Sunday, June 29, 2014

Death Comes to Pemberly and I will be disappointed in Lydia Wickham

Okay.  Not exactly gothic novel that is hundreds of years old, but I have come to the conclusion, given that I am reading other things at the moment, that I define horrid novels, so I'm expanding.  I know.  Big revelation, right?  My blog.  Therefore write what I want.  So now that I have removed my own self imposed restrictions, I'm reading one of my favorite authors, P.D. James.  And it's a sequel to Pride and Prejudice!  It doesn't get more awesome than that.


There is the return of one of my favorite characters in literature.  Of course I mean Lydia!  Who is great fun and a bit self-destructive and foolish in the original novel, but independent and strong.

So it is 6 years later and everything is happy and then Lydia rides to Pemberley in hysterics because Wickham is dead.  That is all I know.

What I suspect is that no matter how wonderful P.D. James is, I will still be disappointed in Lydia, largely because I have my own hopes for her.  I see her and Wickham not working out and her running and diving gleefully into the demi-monde a la Harriet Wilson--Greatest courtesan of her age.

 Lydia would be great at it.  Harriet had freedom, independence, and her own money.  She was involved with Dukes and Princes and routinely told them where to stick it if they annoyed her.

Harriet wasn't acknowledged by the virtuous women of the age, but she still was a trendsetter and set the styles they wore. She was in the newspapers and gossip columns as if she were royalty, and her every move (and her clothes) was watched like we watch celebrities today.

If I were to write a sequel to Pride and Prejudice it would involve the demi-monde where Lydia rules and is involved in scandals. I'd give her a happy ending, like when Elizabeth Armitage married Charles Fox.  It would be gloriously wicked and fun. Sticky, stuffy Darcy and Elizabeth could go be boring somewhere else.

Saturday, June 28, 2014

More Intermission and a lot of excuses

Sorry about this.  My quietness has nothing to do with World Cup obsession... Sure. Um...


I also really want to claim being back to school has caused this drop in reading, but it isn't true.  I've been reading.  Just not Castle of Wolfenbach.

I'm still reading all sorts of fun pulp.  I just have no ability to finish books I'm not fond of and I'm not fond of Matilda and her friends.  Hey!  I have an idea!
Oh.  Mark Gatiss thought of it first.  Oh well.

Instead I got the new re-release of Modesty Blaise from Titan Books and have been reading that.  More modern classic pulp and very worth it. She's been an obsession of mine since I started reading them in the 80s in the Detroit Free Press, the only place in the United States where they were printed.  I only got to read them when I went to visit my grandparents, so it is wonderful to actually read the full stories.  If you haven't read them, do so. NOW.

School did start again, so I have been nose deep in International Accounting.  And last night Andy and I went to see Neil Gaiman at Carnegie Hall.  It was amazing.

And there is the World Cup...



So that is all my excuses for giving up on Castle of Wolfenbach.  I'll choose something else this week and let you know.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

"Why should I continue in the world?"

Not me. Matilda. She spent her whole life thinking she was being cared for by an uncle and therefore had parents of a certain society and it turns out she's an orphan and no one knows who her parents are. Clearly suicide is in order.

Instead she is insisting on leaving the protection of the Marquis for a convent. Honestly, I'm relieved. Maybe it was the forced lack of reading so I need to get into the story again but Matilda has been safe and under protection for long enough.

She has been surrounded by friends, the Marquis staved off the uncle, and she cried a lot because she can't support being a burden or inflicting her society on them when she isn't worthy of it.

But whatever her stupid reasons for doing it, getting out of the safety and protection of the Marquis is a good thing for the story. Not enough evil and screaming. Though there has been some fainting due to the mortification of being an orphan with no known family among the gentry.

Fainting fit count: 3

Friday, June 13, 2014

"I consider the English as the happiest people under the sun"

We interrupt this story for some author patriotism.

Pages and pages of it.



One of the characters has just come back from a trip to England and his friends ask how the trip was.


He goes off into raptures on the people (naturally brave, friendly, and benevolent), the government (they enjoy the blessings of a mild and free government), the laws (their personal safety is secured by the laws), the court of law (no man can be punished for an imaginary crime, they have fair trials). And on and on and on....

                             .....And on and on and on.


The nobility (generous and benevolent), merchants (rich and respectable), politicians (perfectly acquainted with the government of different nations, as much as of their own), and laws against gambling (a habit that dissipates fortunes, distresses families, hardens the heart, depraves the mind, and renders useless all the good qualities they receive from nature).  But wait!  There's more!


"What I most admire in the English, is the great encouragement given to all manufactories, and to all useful discoveries."  The generosity to the poor.  The greatness of the economy.  The public buildings, the entertainment and the performers.

And the ladies, of course!  "The English women, take them all in all, are more fascinating than any other nation I ever saw."


All this coming from a Frenchman at a time when the English and French went to war every twenty to thirty years.  They were fighting each other again at the point the book was published.  I can suspend belief for a lot of things, but a room full of French nobility all happily discussing the superiority of the English in 1792 and everyone agrees on this is just ridiculous.


But it is a great excuse to find every image of Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry that I can and shove them all into one post.


Also, will be a bit slow in posting.  Having some vacation and fun time.  See you soon!

Saturday, June 7, 2014

"you have no right to dispose of yourself without my permission"

As if to prove my point from yesterday, The Castle of Wolfenbach has gone into the story of the Countess of Wolfenbach and why she was found trapped in the castle and later kidnapped.  Also the evil uncle has caught up with Matilda and is demanding she marry him.

Since I didn't talk much yesterday about the book, here is a general rundown.

Matilda is running from her uncle, who clearly has some gross designs on her.

She winds up in the Castle of Wolfenbach and finds the imprisoned Countess of Wolfenbach, Victoria.  Before Matilda learns much about Victoria, Victoria is kidnapped and her servant is killed.  But not before Victoria secures it so that Matilda can go hide out with her sister.  And yes, to get to the point where Victoria's story is still a mystery but they are close enough that the sister relationship gets set up does take a bit of implausible talking about everything BUT the important stuff.

All we know is that both Victoria and her sister were forced into marriage by their father.  It worked out well for the sister since she married a Marquis and they fell in love.  It didn't work so well for Victoria because she married a count and he is EVIL! (As all counts are. It is a job requirement.)

Don't worry too much about the Countess Victoria.  She rapidly escapes from the kidnappers and runs to England, though I don't know how yet.  The uncle has caught up with Matilda and is trying to make her marry him.  She says she will go become a nun instead.  He says the line in the title of the post, that she can't enter into anything without his permission, even to god.  So Matilda is getting the eff out of Dodge.

There are a couple of other side stories about the friends of the Marchioness who also were married to terrible men against their will, but by the time of the story they are fine, doing well after the husband died and left them all their money.  Let's just say Parsons has a big thing against arranged marriages and she is making that point clear.

Really, this is a book entirely about girls.  The men are either good or evil.  When Matilda and her friends go out to a ball, "a swarm of beaus surrounded them, but [Matilda] thought their conversation, their fopperies, and fulsome compliments truly disgusting, on a comparison with the sensible and elegant manners of her newly-acquired female friends."

Fainting Fit Count: 2

--I'm a bit disappointed really.  By everything I was expecting this book was supposed to be endless crying and fainting and all the worst gothic has to offer.  Isn't Radcliffe supposed to be the queen of the sensible heroines and the rest were silly and supernatural?  This is what I was led to believe.  But Matilda has only lost consciousness twice.  While Emily St. Aubert is fainting at the worst possible time, Matilda is helping the old servant Joseph to hide the bodies.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

"the wretched victim to some merciless man was sacrificed in that closet"

I want to talk about more than just the story of The Castle of Wolfenbach.  Perhaps I really have focused too much on the stories, on the simple joy of reading them, and not said enough about why these stories are important.  I'm going to correct that now.  Strap in.

It has been nearly two weeks since Elliot Rodger killed people in Isla Vista, blaming women for his actions.  In his manifesto he barely gives any detail to women.  They are nameless and faceless.  On the forum that he frequented, PUA Hate, women were discussed objects to be used, that if the woman was not a virgin she should have sex with any man who wants it from her.  The response from women to these murders has been huge, from #YesAllWomen on Twitter to When Women Refuse, a website cataloging instances of violence against women who refuse male advances.  You probably know all of this.

You also probably know about Bring Back Our Girls.  That school girls were abducted in Nigeria by men who hate the idea of educating women.  That the response from the Nigerian government has been despicably slow.  That these girls are being sold as wives for $12.

So what does all this have to do with the Gothic novel?

The line in the title of this post is from Castle of Wolfenbach.  The wretched victim is, of course, a woman.  The heroine, the lady with the fatigue at the beginning of the story, has fainted already.  She has also escaped an uncle who intended to rape her, entered supposedly haunted chambers no one else dared to, and volunteered to move the bloody body of a woman who had her throat slit when the elderly servant was not sure he could lift the body on his own.  It is a story of a young woman fighting to control her own life and escape the man who feels he is entitled to her.  Gothic novels are about women, violence against women, and the heroine's ultimately successful escape from the control of men who would hurt her or force her into sex and marriage against her will.  They are among the first responses of women against male entitlement to women's bodies.

The heroine is usually an orphan or otherwise considered unprotected by society at that time. She does not kick ass.  She does not take on male attributes to win the fight the way modern heroines do. (I do like modern heroines too, but it does seem that in modern stories women are only seen as strong if they are as violent and unemotional as traditional male heroes. Rambo with boobs.)  Gothic heroines are still within the bounds of acceptable femininity of the time, and I make fun of  the fainting fits, but in these stories being emotional is not considered a weakness, but a virtue. They may faint and cry every other page, but this does not stop them from being resourceful and determined, using the abilities they have to find friends and escape tyranny.  And above all, they are brave.  They stand up for themselves, even when threatened with death, and they never doubt that they will eventually escape and all will end well.

We've all talked or heard about how the literary canon is skewed towards men.  Reading gothic novels is part of the reclamation of female literature.  Of the 9 novels mentioned in Northanger Abbey 6 are written by women.  Yes, they are adventures and meant for a mass audience, which is usually frowned upon by literary establishment anyway, but so were the works of Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, James Fennimore Cooper, and Mark Twain and they made it into commonly known literature.  These women writers are as good as their male counterparts.  So why the difference?  I don't think it is just because the writers are women.  After all, there are some women writers just as well known.  I think it has more to do with telling women's stories.  Gothic novels are the stories of captives who escape.  The stories we commonly regard as literature are stories of men's adventures.  If there is a woman, she is the captive to be rescued by the hero.  Even the female authors who make literary canon tell stories of men or rescue by men. Austen has her intelligent and resourceful heroines use their talents to find a man to marry, and Frankenstein is about a man.

If we are going to expand the canon, we are going to have to accept women writers for the stories they write, which are women's stories.  Gothics are what women wrote about being a woman, with the horror of losing control of your own life, though that is made more palatable by the fun story and adventure.  They are good stories.  They are well written stories.  They are stories we need to read as literature and not just for the purpose of reading women's writings as an attempt to be inclusive.  "Women's literature" is its own way of making those writings second class.

As a reader and a writer I believe art is important.  Until we believe adventure stories of women who rescue themselves--which is not a new or modern phenomenon-- are as important as adventure stories of men rescuing women, we will not, as a culture, begin that deep, ingrained transformation that needs to happen.   Gothics are good stories and worth reading.  Let's read them and enjoy them as if they are as good and important as they really are.



Tuesday, June 3, 2014

"there are bloody floors, prison rooms, and scriptions on the windows to make a body's hair stand on end"

Woah it has been a crazy time. Sorry it has been so long since my last post.  My church (and the surrounding town) had its annual fair and I was part of that.
The bit about the tarot card reader---That was me. I'm generally quite shy about saying I read tarot cards, but after years of nagging, I finally got talked into it. Only had one guy who ranted about a tarot reader at a church charity and witchcraft and how I am EVIIIILLL.

 I always enjoy being evil. My greatest delight was the job where some of my coworkers would make the sign of the cross when I went past. Not kidding.

But all of this is not about Castle of Wolfenbach!

It starts off as all good gothic novels should. There is a storm, peasants who must take in a fine lady fatigued with weakening spirits. There is a haunted castle just up the way that is inhabited only by an old couple, left behind as caretakers of this otherwise abandoned place. The peasant wife tries to warn the fine lady of going there by telling terrible and vague stories. And the fine lady feels she must go there because obviously buckets of blood are preferable to a nice, safe peasant cottage with a bed on the floor.

It took Radcliffe an entire volume and too much poetry to get to this sort of scene.

P.S. No one has fainted yet though. C'mon Eliza. Hurry it up!