Dr. Literature:  Should We Diagnose Fictional Characters?

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Here’s a question for your doctor:  Should you diagnose fictional characters with imaginary illnesses?

CLUNK! 

You lay down your head.  Did you know that Caroline Helstone in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley had anorexia?  No, nobody did.  Sure, she is thin, but a fellow reader diagnosed her with an eating disorder because she was “languishing.”

“Maybe she just needed a day in bed,” someone else in the group said wisely.

I mean, I’m languishing, too. I flip through my books listlessly, because I only want to read the Brontes.  I don’t ever want to read anyone else again. And there are only seven published novels by the Brontes:  four by Charlotte, one by Emily, and two by Anne – hardly enough to last a month and a half.

Oh, yes.  Let me pass on that Emily’s Wuthering Heights is a veritable mental hospital.  Lo and behold! Ups, downs, love, betrayal, tantrums, nervous breakdowns, vengeance, hanging a dog from a tree, depression, bipolar – I can’t keep up with the diagnoses.  Fascinating, but can you believe I used to think this was a romantic novel?  I miss those days.

“Catherine and Heathcliff are bipolar for sure,” a psychologist said authoritatively.

Finally!  A doctor! Can she cure them?

But please, take away our other friend’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Everything with her is a gynecological illness that could be cured if you did your own pelvic exam.

I love Esther Summerson in Dickens’ Bleak House, an  angelic woman who is kind, helps the poor, makes her friends laugh, and gently gives good advice in such a way that it seems to be their own idea.

But alas! I am human, not a darling fictional character.  The angels are all in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and The Bishop’s Wife.  In Wings of Desire, an angel falls in love with a trapeze artis, and tumbles down to Earth to be human with her. In The Bishop’s Wife, Cary Grant the angel is here on Earth to help the bishop, but he falls in love with Loretta Young, the lovely bishop’s wife. Cary is charming and takes Loretta Young skating, and still she doesn’t fall in love with him. Poor Cary!

I LOOK angelic these days. I am sure of it.  If the light is dim – I am the soul of angelic beauty. I And yet I don’t get assigned to work in Heaven with Cary Grant,  who by now surely is an angel and could be my mentor. 

I can only be an angel at book group.

Depression & Rage: “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and “Wuthering Heights”

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It may seem unlikely that Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther influenced Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: he wrote a confessional novel; she wrote a Gothic novel, as did her sisters, Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Ann (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall).

But Goethe’s novel, an international best-seller, must have influenced the Gothic writers, as did Daniel Defoe’s confessional novel, Roxana, published in 1724, the rowdy, rollicking confessions of a-deserted-wife-turned-courtesan. How could the Gothic writers, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, Horace Walpole, the Brontes, Jane Austen, Sheridan Le Fanu, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Emily Bronte not have read Young Werther?

And it is easy to see Goethe’s influence on Bronte’s wild prose. Both Werther and Bronte’s Heathcliff pursue women who are off the market, so to speak.. Werther dances all night with Lotte and then learns she has a fiancé. Lotte is flirtatious with Werther, but shifts her attention to her fiance Albert when he returns home from a business trip. From here it is a downward trip for Werther psychologically.

On the other hand, Bronte’s Heathcliff is madly in love with Catherine, his childhood playmate and presumed adolescent lover. But In the kitchen of Wuthering Heights, he overhears Catherine say that Heathcliff “is more my self than I am,” yet she plans to marry wealthy Linton, for the comfort and, as the housekeeper thinks, because she can control him.

In Book 2 of The Sorrows, Werther is depressed and has suicidal thoughts. He writes to Lotte: “..this broken heart has often thought of – killing your husband! – or you! – or myself!…” He turns his repressed rage and violence against himself. Ironically, Lotte gives him his suicide weapon, Albert’s pistols. Albert insists that she hand them over – he has no fears for Werther – and though she is fearful she not protest.

Heathcliff’s primary mood is rage, and he seeks revenge, even after leaving Wuthering Heights and coming home rich. Catherine is still at the center of his life, and his contact with her at Linton’s house is passionate, in the style of Albert and Lotte’s, though Heathcliff and Catherine obviously have sexual feelings for each other. He sees Catherine a few times against Linton’s wishes, and again before she dies in childbirth. Later, Heathcliff goes so far as to dig up Catherine’s grave, only to discover that she has not decomposed. Is she a bit of a witch?

Both Werther and Heathcliff are torn up by decisions made by women. Heathcliff’s rage and depression inspire him to destroy everyone Catherine loved, while Werther destroys himself. Both men are involved in complicated triangles.

Two harrowing narratives, both frame stories, and though Werther is stable compared to Heathcliff, both are full of rage. The novels are written in different periods, but linked by a long lineaage of confessional and romantic Gothic literature. Werther’s love would seem realistic, if he could have let it go. But Bronte caps every character’s weirdness with Heathcliff, who I hope was not based on Branwell, he brother, though I have read that he was.

Brontë vs. Austen: “Emily” and “Sense and Sensibility”

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You know there’s something wrong with the culture when you find a movie on Netflix about Emily Brontë.

The notion horrified me.  But maybe…? I’m desperate for a good movie.

I did not watch the entire 2-minute trailer, but it resembled a Jane Austen film:  twirling, laughing, emaciated sisters, bonnets on and bonnets off, Emily alone with a man….  Good God! 

And you see, there’s this:  Emily would not have been a movie-goer.  She and her sisters were writers from childhood and would have written or directed their own movie if they’d wanted one.  Branwell preferred drink and opium to writing after a certain point, so he might have gone to the movies – on drugs!

If you don’t want to watch Emily, and I definitely don’t, you can see the latest adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. I watched only part of the trailer but noticed the following:  the actresses wear their hair loose, instead of up, and the film has a non-Austen sexualized atmosphere:  sisters confiding in bed, having pillow fights, and then strangely cuddling in bed, getting out of bed to take walks in a ravishing landscape and, in Marianne’s case, meet her beloved, and Elinor barely touching her boyfriend’s hands, an intensely sexualized moment .  It is mostly a bonnets-off movie! I’m all for sex and bonnets off but I want the book more.

“Will there never be an end of Austen and Bronte films?”  asked my soulmate.

“Never.”

I will wait to watch Sense and Sensibility on Netflix.

Toxic Masculinity or Toxic Femininity?

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How many times can the phrase “toxic masculinity” be used in a sentence?

I never use this phrase: there is as much “toxic femininity” as “toxic masculinity” in our culture – and you’re kidding yourself if you deny it.

Recently, at a lecture on 19th-century English literature, I heard the phrase “toxic masculinity” several times.  Oddly, an aging male scholar used it. And, because I’m a Doris Lessing fan, and she denied she was a feminist, and because I want nothing to do with feminist quacks, I have lost the feminist ideals that defined me in my youth. I always wonder, What is the context? What is the source? Or when a man uses the phrase “male toxicity,” is it because he is afraid not to kowtow to women?

Look at female politicians. (They don’t mind being looked at.)  Like male politicians, a number of them are hawkish and unreasonable.  In some states, not only have female governors signed bills into law that ascertain everyone and anyone can carry a gun, but they have waived gun permits, and lowered the age for gun ownership. 

And they say that it is preferable for everyone to carry a gun, and that armed teachers will stop school shootings. As soon as women get political power, they copy the men.

And so if we must use the phrase “masculine toxicity,” we must add  “Toxic femininity” too.  Can you imagine a woman using the phrase “toxic femininity?” No, because it is sexist, for both sexes.

“Male dominance” doesn’t quite have the witch-hunting tone of “male toxicity.” In general, I feel more attention should be given to language, because words can trigger violence against both men and women.

New vs. Old:  Does Anyone Read “Middlemarch”?

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Long books intimidate the modern, scattered reader.  In the “By the Book” interviews in The New York Times, writers often admit that Middlemarch is the great book they haven’t read.

Has no one read Middlemarch? I have the opposite problem. I love Victorian novels, and admit, not to be snobbish but because it is true, that I have read Middlemarch three times. 

I had hipster mentors, a married couple who read Middlemarch aloud to each other in Europe, and they inspired me to read Middlemarch when I was 17. I was already a classics junkie, but they certainly expanded my syllabus. On my own, I read a lot of German literature in translation, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Peter Handke. But I read anything and everything.

And honestly, I feel I must read Victorian novels or die. I have read two and a half new books nominated for the Booker Prize this year, one of which made the shortlist, and they’re fine, but I doubt I’ll read any more of them. I’ve read half of The Vivisectors, a beautifully-written longlisted novel, but I look at it with dread when I see it on my bedside table.

All because I need to read classics.  Some of you will get this. Homer to Virgil (The Aeneid is a homage to the Iliad and the Odyssey),  Petrarch, Milton, Keats, Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, Dorothy Parker, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Barbara Pym.

Any of these books are fine for me, but perhaps it is Middlemarch time again. It’s a comfort book!

A Few Notes on Petrarch’s Sonnet 6: Apollo Loses the Race

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As a Latinist, I fell in love with Petrarch after discovering Sonnet 6, a reworking of Ovid’s Apollo and Daphne myth (Metamorphoses, I.452-567).  Petrarch’s sensitive Apollo describes his “insane desire /to chase the lady who has turned in flight… /(and) flies off ahead of my slow run for her.”   The “slow run” is a breathless allusion to Ovid’s Apollo’s comic speech, “Run more slowly, I beg you, and moderate your flight:  I myself will run more slowly.”

In a race of slow runners, Daphne and Laurel “win” the race. But Ovid’s Apollo and Petrarch’s Apollo’s paths diverge significantly. Ovid’s coarse Apollo, rather adorably obtuse at first, is angry when Daphne continues to run away from him. He is an outraged celebrity: doesn’t she know who he is? (She does.) On the other hand, Petrarch’s sensitive Apollo struggles to control his desire, but the reins and all control are snatched away from him: “I am left there in harness of his lordship/ as he against my will rides me to death.” And instead of Laura, he finds the laurel whose “bitter fruit… afflicts rather than comforts someone else’s wounds.”

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we also see the woman’s point of view. Daphne, a virginal follower of Diana, metamorphoses into a laurel tree after she begs her father, a river god, to change the form that has caused her distress. But Apollo still possesses her: he declares that she is his, and that the laurel will reward poets and winners of games. Still, Daphne comes out the winner, or that’s my interpretation. She and Laura both are inaccessible to men.

My edition of Petrarch, alas,  had no footnotes. But this sonnet fascinates me: a brilliant take on the famous myth.

Okay, What about My Social Life?

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Okay, I’m a social failure.  I DID NOT KNOW THAT THE BUFFALO BILLS WON A FOOTBALL GAME AGAINST THE LOS ANGELES RAMS ON MONDAY. While the TV was on I hid in the bedroom reading my favorite book, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette.

I do not watch football, and yet the Bills are a part of my life.  I do not have a Bills t-shirt – yet – but it’s a matter of time. A few years ago I was on a plane to London with a group of Bills fans called the Bills Mafia, who were going to watch the Bills play the Jacksonville Jaguars at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Well, I’m not a sports fan. I have attended professional baseball games, but am distracted by issues of spilling a Diet Coke on the person next to me or the state of the public restroom.

One time I got to sit in an excellent seat behind the baseball wives, because I was an FOBW ( Friend of a Baseball Wife), who was a mere acquaintance actually, but very sweet.  I interviewed her and her family – embarrassingly, I cannot remember their names – but this was a kind gesture I will always remember.

Why do I resist the call of baseball?  It is the intellectual game, I hear. But the only game I liked in gym class was field hockey, and that’s because I got to be the goalie, who had very little to do except stand around and read magazines, and block an occasional ball, which I could almost do without looking up from my magazine.

I dislike sports, which was allowed for women of my generation. We took long walks, bicycled and avoided any sport that involved throwing a ball.

“If you’re having good sex, you don’t need to watch sports,” I say to the sports fans who litter the living room with chips packages and beer cans.

Because who has to pick up the chip packages and beer cans? Well, to be fair, it’s not me. But I do think they could skip a Bills game for a date with their wives/girlfriends/husbands/boyfriends.

The Older, the Better… 30, 40, and Onwards

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Ageing both matters and does not matter. When a fifty-something friend injured himself on a bike ride, he said, “I’m getting old.”

“You’re in your prime.”  (He healed after a day.)  But, yes, the numbers matter in our society, and “You’re as young as you feel” is one of those stupid sayings that demonize aging.  That’s why comedian Jack Benny was “forever 39.”

Some celebrate ageing (there are croning ceremonies), some agonize over it. And when does old age begin?  No one seems to know. At 30, you think you’re maturing too fast. Forty comes and goes without trauma.  Fifty has a different ring.  Sixty will never happen.  Oh, wait, you meant 70.

I cannot guess how old people are, unless I went to school with them. And it is vaguely reassuring to realize that they are the same age as you.  YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY PERSON TURNING A NUMBER YOU WILL NEVER REVEAL. 

The assumption is that older is worse, not better, but it can be the opposite.  It is fascinating to have a long perspective, to have lived through history that has ended in this present. “We are not responsible for the eighties,” Cynthia Heimel wrote. 

Is someone responsible for the rest of it?  Can we talk to them, please?

Because either our age or our history is out of control.

Colette’s “Mitsou”:  Part Play, Part Epistolary Novel

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Colette’s brilliant novel Mitsou is unfortunately out-of-print. Part play, part epistolary novel, set during World War I, it is the story of a brief romance between a music hall artist and a soldier.  Mitsou, the heroine, corresponds with Blue Lieutenant, and their letters are so enchanting they read like intimate diaries.

The novel is dominated by class issues. Mitsou, a 24-year-old lower-class woman, set her eyes on the music hall because she was desperate to leave the monotonous working-class jobs. Fortunately, Mitsou had talent, and became the star of the music hall.

Colette, too, knew the music hall world well:  she worked as an actress and traveling music hall artist after leaving her redoubtable first husband, Willi, the notorious man who locked her up to write the Claudine books. Later, Colette wrote elegantly and touchingly about her music hall experiences in The Vagabond and Music-Hall Sidelights.

Class divides Colette from the Mitsous of this world. Colette moved in literary circles, and socialized with artists and critics, while Mitsou had a narrow range of companions. Mitsou’s life is complicated: in addition to being a music-hall artist, she  is “kept” by  the “Respectable Gentleman,” a man in his fifties who pays for her apartment, maid, and anything she wants to buy. She is proud of her collection of knick-knacks, grotesque mirrors, and odd furniture.

Romance is not a part of Mitsou’s life, nor does she expect it to be. There was little romance for shopgirls and factory workers, and since the young men are away at war, she meets only older men. Then one night Mitsou unwittingly finds romance backstage when Bit-of-Fluff, another music hall artist, begs Mitsou to hide two soldiers in her  wardrobe.  Fluff will get in trouble if the manager finds her with men.

Of course Mitsou isn’t crazy about the idea. What if the Respectable Gentleman came to her dressing room?

 MITSOU (continuing to speak to Fluff in the same tone):  You must understand too, that so far as I’m concerned I don’t care at all whether they’re in my wardrobe or where they are. That’s not the question.  It’s just the way things will look.  You know I’m not that sort of girl.   

FLUFF (overwhelmingly):  I do, darling, I do, I do!  But you will do it for me!  You are always so sweet!  (To the lieutenants)  Jump to it, you!  Into the wardrobe!

One of the lovely things about Mitsou is that she is sincere. You might think she’s a hypocrite, with her talk about appearances, but she really is “not that sort of girl.” Fluff is more harum-scarum, a witty, sharper, more fun-loving person altogether. The two women might not socialize much, but they are friends in the theater.

How exactly do you fall in love with a soldier who is hiding in your wardrobe? The answer is, You don’t. Mitsou barely notices them, but when she asks Robert, nicknamed “Blue Lieutenant,” to zip up her dress, he sees how beautiful she is, and is haunted by this incident she barely noticed.

And then he sends her a gift, and they begin to correspond. It is through the letters that we see how thoughtful Mitsou is, how she understands things she cannot express in conversation.  The couple seem perfectly matched on paper.

She writes, “…Sir, you are my Blue Lieutenant. See how funny words are. If I say ‘My lieutenant,’ it’s nothing, but if I write “my blue lieutenant,’ it becomes nice.”

Blue Lieutenant writes later, “I want to see you. i want to see you. What else is there to say to you? I want to see you.”

 And then when he sees her again in person he dislikes her. She is in love, but he despises her lower-class taste in furniture and makes fun of her taste to to her face.  He also despises her manners at the restaurant. Some of it is a class issue, some of it is because she’s bohemian. Sometimes she catches his sarcasm, but she stoically ignores it because she is so desperately in love.

Again, the class differences dominate.

“How pretty she is,” he notices. “And what a pity…” He is almost thinking aloud, and has startled himself. “What a pity what? … A pity I stopped being in love with her when I saw her.”

What will happen?  Will they continue to write, or will he drop her because he’s a snob? She waits all day for him after he leaves the morning after. Slowly her heart sinks. She waits by the phone.

Colette doesn’t quite give up on Mitsou and Blue Lieutenant, though. At the end there is room for ambiguity.

The only other novel I can think of that describes the music hall relationships with equal skill is J. B. Priestley’s Lost Empires, which describes a traveling music hall theater in the early 20th century.

The Older Woman:  Colette’s “Break of Day”

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Colette is my favorite 20th-century French novelist, a charming writer of novels about independent heroines in love. Her style is splendidly, subtly comical and sexy. Indeed, it is difficult to surpass her post-modern lyricism. While Virginia Woolf wrote manically gorgeous stream-of-consciousness in To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, Colette expressed her characters’ thoughts and actions in in shorter,  more pointed sentences, lightly strewn with descriptions of gardens and fresh strawberries.

Colette’s women struggle in and against love. And perhaps we readers love these novels, because they do not tally with our own experience, nor with Colette’s, as she tells us repeatedly, and we are grateful for our own domesticity, though we like a brilliant love story. 

And what I’ve noticed during this rereading is that she is fascinated by the problems of older women in love with younger men.

In her two most famous novels, Cheri and The Last of Cheri (which are my least favorite, by the way), Lea, a 50-year-old courtesan, gently rejects her 25-year-old lover, Cheri,  realizing that she will not be able to conceal her aging much longer. Later, in a painful scene in the second book, Cheri visits her and is horrified by Lea’s aging, as she had predicted. 

This is what I call one of Colette’s Older Woman’s Conscience books.  And  Break of Day, her masterpiece, is another Older Woman’s Conscience novel.  The narrator, called simply Colette, exults in her life as a  woman in her fifties. She feels she can throw off her constraints and explore freedom from sex.   She strives to attain to her mother’s philosophical acceptance of nature, and to live mostly in the garden and with her animals.

 Perhaps this was  Colette’s fantasy, to live a completely independent  life, the  opposite of what  she knew, because she always had lovers or husbands.  She explains in Break of Day that though she calls the narrator Colette, the fictional character is not the same person as the writer.

Break of Day is part contemplation of aging, part epistolary novel, and part laudation of the joys of  living  alone.

Her life in a house by the sea is idyllic, except for one problem, her friendship with Vial, her 35-year-old neighbor.  He is in love with her, and she likes him very much, too, though she is determined not to get involved sexually. But her interactions with him are almost conjugal.  They are together all day, almost every day.

 We enjoy the scenes of Colette’s impish, enjoyable flirtation with him while she prepares chicken in sauce.  She enjoys the way he looks. She doesn’t mind his silence.

“Tie my apron for me, Vial.”

Later, she asks him to pour some oil for her,

“When I said ‘Stop!’  he cut short the thread of golden oil and and straightened himself, and I laid my hand caressingly for a moment on his chest, as one does with a horse. He looked at my hand, which proclaims my age – in fact it looks several years later – but I did not withdraw it.”

This is such a sexual scene.  It is impossible for the reader not to notice Colette’s flirtation: she offers her aged hand with the same confidence an older man might to a younger woman. Does she know what she’s doing, or is  it being French?  Does she like Vial more than she says?  She does.  But triangulation occurs when a young woman acclaims her love for Vial – to Colette, not Vial.

In real life, younger men often fell in love with Colette, and when she was 52 she fell in love with 35-year-old Maurice Goudeker, a Jewish man, who adored her.  They lived together for many years, married in 1935, and tried to lie low in the ’40s in Occupied France, but one day  he was dragged away to a French concentration camp. Colette managed to rescue him after six weeks, perhaps because she had never written about politics.  There is an Anything for Love vibe in Colette’s life.