things mean a lot

Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace by Kate Summerscale

2012-05-21T11:47:00.005+01:00

In Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady, Kate Summerscale tells the true story of Isabella Robinson, a married woman whose affair with a younger man, one Dr Edward Lane, scandalised Victorian society. Mr Henry Robinson was among the first to take advantage of the newly passed Matrimonial Causes Act to divorce his wife, and during the trial it surfaced that Mrs Robinson had detailedly documented her extramarital experiences in a diary, which her husband was now presenting to the court as evidence.

As Summerscale tells us, keeping this diary was an act almost as transgressive as the adultery itself: “to the astonishment of those who read the extracts in the press, Mrs Robinson seemed to have invited, and lovingly documented, her own disgrace”. Throughout the book, she recounts the story of Isabella Robinson’s unhappy marriage, of her involvement with Edward Lane, of the divorce trial that followed, and of the public’s reaction to Isabella’s story and its implications in terms of dominant ideas about marriage and female sexuality.

Those of you who have read The Suspicions of Mr Whicher will already know that Kate Summerscale has a knack for producing works of non-fiction that are every bit as readable as any novel. Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace engrossed me right away, and its sheer readability is even more remarkable if we consider that Mrs Robinson’s story doesn’t lend itself to a suspenseful retelling quite as easily as a murder mystery. But Summerscale makes it suspenseful all the same, particularly in regards to the outcome of the trial. She also draws attention to the parallels between Mrs Robinson’s story and those of heroines of controversial nineteenth-century novels such as East Lynne and Madame Bovary, and thus enriches her narrative with a layer of intertextuality.

Another thing Summerscale excels at is making the connection between the facts of the case at hand and their wider social context. Isabella Robinson’s story is all the more interesting if we consider what was happening in Victorian society at the time; Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace accordingly explores public debates about marriage and divorce; fashionable medical theories about masturbation, female sexual desire, and madness; and the ideas of writers, thinkers and scientists such as Robert Chambers, George Drysdale, Charles Darwin and George Eliot, all of whom were directly or indirectly connected with Mrs Robinson.

The mid nineteenth-century was a time of considerable shifts in social customs, and Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace is primarily a history of anxieties about sexuality and the moral panic caused by perceived threats to the social order. Mrs Robinson’s diary flew in the face of conventional wisdom about femininity, desire and sexual agency, and as such the public, legal and medical response was to pathologize her: the question of whether or not she was mad (who but a mad woman, the argument went, could possibly keep such a diary?) became crucial to the divorce court’s decision.

It’s also particularly interesting to consider that this was a time when the definition of marriage was changing, due not only to the new divorce laws but also to growing support for what was to become the Married Women’s Property Act. As customary in times of change, this lead to social resistance as people clung desperately to familiar mores and made doomsday predictions about what would befall society should these proposed changes happen. As I read Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, I couldn’t help but make parallels with contemporary changes to marriage laws as lgbtq people gain more rights and the eerily similar apocalyptic arguments used by those who try to resist them.

As much as I enjoyed Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, I have to say it didn’t quite live up to my expectations and that I ended up not loving it as much as Summerscale’s previous effort. This surprised me quite a bit, as the topic of this book interests me so much more at first glance. I suspect that my current reading mood might have been to blame. There were times when I wanted more analysis from this book, more overt feminist commentary. However, Summerscale’s approach is more descriptive and narrative than analytical, and she remains neutral and dispassionate at all times. Part of me wonders whether this will make it easy for some to read Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace as nothing but an exercise in a tut-tutting a scandalous woman – which it certainly isn’t, but it also isn’t the reverse. I should add, though, that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with presenting the facts and leaving room for the reader to do the analysing themselves. The fact that I wasn’t quite up to the task is what makes me think that my current state of mind was the real problem here.

There is one thing, though, that I do wish this book had done. As I said above, Isabella Robinson’s story says a lot about dominant attitudes towards female sexuality and the pathologization of women who transgress social norms, and these things are fascinating and well worth thinking about. But the more I read about the Victorians, the more I realise that the popular understanding of the era as a time of unmitigated repression isn’t really the full picture. Yes, there were plenty of people who believed, like Dr William Acton, that “the majority of women [were] not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind” – but as books like The Other Victorians and Unauthorised Pleasures have shown us, there were also a lot of gaps, nuances and grey areas, and a world of difference difference between people’s public attitudes and private lives. I wish this book had balanced the picture a little more by exploring this messier, more complex side of Victorian sexuality. Summerscale does this to some extent when she describes the work of George Drysdale, but I felt that there was room for more, and that this approach would have made the book even more interesting.

Still, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace is a fascinating read. It reminded me that I really must read Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady and Eric Berkowitz’s Sex and Punishment, both of which would probably make excellent follow-up reads and should provide the overt analysis that I craved here.

Interesting bits:

The work of Lallemand and other French researchers set off a moral and medical panic about onanism that was to continue throughout the century. Masturbation was the dark corollary of the individualism so prized by Victorian society, an embodiment of the dangers of privacy and self-reliance: a man like George Drysdale might lose himself in books and dreams, folding inwards into a dissolute imaginary realm.

Both Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights (1847) and her sister Anne in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall used journals as the scaffolds for the plots of their novels. Dinah Mulock, a regular at Moor Park, in 1852 wrote a novel in the shape of the secret journal of a governess, and Wilkie Collins in 1856 published two tales in the guise of journals by women. By now, the Athenaeum observed: ‘The Diary seems to have superseded Letters as the means by which persons are made to relate their own stories.’ The thrill of the form lay precisely in its verisimilitude, its semblance of reality. The reader of a diary could feel the naughty pleasure of scanning pages not meant for her eyes; or accept the role of the trusted friend for whom the narrator longed. Whether as a spy or a confidante, or both, she experienced a sharp sensation of proximity.

Gynaecology was a new specialism, and the diagnosis of ‘uterine disease’ encompassed all manner of female complaints, from the mental to the menstrual. Since a woman’s reproductive system was believed to exert a strong influence on her mental health, the two were often entwined – about ten percent of sufferers from uterine disease were said to end up in asylums. Any change in a woman’s sexual or reproductive life was seen as an opportunity for the disease. After giving birth, wrote Dr Bennet, a woman usually lost all erotic appetite, but ‘in some exceptional cases, so far from inertia being the result of uterine inflammation, the sexual feelings are exaggerated. Indeed, I have known this exaggeration carried so far as to constitute a kind of nymphomania. When this is the case there is often clitoric enlargement, and its sequela, local irritation.’ Alternatively, the trigger could be the menopause: the eminent gynaecologist E. J. Tilt (a colleague of Bennet) identified the ‘change of life’, or ‘dodging-time’, as the most common cause of hysterical nymphomania. Forbes Winslow, too, observed that women sometimes experienced erotic mania when they stopped menstruating. Then again, an amative woman could be unbalanced simply by a sudden reduction in the frequency with which she had intercourse: as a result of widowhood, for instance, or a husband’s prolonged absences on business.

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll be happy to link to you.)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%. I received a free copy of this book for review.

My Paris Reading List

2012-05-18T13:55:00.003+01:00

Photo credit: Copyright by Moyan Brenn

First of all, many thanks to everyone who left me a comment (or sent me an e-mail or tweet) with Paris reading and/or visiting suggestions. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. I used your book recommendations to compile the reading list below – I didn’t include more books not because I don’t think the suggestions I got were all great, but because I know that realistically there’s a limit to how many books I’ll be able to get a hold of and read in the next month and a half. I also left out a few books (Suite Française, Anna and the French Kiss and Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs aka Time Was Soft There) simply because I’ve already read them.

Without further ado, here’s my Paris reading list:

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway — Like I said before, I want to make sure I read at least this book before my trip. I confess I’m not very drawn to Hemingway in general, but this still sounds like something I’d really love.
The Paris Wife by Paula McLain — A historical novel told from the point of view of Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley. It sounds like a great companion read to A Moveable Feast.
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy — The story of a young American actress in Paris in the 1950’s. Plus it’s a Virago Modern Classic, which practically guarantees I’ll like it.
The Most Beautiful Walk in the World by John Baxter — From the publisher’s description:

In this enchanting memoir, acclaimed author and Paris resident John Baxter recounts his year-long experience of giving literary walking tours through the city. Along the way, he tells the history of Paris through a brilliant cast of characters and their favourite haunts: the cafés of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce; Picasso s underground Montmartre dives; the bustling boulevards of the late-19th century flâneurs; the secluded Little Luxembourg gardens beloved by Gertrude Stein; and finally Baxter s own favourite walk near his home in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Sounds absolutely perfect, right?
French Milk by Lucy Knisley — A graphic memoir about the author’s time in Paris with her mother, and a book that has been on my radar for ages but I’d kind of forgotten I wanted to read.
Something by Collette — Because it’s about time I read her. I have Gigi and the Cat, so perhaps I’ll start there. Do you think that would be a good choice?
Under a Glass Bell by Anaïs Nin — Another author I’ve really been meaning to get to for ages.
The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola — The publisher describes this novel as painting “a picture of a world in which food and the injustice of society are inextricably linked”, which sounds incredibly interesting. I have a question about this book, though – there’s a free English language version on Project Gutenberg, but I know that older translations aren’t always the best quality. Does anyone happen to know if this is a decent one? Would it be a mistake to read it instead of a more recent version?
Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik — A collection of essays by an American journalist in Paris.

Have you read any of these? Which ones do you think I should prioritise? Also, is there anything I left out of my list that you think I really should have included? If so, I’m all ears.

Quiet by Susan Cain

2012-05-15T11:56:00.010+01:00

In Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain describes how the contemporary world is oriented towards what she calls the Extrovert Ideal: from a very young age, we’re taught that being an extrovert is desirable, while being an introvert is something that needs to be fixed. Introverts learn that to advance socially and professionally they need to be able to at least pretend to be extroverts – if they can’t, they’ll find that many doors are closed to them. The most obvious consequence of this is that introverts end up feeling constantly inadequate, but Cain suggests something more: a business culture that values the skills associated with extroversion and the expense of those that go along with introversion will only end up hurting itself. In the many situations in which caution, thoughtfulness and slow deliberation are necessary, there will be few people around who take such an approach.

Quiet is mostly focused on American society in general and on the American business world in particular, but the Extrovert Ideal is widespread enough in Western culture that much of what Cain describes was familiar to me. I was hoping this book would be particularly valuable for me at this point in my life, and it was: it’ll probably come as no surprise to most of you to hear that I’m a huge introvert, and I’ve often been told that the trouble I have networking and putting myself out there is the main reason why I’ve completely failed to advance professionally. While this may well be true, hearing it repeatedly isn’t exactly pleasant, especially when, unlike what people seem to believe, changing this isn’t necessarily just a matter of trying hard enough. It was comforting to see someone say that the problem isn’t that there’s something irrevocably wrong with me, but rather that the world is biased against valuing the kind of skills someone like me does possess. At the same time, Cain acknowledges that we can’t just snap our fingers and make this bias go away, so she offers a lot of practical advice to help introverts make the most of their strengths and learn to triumph despite the pervasiveness of the Extrovert Ideal.

I really appreciated Quiet for this reason, but at the same time, I was a bit put off by Cain’s tendency to favour biological explanations of introversion and extroversion. Readers of this blog will have noticed that essentialism isn’t something I’m comfortable with in general, and I should clarify that this isn’t because I refuse to accept reality, but because essentialist approaches (be they to gender, sexuality or personality traits) have so far failed to convince me on methodological and scientific grounds. I haven’t done enough background reading on the idea that introversion and extroversion are hardwired to be able to unpack Cain’s arguments with complete confidence, but I’ve read enough books that explore this possibility when it comes to gender that I’ve learned to detect the patterns and spot the gaps in these studies. Take this passage, for example:

Of course, the Extrovert Ideal is not entirely a modern invention. Extroversion is in our DNA—literally, according to some psychologists. The trait has been found to be less prevalent in Asia and Africa than in Europe and America, whose populations descend largely from the migrants of the world. It makes sense, say these researchers, that world travelers were more extroverted than those who stayed home—and that they passed on their traits to their children and their children’s children. “As personality traits are genetically transmitted,” writes the psychologist Kenneth Olson, “each succeeding wave of emigrants to a new continent would give rise over time to a population of more engaged individuals than reside in the emigrants’ continent of origin.

As much as this idea may at first glance strike us as something that does make sense, it seems to me a very convenient way to get around the fact that you can’t claim a trait is hardwired when there’s no cross-cultural evidence for it. Also – and like plenty of other hypothesis based on evolutionary psychology – this claim is completely unfalsifiable and nothing more than a just-so story, which only makes me warier. Here’s another passage I had trouble with:

Kagan has given us painstakingly documented evidence that high reactivity is a biological basis of introversion, but his findings are powerful in part because they confirm what we’ve sensed all along. Some of Kagan’s studies even venture into the realm of cultural myth. For example, he believes, based on his data, that high reactivity is associated with physical traits such as blue eyes, allergies, and hay fever, and that high-reactive men are more likely than others to have a thin body and narrow face. Such conclusions are speculative and call to mind the nineteenth-century practice of divining a man’s soul from the shape of his skull. But whether or not they turn out to be accurate, it’s interesting that these are just the physical characteristics we give fictional characters when we want to suggest that they’re quiet, introverted, cerebral. It’s as if these physiological tendencies are buried deep in our cultural unconscious.

Take Disney movies, for example: Kagan and his colleagues speculate that Disney animators unconsciously understood high-reactivity when they drew sensitive figures like Cinderella, Pinocchio, and Dopey with blue eyes, and brasher characters like Cinderella’s stepsisters, Grumpy, and Peter Pan with darker eyes. In many books and Hollywood films and TV shows, too, the stock character of a reedy, nose-blowing young man is shorthand for the hapless but thoughtful kid who gets good grades, is a bit overwhelmed by the social swirl, and is talented at introspective activities like poetry or astrophysics. (Think Ethan Hawke in Dead Poets Society, or any number of Beauty and the Geek contestants). Kagan even speculates that some men prefer women with fair skin and blue eyes because they unconsciously code them as sensitive.

It is of course to Cain’s credit that she readily acknowledges the parallels between Kagan’s speculations and the 19th century phrenology fad, but I found it disheartening that she went along with the idea anyway, as if there just might be something to it after all. The realm of cultural myth she’s entering here has a lot of baggage in terms of race and power dynamics: associating pale, blue-eyed people with prestigious, “civilised” traits such as sensitiveness and thoughtfulness is indeed nothing new, and neither are the racist stereotypes that claim that these traits are lacking in brown-skinned, dark-eyed people. If someone is ready to subtly suggest that there just might be echoes of truth in these ideas and that these echoes have caused them to become part of our “cultural unconscious”, I would like them to be equally ready to address the racist implications behind this.

Later on, Cain does discuss the “the spectre of Nazi eugenics and white supremacism” behind such ideas, but this is done in the following context:

I decided to track down Professor Kagan to ask him these questions in person. I felt drawn to him not only because his research findings were so compelling, but also because of what he represents in the great nature-nurture debate. He’d launched his career in 1954 staunchly on the side of nurture, a view in step with the scientific establishment of the day. Back then, the idea of inborn temperament was political dynamite, evoking the spectre of Nazi eugenics and white supremacism. By contrast, the notion of children as blank slates for whom anything was possible appealed to a nation predicated on a belief in democracy.
But Kagan had changed his mind along the way. “I have been dragged, kicking and screaming, by my data,” he says now, “to acknowledge that temperament is more powerful than I thought and wish to believe.”

The problem I have with this passage is that it implies that the only reason why someone would shy away from essentialist explanations is because they don’t want to align themselves with eugenics and white supremacism – in short, because they don’t want to believe them for political reasons. While I definitely think that these political aspects are hugely important and need to be addressed, I’m also tired of seeing the rejection of primarily biological explanations for human traits be framed solely in political terms. Here is what Jesse Printz says about this in the book Beyond Human Nature:

We should never deny facts because we don’t like them. The problem with naturism is not that it is politically incorrect. The problem is that naturist conclusions are too often based on inadequate science. They tend to overlook evidence for variation and base strong conclusions about biological sources of behaviour on limited evidence. By ignoring cultural factors, naturists reify aspects of behaviour that are shaped by experience.

Yes, a lot of the time these ideas also happen to have disturbing political implications, but this is neither an unfortunate coincidence nor a reason to censor them: it’s rather a symptom of the fact that they’re the result of extremely common cultural biases; cultural biases we’re blind to to such an extent that we think of them as “natural”.

Again, to be fair to Cain, she does discuss many of the questions posed by nature-nurture debates, and she does consider other possibilities and explanations. She also never actually claims that genetics are destiny, and acknowledges the roles of plasticity, flexibility, and experience. I agree with her completely when she says, “maybe the mystery of what percent of personality is nature and what percent nurture is less important than the question of how your inborn temperament interacts with the environment and with your own free will”, and “we have free will and can use it to shape our personality”. However, there were still many instances in Quiet where Cain leaned more towards naturism than I think the data alone merited.

Having said this, I think I understand where Cain is coming from: what she’s trying to do in Quiet is gain more acceptability for introversion and counter the harmful myth that to be an introvert is some sort of character flaw that people can (and indeed should) change if only they try hard enough. And unfortunately we live in a world that tends to equate “not hardwired” (at least to some extent) with “not actually real”. I’ve had this conversation often enough when it comes to gender: it can be very difficult to explain to people that not believing there are innate personality differences between men and women doesn’t mean I’m denying that men and women have extremely difference life experiences as a direct result of gender; or that seeing femininity as a cultural construct is not the same as denying that its constant devaluation is a very real and pervasive problem. Perhaps we can see some parallels here: whatever its origins, introversion is real, and so is the cost of its devaluation in a culture that favours the Extrovert Ideal.

I really appreciated Cain’s empathy and her efforts to validate introverts’ experiences, preferences and behavioural patterns, even if I sometimes felt that she ended up unwittingly idealising them a little too much. Thoughtfulness, rich inner lives and emotional complexity don’t belong to introverts alone; again, Cain does acknowledge this, but she sometimes gets carried away and ends up implying the reverse.

As I said earlier, I found many of the ideas and practical tips in Quiet very useful. The book is simultaneously accepting and pragmatic: it tells readers that it’s okay to be an introvert, but it also offers them sensible advice about how to deal with contexts in which this will continue to be seen as a disadvantage. I was particularly interested in the idea of “personal projects” and in Cain’s suggestion that it’s far easier for introverts to get themselves out there if they’re doing it for things they truly care about. I was immediately reminded of the fact that the only time during a whole year of grad school where I happily and unselfconsciously joined a classroom debate was when we were discussing gender and reading. On the other hands, there are my memories of disastrous job interviews for sales positions I’m just not deeply invested in, and where all the desperate need to make things work in the world wasn’t enough for me to be able to convince others that I was a competent and enthusiastic candidate. Cain explains this in terms that leave personal failure aside, and that was something I very much needed to hear.

In sum, Quiet is a useful book that introverts or those who have one in their lives (and who doesn’t?) will find interesting, useful, and reassuring, even if some sections should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.

They read it too: Shelf Love, Medieval Bookworm, Sophisticated Dorkiness, Bibliophile by the Sea, The Indextrous Reader, So Many Books, Book-a-Rama

(Have I missed yours?)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%. I downloaded a review copy of this book via NetGalley.

Railsea by China Miéville

2012-05-14T11:09:00.008+01:00

As long as humanity has rolled on the railsea, the rigours & vigours bloody triggers of the underground have been legendary. There are predators on the islands, too, of course, above the grundnorm. Hill cats, wolves, monitor lizards, aggressive flightless birds & all manner of others bite & harass & kill the unwary. But they’re only one aspect of the hardland ecosystems, pinnacles on multiform animal pyramids. These systems contain vastly varied behaviours, including cooperations, symbioses, & gentlenesses.
Subterrestriality, by contrast, & life on the flatearth that is its top, is more straightforward & exacting. Almost everything wants to eat almost everything else.

How do I even begin to describe China Miéville’s incredibly inventive new novel Railsea? Imagine a world in which almost every inch of land, save for a few islands, is covered in rail tracks. Humankind ventures out to the railsea in much the same way we venture out to sea in our world. And much like in the real sea, the land beneath the railsea is inhabited by dangerous creatures, including flesh-eating giant moles.

Our hero, Sham ap Soorap, is a doctor’s assistant in a mole-hunting train (think nineteenth-century whaleship and you’ll have an idea of what this consists of). His captain has lost an arm to a giant mole that goes by the name of Mocker-Jack, and now thinks of the beast as her philosophy: hunting him down has become her guiding purpose. One day, Sham and the Captain come across something unexpected on the railsea – something that causes them to question their assumptions about their world. And thus starts an adventure that takes them where no other train has gone before.

As is customary in China Miéville’s novels, the plot of Railsea takes a little while to pick up, but once it gets started it really gets started. Once I was past the first fifty pages or so, I absolutely couldn’t put this book down. But even before then, my interest in Railsea was sustained by the fascinating world Miéville has created. There are hints of the post-apocalyptic here; of a world torn apart by unchecked greed. But I can only tell you so much, because discovering more as the story progresses is one of the greatest pleasures of this novel.

As I said a few years ago of Un Lun Dun, Miéville’s previous venture into YA, Railsea is very much a worldbuilding-oriented novel. And as I also said then, you can tell just how much fun the author is having putting the world together. I loved the way the worldbuilding was embedded in the language of the novel itself; how it became almost indissociable from the narrative voice. Take the following passage, for example, in which the narrator explains why an ampersand is used for “and” throughout the novel:

There was a time when we did not form all words as now we do, in writing on a page. There was a time when the word “&” was written with several distinct & separate letters. It seems madness now. But there it is, & there is nothing we can do about it. Humanity learnt to ride the rails, & that motion made us what we are, a ferromaritime people.
The lines of the railsea go everywhere but from one place straight to another. It is always switchback, junction, coils around & over our own
train-trails. What word better could there be to symbolise the railsea that connects & separates all lands, than “&” itself? Where else does the railsea take us but to this place & that one & that one & that one, & so on? & what better embodies, in the sweep of the pen, the recurved motion of trains, than “&”?

There are many other asides along these lines – little breaks from the story in which the narrator addresses readers, encourages them to engage with the world beyond the limits of the text, or subtly comments on Railsea’s many intertextual references. Being the shameless fan of metafiction that I am, I was absolutely charmed by these interludes. Here’s another one of my favourites:

People have wanted to narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There’ll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.
Some such stories are themselves about the telling of others. An odd pastime. Seemingly redundant, or easy to get lost in, like a picture that contains a smaller picture of itself, which in turn contains—& so on. Such phenomena have a pleasing foreign name: they are mise-en-abymes.

Railsea is full of echoes of classic seafaring adventures – as I said before, this is a wildly imaginative story, but it manages to have the feel of a classic adventure at the same time. There are pirates, trainwrecks, dangerous beasts from the depths, and plenty of narrow escapes. There are also loving hat tips to several other books and authors: the most obvious is Herman Melville and Moby Dick, but there’s also Robert Louis Stevenson, Daniel Defoe, Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series – and these are only the ones I picked up on. Miéville provides a full list of his influences at the end, and I’m already anticipating all the fun I’ll have seeking out the ones I’m not yet familiar with. (Don’t get me started, by the way, on how much I love him for making a YA novel so unapologetically literary, for not assuming all these references would be wasted on teen readers, for writing up rather than writing down.)

The world of Railsea presents readers with a mythology that is both familiar and new. The novel puts us in mind of our relationship with the sea, but because there’s much here that is strange and bewildering, the comfort and certainty of those old familiar sea stories are disrupted. We ask different questions; we stand outside the characters’ dogmas and assumptions in a way we perhaps wouldn’t if the novel drew directly from our own world’s sea stories and myths. Another thing Railsea does brilliantly is evoke the sheer excitement and sense of awe of classic exploration and adventure stories. This is especially true of the ending, which I found absolutely perfect – it’s hopeful, full of possibilities, and ever so slightly frustrating because it leaves you wanting more, more, more. But as the narrator reminds us in one of the many interludes, we’re free to imagine further stories and make it our own playground.

And then there are all the things Railsea simply does as a matter of course, from placing women in positions of power without feeling the need to draw attention to this as if it were something unexpected — because why not? — to having two characters reveal, with no fanfare, that they were raised by a functional and loving polyamorous family. It was refreshing to find a world in which these things were mostly taken for granted. I love many fantasy novels that portray sexism in order to address it, but it was still a breath of fresh air to find a story that just does away with our world’s power dynamics, and in doing so demonstrates how they’re really not inevitable.

Last but not least, I loved how Sham and his friends Caldera and Dero were largely driven by intellectual curiosity. Yes, they go off on adventures, they battle pirates and monstrous predators, they get marooned, they’re rescued at the nick of time – much like all protagonists of classic adventure stories. But they make this happen because they genuinely want to know how the world works; because they can’t stop asking questions or shut down the part of their brains that’s ravenous for more; that truly wants engage with the world around them even when their curiosity clashes with dogma. They dare think the unthinkable and ask the unaskable: this is their starting point, and this is what brings them together.

They read it too: The Readadventurer, The Wertzone, The Book Smugglers, Bunbury in the Stacks

(Have I missed yours?)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%. I requested a review copy of this book using NetGalley.

Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky

2012-05-11T12:47:00.006+01:00

Suite Française is a sequence of two novellas (of a planned total of five) set in 1940-1, the period when France was first occupied by the Nazis. The first section, “Storm in June”, follows a large group of characters as they flee Paris to escape the approaching German army; section two, “Dolce”, takes place in a countryside village during the Occupation and details the lives of both locals and German soldiers, with particular focus on a young married woman who falls in love with a German officer. The two sections have a few characters in common, but otherwise read as independent stories. Still, when put together they form a detailed, acute and incredibly humane portrayal of life in France during the Nazi occupation.

I read Suite Française as part of my quest to seek out all the novels Elizabeth Wein named as inspirations for Code Name Verity — I particularly wanted to read more about occupied France, as this is an aspect of WW2 I hadn’t previously explored in much detail in my reading, and Suite Française proved absolutely perfect for that.

Although I’m not usually a fan of biographical approaches to literature, I really can’t separate my response to Suite Française from my knowledge about the circumstances in which it was written. As many of you probably know, Irène Némirovsky was a French writer of Jewish origin who wrote the novel in 1941 and 1942, while experiencing the historical events it describes. Némirovsky belonged to a wealthy Russian family who moved to France after the revolution, and at a glance her life makes me think of an Eva Ibbotson heroine minus the happy ending: she rose to literary stardom at a young age, but the safety and prosperity her family had achieved was shattered by the war. She was arrested in July 1942, after having completed only two of the five planned sections of Suite Française, and died in Auschwitz a few months later. Here’s how The Guardian describes her manuscript’s long path to publication:

The manuscript of Suite Française was preserved by Denise Epstein, Némirovsky’s daughter, who was 12 at the time of her parents’ murder. She kept her mother’s leather-bound notebook with her each time she and her younger sister were moved from one place of safety to another. Almost 60 years later, Denise read the notebook and discovered that it contained not a diary, as she had always supposed, but a novel.

I loved Suite Française for the amazingly accomplished writing, for the everyday details about life under chaotic and tense sociopolitical circumstances, for the acute social observations, and most of all for the moments of humanity and even humour amidst all the darkness it describes. Némirovsky’s depiction of the Occupation is brutally honest, but it nevertheless leaves room for the humanity of those who were carrying it out to be acknowledged. My favourite section, “Dolce”, makes that particularly clear. For example, take this description of the first interaction between a common soldier and the villagers:

The Frenchmen replied, then became bolder; ‘Has the armistice been signed?’
The German threw open his arms. ‘We don’t know yet. We hope so,’ he said.
And the humanity of his words, his gesture, everything proved they were not dealing with some bloodthirsty monster but with a simple soldier like any other, and suddenly the ice was broken between the town and the enemy, between the country folk and the invader.

Although she explores all the complications associated with collaboration with the Nazi regime, all the resentments and divided allegiances and political implications even the smallest gesture could take, Némirovsky also portrays the French villagers and the German soldiers as human beings doing their best to live side by side in circumstances fraught with tension; as individuals whose personal feelings were often at odds with what they were expected to feel as occupier and occupied. Suite Française is remarkable in its humanity, and it’s particularly moving to think that this story was written by a Jewish woman who was soon to die in Auschwitz; who must have known, if not the details of what awaited her, at least that her chances of survival weren’t good. And yet she refuses to give up her compassion when portraying those who executed the kind of orders that were to cost her and her husband their lives.

I was also interested in the way Suite Française portrays class attitudes in 1940’s France. Némirovsky is wonderfully satirical, especially in her portrayal of the Péricands and of the writer Gabriel Corte in “Storm in June”. These characters are wealthy Parisians whose selfishness and callousness is only exacerbated by the increasing chaos around them. Most of the characters in the first section are not exactly sympathetic, and yet in the end you can’t help but feel for them. Némirovsky allows glimpses of their humanity to shine through, even among biting satire and dark humour. There are moments when even those who have spent most of their lives valuing material luxury become concerned with nothing but immediate survival and human ties:

Panic obliterated everything that wasn’t animal instinct, involuntary physical reaction. Grab the most valuable things you own in the world and then…! And, on that night, only people—the living and the breathing, the crying and the loving—were precious. Where was the person who cared about their possessions; everyone wrapped their warms tightly about their wife or child and nothing else mattered; the rest could go up in flames.

Despite all its breadth and detail, Suite Française has one obvious omission: the absence of any Jewish characters. We see the consequences of the Nazi occupation for French people belonging to every social sphere, but not for the group of people who had the most to fear. It’s easy to read this gap in terms of self-hatred or repudiation, but it’s equally easy to imagine Némirovsky as a human being for whom some possibilities were simply too terrifying to even consider. She described what was going on around her with amazing clarity and insight, but perhaps the immediate threat to her safety and her family’s was too close to home to write about.

Reviewed at: Caribousmon, Fyrefly’s Book Blog, Musings, Erin Reads, Bookgirl’s Nightstand, Avid Reader’s Musings, It’s All About Me, Fizzy Thoughts, Bookfoolery and Babble, An Adventure in Reading, What Kate’s Reading, You Can Never Have Too Many Books

(Have I missed yours?)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

2012-05-08T11:00:00.002+01:00

The year is 2044, and the world is in a sorry state. Unemployment is high, fossil fuels are scarce, the environment is damaged almost beyond repair, and most of humankind has been plunged into deep poverty. The narrator of Ready Player One, Wade Watts, is an 18-year-old who lives with his aunt, his only remaining relative, in a (literal) pile of trailers near Oklahoma City. Wade’s aunt doesn’t particularly want him around, but she tolerates his presence because it means access to additional food stamps.

Wade’s only comfort is the OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation), the virtual reality where he attends school and spends most of his free time. The OASIS was created by James Haliday, a video game designer who grew up in the 1980’s playing classic games. When Haliday died, a video was released explaining that he was leaving his considerable fortune to whoever managed to unlock the hidden “Easter Eggs” in the OASIS. Haliday used his avatar, a wizard by the name of Anorak, to leave a farewell message to the world with instructions about how to begin this quest. However, five years pass before the Gunters (egg hunters) make any real progress towards its completion. And as you surely suspect by now, it is our protagonist who manages to be the first to get his name on the scoreboard.

Ready Player One is nothing if not a 1980’s pop culture extravaganza: because Haliday was a teenager during the 80’s, the Gunters rightly figured that the answers to his riddles might require familiarity with the comics, movies, music, video games, TV series and novels he grew up with. As a result, Wade and his fellow Gunters spent their lives immersed in these cultural products, and references to the decade abound in the novel. Some of these were a little too old for me, but enough of them were familiar than I immediately felt at home in Wade’s world.

One of the things I appreciated the most about this novel was how it effortlessly combined an exciting, suspenseful and immensely readable adventure story with social commentary about the reality of climate change, about our culture’s uneasy relationship with the digital world, and about the current struggles for a free Internet where the interests of corporations don’t trump individual freedoms. Cline’s take on these themes is not as in-depth or sophisticated as, say, Cory Doctorow’s (who, by the way, gets an awesome shout out, along with Will Wheaton, for his digital activism), but that doesn’t mean it’s not thoughtful and satisfying. Ready Player One is a excellent example of how good dystopias are really about engaging with present day concerns rather than about anticipating the future.

I also particularly appreciated the fact that Ready Player One mostly goes for a nuanced approach to the reality and validity of web-based and virtual experiences. There’s a clear element of escapism to the OASIS: people choose to spend time in a virtual environment because they want to avoid a heavily polluted and impoverished world that offers them no real opportunities. However, this doesn’t invalidate the fact that what goes on in the OASIS is meaningful to people; that the experiences lived there and the connections formed are very much real. There’s nothing wrong with virtual reality per se; it just shouldn’t come at the expense of caring for the real world and trying to change it for the better. As a reader who is very much tired of seeing fiction default to portraying web-based connections as shallow and less than real, I thought that this made for a welcome change.

As you’ve gathered by now, I’m ready to join the ranks of bloggers who loved Ready Player One. However, there was a moment that made me very uncomfortable and that I really want to discuss. This moment has little bearing on the novel’s overall plot and themes, but all the same I keep thinking about it and I believe it’s worthy of discussion. I thought I’d draw attention to it not only because I’m generally interested in gender and definitions of womanhood, but also because I’ve particularly interested in the relationship between politics and literature; in how stories shape our perception of the world and of marginalised groups; in how they can both represent and contribute to dominating social attitudes. My discomfort with this passage doesn’t erase my huge enjoyment of Ready Player One (although I do realise that the fact that something like this is not a deal-breaker for me is in itself a privilege), nor is my drawing attention to it a call for this book to be censored or for its fans to be shamed. It’s just what it is – a conversation. What are stories, after all, if not excellent points of departure for conversations?

The moment I mean is a conversation Wade has with his fellow Gunter (and love interest) Artemis on the OASIS. It goes as follows:

Art3mis: How well do you know Aech?
Parzival: He’s been my best friend for five years. Now, spill it. Are you a woman? And by that I mean are you a human female who has never had a sex-change operation?
Art3mis: That’s pretty specific.
Parzival: Answer the question, Claire.
Art3mis: I am, and always have been, a human female. Have you ever met Aech IRL?
Parzival: No. Do you have any siblings?
Art3mis: No. You?

This excerpt from what is a longer game of flirtatious Q&A between the two reveals that both Wade and Artemis appear to operate under a definition of “woman” that excludes trans women and implicitly defines them as not “really” women. I realise it’s possible to argue that it’s realistic to portray two teenagers as operating under this definition, and also that there’s a world of difference between what the characters in a novel say and what a narrative as a whole endorses. Stories are allowed subtlety, after all – there’s no need to be openly didactic or to explicitly tut-tut every wrongheaded thing a character says or does for a narrative to challenge it. To pretend otherwise is to claim that, say, a story like “The Lottery” endorses stoning people to death, which is patently ridiculous.

However, in this case Wade and Artemis’ comments are not even further addressed by the narrative, let alone challenged. This is the only time in the story trans women are alluded to, and there are no transgender characters. To return to the question of realism, these comments could perhaps be read as reflecting the fact that most people do in fact define gender in very rigid terms that exclude trans women (and men), and no, I don’t believe that fiction should ever shy away from acknowledging this. But all the same, it saddens me that the assumption here is that these definitions would still be the default in the year 2044 – so much so that they’re unthinkingly voiced by two sympathetic characters in a way that makes the reader complicit (and yes, making readers complicit in problematic worldviews can be a powerful literary tool, but again I don’t think that’s what’s going on here). There’s no reason whatsoever why these characters need to operate under this limited understanding of “woman”, especially in a novel that doesn’t develop these themes further.

The exchange between Wade and Artemis was especially jarring because Ready Player One seems otherwise committed to progressive values. The novel attempts to be inclusive when it comes to race, gender, and sexual orientation; to acknowledge the reality and consequences of powerlessness, oppression and discrimination in our culture. This only makes me wish all the more that the same approach had been extended to transphobia; that there had been something in the narrative, however small and subtle, that challenged or addressed the implications of holding such a narrow definition of “woman”.

Another reason why this absence was particularly noticeable was because there were moments when the narrative actually came close to erring on the side of after school special-ness: the “don’t forget this isn’t real!” speech at the end, for example, or the conversation between Aech and Wade when they finally meet face to face (I can’t discuss this in detail without spoilers, but anyone who has read the novel will know what I mean). I appreciated the function these moments served in the story, but the truth is that they were overt rather than subtle and could perhaps have been handled with more elegance. To clarify, I’m not arguing that Ready Player One should have veered even closer to didacticism; I’m only pointing out what I suspect is an example of a common cultural blind spot. And needless to say, I’m completely open to everyone else’s thoughts on this.

To reiterate what I said before, overall I very much enjoyed Ready Player One. It was one of the most fun reading experiences I’ve had so far this year, and this is certainly something I value. Furthermore, I’ve always believed that it’s perfectly okay to be a fan of flawed things: it’s how you engage with them that makes all the difference.

They read it too: Medieval Bookworm, You’ve GOTTA Read This, The Book Smugglers, Raging Bibliomania, Fizzy Thoughts, So Many Books, my books.my life, Eclectic/Eccentric, A Librarian’s Life in Books, Bermudaonion’s Weblog, The Written World, Book Nut, Capricious Reader

(This is a very popular novel, so there are probably several dozen reviews I missed. Is yours one of them? If so, leave me your link and I’ll be happy to add it.)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

The Sunday Salon – Bookmarks Galore

2012-05-06T10:55:00.003+01:00

As those of you who have been with me for a few years might remember, I collect bookmarks. I also used to make my own: what better way, after all, to inexpensively add to your collection? I used to make them for friends and fellow bloggers too, and giveaways of homemade bookmarks were a regular feature of this blog a few years ago. In fact, I strongly suspect that most of the people who have been blogging friends with me for over three years have had bookmarks forced on them at some point or another. The reasons why I stopped making them amount to becoming busier, to having had to leave my craft supplies in storage for a long period, and to a steady waning of the kind of confidence required to believe other people could be interested in something you have made with your own hands (and to think you’re supposed to grow less self-conscious as you age).

Anyway, in case you’re curious, here’s what some of my homemade bookmarks looked like:

(Apologies for the terrible quality of the photos, by the way – this was all prior to my getting a semi-decent camera.)

The actual goal of this post is to show you some of the latest additions to my collection, much like I did with postcards a few weeks ago. Let’s start with the cat-themed ones (as always, click to enlarge):

The first one on the left is a print of “Cat in the cottage window” by Ralph Hedley, and I picked it up at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle last year. The fabric one beside it came from a craft fair I stumbled upon randomly in York. The following three were all gifts from lovely people: the ribbon one from Renay, the giant clip from M’s mother, and the blue one from Amy. The last two were sent to me by the very nice folks at Pomegranate, along with a copy of Edward Gorey’s The Lost Lions as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

The one on the left in this picture is actually the only bookmark I made myself in the past two years or so. It was inspired by my fellow blogger Marieke, and I’m actually quite happy with how it turned out. I wouldn’t quite say I collect stamps, but whenever I receive a package or letter with nice ones I tend to save them, and as a result I have gathered some really beautiful ones from all around the world over the years. It was great to finally have something to do with them. The following two were presents from M (the owl one is made from wood shavings that would otherwise go to waste, which makes me even fonder of it), the vintage one was a thrift store find, and the bottom right one was a gift from Jodie. It’s a Much Ado About Nothing bookmark, and it makes me happy because it reminds me of the very fun day when we saw it performed at The Globe along with Meghan and Ana.

Here we have two from Foyle’s in London, followed by three that came with the Persephone Biannually (always such a pleasure to receive it). I have a few other Persephone bookmarks, but when I actually own the book they match I tend to keep them inside it. The two on the right are from Manchester Metropolitan University’s Library Special Collections. Who said free bookmarks couldn’t be awesome?

Lastly, here are a few more awesome free bookmarks: one of one of my favourite novels of last year; one from the amazing British Library science fiction exhibition I saw last September (speaking of which, I really wish I had blogged about it, but this was around the time when I was finishing my dissertation), and four limited edition ones from The Book Depository. These aren’t even the only Book Depository ones I managed to collect, which suggests alarming things about the amount of books I used to order from them three years or so ago.

Do you collect bookmarks yourself? If so, what are some of your favourites?

Quicksand by Nella Larsen

2012-05-04T13:08:00.004+01:00

Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand tells the story of Helga Crane, the daughter of a Scandinavian mother and a black father. Helga is a young woman trying to find her place in early 20th century American society. When the novel opens, she is a teacher at Naxos, a wealthy boarding school in the South that educates black pupils. Helga becomes increasingly frustrated with the school’s segregationist race politics, which are summarised in the following passage:

And he had said that if all Negroes would only take a leaf out of the book of Naxos and conduct themselves in the manner of the Naxos products there would be no race problem, because Naxos Negroes knew what was expected of them. They had good sense and they had good taste. They knew enough to stay in their places, and that, said the preacher, showed good taste. He spoke of his great admiration for the Negro race, no other race in so short a time had made so much progress, but he had urgently besought them to know when and where to stop

As a result of her rejection of this ideology, Helga quits her job at Naxos; Quicksand then follows her as she moves to Chicago, to Harlem during its famous Renaissance, and then to Denmark to stay with her mother’s family. Over the course of the novel, Helga tries to find a place where she belongs, and also to make sense of her identity in a world that keeps trying to impose stifling definitions of what it means to be a mixed-race woman on her.

I fell in love with Nella Larsen’s amazing writing from the very first page and I could not put Quicksand down. The opening chapters in particularly really resonated with me: they show Helga drifting, trying to figure out what to do after quitting her teaching job, and slowly realising how many opportunities are in fact closed to her. The challenges Helga faces as a woman of colour are of course completely different from my own experiences, but nevertheless Larsen evoked a feeling that is familiar to me in a very powerful way.

Helga is a very interesting protagonist: she’s not without her flaws, but even so I never stopped empathizing with her. She’s particularly quick to judge others and prone to internalised racism, but Larsen does a great job of showing how this is a result of the conflicting social messages she’s been exposed to through her life. For example,

Worst of all was the fact that under the stinging hurt she understood and sympathized with Mrs. Nilssen’s [her uncle’s wife, who rejects any family association with Helga due to her race] point of view, as always she had been able to understand her mother’s, her stepfather’s, and his children’s points of view. She saw herself for an obscene sore in all their lives, at all costs to be hidden. She understood, even while she resented. It would have been easier if she had not.
(…)
Abruptly it flashed upon her that the harrowing irritation of the past weeks was a smoldering hatred. Then she was overcome by another, so actual, so sharp, so horribly painful, that forever afterwards she preferred to forget it. It was as if she were shut up, boxed up, with hundreds of her race, closed up with that something in the racial character which had always been, to her, inexplicable, alien. Why, she which had always been, to her, inexplicable, alien. Why, she demanded in fierce rebellion, should she be yoked to these despised black folk?

Race and gender are at the forefront of Quicksand. The section set in Denmark particularly does an excellent job of examining the exoticisation of women of colour – an exoticisation that is closely tied to Helga’s sexuality. Helga is treated kindly, but at the same time she’s condescended to as her personhood is dismissed. As the following sections show, she is mainly perceived as a primitive being whose function in a white society is purely ornamental:

Everyone was very polite and very friendly, but she felt the massed curiosity and interest, so discreetly hidden under the polite greetings. The very atmosphere was tense with it. “As if I had horns, or three legs,” she thought. She was really nervous and a little terrified, but managed to present an outward smiling composure. This was assisted by the fact that it was taken for granted that she knew nothing or very little of the language. So she had only to bow and look pleasant.
(…)
To them this girl, this Helga Crane, this mysterious niece of the Dahls, was not to be reckoned seriously in their scheme of things. True, she was attractive, unusual, in an exotic, almost savage way, but she wasn’t one of them. She didn’t at all count.

From a historical perspective, Quicksand is groundbreaking for its frank portrayal of Helga’s inner life – the fact that we’re openly told about her desire for Dr Anderson, her impatience with those who surround her, her experiences with racism, and the impact of these experience in how she sees herself is no small thing. We are also shown how uncomfortable Helga’s experience of her own sexuality, and again Larsen intelligently points readers towards the root cause of this discomfort. Helga is caught between feeling she’s conforming to the racist stereotype of the hypersexual black woman and repressing her emotions altogether. In either case, she is robbed of the sense that her sexuality is truly her own. Neither option is really viable, and this leaves her with no place to go.

Quicksand has a bleak ending reminiscent of novels such as The Awakening or Ethan Frome. It took me a while to make sense of my feelings about it – on the one hand, the ending could leave room for Quicksand to be read as yet another story that conforms to the long tradition of punishing women for their sexuality. There is no way around the fact that the ending puts Helga in a position of victimisation and sacrifice. But on the other hand, it makes sense to me that Helga would fail to find independence and fulfilment under her social circumstances. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of novels that draw attention to social systems that are insurmountable in their current shape and thus to how they need to be changed, rather than to individual feats of triumph and strength. I believe that Quicksand is one of these novels, and for this reason I really appreciated the ending.

I absolutely can’t wait to read Nella Larsen’s Passing, which I hear is an even better novel.

They read it too: My Friend Amy, Rebecca Reads, Beauty is a Sleeping Cat, A Striped Armchair, Paperback Reader

(Have I missed yours?)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall

2012-05-03T13:31:00.007+01:00

Tens of thousands of years ago, when the human mind was young and our numbers were few, we were telling one another stories. And now, tens of thousands of years later, when our species teems across the globe, most of us still hew strongly to myths about the origins of things, and we still thrill to an astonishing multitude of fictions on pages, on stages, and on screens — murder stories, sex stories, war stories, conspiracy stories, true stories and false. We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.

I can’t tell you how happy I was when I found out that The Storytelling Animal existed. The subtitle – How Stories Make Us Human – immediately reminded of an idea towards which I’ve always gravitated: that our tendency to organise our lives around narratives is a fundamental part of what being a human being is all about. I’ve encountered this idea several times in fiction, in the works of favourite authors of mine such as Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and in series like Fables or The Unwritten, and I was very excited to see it explored in a work of non-fiction.

In The Storytelling Animal, Gottschall explores our relationship with stories in a way that goes beyond what we traditionally think of as the consumption of fiction: after all, “the human imperative to make and consume stories runs even more deeply than literature, dreams, and fantasy. We are soaked to the bone in story.” He explores the role stories play as social glue; as systems that allow us to organize the world; in our childhoods; in politics, sociology and science, etc. To quote from the preface,

The Storytelling Animal is about the way explorers from the sciences and humanities are using new tools, new ways of thinking, to open up the vast terra incognita of Neverland. It’s about the way that stories — from TV commercials to daydreams to the burlesque spectacle of professional wrestling — saturate our lives. It’s about deep patterns in the happy mayhem of children’s make-believe and what they reveal about story’s prehistoric origins. It’s about how fiction subtly shapes our beliefs, behaviors, ethics — how it powerfully modifies culture and history. It’s about the ancient riddle of the psychotically creative night stories we call dreams. It’s about how a set of brain circuits — usually brilliant, sometimes buffoonish — force narrative structure on the chaos of our lives. It’s also about fiction’s uncertain present and hopeful future. Above all, it’s about the deep mysteriousness of story. Why are humans addicted to Neverland? How did we become the storytelling animal?

Sounds exciting, right? I started out really enjoying The Storytelling Animal, but a few chapters in I was hit in the head by a staggering dose of gender essentialism. After rehashing some scientifically repackaged old gender stereotypes, Gottschall actually pulls what Cordelia Fine so brilliantly calls the Modern Day Galileo manoeuvre. He says:

Writing this, I feel a little like the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat.” Before tying a noose and hanging the titular feline from a tree, the narrator first digs out the cat’s eye with a jackknife. Confessing his crime, he writes, “I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity!” The idea that gender has deep biological roots is something almost everyone accepts these days but still avoids saying in polite company. It sounds too much like a limit on human potential, especially on the potential of women to move into positions of cultural equality. But the spectacular changes in women’s lives over the past half century — driven largely by the way that cheap and reliable contraception has given women control of their fertility — should allay our fears.

First of all, I deeply resent the misleading implication that there’s a scientific consensus about the reality of gender essentialism that society keeps trying to censor – as scientists such as Janet Hyde, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Cordelia Fine, Mark Liberman, Carol Tavris, Lise Eliot, Lesley Rogers and others have shown, this is far from the truth.

Secondly, yes, it takes such courage to bring up this suppressed truth in “polite company”. The idea that Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus is not completely steeped in popular culture – oh no, not in the least. Pick up a random magazine, watch a sitcom, see advertisements, and you’ll certainly not come across the belief that men and women are so different they might as well belong to different species. Nope. Thank goodness for brave prosecuted harbingers of truth such as Gottschall. My heart absolutely bleeds for them. And yes, our fears about sexism should certainly be allayed by now – not only are women’s reproductive rights completely secure, but gender essentialism doesn’t continue to hurt women – and men – on a daily basis. Nothing at all to worry about here. I realise I’m zooming in on what is ultimately a small aspect of this book, but this kind of thing exhausts me and I have frankly completely run out of patience for it.

Sadly, my misgivings about Gottschall’s approach don’t end here. He relies heavily on evolutionary psychology, a field of study I’ve always had big problems with – not because I don’t care about science, but exactly because I do. I do think there’s something to the ideas presented in The Storytelling Animal, and Gottschall’s exploration of them is often very interesting, but this book is far more speculative than solidly scientific. This is not something I’d have a problem with, if not for the fact that the way these hypotheses are presented suggests otherwise. To quote from the preface again, Gottschall says:

I’m aware that the very idea of bringing science — with its sleek machines, its cold statistics, its unlovely jargon — into Neverland makes many people nervous. Fictions, fantasies, dreams — these are, to the humanistic imagination, a kind of sacred preserve. They are the last bastion of magic. They are the one place where science cannot — should not — penetrate, reducing ancient mysteries to electrochemical storms in the brain or the timeless warfare among selfish genes. The fear is that if you explain the power of Neverland, you may end up explaining it away. As Wordsworth said, you have to murder in order to dissect. But I disagree.

I’m completely with him on this – I don’t for a moment believe there’s no place for science here, or that to dissect our fascination with stories is to destroy it. But we must make sure we don’t get too carried away and present what are no more than interesting speculations as solid, empirically supported facts.

Another aspect of The Storytelling Animal I had a problem with was the way Gottschall’s appreciation for story sometimes came at the expense of art forms that aren’t narrative based. For example, he says of the Modernists:

Gertrude Stein praised herself, along with writers like Joyce and Marcel Proust, for writing fiction in which “nothing much happens… For our purposes, events have no importance.” Nothing much happens, and aside from English professors, no one much wants to read them. Yes, experimental fictions like Finnegans Wake are still in print, but they are mainly sold either to cultured autodidacts dutifully grinding their way through the literary canon, or to college students who are forced to pretend that they have read them.

As readers of this blog will know, I personally tend to favour narrative-based fiction, but the suggestion that to read Finnegans Wake couldn’t possibly be a rewarding experience still makes me very uncomfortable. No, I’m not likely to ever read it, but I know people who have and who didn’t do so out of duty. And as much as I love story, there are novels that I love for their use of language or for the new possibilities they opened in fiction. We can appreciate all these different aspects of literature without having to dismiss some to champion others.

To end on a more positive note, I very much appreciated Gottschall’s optimism about the future of story, particularly at a time when many pronounce the death of fiction. Yes, the way we tell and consume stories might change in the future, but Gottschall believes (much as I do) that stories are going to stick around anyhow.

In sum, some aspects of The Storytelling Animal were unconvincing, but Gottschall is an engaging writer and presents interesting ideas about why stories loom so large in our lives. Recommended with reservations.

Bits I liked:

Our hunger for meaningful patterns translates into a hunger for story. As the video game designer and writer James Wallis puts it, “Human beings like stories. Our brains have a natural affinity not only for enjoying narratives and learning from them but also for creating them. In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story.” There are a lot of neat studies that make Wallis’s point, showing how we automatically extract stories from the information we receive, and how — if there is no story there — we are only too happy to invent one.

The characters in fiction are just wiggles of ink on paper (or chemical stains on celluloid). They are ink people. They live in ink houses inside ink towns. They work at ink jobs. They have inky problems. They sweat ink and cry ink, and when they are cut, they bleed ink. And yet ink people press effortlessly through the porous membrane separating their inky world from ours. They move through our flesh-and-blood world and wield real power in it. As we have seen, this is spectacularly true of sacred fictions. The ink people of scripture have a real, live presence in our world. They shape our behaviours and our customs, and in so doing, they transform societies and histories.

So whenever you hear that the novel is dead, translate as follows: “I don’t like all of those hot-selling novels that are filling up the bestseller lists — so they don’t count.”
But what if the novel were actually to die or just dwindle into true cultural irrelevance? Would that signal the decline of story? For a bookman like me, the end of the novel would be a very sad thing. But, as David Shields himself stresses, it would not be the end of story. The novel is not an eternal literary form. While the novel has ancient precursors, it rose as a dominating force only in the eighteenth century. We were creatures of story before we had novels, and we will be creatures of story if sawed-off attention spans or technological advances ever render the novel obsolete. Story evolves. Like a biological organism, it continuously adapts itself to the demands of its environment.

(Have you read this book too? Let me know and I’ll be happy to link to you.)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%. I downloaded a review copy of this book via NetGalley.

The New Moon with the Old by Dodie Smith

2012-04-30T11:37:00.005+01:00

Dodie Smith’s 1963 novel The New Moon with the Old tells the story of the Carrington family: the first section is told from the point of view of Jane Minton, who arrives at Dome House to begin a new job as a secretary and housekeeper. Jane immediately feels welcomed, and she gets along well with the four artistic and slightly eccentric Carrington children: Richard, a composer; Clare, supposedly a painter but still unsure of what she really wants to do; Drew, who wants to write novels set in the Edwardian era; and Merry, a very talented and precocious actress. Shortly after Jane’s arrival, something unexpected happens to Mr Carrington; as a result, his four children have to find ways to make ends meet for the first time in their lives. The remaining sections of The New Moon with the Old follow the four Carrington siblings one by one, as they leave home and try and make their way in the world.

The New Moon with the Old is a realistic novel, but it reads a little bit like a fairy tale: the Carringtons go off and have solitary adventures; they’re met with trials and obstacles they have to surpass; they’re repaid for acts of kindness; and eventually they all end up finding exactly what they needed. If you pause to think about it carefully it’s all rather unlikely, but once you fall into the rhythm of the story it’s hard not to go along with it all.

Another thing about this novel is that even though it was written and is set in the 1960’s, it has the feel of a much earlier work. This seems like a deliberate choice on Dodie Smith’s part – the Carrigtons, after all, live quite a sheltered life at Dome House and seem mostly unaware of the post-war world. After the first few chapters, I kind of expected their stories to be about the clash between their markedly early twentieth-century lifestyle and modernity, but in reality they all end up finding places that are every bit as seeped in nostalgia as Dome House. However, this isn’t so much a flaw as it is part of what gives the novel its slightly magical, otherworldly feel.

My favourite narrative arc was the one concerning Drew, the aspiring writer and lover of Edwardiana who finds a job as a companion to an elderly lady. She lives in a house where time seems to have stopped; while the perfectly preserved Edwardian interior is great for inspiration and research, Drew soon realises that there’s something really amiss in his new employer’s life. Miss Whitecliff is a product of her times not only when it comes to the décor of her house, but also when it comes to her beliefs about what she, an unmarried lady, is and isn’t supposed to do. This section of the story reads a little like novels such as Consequences or Alas, Poor Lady — Dodie Smith’s tone is much lighter, and she does provide us with a happy ending of sorts, but she still does a fabulous job of depicting the tyranny of gender roles and the consequences of raising girls to be helpless and dependent.

My only slight “but” regarding The New Moon with the Old has to do with wishing Dodie Smith had imagined different life ambitions for some of her female characters: ones that weren’t solely circumscribed to romantic fulfilment. I should clarify that I don’t intend this to be a “romance is bad and anti-feminist” type of comment; I just can’t help but wish for more variety of representation when it comes to women’s wishes and life choices. Although to be fair, Merry is an exception to this pattern, and this is something I feel every bit as often with contemporary fiction as I did with this older novel.

The almost inevitable question about these Dodie Smith reissues is how they compare to I Capture the Castle, though it’s probably unfair to even ask it. Part of me wondered if Smith would prove to be another Stella Gibbons for me (although I’m a huge fan of Cold Comfort Farm, I love her other novels even more), but no, that didn’t turn out to be the case. But really, The New Moon with the Old was a delightful read, and that’s more than enough to make me happy. It may not be an earth-shattering novel full of new insights, but it belongs firmly in the comfort read category – and I’ve never felt that providing comfort was a lesser role among the many that literature can fulfil.

They read it too: Jenny’s Books, Fleur Fish Reads

(You?)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

I come back bearing news and books

2012-04-29T11:27:00.002+01:00

Hello everyone. I didn’t exactly set out to take a blogging break these past weeks, but I’ve been pretty unwell lately and that’s what ended up happening. Usually I put up a warning if I’m going to be quiet for a little while, but this time it was all unplanned and I couldn’t quite muster the energy to do so. I just kept telling myself I would come back the next day, and before I knew it twelve days had passed. I feel really bad that I missed a couple of blogging events I was excited about, and even more so that I dropped the ball when it comes to e-mail, comments, collaborative projects, and a couple of other miscellaneous blogging things I’d promised I’d do. All I can do is apologise and ask you to bear with me during these difficult times.

Sadly my time away from the internet wasn’t exactly productive when it comes to reading, but I do have a couple of exciting things to share. First of all, my partner decided to attempt to cheer me up with a box of books I’d been coveting – and let me tell you, this proved a pretty effective strategy. Here they are:

First of all, the three recent Dodie Smith reissues from Corsair. I’ve already read one of them and hope to be able to tell you about it very soon.
Gillepsie and I by Jane Harris: This caught my eye more than any of the other titles from this year’s Orange longlist, and I’m so happy to have the chance to read it.
The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes: The subtitle – How the romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of Science – says it all. I’ve been dying to read this for years, and it seems like a great match for my current non-fiction kick.
The Thirties and The Blitz by Juliet Gardiner: More exciting non-fiction that is very relevant to my interests.
Finally, there’s Mariana by Monica Dickens – because who doesn’t need more Persephones?

Part two of M’s master plan to motivate me to get better is even more exciting – he’s taking me to Paris for a weekend in July! I don’t know about you, but I find that having something big to look forward to in the not-so-distant future can do wonders for my everyday well-being. It works a bit like a gigantic carrot on a stick, encouraging me to cope with things, to get as well as I can, and to just carry on day after day. I realise a trip isn’t exactly a long-term solution to my troubles, but whatever helps, right?

I haven’t been to Paris before, so this is particularly exciting for me. Paris has been on my mental must visit list for ages, but to be honest the city doesn’t loom as large in my imagination as places like London or New York, for the simple reason that I haven’t read anywhere near as many books set there. So I’d like to ask you for suggestions of books that would give me a real feel for the city, so I can put together a reading list for myself (A Moveable Feast is already on it, of course). I’d also be very grateful if those of you familiar with Paris could give me suggestions of places to visit. Again, I already have a few entries on my mental list, and I do plan on reading every guide I can get my hands on, but I tend to trust direct recommendations more than tourist guides. And since you’re all pretty familiar with my interests, I bet you could come up with some great ones. We’ll only have two days, so there will definitely have to be some difficult choices – what, besides Shakespeare and Company, should I make absolute sure I don’t miss?

Last but not least (and I’m so sorry that this post is nothing but me asking you one favour after another), I’d love it if you told me what I missed while I was gone. Google Reader will have to get the “Mark All as Read” treatment, but I’d really appreciate it if you linked to any particularly interesting posts you wrote (or saw somewhere else) while I was away. Please don’t be shy – believe me when I say that I’d really appreciate the distraction.

My Favourite Bookish Protagonists

2012-04-17T10:34:00.005+01:00

There are few things I love more than coming across a book whose protagonists is a reader. First of all, it gives me an immediate jolt of recognition. I know it’s naïve to assume that just because a character is fond of books I’ll have a lot in common with them, but I just can’t help it; I still feel close to them right away. In addition to that instant sense of connection, I love the fact that bookish heroes and heroines defy the idea that there’s an insurmountable divide between reading and life; that bookish people are dull and don’t have things happen to them. With this in mind, I thought I’d share some of my favourite bookish protagonists with you today.

Charmain Baker from Diana Wynne Jones’ House of Many Ways: As you might remember, I met Charmain very recently: this was actually what gave me the idea for this post. Charmain is certainly an example of someone whose love of reading goes hand in hand with an ongoing attempt to keep the real world at bay, but this attitude of hers changes over the course the novel. Charmain becomes involved in an adventure of her own, and yet her love of books remains.

I particularly loved the scenes where she and the King of High Norland sit companionably side by side in the Royal Library, cataloguing old books and documents. These scenes reminded me of my own work back when I was an archivist, and I can’t say I’d ever come across a novel that did that.

Mosca Meyers from Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge: Mosca Meyer is such an interesting character. She’s a smart young girl who particularly values reading because she’s been starved for words for most of her life. In Mosca’s world – as in ours – literacy is deeply connected to power and opportunities; her desperate and fierce desire to have access to more words, more thoughts, more ways to perceive and organise and discuss the world around her remind readers not to take this connection for granted.

Meggie Folchart from Inkheart by Cornelia Funke: Unfortunately I wasn’t a big fan of this novel overall, but it still wouldn’t feel right to leave Meggie out of a list like this. I did love Cornelia Funke’s premise and her celebration of the pleasures of getting lost in a good book. Meggie’s love of story despite the very real dangers books pose in her world was an absolute pleasure to witness. Her father, Mo, deserves a mention as well, of course. Here's one of my favourite quotes from the book:

If you take a book with you on a journey, an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it... yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.

Bastian from The Neverending Story by Michael Ende: The shy, geeky, isolated Bastian is the first bookish hero I ever remember coming across. Like many other children of the 80’s, I watched the movie version of The Neverending Story countless times, and some years later I was able to get my hands on the book. When I was in middle school I could really relate to Bastian’s school experiences; to the way he took refuge in books and saw them as a lifeline. It was such a comfort to see that someone like that could be at the centre of a story. (On a side note, I think Atreyu was my first ever literary crush.)

Lirael from Lirael, the second book in Garth Nix’s Abhorsen trilogy: I’ve been actually thinking of rereading this trilogy lately – I only hope it lives up to my memories of it. When I started Lirael, the second book in the series, I was actually very disappointed that it wasn’t going to focus on the characters from Sabriel; but within 20 pages I was already irrevocably attached to Lirael, the series’ new protagonist. She’s a librarian at the amazing Clayr’s Library and likes nothing better than to get lost in its dark, cobwebby, mysterious corners. What’s not to love?

Catherine Morland from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey: Catherine is a reader of novels at a time when they were yet to gain respectability. She’s a little apologetic about the fact and sometimes buys into all the negative associations between novels and her gender, but as the story progresses she really comes into her own. I love her interaction with Henry Tilney here:

“I never look at it,” said Catherine, as they walked along the side of the river, “without thinking of the south of France.”
“You have been abroad then?” said Henry, a little surprised.
“Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?”
“Why not?”
“Because they are not clever enough for you – gentlemen read better books.”
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days – my hair standing on end the whole time.”

Now that I think of it, Henry Tilney also very much belongs on this list.

Jo March from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott — Jo is a writer as well as a reader. I have my qualms about the ending of her storyline (who doesn’t?), but I still love the way her presence in the story illuminates the extent to which reading and writing could be acts of subversion for girls and women in her position. Regardless of how things turn out for her, the fact that the indomitable Jo was allowed to exist for a large part of the story is very significant.

Frankie Landau-Banks from The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart — Oh, how can I even begin to explain why I love Frankie? She’s smart, passionate, unwilling to compromise when it comes to being treated as a human being, and a reader of Dorothy Parker and P.G. Wodehouse. She certainly belongs in any list of favourite protagonists I make, bookish or not.

(If TV series were included here, this is where I’d mention Rory Gilmore. I’m up to season six of Gilmore Girls [yep, this is my first time watching it; I never said I didn’t live under a rock] and more I more I daydream about locking Rory and Frankie in a room so they could have a nice long talk. I have a feeling they’d have plenty to say to each other.)

Madeleine Hanna from The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: I probably don’t need to tell you again how much I loved this novel, do I? Unlike some readers, I felt much closer to Madeleine than to any of the other point of view characters. She felt completely real to me, and her love of books, particularly of Victorian literature, was certainly a part of what drew me to her right away.

Last but not least, there’s Roald Dahl’s Matilda Wormwood: It’s been many years since I last read Matilda, but how could I forget its heroine’s voraciousness when it comes to books? I’ve heard that the Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin musical does some very interesting things with this theme. I so hope I’ll have the opportunity to see it someday.

What about you? Are you also a fan of bookish protagonists? What are some of your favourites?

The Sunday Salon – “Marginalia” by Billy Collins

2012-04-15T10:14:00.003+01:00

Good morning, Sunday Saloners. My plan for today was to share my thoughts on Billy Collin’s collection Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes for Serena’s National Poetry Month Blog Tour, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to finish it on time (yes, the reading slump continues).

Instead, I thought I’d share what is probably my favourite poem from it so far, “Marginalia”. At the risk of having rotten tomatoes thrown my way, I’ll confess that for most of my life I’ve been a shameless writer of margin notes (always in pencil, mind you). These days I mostly use Post-it notes, but when I was a student I was especially given to writing in books – though I of course hope my comments weren’t quite as obvious as the ones Collins describes. Does any of the following sound familiar to you too?

“Marginalia”

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive –
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” –
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page—
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

What I like the most about “Marginalia” is how well it captures that sense of connection to past readers we feel when stumbling upon their margin notes: it brilliantly evokes a community of readers that stretches outside the boundaries of space and time. This feeling of connection can take many shapes – agreement, bemusement, mild irritation, curiosity, a vague sense of longing for a stranger we’ll never meet – and the poem captures a wide range of them.

I particularly love the stanza about the Irish Monks: the existence of marginalia in manuscripts that are centuries old is one of those things that can really make the past come to life for me. For a moment it really hits me that history was peopled by real human beings; that despite the centuries that separate us and the inevitable differences in how we see the world, there’s also so much that we share.

“Marginalia” is actually a great example of what I like about Collins’ poetry: his sense of humour, his ability to convey so much with such seemingly simple language, the way his poems illuminate everyday experiences that haven’t perhaps been traditionally considered the subject of poetry.

Are of a fan of Billy Collins? If so, what’s your favourite of his poems? And do you have any favourite poems about the experience of reading?

Zahra’s Paradise by Amir and Khalil

2012-04-13T13:40:00.013+01:00

What mattered to us when we started this project, and what matters to us now, is witnessing the plight and reversing the tragedy that has befallen the Iranian people. The tragedy is personal. Its details and dimensions are unfathomable. It is also legal, political, religious, and cultural.

It was hard for us, like millions of other people outside Iran, to watch Iranian mothers and fathers grieve over the loss of their sons and daughters in Zahra’s Paradise—the actual cemetery—and not feel singed by their grief or touched by their dignity. That is the origin of this work. It is their gift to us. And ours to them.

We have tried to capture and reflect the Iranian people’s dignity, humanity, love, and grief in the mirror of ZAHRA’S PARADISE. And yes, also the violence, cruelty, and ignorance that causes so many to suffer around their absent children, children who lie beaten, betrayed, buried – but not forgotten – in the bottom of a constitution and tradition established in the name of the Hidden Imam.
From the Afterwords by Amir and Khalil

Zahra’s Paradise is a fictionalised account of the aftermath of the fraudulent 2009 presidential election in Iran. The book, which began its life as a webcomic, is about a young man’s disappearance and his family’s incessant search for him. The story is told from the point of view of Hassan, a blogger whose younger brother goes missing the night of the largest demonstration in what became known as Iran’s Green Revolution.

When Mehdi doesn’t return home that night, Hassan and his mother Zahra’s concern quickly turns into full-fledged panic. Their search for Medhi takes them from hospital to hospital that first night; and later to seemingly endless bureaucratic labyrinths, to dead ends where nobody seems to have any answers, and finally to Zahra’s Paradise, a large cemetery on the outskirts of Tehran and one of the origins of the book’s title.

As the afterword carefully explains, Zahra’s Paradise is a work of fiction, but that doesn’t mean it’s divorced from history. Medhi’s fictional story condenses the countless real stories Amir and Khalil heard in the weeks and months that followed the 2009 Iran election. The authors (who have remained anonymous for obvious political reasons) focus on the repercussions that the Iranian government’s violent repression of the demonstration had on the lives of individual citizens - repercussions that are often forgotten in dominant political narratives. This is a deeply political story, but it’s told in such a way that we are reminded that its personal dimensions cannot be divorced from its wider implications.

I love the fact that Zahra’s Paradise makes the distinction between the Iranian people and Iran’s political regime absolutely clear. People like Medhi, Hassam and Zahra suffer the consequences of arbitrary power displays from a dictatorial regime in ways that most of us in the West can hardly conceive of, and are therefore more directly invested in the need for social and political change than any external commenter could be.

I’m always grateful to find stories told by voices from within Iran; stories which focus very clearly on the political dimension of what is happening in the country; stories which, unlike much Western media coverage, never essentialise Iran’s problems. Zahra’s Paradise suggests that the seeds of democratic change in Iran can already be found in the will of its people, and that hope for the future lies in everyday acts of defiance both large and small, rather than in any form of external intervention

Zahra’s Paradise is a memorable story, and also an important work of political dissent.

Reviewed at: Blue Print Reviews

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Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

2012-04-12T11:20:00.006+01:00

‘Write, little Scheherazade,’ he says. It is a command. ‘Tell of your last minutes in the air. Finish your tale.’

Code Name Verity opens with a British spy, ‘Verity’, telling us how she was captured by the Gestapo and is currently being held and interrogated at their headquarters in Ormaie, a town in occupied France. The first person narration of Code Name Verity is soon contextualised: Verity is writing an account of her past and her mission for her captors. She has two weeks to do so, at the end of which she’ll be executed.

I don’t want to give away any more of the plot than this, so I’ll just add that this novel is divided into two sections, and that the second narrative illuminates and comments on the first. This is the kind of book that will make you want to go back to the first page and start all over again the minute you’ve finished. Once you know the full story, you’ll read the beginning with entirely new eyes.

The way the narrative is framed gives Code Name Verity a degree of emotional intensity that you don’t find in many novels. This is a dark story; one that doesn’t shy away from the reality of torture in wartime. But because everything Verity is writing is addressed to the Gestapo, the worst of it must be read between the lines. The result is subtle, but no less horrifying for that. I am in awe of the way Wein managed to create a narrative like this: a narrative created by a prisoner of war who is being tortured; a narrative that communicates so much even though you know it came into being under severe constraints and cannot be taken at face value.

I’ve been in a bit of a fiction reading slump these past few months, and a highly absorbing novel like Code Name Verity was just what I needed. I hadn’t read anything this satisfying since The Brides of Rollrock Island back in February. As some of you might know, the topic of women’s roles in WW2 has commanded a big chunk of my reading attention over the years, so I admit I was predisposed to really love this novel. However, I don’t think you need to be interested in the topic to enjoy Code Name Verity — above all, this is an incredibly human story about human connections, our understanding of courage, resilience, and loss.

The story Verity tells in the first part of the novel is largely about Maddie, a wartime pilot and her best friend. Code Name Verity explores the intense connection between these two women, a connection that’s just as real and life-changing as any romance. I desperately want to find more stories that acknowledge the power and reality of non-romantic ties, especially between women. It’s not that these stories don’t exist, but they don’t have anywhere near as much cultural salience as either love affairs or stories about intense friendships between men. So I’m always happy to find one that contributes to changing that, and Code Name Verity does it extremely well.

The strength of the ties between Verity and Maddie, the emotional intensity of the story, the cleverness of the structure, and the degree of heartbreak at the end all put me in mind of Sarah Waters’ brilliant The Night Watch. The two novels are completely different in many ways, but I think fans of one are very likely to enjoy the other.

Last but not least, Code Name Verity explores the idea of truth: the way two entirely different narratives about the same set of events can be simultaneously real; the relationship between truth and omission; the deliberate process through which we select among the many possible narratives that could emerge out of our lives. The way the novel deals with these themes is – like everything else about it – extremely smart and satisfying. I’ll be very surprised if Code Name Verity doesn’t make my favourites of the year list.

Bits I liked:

Maddie flew back following the 70-mile, 2000-year old dragon’s back of Hadrian’s Wall, to Carlisle and then south through the Lakeland fells, along Lake Windermere. The soaring mountains rose around her and the poets’ waters glittered beneath her in the valleys of memory – hosts of golden daffodils, Swallows and Amazons, Peter Rabbit. She came home by way of Blackstone Edge above the old Roman road to avoid the smoke haze over Manchester, and landed back at Oakway sobbing with anguish and love; love, for her island home that she’d seen whole and fragile from the air in the space of an afternoon, from coast to coast, holding its breath in a glass lens of summer and sunlight. All about to be swallowed in nights of flame and blackout. Maddie landed at Oakway before sunset and shut down the engine, then sat in the cockpit weeping.
More than anything else, I think, Maddie went to war on behalf of the Holy Island seals.

People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realise. You see someone in school every day, or at work, in the canteen, and you share a cigarette or a coffee with them, and you talk about the weather or last night’s air raid. But you don’t talk so much about what was the nastiest thing you ever said to your mother, or how you pretended to be David Balfour, the hero of Kidnapped, for the whole of the year when you were 13, or what you imagine yourself doing with the pilot who looks like Leslie Howard if you were alone in his bunk after a dance.

The horror and humiliation of it weren’t in that you were stripped to your underthings and being slowly taken to pieces, but in that nobody seemed to give a damn. They were not doing it for fun; they were not in it for lust or pleasure or revenge; they were not bullying me, the way Engel does; they were not angry with me. Von Linden’s young soldiers were doing their job, as indifferently and accurately as if they were taking apart a wireless set, with von Linden doing his job as their chief engineer, dispassionately directing and testing and cutting off the power supply.

They read it too: The Book Smugglers, Chachic’s Book Nook, Wear the Old Coat, Janicu’s Book Blog

(You?)

Also, make sure you read Elizabeth Wein’s guest post at The Book Smugglers about her literary influences. She mentions Dorothy L. Sayers and Saplings, which kind of makes me love her a lot.

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

Sexing the Brain by Lesley Rogers

2012-04-11T12:00:00.005+01:00

Lesley Rogers’ Sexing the Brain is – you guessed it – another debunking of what Cordelia Fine so aptly calls neurosexism. Rogers, a Professor of Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour at the University of New England, addresses the unexamined social assumptions behind, and the political implications of, much of the past few decades’ research on neurological gender differences and sexual orientation:

Whether we consider nature (genes) or nurture (experience and learning) to be more important has great social, political and economic outcomes. In the recent past, people have tended to take up one or the other extreme position, some people believing that genes have the preeminent role, and others that social or environmental factors are overwhelmingly important. This action and reaction stirred heated exchanges and generated debate that challenged the very basis of society. At the same time, the nature-nurture debate stimulated a great deal of scientific research and demanded greater rigour in interpreting the results obtained, but did not always receive it.

My favourite thing about Sexing the Brain is the fact that Rogers highlights the political implications of gender essentialism and biological determinism in general. More often than not, it’s only the rejection of these stances that is ever framed in political terms. Do you believe that men and women are just ‘wired’ differently? Then you’re a brave harbinger of truth. But point out how little scientific evidence there actually is for the claim that there are innate neurological gender differences, and the conversation immediately becomes about how your politics must surely be blinding you to the facts. Yes, questioning the status quo is a political position, but so too is upholding, and it shouldn’t be assumed that those who do the latter are above the possibility of bias. However, because the current state of affairs when it comes to gender and power is perceived as “neutral”, this is exactly what ends up happening.

As Lesley Rogers puts its,

Although scientific methods are used in researching sex (or gender) differences, the decision to carry out his research in the first instance has little to do with science. From its inception, this research is never value free. We should remember this when the results of such research are interpreted and fed back to society to provide a framework for future social decisions. The findings do not just fulfil scientific curiosity but also serve social and political purposes far beyond the boundaries of science. This point is starkly apparent in the scientific research comparing the brain structure and functions of homosexuals and heterosexuals, or transsexuals and heterosexuals. The results of these studies have been used as basis for legal sanctions against the practice of homosexuality and transsexuality, and for the medical treatment of homosexuals and transsexuals.

I was also very interested in Rogers’ discussion of the process through which genes and biology are used to map out “normality”, in a way that forcibly narrows down the rich biological variability that can actually be found in the natural world. Research is often used to “construct a framework of ideas about what is natural and what is not”, but there is in fact nothing whatsoever about “biologically more common” that says “and therefore natural and ‘normal’ and better”. Framing things in such terms is entirely a sociopolitical decision.

Sexing the Brain also addresses the very common idea that any differences found in the brain are necessarily innate and immutable, rather than the result of experience:

Today, the [nature-nurture] debate no longer takes quite such flamboyant extremes, but it is essentially still with us and is still of considerable social importance. Although we know realize that all aspects of behaviour rely on both experience and genetic contributions interacting in complex ways, many people are still inclined to interpret evidence of biological differences between the sexes as meaning that the differences are hardwired and fixed by genetic inheritance. Our biology includes our genes and their influences, but it is shaped by experience. There is ample evidence showing that experience can change the biology of the brain (as well as other parts of the body).
(...)
Nevertheless, these points can to be overlooked, and differences in biology are often seen as part of the great plan of nature and to be quite immutable.

Sexing the Brain is a short, smart, and very readable book; Delusions of Gender will probably always be my favourite of all the books covering more or less this same terrain, but you know what? I’m going to stop comparing them and simply plug them all. As readers of this blog might have guessed by now, I’m on a quest to read and blog about every single debunking of gender essentialism in existence, and I’m not one bit sorry for it. At one point I might have felt that I was done with this subject, but the more time I spend thinking about gender essentialism and the impact it continues to have in the world of today, the more I realise we need these books – every last one of need them.

As you might also know, I’m pretty invested in this topic – my MA dissertation approached the gender reading gap from a non-essentialist position, and as part of my research I read a lot of books on the subject, from both side of the debate. This resulted in some exhaustion on my part, and for the past few months I’ve been sort hiding in a feminist book cocoon of my own making. But the thing is, I don’t want to read exclusively feminist non-fiction – both because I have other interests, and because I don’t want to lose perspective. And what has been happening lately is that when I step out of this cocoon and am hit in the head by dominant cultural assumptions about gender all over again, I remember just how necessary books like this really are.

They’re necessary because each of them will find different readers; because different people will respond better to different authors’ communication styles; because the more of them there are, the better the chances that the message will get through. And we need all the help we can get to counter the toxic cultural myth that there’s a scientific consensus about the existence of insurmountable biological differences between men and women, but the politically correct dominant cultural establishing keeps trying to silence this truth. One day, when I have a Proper Grownup Job, I’ll buy copies of these books and distribute them to friends and random passersby on the street. In the meantime, I’ll do the next best thing and continue to not shut up about them on this blog.

Reading the work of feminist neuroscientists such as Lesley Rogers is also a much needed reminder that we often concede far too much, and that by doing so we’re implicitly buying into the harmful myth of the poor lone brave scientist versus the censorious cultural establishment. Even when arguing against, say, gender essentialism in reader development policies, people will often preface it by saying, “Of course there are hardwired gender differences and differences in boys’ and girls’ learning styles; no one can deny that, but…”. Yet the fact is, we don’t know. And yes, not knowing doesn’t mean there are absolutely none, but you know what we also don’t know? That there are no pigs in outer space. And yet we don’t feel the need to preface every thought about pigs with, “Sure, there might be pigs in outer space, but…”. The burden of proof should not lie with those who challenge gender essentialism, but rather with those who are making the claims in the first place. And if you think you have come across proof, please take a moment to scrutinize it closely like Rogers and others have done. You might be surprised at what you find.

Conceding too much is something I’ve done myself in the past, but from now on, if someone asks me in a shocked tone, “Are you denying that there are innate brain differences between boys and girls?”, I’m going to simply say, “You know what? Yes, I am. I’m absolutely denying that we know that there are, and I don’t feel comfortable building policies that affect people’s lives around smoke and mirrors. And don’t you dare suggest that this makes me the equivalent to a sixteenth century monk insisting that the sun orbits the earth”.

Favourite bits:

Girls and boys are raised differently almost from the moment they are born. Social differences are often considered to result “naturally” from biological differences, but that need not be the case. In fact, it can be the other way around: many biological differences may result from the influence of being raised in different social environments. The environment first becomes different when baby girls are dressed in pink and baby boys in blue. This may continue by mothers speaking more to girls than to boys, and encouraging (or discouraging) girls and boys to play with different toys and to show different amounts of aggression. All too often, biologists studying sex differences ignore such effects of social experience in biology, or at least underplay it.

As we have seen, not all men have better spatial abilities than all women, and not all women have better language abilities than all men. In fact, the sharp division between women and men that has been constructed by society is much more polarized than any measured differences between the sexes. Society puts women and men, girls and boys, into separate categories and constructs absolutes. A person is said to be either one or the other. The similarities are ignored and the differences exaggerated.

Sociobiologists are not merely speculating about sex differences in genes. In so doing, they are also constructing a framework of ideas about what is natural and what is not. Women who enter professions that are typical of men are therefore seen as unnatural and going against their biology; so too are men who take a profession using abilities considered to be typical of women. These 'unnatural' women and men are considered to threaten the fabric of society, as seen and maintained by those (scientists, politicians, business leaders and the general public) who see genes as paramount in causing sex differences in behaviour. The notion that genes cause sex differences has more to do with social attitudes than scientific proof.

I would argue that the pervasiveness of genetic theories of human behaviour today is a reflection of conservative social values and forces, as genetic determinism implies that differences between groups are not only natural but should not and will not disappear. Genetic theories are not a reflection of new scientific facts. Despite the availability of new technologies of molecular genetics, we have no new and convincing evidence that links human behaviour to the direct expression of the genes alone, as is often stated by the general media and some scientists. These voices are the echoes of a society at pains to understand itself, and to do so in the most rigid and unflinching terms. They are an effort to recruit science into the social debate and use it to uphold the status quo.

Rather simplistic thinking tends to dominate much of the scientific research of sexual preference, as we saw in Chapter 3. In every theory in which hormones cause lesbianism or male homosexuality, there is an assumption that homosexual men are more like women than are heterosexual men, and that lesbians are more like men than are heterosexual women. This thinking is based on traditional notions about homosexuality and lesbianism that were shown long ago by psychosocial research to be incorrect. Inevitably, such simplistic thinking at the behavioural level leads to simplistic biological explanations.

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll be glad to link to you.)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

Spring!

2012-04-05T12:23:00.003+01:00

My partner’s father was just visiting from Brazil for a few weeks, so we got to play tour guide a little bit and enjoy the nice spring weather in the process. I take pretty much the exact same springtime photos every year, but what can I do? They make me happy. I thought I’d share a few of them with you:

I wish this one was mine, but alas. Credit to M’s father.

Picnic!

A toad enjoying the sunshine.

Apparently the only way I feel comfortable posting pictures of myself is if they're small and not enlargeable.
I hope the weather’s nice wherever you are; if not, I hope you can at least curl up with a good book over the long weekend. To those of you who celebrate it, have a great Easter weekend. See you next week!

How Beautiful the Ordinary edited by Michael Cart

2012-04-04T12:51:00.007+01:00

There are countless reasons for reading, but when you’re young and uncertain of your identity, of who you may be, one of the most compelling is the quest to discover yourself reflected in the pages of a book. What a comfort that provides, seeing that you are not alone, that you are not—as you had feared—the only one of your kind. But what if you search whole libraries of such books in vain for your own face?

From the introduction by Michael Cart

How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity is an anthology of YA short stories focused on the experiences of lgbtq protagonists, which includes such renowned contributors as Emma Donoghue, Jacqueline Woodson, Gregory Maguire, David Levithan, Margo Lanagan, Francesca Lia Block and Julie Anne Peters. As the subtitle tells us, the emphasis of these stories is on identity: they’re about how sexual orientation or gender identity impact these characters’ lives as a whole¹. There are stories about first love, about other forms of meaningful human connection, about parenthood, about accepting who you are, about sex, about loss: stories that cover a wide range of emotions and human experiences.

As with any anthology, I enjoyed some stories more than others. I was less than crazy about Ariel Schang’s comics panels (although I love the idea of including comics in an anthology like this), but otherwise there were no stories I actually disliked. However, it was a handful of contribution that really made How Beautiful the Ordinary stand out for me, so I thought I’d focus specifically on those:

David Levithan’s “A Word From the Nearly Distant Past” is a beautifully written and haunting story told from the point of view of a past generation of gay men who had to confront the threat of AIDS and levels of bigotry superior to those of the present day. These unnamed narrators watch the lives of several contemporary gay teens with astonishment and awe, and urge them to live their lives to the fullest:

We were once like you, only our world wasn’t like yours.
You have no idea how close to death you came. Ten years. Twenty years. A generation or two earlier, you might not be here with us.
We resent you. You astonish us.

Levithan strikes the exact right tone here, and the result is incredibly moving. “A Word From the Nearly Distant Past” combines an appreciation for the ways in which the world has changed for the better with an awareness of just how fragile such changes are, how recent, and how long a way there still is to go. It’s a celebratory story, but also a painful one: it doesn’t invite readers to pat themselves on the back or to slip into political complacency, but rather to be aware of the steep human cost of the progress they now enjoy.

A few more bits I particularly liked:

“Let’s just do it,” one boy says to another.
We yell no.
And when we’re not heard, it hurts even more.

We know that some of you are still scared. We know that some of you are still silent. Just because it’s better now doesn’t mean that it’s good.
Dreaming and loving and screwing. None of these are really identities. Maybe when other people look at us, but not to ourselves. We are so much more complicated than that.”

Margo Lanagan’s “A Dark Red Love Knot” is a reworking of the Alfred Noyes ballad “The Highwayman”. In this version, the story’s protagonist, Tom, is not in love with the innkeeper’s daughter but rather with a soldier in the King’s army with whom he had a sexual experience. In her usual gorgeous, fearless prose, Margo Lanagan explores the links between homophobia and the casual derision of femininity, as well as the ways in which the two reinforce each other. Tom is simultaneously the victim of an oppressive system and an actor in another one, but he only comes to realise this when it’s too late to avert tragedy.

Julie Anne Peters’ “First Time” is a story in verse about a young lesbian couple’s first sexual experience. Peters uses an original text layout to give both girls a voice, and the story does a wonderful job of capturing the intimacy and extreme vulnerability of sexuality.

Last but certainly not least, there’s Emma Donnogue’s “Dear Lang”, my favourite story in How Beautiful the Ordinary. “Dear Lang” is a letter written by a nonbiological lesbian mother to the daughter, now a teenager, she was completely cut off from. As the narrator tells us, the coldness of a term such as “nonbiological” is itself part of the problem:

Nonbiological: as if I’m made of silicon or something. A cyborg. As if I have no body, or at least not one that ever touched you, my baby Lang, ever stubbed a toe on your wooden blocks, ever got a crick in the neck with you asleep on my shoulder on the couch all night, ever registered that surge of warmth on my belly that felt like love but actually meant you’d just peed through both our clothes.

“Dear Lang” is a very moving and powerful illustration of the human consequences of the complete lack of legal recourse of gay and lesbian parents: when a relationship goes wrong (and some of them inevitably will, as all human relationships do), they’re left completely vulnerable and at the mercy of their former partners’ whims. As I said before, I enjoyed almost all of How Beautiful the Ordinary, but I would not hesitate to recommend this anthology for Donnogue’s story alone.

Many thanks to the lovely Kaz Mahoney for sending me this book.

Reviewed at: Stuff as Dreams are Made Of, Becky’s Book Reviews, Bonjour Cass, A Book Blog of One’s Own

(Have I missed yours?)

¹ Though I’ll return to this idea from a completely different angle when I review Hanne Blank’s fascinating Straight.

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution by June Rose

2012-04-02T11:45:00.008+01:00

In Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution, June Rose chronicles the life and work of renowned social reformer and early popularizer of contraception Marie Stopes. Stopes was a pioneer in many ways: she received a PhD from the University of Munich in 1904, being the first woman to do so; she was the first woman lecturer at the University of Manchester; and in 1907 she travelled to Japan to research fossil plants – this at a time when it was highly unusual for women to travel anywhere unaccompanied, let alone in scientific expeditions to Japan. She was unconventional from a young age, and this willingness to challenge dominant social norms proved crucial in her later work.

I must confess I was far more interested in the “and the Sexual Revolution” bits of this biography than in the “Marie Stopes” ones. It’s not that Stopes’ life wasn’t interesting: it was fascinating to read about the makings of a social reformer, as well as about all the times her path crossed with those of some of the most interesting Edwardians around: she met everyone from George Bernard Shaw to Bertrand Russell to H.G. Wells to Captain Scott (whose ill-fated polar expedition she requested to join – in retrospect, it seems a very good thing that he said no). The problem with the more personal sections if this biography, however, was that June Rose’s approach was at times a little too speculative for my taste.

For example, she suggests that Stopes might have been bisexual, and that a complicated involvement with a tutor, Clothilde Von Wyss, was behind her strong homophobia later in life. I don’t want to say that this is impossible, of course; it’s just that Rose sounds too certain based on too little evidence – not to mention the fact that her theory has too many uncomfortable echoes of stereotypical assumptions about predatory gay teachers. I was also slightly put off by her portrayal of Stopes’ marriage dynamics. Again, it’s not that I don’t think that Marie’s constant questioning of traditional power dynamics in relationships would have had a psychological cost for a man raised to take on a patriarchal role; it’s just that June Rose’s assumption that her poor husband must have felt domineered, and her constant reminders that readers ought to feel extremely sorry for him, seemed out of place in a book like this.

But really, these were only minor aspects of Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution. With that out of the way, let me focus on the good – and there’s plenty of it. Among many other things, this book is a fascinating history of social and political attitudes towards contraception, female sexuality, and heterosexual relationship dynamics. Reading it reminded me of what Amy was saying recently about the cyclical nature of anti-contraception arguments. So much of what Marie Stopes had to face is still scarily familiar now.

June Rose does an excellent job of drawing attention to just how groundbreaking Marie’s work on sexuality and contraception was. And at every turn, she reminds readers of what she was up against:

By 1911, the National Council of Public Morals had recommended the teaching of nature study as an introduction to the facts of life. One or two of their tracks actually mentioned married life but always with a warning that too much indulgence could be dangerous. The Boy Scouts, the eugenics lobby and sections of the Women’s Suffrage movement, alarmed at the scourge of venereal disease and at the assaults on women, supported the purity campaign. Now Marie Stopes, a self-confessed virgin wife, had violated her purity with a manuscript that claimed that women’s sexuality was as powerful and therefore as dangerous as men's. So strong was the taboo on the subject that even in the sixth edition (1915) of T.H .Huxley’s Human Physiology, no editor had dared to include a reference to the human reproductive system. In writing so openly about ‘married love’ Marie had taken an enormous risk.

First of all, how creepy is the fact that a National Council of Public Morals even existed? Secondly, it’s amazing to think that in the immediate aftermath of the Victorian age, Marie Stopes did so much to popularise the notion that women also experienced sexual desire and pleasure. Almost a hundred years later, this remains something that some people can’t seem to wrap their minds around. However, acknowledging how groundbreaking her work was doesn’t mean we can’t also discuss its many limitations. Here is a good example of Stopes’ tendency to take two steps forward followed by one step back:

Ten days before Married Love was published, Marie herself had doubts about the value of the ‘pristine purity’ of the virgin state. In a draft letter to an unnamed correspondent, she pondered whether too much emphasis was placed on the woman retaining her virginity before marriage: ‘in giving her body love a woman gives her “all” (while a man hardly does as much).’ This, she argued, divided women into three unhealthy categories:
a) The unmarried—never allowed to have any sex joy or relief however much they fundamentally suffer for the lack of it...
b) The married (possibly burdened without limit with childbearing) with perhaps a normal (but often excessive) sex life.
c) The outcast—in order to balance skin healthy percentage of unmarried they are overworked to the point of sex machines... that a woman should never give herself save for love is an axiom; but it is outrageously violated in our social system…

The fact that in the early 20th century she was questioning the emphasis society put on female virginity is quite remarkable. However, this excerpt also shows how quickly she went from acknowledging that women had sexual feelings to a prescriptive, normative stance full of assumptions about those whose sexual lives didn’t follow the particular script she happened to privilege. We can recognise that easily today without this erasing the fact that Married Love was a momentous book.

It was extremely interesting to see how her progressive ideas coexisted with these and other limitations – she was, as I mentioned above, extremely heteronormative, as well as strongly against the legalisation of abortion and the idea of sex outside of marriage. Or at least she positioned herself as such in public: reading Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution reminded me of my discussion with Aarti about Mary Seacole and the way social pioneers and reformers often adopt a veneer of hyper-respectability in all other areas of their lives, in order to best advance their cause. It’s possible that like many other early feminists, Marie Stopes was picking her battles very, very carefully. Making female sexuality and contraception respectable within the confines of heterosexual marriage was a huge battle – perhaps she feared that extending it even one inch further than that would have made it a lost cause.

Marie Stopes was also interested in subverting traditional gender dynamics in ways that went far beyond the sexual. As June Rose tells us,

Marie advocated that both husband and wife should be free to go alone on long trips, weekends, or walking tours ‘without the possibility of a breath of jealousy or suspicion…’ and asserted that that marriage could never reach its full stature ‘until women possess as much intellectual freedom and freedom of opportunity within it as do their partners’. In her marriage to Gates, Marie had assumed that freedom for herself, and in her relationships with men became the dominant partner, since for her the notion of equality between the sexes was almost impossible to practice.
At the same time, in her book, as in her life, she looks for eternal romance: ‘For man is still essentially the hunter, the one who experiences the desires and thrills of the chase, and dreams ever of coming unawares upon Diana in the Woodlands.’ Wives, she believed, should be always escaping. She disapproved of married people sharing a bedroom because it was impossible for the woman to keep her aura of mystery and romance if her husband saw her ‘during most of the unlovely and even ridiculous proceedings of the toilet. Now it may enchant a man once—perhaps even twice—or at long intervals to watch his godless screw her hair up into a tight and unbecoming knot and soap her ears. But it is inherently too unlovely a proceeding to retain indefinite enchantment.’

Again, we have a good example of how Stopes would go some way towards equality but not really any further. Her ideas about equality were boycotted by strict essentialist notions of gender roles that forbade real intimacy. These ideas are not unlike how many people still conceive of heterosexual relationships today, and they were all the more fascinating to read about for that.

Married Love was Marie Stopes’ first success, but today most people are likely to associate her name with birth control. Her quest to popularise contraception, however, came later in life:

Marie had written Married Love for women like herself, educated middle class wives who had been left ignorant of the physical side of marriage. Her tone in her book and in the letters of advice sent to readers implied that they shared a community of interests and the income. She had no particular interest in the lower classes and in Wise Parenthood had written censoriously of the ‘less thrifty and conscientious’ who bred rapidly and produced children ‘weakened and handicapped by physical as well as mental warping and weakness’. ‘The lower classes were,’ she wrote in a letter to the Leicester Daily Post, ‘often thriftless, illiterate, and careless.’

Her attitude changed to some extent, and she had her husband went on to found the Mother’s Clinic in London, one of the earliest contraception clinics in existence:

The Mother’s Clinic had four aims: to help the poor (and advice was given free); to test out the attitude of the working class toward birth control, hitherto considered hostile; to obtain first-hand data about contraception in practice and to collect scientific data on the sex life of women. The Clinic was kept deliberately simple to demonstrate that birth control advice could be given to the ‘poor and ignorant’ in a small institution without spending large sums of money. This was necessary since Humphrey and Marie had bought the house, renovated it, and equipped it themselves and would pay for the staff and upkeep.”

Marie’s involvement with the dissemination of birth control, however, should not be taken to mean that she had any sort of epiphany when it comes to class privilege. Her activism went hand in hand with problematic attitudes towards class and race; and as in the case of many other early birth control advocates, with an interest in eugenics. Marie and her colleagues believed that the “lowers orders” were “still producing in excessive numbers and producing a race which is not fitted for the Empire which we have to govern.

Many of the excerpts of letters and speeches included in Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution reveal the problematic rhetoric these early advocates used, as well as their extremely paternalistic approach to helping working class mothers have access to contraception. But once again, we can acknowledge all this while still recognising the very real, tangible benefits of the practical knowledge about birth control Stopes and others helped disseminate. It always seems disingenuous to me to see anti birth control advocates claim that we can’t recognise the good of the work of early reformers such as Marie Stopes without aligning ourselves with their classist and racist ideology. Here is what June Rose has to say on the subject:

Marie was an elitist, and idealist, interested in creating a society in which only the best and the beautiful should survive. Brought up on the ideas of Darwin, she responded enthusiastically to the view that his theory of natural selection argued for the need to create a super breed of humans. She was in sympathy with the aims of the Eugenics Society, founded in 1908 by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, to encourage the prevalence of the more suitable races or strains of blood over the last suitable. Like writers of the caliber of Shaw and H.G. Wells, Marie was inspired by the simplistic notion of human perfectibility.
(…)
To our ears, in the aftermath of Hitler, there is something blood-chilling in her fearless quest for excellence, sacrificing ordinary humanity on the altar of The Race. But at the time, the notion of suppressing week for members of the next generation, reducing the need for institutions such as prisons and hospitals, and relieving the burden on tax payers was immensely attractive to many members of the wealthier classes.

Being human and therefore full of contradictions, Marie Stopes combined these simplistic and problematic notions with genuine warmth and compassion towards the individual working class mothers who wrote to her asking for advice. The book includes some excerpts from the thousands of letters she received weekly, and these demonstrate the extent to which people were kept in the dark about sexuality and reproductive health. The excerpts were some of my favourite sections in Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution — I’m now very interested in getting my hands on Mother England, an anthology of these letters that Stopes edited and published herself.

I’ll leave you with some more interesting bits:

The reasons for [Married Love’s] success are complex. Writing from a woman’s point of view, with an intensity of feeling with which her many readers would empathize, Marie had produced the first book about sex technique for women. In it she had dared to state a claim for female sexuality, for women sexual needs and sexual rights. Her book challenged the centuries of prejudice and superstition and the accretions of religious teaching which saw women’s bodies and women’s attractions as desirable but also dirty and corrupting and the lust for women as shameful and sinful. The wife’s fate, therefore, was to be a passive, suffering victim of her husband’s lust. Marie dismissed the idea that ‘nice’ women have no spontaneous sexual feelings and devoted a chapter, “The Fundamental Pulse”, to explaining women’s sexual instincts according to her own law of the “Periodicity of Recurrence of Desire in Women”, illustrated by two charts. Her records of her own and her friends’ peak period in the month may not have been strictly scientific but they were immensely important, because they lead women to understand that they had a right to sexual impulses and need not feel ashamed of them.

Her outspoken clarity gave her woman readers the courage to ask questions and to hope for improvement in their married lives: ‘as a girl I was taught that it was really rather misfortune to have the body, but that, as it was there, the best thing to do was to ignore it as far as possible,’ wrote and Mrs. M.F. from Pertshire, who described herself at forty-two, after a good marriage, as without desired and pleasure in love almost impossible. She asked Marie to write about the subject: ‘it is books like yours… that are needed to clear away the old evil conspiracy of secrecy which has ruined so many women’s lives.’”

Although in many of her ideas she was extremely progressive, Marie believed that progress was dependent on the class structure. She knew from personal experience that freedom for educated women depended on the servitude of their ‘sisters’ from the working-class. ‘How long would civilization as we know it today last if every woman of marriage age was married and buried children with no domestic help? Civilization as seen today would fall the pieces…’

Her work enhanced her reputation among those doctors interested in prevention that also made her enemies. In 1920 the Federation of Medical Women warned that if condoms were made available, ‘promiscuous intercourse would be looked upon as free from the risk of infection and to a great extent free from the risk of conception…’ This would introduce a phase of society ‘as vicious and degenerate and any of which history has record… moral degeneration and sex excess would rot the very foundation of society.’

They read it too: Woodsiegirl Writes

(You?)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

A quick side note: I was inspired by Iris and all the other Bloggiesta participants who were discussing blog housekeeping in Twitter all weekend to create a Facebook page for the blog. Right now all it does is post my RSS feed, and I’m not sure what else I’ll do with it in the future, but at least the name is taken for if I ever get any bright ideas. I’m not going to pester you constantly for “Likes” or anything of the sort, but I realise that a lot of people use Facebook much like I use Twitter, to keep track of and share interesting links. So if you find the page convenient or useful, feel free to follow Things Mean a Lot there.

The Sunday Salon – In Which I Show You My Collection of Bookish Postcards

2012-04-01T10:44:00.004+01:00

It’s been a long while since I last did a fun semi book-related post, so I thought today I’d take a moment to show you my collection of postcards (hat tip to Chachic, whose recent Postcard Love feature inspired this post). First of all, I should say that I didn’t exactly set out to start collecting bookish postcards – it’s just that I got into the habit of picking some up whenever I visited a new place, and since the majority of my interests are at least marginally bookish the collection ended up reflecting this. I also visit a lot of historical sites, but as social history features heavily in my reading, it all more or less ends up fitting the same general theme.

I collect postcards for a few reasons: first of all, they’re very inexpensive souvenirs. I usually travel on a budget, and more often than not a postcard is the only thing I can afford to pick up from a museum or gallery gift shop. Secondly, I love how postcards tell a story – they often portray or allude to something I’ve seen on my travels, and adding them to my collection helps me remember said thing better. And finally, I love that they can be used as bookmarks. I also collect actual bookmarks (and I haven’t showed you my collection in a while, so that will be the subject of a future Sunday Salon post), but I alternate between using them and just using a postcard. One of the things I like to do is match the bookmark with the book I’m reading, and all these literature- or history-themed postcards make that a lot easier.

I won’t show you my entire collection or else we’d be here all day, but here are a few of the highlights (you can click the images to enlarge them):

In this first photo we have a postcard with art by the wonderful Italian illustrator Nicoletta Ceccoli, about whom I’ve raved in the past; one with storyboard art from Toy Story 2; and one with art by Ando Hiroshige, which I got at the amazing Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. The second row has a fairy tale illustration from 1912 by Maginel Wright Enright, who happens to be Frank Lloyd Wright’s sister (the back doesn’t say which fairy tale, but the imagine immediately makes me think of “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”, which just so happens to be my favourite fairy tale); and two postcards from the National Library of Ireland: a 1812 colour engraving, and a painting by James Henry Brocas called “Man Reading”.

On the top and bottom left here we have two postcards from the Imperial War Museum in London: one is a classic WW1 trenches image, and the other a photo of child evacuees from WW2. They get used a lot when I’m reading war-related history or historical fiction. The others are all from an excellent exhibition of turn of the century photography which I saw at the National Photographic Archive in Dublin. As you can probably tell by now, my Dublin trip last year was particularly productive in terms of postcard acquisitions.

The top left one here is also from the National Photographic Archive in Ireland; then we have Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Brontë from the National Portrait Gallery in London (it took a lot of restraint for me not to get about five hundred postcards there); and finally what I think of as my mini 60’s collection: a photo of The Beatles in Blackpool (which was actually purchased in Liverpool); an iconic Foyle’s photo of what happened only a few hours after the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover was lifted; and a free postcard advertising a club, which I kept because I liked the retro look of the photo.

These are all the result of what I fondly refer to as “That One Time I went to The British Library and went A Little Nuts at the Gift Shop”: the top and bottom left postcards are Mervyn Peake’s illustrations for “Snow White” and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; then there’s a facsimile of the Alice manuscript with art by Lewis Carroll himself; a 1950 drawing from the London Archive of Outsider Art; an illustration from “The Cat That Walked by Himself” from Kipling’s Just So Stories; a J.J. Grandville 1838 illustration for Gulliver’s Travels; and the first line of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle.

The two on the left are watercolours by D.H. Lawrence, which I got when I visited his birthplace in Eastwood during my Erasmus exchange in Nottingham (I was completely convinced I had blogged about the visit, but I searched my archives and nothing. I don’t know what my past self was thinking). Then we have a Charles Robinson illustration for The Secret Garden, and the Arthur Rackham Peter Pan illustration my blog header comes from. As you can see, the print job on the postcard is rather poor and the colours are very washed out, but I couldn’t resist getting it anyway. The postcard with the dog on the top right has art by Catriona Hall, and it was purchased at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire (side note: I’ve only recently found out that this is where the latest adaptation of Jane Eyre was filmed, so now I want to watch it for this reason alone). Then we have an Edmund Dulac illustration for Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor (acquired when I visited Haworth); and “Beauty and the Beast” by Walter Crane, from the Withworth Art Gallery in Manchester.

I really love the top left postcard in this photo: it’s a painting called “Two Women” by E. Harding, and I got it at the York Art Gallery. The one below it is a painting by Marion Adnams from the Manchester Art Gallery – also the location of Arthur Hughes’ “Ophelia”, which looks so much more impressive in person; if you’re ever in the city, make sure you visit it. Below it we have “The Return to the Front” by Richard Jack, a WW1 painting from 1916. I saw it at the York Art Gallery, and the actual painting is full of really moving details you can’t quite see here. Lastly, there’s “La Mort D’Arthur” by James Archer, also from the Manchester Art Gallery. They have an amazing collection of Pre-Raphaelite art, and I know I got far more postcards there than the ones I can currently find. Probably some have been forgotten inside one of my books.

This is my locations collection: there’s the Japanese Gardens at Tatton Park, Knutsford (also known as “the real Cranford”); Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, which I visited last December; a watercolour of central Munich; the Trinity College Library in Dublin; an old picture of turn-of-the-century Chester; another watercolour, this time of York; and the stunning Lake District.

The ones in this picture were all free promotional postcards that I kept because I liked how they looked. The first is one of a series of Polaroid-like postcards with literary quotes promoting the 2010 edition of the Manchester Literature Festival; the one below is from the Liverpool John Moores University Library Special Collections; and the bottom left one is an OED postcard (who could resist that?). Then we have one advertising a Vintage and Craft Fair (in case you’re curious, I went), one for an Edinburgh Fringe play I didn’t go to, and finally one from the Science Museum in Lisbon.

The very last picture has the postcards I currently keep outside, decorating my shelves: an official Fringe 2011 one and also one for the stage adaptation of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase I saw; a watercolour of Haworth Village; a drawing by Lily Greenwood, purchased at the Manchester Crafts and Design Centre; a photo of a cat at a window in Lisbon; and two more from The British Library: more art by Mervyn Peake, and a 1892 science fiction illustration by Albert Robiga.

Phew! I turns out that even just the highlights took far longer to describe than I expected. I hope you enjoyed having a peek at my collection, though. Do you collect postcards too? What are some of your favourites? And if not, is there anything else that you collect?

And Now We Are Five

2012-03-29T09:21:00.002+01:00

Photo Credit

It’s hard to believe that a whole half a decade has passed since my first post here at things mean a lot went up. Blogger tells me that in the past five years, I’ve published over 1100 posts and received around 31000 comments (though I imagine that a good chunk of those were actually replies of my own), which is absolutely flabbergasting to me. I really regret the fact that for the second year in a row I’m not in a place where I can celebrate my blogging anniversary the way I’d like, with a big international book giveaway, but I also know that free books are not really the reason why you are still here.

The other day I happened to reread my fourth blogging anniversary post from last year, and it struck me immediately how close to burned out I sounded. That feeling actually lasted the better part of a year, but I’m happy to report that I’ve now reached a point where I’m truly comfortable with what I’m doing. Yes, perhaps I used to be better at this whole blogging thing, but that isn’t to say I was ever in a place where it meant more to me. Chances are that this feeling will change again in the future, but for the time being I seem to have reached that elusive balance between too much stress and complete detachment: I blog how I want and when I want to, and try not to let things like self-induced pressure, anxiety or feelings of failure get in the way.

As my friend Aarti was wisely telling me the other day, “a sense of self-worth is so often tied to the ability to do good work”: I’ve been unemployed for five months now, and no matter how aware I am of the fact that the current economy is dreadful, it’s very hard not to eternalise the constant rejections and end up feeling useless and like I have nothing to offer to the world. This is where blogging comes in: now more than ever, my blog allows me to experience a sense of achievement and fulfilment that is absent from other areas of my life.

It may be a bit of a stretch to equate what I do here with actual meaningful work – I have no idea whether all this reading and writing on the Internet has ever had any sort of tangible effect in the world – but I try to believe that people come here for a reason. If nothing else, discussing books and all the ideas they contain is extremely satisfying for me personally. It gives me an outlet for my passions, and a venue where I can make sense of my thoughts and hopefully grow as a human being in the process.

All this to say: thank you so much for reading. Whether you’re a regular comment or a “lurker”, whether you’re a new reader or someone who’s been with me from the very beginning, whether you’re a casual visitor or a loyal one, I wanted you to know how very much I appreciate you – lately more than ever before.

A Diana Wynne Jones Extravaganza: House of Many Ways, Archer’s Goon and Eight Days of Luke

2012-03-28T13:12:00.003+01:00

Kristen at We Be Reading is currently hosting Diana Wynne Jones month: she’s dedicating the whole of the month of March to her work, inviting other readers to join her, and generously offering participants the chance to win a $20 gift certificate. Since I wanted 2012 to be all about spending more time with my favourite writers’ back catalogues, I thought this would be a perfect excuse to finally read some of those Diana Wynne Jones books that have been lingering on my TBR pile for so long. Then one thing led to another, and I also wound up revisiting a couple of DWJ classics. I’ve been on a bit of a reading slump for most of March, and, just as I hoped, a mini Diana Wynne Jones extravaganza proved the perfect antidote. Without further ado, here are my thoughts on the books I read:

House of Many Ways is the third and final book in the Howl series (in case you’re wondering, the first two are Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Air). The books actually work perfectly well as stand-alones, but they’re probably best appreciated if read in sequence, so that readers can make the most of the cameos by Howl, Sophie and Calcifer from Howl’s Moving Castle.

House of Many Ways tells the story of Charmain Baker, the teenaged daughter of a Respectable Family from the kingdom of High Norland. Charmain was never really taught to do anything for herself (her mother finds most everyday activities very unrespectable for young ladies) and prefers to spend her time reading. When she’s asked to look after the house of a relative who happens to be a powerful wizard, she’s plunged into situations she never had to face before – ranging from things as simple as making a cup of tea to complicated tasks such as finding her way around Great Uncle William’s magical house or confronting a lubbock, a dangerous insect-like creature. Add a missing royal treasure, a mysterious something called the elfgift, an apprentice wizard named Peter, and a threat to the kingdom of High Norland, and you have the plot in a nutshell.

First of all, let me tell you all about the many things I loved: as per usual in Diana Wynne Jones’ work, House of Many Ways combines an imaginative fantasy plot with a very human story about a girl finding her independence. I loved how Charmain came to see her parents in a new light once she had the opportunity to step away from them. And needless to say, I loved the fact that she’s a reader and wants to be a librarian. It was also lovely to see Sophie being efficient, Howl being adorably infuriating, and Calcifer being just plain adorable. Their appearances were like meeting old friends once again. Last but not least, House of Many Ways features the delightful Waif, who just might be my new favourite dog character.

My only “but” about this novel has to do with the fact that there’s no real moral ambiguity to the villains: they’re just inherently bad, and in the end they’re gotten rid of in a very conventional manner. This surprised me in a Diana Wynne Jones novel, and the only reason why it didn’t get more in the way of my enjoyment of it was the fact that there is plenty of nuance to the other characters: to Charmain’s parents, to the High Norland Royal Family, and even to Charmain herself. Also, the novel is really about these characters and what is going on with them, with the villains being important plot-wise but incidental to the story’s emotional core. I think Diana Wynne Jones is at her best when writing villains that are more fleshed out and have more convincing and complex motivations, but this was still a very enjoyable novel, and one that most of her fans are likely to find satisfying.

Next I read Archer’s Goon, which is about thirteen-year-old Howard Skyes and his family: when Howard comes home from school one day, he finds a Goon taking up most of the kitchen. The Goon says he was sent by Archer, and refuses to leave until Howard’s father pays the 2000 that he owes. Only this debt turns out to have nothing to do with money, and unravelling this mystery introduces Howard and his little sister Awful to a dysfunctional family of seven wizards who have Big Plans concerning the running of the world. And thus begins a hilarious and very clever novel where nothing is quite as it seems.

Confession time: although I know Archer’s Goon is a big favourite with Diana Wynne Jones fans (including with Neil Gaiman), it didn’t make much of an impression on me the first time I read it. I still can’t say it’s one of my favourites, but this time around I really appreciated the humour (it might be her funniest book after The Tough Guide to Fantasyland) and the typically DWJ-esque intricate plot. Archer’s Goon might not be quite up there with Hexwood or the ending of Fire and Hemlock when it comes to narrative complexity, but it comes pretty close.

The twist – which I had managed to forget about completely – was as brilliant now as the first time around. I love how masterful Wynne Jones is at pulling plot twists that are complete surprising and yet make perfect sense in retrospect (well, they are surprising to me, anyway - whenever I say something like this someone much smarter than me usually comes along and points out how very obvious the whole thing actually was all along). She does this matter-of-factly, in a way that reveals that she implicitly trusts readers of all ages to be smart, to be excited by challenging books, to happily follow her story if it asks a little more of them. There are many reasons why she’s one of my favourite authors (including, of course, the real emotional resonance her books seldom fail to have), but this is certainly one of the main ones.

Finally, there’s the wonderful Eight Days of Luke, a precursor to American Gods: David is home from school for the summer holidays and he’s feeling miserable. His relatives have made it clear that they don’t want him and that he’s only getting in the way of their plans, and when David’s frustration drives him to try to curse them one day, he ends up accidentally conjuring a new friend named Luke instead. Luke tells David he released him from a horrible prison, and that if he ever wants to call him all he has to do is strike a match.

Luke’s presence infuses David’s life with an excitement that was lacking before, but it doesn’t take David long to realise he doesn’t operate by the rules that govern most people. Still, he’s the only friend he has around, and his desire to protect him drives David to make a bargain with the mysterious Mr Wedding…

Eight Days of Luke is a wonderful reworking of Norse mythology – it won’t take readers familiar with Norse myths very long at all to figure out who Luke, Mr Wedding or Mr Chew really are, and this knowledge makes the book a lot more fun. But this is also a book that gives Diana Wynne Jones the opportunity to write one of her most brilliant Horrible Families – except there’s at least one member who turns out not to be so horrible after all.

I love how in this novel both the real and the mythical families turn out to have dynamics and inner alliances that are as complex and difficult as in real life; and how the relationships between the fantastic characters and the human ones help illuminate each other. Eight Days of Luke has this in common with Archer’s Goon, actually, and in both cases it works wonderfully well.

They read it too:
House of Many Ways - Ramblings, Stella Matutina, Jenny’s Books, Bird Brain(ed) Blog, Booklust, The Written World
Archer’s Goon - Books Love Me, Jenny’s Books
Eight Days of Luke - We Be Reading, Jenny’s Books

(Have I missed yours? Let me know and I will be glad to add it.)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

The Father and The Wellspring by Sharon Olds

2012-03-27T10:27:00.004+01:00

Today is the last Tuesday of the month, which means it’s time for Lu and Kelly’s monthly Read More/Blog More Poetry event. This month I decided to revisit one of my all-time favourite poetry collections, Sharon Olds’ The Father, and to accompany it with a new-to-me collection by the same author, The Wellspring. This turned out to be an excellent idea – the two collections complement each other so well they’re almost like two sides of the same coin.

The Father is a collection of poems about the speaker’s experience of watching her father die of cancer. As I said when I blogged about it briefly two years ago, it’s a harrowing book, but it’s also a beautiful one. Olds turns her attention to the physicality of dying, and uses raw and direct language to express her sense of connection to a body that is weakening day by day.

The Father reads like a diary of grief, and that alone is painful enough; but the book’s emotional landscape is further complicated by the speaker’s relationship with her father, which is far from straightforward. Poems like the amazing “Beyond Harm” (which still never fails to make me cry”, “I Wanted to be There When My Father Died” [.doc link] or “Last Words” capture all these conflicted feelings flawlessly.

I really appreciate the fact that Olds documents a kind of emotional experience that falls outside the fictional but nevertheless socially powerful and constrictive script of illness, death, grief, and mourning. We all have set expectations about how this sort of process is supposed to go, both for ourselves and for others, and this book bulldozers them all. Books like The Father expand the sort of narratives we tend to guide ourselves with: by voicing a very complicated emotional experience, they make it seem less lonely and more permissible, and that alone is a very valuable thing. The only two things I can think to compare this book to are a) the Mountain Goats album “The Sunset Tree”, which covers analogous emotional terrain and b) A Monster Calls, which also illuminates some of the complications of grief (though complications of a different sort).

Here’s a poem I particularly liked, “Death and Mortality”:

My father’s dying is not evil.
It is not good and it is not evil,
it is out of the moral world altogether.
When the nurses empty his catheter bag,
pouring the pale, amber fluid
into the hospital measuring cup, it is
neither good nor bad, it is only
the body. Even his pain, when his face
contracts, and his mouth makes a sucking snap
when his jaws draw back
is not wicked, no one is doing it to him,
there is no guilt, and no shame,
there is only pleasure and pain. This
is the world where sex lives, the world
of the nerves, the world without church,
we kiss him in it, we stroke back his gunned
hair, his wife and I, one
on either side, we wipe the flow of
saliva like ivory clay from the side of his mouth.
His body feels us attending him
Outside the world of the moral, as if
We are making love to him in the woods
And we hear, far away, in a field,
The distant hymns of a tent-meeting,
Smaller than the smallest drops of green-black
Woods dew on his body as we dip to touch him.

In the more recent collection The Wellspring, Sharon Olds turns her attention to life. When I say this collection complements The Father perfectly, I’m not saying it because I don’t want allow a book room to be unrelentingly sad; but rather because it was interesting to me to see the same poet turn her attention to other types of emotional experience. In The Wellspring, Olds focuses on the same kind of physical details as in The Father, but this time in relation to puberty, to sexuality, to motherhood, to a child’s illness. The unapologetic physicality of her poetry is one of the things I appreciate about it the most. Let me use an excerpt from “Her First Week” to show you what I mean:

It was in
my care, the creature of her spine, like the first
chordate, as if the history
of the vertebrate had been placed in my hands.
Every time I checked, she was still
with us – someday, there would be a human
race. I could not see it in her eyes,
but when I fed her, gathered her
like a loose bouquet to my side and offered
the breast, greyish-white, and struck with
miniscule scars like creeks in sunlight, I
felt she was serious, I believed she was willing to stay.

Or another one, from “Bathing the New Born”:

I love that time
when you croon and croon to them, you can see
the calm slowly entering them, you can
sense it in your clasping hand,
the little spine relaxing against
the muscle of your forearm, you feel the fear
leaving their bodies, he lay in the blue
oval plastic baby tub and
looked at me in wonder and began to
move his silky limbs at will in the water.

I’m not a mother and am not personally interested in becoming one, so a lot of what The Wellspring covers falls outside of my experience. But reading is about far more than merely finding echoes of yourself, after all: I loved this collection exactly because Olds focuses on female experiences that have been historically marginalised, and because she does such a wonderful job of conjuring them in vivid sensorial detail. You can find another one of my favourite poems, “High School Senior”, online here.

Many thanks to Lu and Kelly for encouraging me to make time for poetry again. It’s been a wonderful experience so far, and I can’t wait to see what I’ll revisit or discover next month.

(Have you posted about any of these books too? Let me know and I’ll be glad to link to you.)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

Global Woman edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild

2012-03-23T11:26:00.009Z

Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy is a collection of essays about the commodification of what is traditionally thought of as “women’s work” and the low pay and low status associated with these professions. The essays cover a wide range of subtopics within these general themes, such as the lives of the children of transnational families in the Philippines; the experiences of paid caregivers of disabled people; the wider social impact of the commodification of domestic labour; sex trafficking and modern day slavery; the concept of filial piety, cross generational relationships, and domestic work in Taiwan; female migration and notions of masculinity in Sri Lanka; the complexity of the relationships between nannies, the children they care for, and their employers; etc.

The focus of Global Woman truly is global: the contributors are from all around the world, and the essays are about more than jus women from the Global South or East coming to the US or Europe to work low-paid care jobs (though naturally this is covered too). Global Woman suggests that there is a trend of families from economically privileged countries subcontracting devalued care work to immigrant women from the developing world, but more than anything else I was hoping the contributors would write about this in a way that a) respected the agency of migrant women; and b), didn’t demonise immigration per se. I’m happy to report that for the most part I wasn’t disappointed.

Global Woman is a book of questions rather than of clear-cut answers, but I thought that Arlie Russell Hochschild’s essay, “Love and Gold”, got to the heart of the matter:

And now here’s the rub: the value of the labor of raising a child – always low relative to the value of other kinds of labor – has, under the impact of globalization, sunk lower still. Children matter to their parents immeasurably, of course, but the labor of raising them does not earn much credit in the eyes of the world. When middle-class housewives raised children as an unpaid, full-time role, the work was dignified by its aura of middle-classness. That was the one upside to the otherwise confining cult of middle-class, nineteenth- and early-twentieth century American womanhood. But when the unpaid work of raising a child became the paid work of child-care workers, its low market value revealed the abidingly low value of caring work generally – and further lowered it.

The low value placed on caring work results neither from an absence of need for it nor from the simplicity or ease of doing it. Rather, the declining value of child care results from a cultural politics of inequality. It can be compared with the declining value of basic food crops relative to manufactured goods on the international market. Though clearly more necessary to life, crops such as wheat and rice fetch low and declining prices, while manufactured goods are more highly valued. Just as the market price of primary produce keeps the Third World low in the community of nations, so the low market value of care keeps the status of women who do it – and, ultimately, of all women – low.

The inequality at the root of this problem would be challenged through a more equitable division of labour in the home, to start with. We need care work to cease to be devalued and fully transferred to less powerful parties, be they women in traditional domestic arrangements or low-paid workers in economically privileged families. This isn’t to say that there’s something inherently wrong with hiring domestic help – only with perceiving care work as being at the very bottom of an imaginary hierarchy of merit, and paying (and in many cases, treating) those who do it accordingly.

Gender essentialism plays a crucial role in the devaluation of care work: these jobs are seen as “unskilled” for women because care work is perceived as what they’re “naturally” supposed to be doing anyway. This problem is further aggravated by racist assumptions about the more “caring”, “warmer” or “submissive” nature of women from developing nations. As Lynn May Rivas writes in her essay,

Women and members of certain ethnic groups are often thought to be natural “caregivers”. Not surprisingly, the consumers I interviewed claimed that workers who were mothers or who came from foreign countries (bearing, as Ron asserted, “old world values”) made the best caregivers. One consumer, Janet, offered that “foreign people stick around longer, and, unfortunately, they take better care”. Another, Sue, averred that immigrants “just care a lot more and have much more of a helping attitude than, let's say, an American”. George, a self-described consumer advocate, agreed, noting that “some feel the best workers are illegal immigrants.”

And Bridget Anderson adds:

Racial stereotypes play a role both in the abuse of domestic workers and in the selection of migrant workers over local citizens in the first place. Certainly, such stereotypes help manufacture a sense of difference between the female employer and her domestic worker: “other” women are presumed suited to such service work, and these others are so alien that some employers actually fear that the migrant’s bodies will contaminate their homes. Workers are typically required to wash their clothes separately from those of the family, and they are given their own cutlery and plates.

One of my favourite essays in Global Woman was “Blowups and other Unhappy Endings” by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, which focuses on the often complex power dynamics between employer and employee in domestic work. These are often even more difficult when the care of children or vulnerable adults is involved. Hondagneu-Sotelo says:

The complexity of domestic-employment arrangements begins with the very nature of the work involved. Providing daily care for children or the elderly is a personal and idiosyncratic affair. Not only that, but as political analyst Deborah Stone has noted, care work is inherently relational, whether it consists in routine bodily care, such as bathing and feeding or in emotional attachment, affiliation, and intimate knowledge. Parents who hire nannies and housekeepers want employees who will really “care about” and show preference for their children; yet such personal engagement remains antithetical to how we normally think about employment. In fact, it can be hard for employers to acknowledge that the domestic employee has her own family life and is in fact tenderly caring for and cooing over the employer’s children because she needs the cash.

Nannies do form genuine bonds of affection with some of the children in their care, but this does not obviate their need for a living wage and decent working conditions. Moreover, the nannies who open their hearts to the children they care for often express bewilderment, hurt, and rage with the children’s parents then treat
them with little regard.

This essay (and others in the book) includes horrific stories about the severe personal cost this kind of emotional investment can have. Nannies seem to be simultaneously expected to genuinely care about the children they look after and resented for doing so. Furthermore, it’s incredibly easy for a conflict, a misunderstanding, or simple jealousy on the parents’ part to completely shut them out of the lives of children they have brought up since birth but have no socially recognised bond with.

I also found Michele Gamburd’s essay “Breadwinner No More” particularly fascinating: the essay tells the story of Lal, a Sri-Lankan man whose emigrant wife became the breadwinner in the family. Left behind in Sri-Lanka, Lal ended up taking on a traditionally feminine domestic role, but found that this shift had to be carefully negotiated to avoid a severe social cost. The essay was incredibly interesting, and strongly reminded me of Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s novel The Home-Maker. Here’s an excerpt:

Lal’s calm, slow, joking manner made him a hard target for teasing. He was the only male recipient of government aid who waited in line with the women to collect food at the local cooperative store. When the villagers mocked his feminine behavior, Lal regaled them with humorous stories about his finicky taste in groceries; those who attempted to laugh at him found themselves instead laughing with him about the dead gecko in the rice bag and the dried fish so smelly it must have been fertilizer. He met comments on his domesticity with exaggerated stories about the latest crisis in the kitchen, the rough quality of a new soap, and the price of beans. These complaints were uniformly within his domestic role, not about it. He created an ambiguous self-image as something between a simpleton with no understanding of his failure to fulfil a man’s proper role and a freethinker, impervious to criticism, who held a singularly different set of values. That opacity, along with his nonstop wit, allowed Lal to carve out a unique space for himself as a man whose sole job was women’s work. The good-humoured probing of the Graama Seevaka and the Justice of the Peace indexed at once the community’s awareness of Lal’s unusual behaviour and its baffled but amused acceptance.

I’ll leave you with a few other interesting bits:

We are all dependent on others to varying degrees. A language that denies this fact fuels a system that obscures the ways in which other people care for us. Words such as independence, self-reliance, and self-made help create, and are created by, a dynamic within which people are ignored and devalued. Joan Tronto reminds us that by “not noticing how pervasive and central care is to human life, those who are in positions of power and privilege can continue to ignore and degrade the activities of care and those who give care”.

Independence is perhaps the most fundamental of our cultural myths; it supports the organization of our society and justifies the distribution of goods, real and ideal. The labels independent and dependant, rather than reflect empirical reality, are used to justify inequality.
(From “Invisible Labors” by Lynn May Rivas)

The dominant East Asian model of three-generation cohabitation has been praised by policy makers and academics as a time-honoured solution to elder care. This romanticized image of family unity obscures intergenerational power struggles. A family-based model of elder care also exacerbates class inequalities among the elderly: the poorer the elderly are, the more dependent they are on their children. Migrant care workers only present a solution to relatively privileged households, which outsource elder care to low-wage migrant women, who hen leave their own families to care for others.
(From “Among Women” by Pei-Chia Lan)

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll be glad to link to you.)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

Girls to the Front by Sara Marcus

2012-03-21T11:06:00.002Z

I began to hear people talking about Riot Grrrl in the past tense. Some spoke of it as having been a radical feminist movement of young women, but most people thought of it as a music scene, an expired trend: at best, a period of openness to strong female performers; at worst, an ideology of bad musicianship or a style of dress. Girls playing guitar sloppily were referred to as riot grrrls, as if it were a genre like rockabilly or grindcore. A “Riot Grrrl” Halloween costume for sale online (child sizes eight to ten) looked like a Goth cheerleader outfit with moon boots. Even feminist books on gender and rock music downplayed the movement’s political aspects—because, I suspect, people didn’t know how to treat the lives of teenage girls as if they mattered. The truth about the movement was getting buried. I longed for someone to set the record straight, or at least tilt the balance in the right direction. Then I realized that I could pull everyone’s stories together, and I devoted myself once again to finding the riot grrrls.

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution is a cultural history of the feminist movement that spread among teenage girls in the early 1990’s, mainly in the US, and that mostly found its expression through rock music and zine making. Sara Marcus writes about the origins of major Riot Grrrl bands such as Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, and of course Bikini Kill, but her main focus is on the teenage girls who took Riot Grrrl into their hands and made the movement their own. Through their stories, Marcus explores the very real application the feminist principles behind the movement had to their everyday lives.

Girls to the Front opens with a preface in which Marcus explains the impact Riot Grrrl had on her own life as a teenager. This section alone told me right away I was going to adore this book. Marcus writes:

Talking to these girls, I began to understand that I didn’t have to be miserable. Maybe being a teenager was always going to be a bloodbath to some extent, but it did not have to be this particular bloodbath. Its severity and the specific tone of its miseries were political, which meant they were mutable. I felt powerless not because I was weak but because I lived in a society that drained girls of power. Boys harassed me not because I invited it but because they were taught it was acceptable and saw that no one intervened. These things weren’t my fault, and we could fight them all together.

For the first time in years, I knew that I was going to be okay.

I was too young in the early 90’s to have been aware of Riot Grrrl, and didn’t find out about the movement at all until much later in life. But once I did, I always thought of it as missed opportunity. I felt like I had just missed out on something that could have been huge and life-changing for me; that could have helped me immensely in the exact same ways Marcus describes in her preface.

Much of what Girls to the Front deals with has to do with how crucial becoming aware of the political dimension of personal struggles can be, particularly for teenage girls. A huge part of what Riot Grrrl did for these girls was help them join the dots and identify the different ways in which sexism affected their lives. Once you name a problem and identify it as something that can be fought, you’re at least one step further away from losing your mind; you at least know that the problem isn’t you and that you’re not alone. That doesn’t make it go away, of course, but the difference can be lifesaving.

What the Riot Grrrl movement did for these girls really reminded me of what several different Internet communities did for me as I was growing up. What homemade zines were for them, particularly in terms of community and self-expression, Internet forums were for me. A lot of the dynamics described in the book were recognizable too, particularly the girls’ struggles to make sense of the ways in which sexism intersected with race and class issues, the difficult conversations that followed, the hurt feelings, but also the genuine personal and political growth. It surprised me to see how familiar a cultural history of something I missed out on turned out to be. I can actually easily imagine similar books being written about blogging and other online communities some years down the road.

The Riot Grrrl movement was strongly connected with the early 90’s music scene in Olympia, WA: this was where the first Riot Grrrl band, Bikini Kill, was formed, and the way the town’s arts scene operated played a huge role in the inception of Riot Grrrl. The Olympia music scene was all about learning and progressing in public: anyone with a newly formed band and a couple of songs in their repertoire could play a show in someone else’s basement, and instant be met with receptiveness and feedback. Seeing other people get better at what they did in public helped demystify art – it let anyone watching know that perhaps this was something they could be doing too. The early Riot Grrrls were aware of this: Bratmobile in particularly deliberately played showed before they were ready (by most people’s standards, anyway) because they wanted to help make girls who wanted to start bands not feel too intimidated to do so.

These principles of public growth and progression also applied to zine making, in ways that tied in not only with art but also with political development. One of Marcus’ interviewees tells her:

Grrrl zines were the coffee-table reading and the father for dinner conversation in his house of punk rock schoolteachers—“the main texts of our lives,” he said. One of his favorite things about the zines was that the writers weren’t pretending to have all the answers; they were making visible the process of figuring things out. Mary and Erika, in particular, constantly included calls for dialogue and feedback. “They claimed the space to be wrong,” Abram said, “and I found out to be very powerful intellectually.

As I was saying the other day, this process of “making visible the process of figuring things out” and “claiming the space to be wrong” is something I have experienced when it comes to blogging and have only recently come to fully embrace. It was reassuring to see that no matter what the medium, other young women have been there before.

Another thing Girls to the Front explores in detail is the relationship between art and political activism. The Riot Grrrl movement came into being in a very specific political context which was leaving young people deeply unsatisfied – a context not at all unlike today’s:

To be young in 1992 was to feel that the world’s fate could be determined in the next seventy-two hours, and that the outcome might not be favorable to human survival. With the September 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, the threat of nuclear annihilation had finally faded, but other terrifying forces, seemingly more cosmic and geologic than strictly political, had come to light. AIDS was painting everybody’s sexual awakening with somber mortality; global warming and skin cancer meant that the sun was suddenly deadly as well. Magazines and newspapers printed ominous maps of North America striped with creeping red fever-rashes. Temperatures and sea levels were rising; incomes and standards of living were plummeting. For the first time in the nation’s history, young people told pollsters they expected to do worse than their parents had done.

Marcus describes how Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill, wanted to start a band specifically because she had a mission: she wanted to spread feminism to teenage girls, she wanted to tell them they weren’t the problem, she wanted to address sexual abuse, and she wanted to do so from a platform that would reach as many people as possible. Like most other people, I believe that good art should not be didactic; but I also believe that this idea is sometimes taken too far. People mistake any kind of political intervention whatsoever for didacticism, and therefore frown upon it almost by default and worship an dubious ideal of complete political neutrality. Bikini Kill was a band with a political mission, but this didn’t make them any less powerful on a purely artistic level. They combined music with unapologetic activism, yet this was not a hindrance but rather something that made them a better, more resonant band.

As you can probably tell by now, Girls to the Front is many things, and one of them is a plea for young women’s lives to be taken seriously. One of the major obstacles the Riot Grrrl movement had to face was the increasing interest from the mainstream media. Articles about Riot Grrrl started to pop up in several publications, and if on the one hand they helped spread the word about the movement, on the other hand they invariably condescended to it and portrayed it as a fad. This kind of media coverage

confirmed what many of [the girls] were reading in school, about how mass media turned real-life into spectacle in order to sell it back to people as a meaningless, glammed-up, depoliticized version of their own lives.

The more I read about the media’s tendency to depoliticise and patronise these girls and what they were doing, the more I was reminded of today’s laments about young people’s lack of political engagement. I suspect that much of it also comes down to this generalised tendency to discount the lives of young people, particularly young girls, or to dismiss forms of activism that don’t take the exact shape we happen to be familiar with. Young women’s bodies continue to be the objects of political struggles, but we don’t often allow them room to be subjects or to speak for themselves. The Internet has made the mobilisation and community involvement at the heart of Riot Grrrl much easier, but I’m not sure how much progress has been made when it comes to treating youth-led political initiatives seriously or acknowledging their legitimacy.

Girls to the Front is an absolutely amazing book, and I’ll be very surprised if it doesn’t end up in my top five non-fiction reads of the year. Highly recommended to anyone interested in feminism, music, pop culture, politics, or the experience of being a teenage girl.

Other interesting bits:

The girls were furious about things like parental-consent abortion laws, bikini-clad women who hawked beer and cigarettes on billboards and TV, and archaic gender roles that pervaded the cartoon section of the Washington Post. They are ready to revolt over things like hallway gropes and sidewalk hecklers, leering teachers, homophobic threats, rape, incest, domestic violence, sexual double standards, ubiquitous warnings against walking certain places or dressing certain ways… the affronts were neverending. These girls couldn’t block these things out and they didn’t want to; they wanted to stay acutely aware of the war against them so they could fight back.
(...)
They were mustering for battle against the idea that to be a girl was to be in grave danger that you could never fully escape, only manage by narrowing your life, your range, your wardrobe, your gaze. The end of the summer was here, but the girl revolution was just beginning.

If all the articles that were to follow White’s into print over the next year had been a smart and sympathetic as hers, maybe media coverage of Riot Grrrl wouldn’t have become the huge problem that it did. But for whatever reason, most adults find it tremendously difficult to take teenage girls’ life seriously. Even when girls’ lives and bodies constitute a major political battleground. Even when girls are speaking truth to power in clarion, prophetic voices. Even when girls are right.

“Signing to a major label was not just a matter of ‘integrity’ or ‘purity,’” Tobi said. “Our vision was of creating a feminist youth culture that was participatory and would change society. We wanted all girls in all towns start bands. We didn’t just want to be the ‘feminist punk band’ that people would come and see on tour.” But that was what they were becoming. They played more shows, wrote more songs, took breaks when they could afford to. They were becoming better musicians, better songwriters, better performers. At the same time, audiences were starting to see them as stars. “Pretty soon we were all over twenty-five, and our biggest fans were under sixteen,” Tobi said. “Selfishly, I wanted stuff to change and for there suddenly to be all these women in bands around my age who could be peers. Instead there would be a long line of kids at a DIY show making us sign autographs.”
Yet at least young listeners now had the option of idolizing an overtly feminist, majorly-female band. This was progress. Even if it wasn’t exactly what the musicians had wanted, it was changing the soundtrack of adolescence for good.

They read it too: Serendipitous Readings, Reading Through Life

(You?)

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