The noise would be horrific and unrelenting, as it grew clear even to the willfully careless that there was no refuge…

There was debate in the aftermath about what had happened to the Mayor. Fled, dead, not right in the head, the theories proliferated in his absence. His face appeared on bills posted all over the wood fences around vacant lots, the rear ends of streetcars, its all-too-familiar bone structure shining with the unforgiving simplicity of a skull. “Remain indoors,” warned bulletins posted on the carbonized walls over his signature. “This night you will not be welcome in my streets, whether there be too many of you or too few.” (p. 152).

Thomas Pynchon

This is breathtakingly good writing, but understand: it is an aside. The Figure wreaking havoc on this town is never explained, and not mentioned again. It is a small piece of madness in a swirling world, important the way everything is important, meaningless the way everything is meaningless.

Pynchon isn’t incoherent because he’s garbled, he’s incoherent because he never pauses for breathe, doesn’t resolve loose ends, doesn’t resolve anything. Because his worlds are magical and he never explains them, because he doesn’t give context or backstory or rationale. He makes no sacrifices for you, makes no gestures at you, doesn’t even seem to realize that you exist.

Oh, and he’s funny. Funny, and rude, and crude. ‘Gravity’s Rainbow‘ launched him into the pantheon of the unread Greats, the Postmodern Masters, but because no one can read him and everyone knows that he is Important, no one supposes that Thomas Pynchon is fucking hysterical, that he’s obsessed with sex, and gutter-minded, and slapstick.

I suppose that maybe that I love Pynchon, but not as an author. I love him as writer, if that makes any sense. I don’t love his books, but I love the lucid moments in his incredible prose, the those moments of blinding skill. I love the lens through which he looks out upon the world, the mischief, the chaos, the evil and the love and the humor which provide respite from it. The great human forces which pull us all along, and how strange and unreasonable it all looks to him. How alien and small we are all, and how lovingly he draws us. I don’t understand him at all, but I’ll read him, I think, forever.

Ivanhoe

| ruthpelletier

By Sir Walter Scott

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I think we sometimes assume that old stories are boring stories.

‘Ivanhoe‘ is an old story. I found my copy in my favorite used bookstore, ‘Second Story Books‘ in Washington D.C. It’s a Heritage Press Edition, and I’ll confess to a weakness for this kind of hardback reprint. They are wildly inconvenient and hard to read (too heavy, difficult to hold), but they really make you feel as though you are reading a proper book. And I’m a sucker for proper books.

But I bought my ‘Ivanhoe‘ years ago and, clearly, I haven’t been in a rush to read it. Honestly, as beautiful as my edition is, I suspected that it was going to be boring. I took a run at it a year or so ago: it opens with a brief exposition of the continuing effects of the Norman Conquest, and then cuts to a scene in the middle of an old-growth English forest, where two good-hearted Saxon yeomen are complaining about anti-poaching laws. So, yeah, it seemed like it was going to be really, really boring – I put that thing down like it was on fire and didn’t pick it up again until last week.

Old stories aren’t just boring-seeming because they’re, well, old, and because we think we’ve heard them already (although that is part of it) – it’s because we think that old stories are simple.

And they sometimes are, but we mostly think that old stories are simple because old stories are foundational – they are the stories upon which later stories have elaborated. They aren’t simple, but they are archetypal, which makes them predictable.

They also aren’t modern, which is obvious but important. They aren’t written in our vernacular, and their vernacular often seems cheesy to us: lacks the rawness, or subtlety, or emotional complexity, of our own.

All of which gives these stories a sort of hokey, old-timey feel which can strike some people as quaint and some people as lame.

‘Ivanhoe‘ lands right in the sweet-spot of this quaint/lame zone. This is a long-ass novel of Ye Olde England, and it’s filled with all the cliches of that genre. Robin Hood is here, Friar Tuck is here, Richard the Lion-Heart is here (his wicked brother John is here); there is an archery contest, there is chivalry and maidens and Sherwood Forest and wicked Norman knights and valiant Saxon knights and tournaments of honor.

But it’s a classic, and my beautiful copy kept calling to me, so I took another stab at it.

Pretty quickly, though, after I pushed through the two soul-crushingly boring yeoman, I realized two things:

  1. ‘Ivanhoe‘ is a weirdly complicated story. Its plot is complicated; its characters are complicated; its morals are complicated.
  2. I actually have heard this story before.

As it turns out, big parts of Disney’s ‘Robin Hood‘ (you know, the amazing cartoon from when we were all kids, where Robin Hood is a fox and Little John is a bear?) is ‘Ivanhoe’-adjacent. There is no Maid Marion in the novel, but the whole scene with Robin Hood at the tournament taunting Prince John and winning the archery contest in disguise? That’s ‘Ivanhoe‘.

But Disney’s ‘Robin Hood’ is a simple story of good and evil – ‘Ivanhoe‘ isn’t. Or, it is, but with a lot of shades in between.

The story is almost unnecessarily complicated, and several attempts to summarize the plot have convinced me that it isn’t a worthwhile exercise. Part of the problem is that ‘Ivanhoe‘ is actually many stories woven together: two love stories, one tragic, one classic; a tale of chivalric honor over villainy; several tales of knightly valor; three tales about the honor of thieves; one tale of a sibling rivalry between two princes; a tale of a prodigal son; a tale about the loyalty of servants, and the wisdom of fools; a tale of a wicked usurper and a virtuous king; a story of the Jewish diaspora, and the terrible wickedness of Christians to Jews; and a tale of palace intrigue, all set against the backdrop of the tale of a conquered people trying regain their dignity. With some comic relief thrown in.

It’s a lot, and that really doesn’t even begin to describe it all. Before everything is through, there will be a tournament, a siege, Robin Hood will end up fighting alongside Richard the Lion-Heart, a castle will burn down with people in it, maidenly virtue will be rewarded, maidenly lack of virtue will be mocked and punished, a beautiful woman will be tried for witchcraft, a man will die of a broken heart, someone will come back from the dead, and lots and lots of horrible things will be said about Jews.

A Maiden

And I know that this sounds like a bunch of tropes all strung together into some sort of batshit Merry Old England mad-lib, and it kind of is! But if you’re expecting something simple, something quaint, ‘Ivanhoe’ isn’t it.

And if you are expecting easy moral takeaways, ‘Ivanhoe‘ won’t give them to you. There is one pure villain and maybe two pure heroes – everyone else is complicated. People are strong and weak, they succeed and fail, they are subject to imperfections but may overcome them, with work. They love truly, but with private reservations. They have virtues and failings, and sometimes they die and it’s unfair, and sometimes they are forgiven and it’s even less fair. It’s all very…modern.

Well, not all of it. The equivocation is modern – the Jew-hating chivalry is not.

Sir Walter Scott apparently used to be hot shit in Britain. He was a poet and author in the early/mid 19th century, but he was equally or more famous for his novels. ‘Ivanhoe‘ is the one for which he is best remembered now, but at the time he was also known for the Waverly novels, and ‘The Bride of Lammermoor’.

And one gets the sense, reading ‘Ivanhoe‘, that he was also pretty progressive for his time. A major theme of ‘Ivanhoe’ is that Jews are People, Too, pleaded with the sort of earnest heavy-handedness that indicates to me that the message was not uncontroversial.

Sir Walter Scott

And it’s a good message, but it’s delivery is decidedly pre-modern: Scott is going way out of his way to show you that, despite all the usury and their maniacal love of riches, Jews are also capable of love and goodness, even, in some rare cases, true human virtue. At one point, Robin Hood must admonish Isaac of York not to spare any expense in saving his daughter’s life:

“Yet, ere Isaac departed, the outlaw chief bestowed on him this parting advice: ‘Be liberal of thine offers, Isaac, and spare not thy purse for thy daughter’s safety. Credit me, that the gold thou shalt spare in her cause will hereafter give thee as much agony as if it were poured molten down thy throat.'” (p. 327)

And though Isaac acquiesces, because he loves his daughter (because, remember: Jews are People, Too!), the loss of fortune hurts him. Though the depictions of Isaac and Rebecca are meant to sympathetic, they are in fact anti-semitic and vile, and they represent, for me, an immovable obstacle to loving this book truly.

We’re allowed to be ambivalent about classics. It’s hard to remember that, sometimes, when we’re confronted by a handsome old hardback. But we are: we don’t have to love them. We can hate them, or like some parts of them and hate other parts. We can marvel at the complexity of the story and recoil at the endless, patronizing anti-semitism and laugh at the old-timey language and roll our eyes at the values.

I wonder sometimes whether classics are not our best-loved novels, but the ones which evoke the strongest ambivalence from us. The ones that elicit the strongest positive and negative emotions from us, at once. ‘Ivanhoe‘ was a ripping read, I tore through it, and I was held genuinely in suspense. That’s not to say that I loved it, but I’ll remember it.

A Room of One’s Own

| ruthpelletier

By Virginia Woolf

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I really don’t like being wrong.

You’d think I’d be used to it by now, since I’m wrong at least as often as I’m right, but I still hate being wrong with the same furious intensity I did when I was a child, when I would rather have chopped off one of my own fingers than admitted I had been mistaken about something. It irks me, deep in my soul, to look foolish.

And it’s all well and good to be wrong about things that don’t matter, like math or medicine, but one would hope that I would be slightly more reliable on the subject of books. They are, after all, the most important thing in the world, the meaning and substance of my life – one would expect that, if I were going to be right about anything, I might be right about them.

And yet I’m wrong about books all the time. Even more distressing, my wrongness usually takes the same form: I discover, with depressing regularity, that I have disdained an author, often for years, who is actually excellent. Whom, when I actually trouble to read them, I end up loving.

In my defense, I rarely disdain an author for no reason. Usually, I have been forced, as a child in school, to read a classic, and found, in all my teenage wisdom, the classic wanting, and decided that the author was therefore garbage. I did this to John Steinbeck (did not like ‘Of Mice and Men‘); I did this to Zora Neale Hurston (hated ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God‘); and I did this to Virginia Woolf.

It was ‘Mrs. Dalloway‘ that did it. My fifteen year old self was not impressed by ‘Mrs. Dalloway’. I do not remember precisely why – I suspect I thought it was vapid. Or maybe that Mrs. Dalloway herself was vapid, and I did not feel that I should have to spend my time reading about the interior world of a vapid party-planner when there were so many more interesting things to read about, like War and Death and Space Battles. I did not understand yet that it was a novel about trauma, that great tragedies play out quietly in the psyches of ordinary people, probably because I was a teenager and so had no interior world to speak of.

Because I did not like ‘Mrs. Dalloway’, I decided that I did not like Virginia Woolf. I have never read another of her books. But I believe in reading the classics; I’m traditional, and have an idea that one should read The Great Books, even if one really didn’t like ‘Mrs. Dalloway’. And so, when I saw ‘A Room of One’s Own‘ at the Harvard Bookstore Warehouse Sale this summer, I got it.

‘A Room of One’s Own‘ is an essay, born from two lectures which Woolf gave to women’s colleges of Cambridge. It takes, famously, as its thesis, the problem of Shakespeare’s sister, a woman born with all the talent of Shakespeare, but none of his masculine freedom. Would she, this sister, have left brilliant plays behind her? Not, Woolf concludes, without the time, space, and money to work. Not without a room of her own.

I was not expecting to enjoy ‘A Room of One’s Own‘. I read it entirely out of a sense of duty, an obligation both the Canon and to feminism. ‘A Room of One’s Own’ is a foundational feminist text, one of those books that you, if you are a woman, really ought to have read by now. I somehow graduated from an East Coast liberal arts college without reading it (I won’t say which one, lest they recall my degree), and have felt sort of nagged ever since by my own bad feminism.

I didn’t expect her to be funny. No, not because she’s a woman – because ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is almost shockingly unfunny, and because about ten years after she published it, Virginia Woolf loaded her pockets with stones and walked into the river Ouse to drown herself, and so I don’t think of her as hilarious.

But, wrong again: she is funny. She’s sardonically, dryly funny, almost caustic. Her gimlet eye misses nothing, she is subtle, but when she cuts, she cuts deep, and her aim is devastating:

“..I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also told a lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.” (p. 46)

And she is a beautiful writer, but, of course, we all knew that. What I was not prepared for was how I would feel, as a woman, when this beautiful prose, this clear-eyed analysis, applied itself to the problem of women’s rights.

Virginia Woolf

Woolf is a feminist from an earlier time: she isn’t writing about #metoo, or whether Cosmo causes eating disorders. She is writing about whether or not women are as smart as men, whether their minds can ever be as fine as men’s minds, whether they deserve to be educated, whether they can make art. It’s moving to read such a fine writer, such an understated and lovely writer, speak to this: her very existence should prove her point, but you know that it won’t.

I was surprised by her, I suppose: I was expecting something glum, or censorious (I think, upon reflection, that I confused the character of Mrs. Dalloway with Woolf herself – oops). But ‘A Room of One’s Own‘ isn’t censorious at all – it’s a gentle argument, a ripost, to a society which much have been a source of great pain to its author. And so it still consoles now, as long as society remains a source of pain to her readers.

“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice it’s natural size….Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically on upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism…For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?” (p. 36)

It’s hard to know whether you are connecting with a work because the work is magnificent, or because you are a woman, or a mix of both. It’s OK for works to have special resonance for certain groups, but I’m always a little uncomfortable when I feel that I am only connecting to a work “as a woman” (like I said, bad feminist).

But Woolf is such a good writer, there is no question that the connection to her work is merely estrogenic. Magnificent prose is magnificent prose, whether its author is invaginated or not.

A fact with which Woolf would doubtless agree. I’m not sure I learned a lot from ‘A Room of One’s Own‘, but I’m also not convinced that that was the point. Rather, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ was a consolation, the reaching out of one woman to another through time. I am very glad I read it, which I suppose serves me right. Wrong again, happily.