Category Archives: Books

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Privacy

So I began a new book called Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self by Patricia Meyer Spacks — I chose it because I was looking for interesting books about the eighteenth century, but then I began to realize that the topic is perfect for me to think about right now, having begun this blog only a couple months ago, because I’m sorting through what I think about privacy in a very direct way every time I write a post. Since this book looks at privacy through the lense of literature, largely the novel although including other genres, I’m afraid, reader, that you will be subjected to more quotations about Samuel Richardson. But not today.

Oh, sorry — I just found the quotation I wanted to give you and it’s about Clarissa. Okay, you will be endlessly subjected to quotations about Richardson, and I guess you’ll have to deal with it. This is Spacks talking about the contradictions in Clarissa’s attitude towards privacy:

Desiring to slide through life unnoticed, she resolutely separates herself — physically, as much as she can; psychically, almost completely — from others … Yet all eyes are upon her: the eyes of all she encounters, but also, by her prearrangement, the eyes of all who survive her: not only family and friends, but potential readers of the book to be compiled by Belford, for which she also arranges. She wants to slide through life unnoticed; she also wants all eyes upon her. She wants privacy; she wants fame.

This is quite the paradox — she wants to be alone and wall herself off from others but she arranges her own exposure through writing and reading; she wants privacy and fame both. It sounds a bit like blogging, doesn’t it? I write about exactly what I choose to write about, including some personal details and excluding others — a lot of others — and thereby I’m preserving my privacy. Sort of. Having a blog means that I’m violating my own privacy to some extent (if such a thing is possible — if I’m the one doing the violating, is it violation?). I’m both hiding and revealing myself. The thing that amuses me about the picture I put up of myself on the blog a while back is that it’s self-revelation — but not really. It’s Clarissa herself who’s hiding my face. Clarissa writes and writes and writes — the novel is made up of letters, a large number from Clarissa herself — but her character is in a lot of ways still obscure. Writing about oneself can be a way of revealing oneself, but, paradoxically, of shielding oneself too.

I recently came across this post from Tales from the Reading Room, where Litlove describes why she blogs:

If I did believe that identity was in fact composed of a myriad assortment of small narratives, and that our sense of self changed with the ebb and flow of the stories we told, wouldn’t it be intriguing to watch such a dynamic in action?

The wording here is interestingly ambiguous — who is intrigued? Watching the “ebb and flow of the stories we told” is intriguing for the writer and for the reader both, the “we” of Litlove’s phrase. The writer is discovering things as she writes just as the readers is discovering as she reads. I would add that what’s intriguing is not only watching the ebb and flow of a changing and fragmentary identity, but getting the sense of what is not said as well — of the person that lies behind the posts, undescribed and unrevealed. Making writing public somehow enhances the feeling of depths unexplored, kept private.

I finished Colette’s My Mother’s House and Sido last night; if you aren’t familiar with it, the short chapters in My Mother’s House were published serially first and then collected in book form in 1922, and Sido was published seven years later. Sido is made up of three sections, one each about Colette’s mother, father, and siblings.

I enjoyed the book very much and recommend it — I do think it should be read slowly. I read it a bit fast and sometimes felt like it was rushing past me and I was missing things. The writing was beautifully lyrical, which is a phrase that would turn me off if I read it in someone else’s review, but in this case the writing worked for me. The short chapters are like prose poems, each capturing a story or a character or a mood. They got me interested in reading a biography of Colette; there are things hinted at in this book that I’d like to know more about — Colette’s conflicted feelings about femininity and sexuality, in particular.

Here is Colette writing about her hair:

I was twelve years old, with the manners and vocabulary of an intelligent, rather uncouth boy, but my gait was not boyish because my figure already showed signs of development, and above all because I wore my hair in two long plaits that swished through the air around me like whips. These I used indiscriminately as ropes from which to hang the picnic basket, as brushes to be dipped in ink or in paint, as whips for a recalcitrant dog or as ribbons to make the cat play. My mother wailed to see me maltreat these two golden brown thongs for whose sake I was daily condemned to get up half an hour earlier than my school-fellows. At seven o’clock on dark winter mornings I would fall asleep again, sitting before the wood fire, while my mother brushed and combed my nodding head. From those mornings I date my invincible hatred of long hair.

As someone who would head out in sub-zero weather with wet hair rather than wake up ten minutes earlier to use the blow-dryer, I sympathize. I love her impulse to think of her hair as a whip before she thinks of it as an object of beauty or a source of attention. She ends the paragraph this way:

Long hairs would be discovered tangled in the lower branches of the trees in the garden, long hairs attached to the cross-beam from which hung the trapeze and the swing. A pullet in the barnyard was supposed to be lame from birth, until we ascertained that a long hair, covered with pimply skin was bound tightly round one of its feet and atrophying it.

Could she be clearer about seeing the conventions of femininity as crippling? However, the next paragraph takes another turn:

There is just one moment, in the evening, when the pins are withdrawn and the shy face shines out for an instant from between the tangled waves; and there is a similar moment in the early morning. And because of those two moments everything that I have just written against long hair counts for nothing at all.

Colette both loves and hates her hair, she feels it holds her captive, but she is also captivated when it’s let loose. It can cover and hide her face, but the moment of her face “shining” through the dangling hair somehow compensates for everything. She is oddly removed from this passage; it’s not “my shy face” but “the shy face” that shines through, as though she can appreciate her own beauty only if she pretends it is someone else’s.

Colette’s chapter called “Maternity” is similarly conflicted. Her sister makes an unfortunate marriage and is estranged from the rest of the family; when they find out she is pregnant, here is Colette’s response:

I had ceased to think about her, nor did I attach any special significance to the fact that just at that time my mother began to have attacks of nervous faintness, nausea and palpitations. I only remember that the sight of my sister, distorted and grown heavy, filled me with still more embarrassment and disgust.

When her sister is giving birth, her mother, kept from her side because of the family feud, goes over to the sister’s house and lingers outside, listening for sounds that would tell her what is happening. Colette writes this remarkable passage:

A second cry, pitched on the same note, almost like the opening of a melody, floated towards us, and a third …. Then I saw my mother grip her own loins with desperate hands, spin round and stamp on the ground as she began to assist and share, by her low groans, by the rocking of her tormented body, by the clasping of her unwanted arms, and by all her maternal anguish and strength, the anguish and strength of the ungrateful daughter who, so near to her and yet so far away, was bringing a child into the world.

Colette is shocked and embarrassed by this physical spectacle, and yet she is fascinated by her mother as well, seeing the horror of her mother’s anguish and her tremendous strength at the same time. She knows, as a woman, she is a part of this process — the writer Colette has given birth to a daughter by this time — and she agonizes and at the same time she can’t keep herself away.

Here’s why. This is from the introduction to Colette’s book My Mother’s House and Sido, by Judith Thurman:

[Writing] was not, however, the only bridge to liberation. Colette had perceived, precociously, that the beauty of a woman’s muscles is identical with their purpose, which is self-support. By 1902, she had installed a private gymnasium, with a trapeze and parallel bars in the studio upstairs from the luxurious conjugal apartment on the rue de Courcelles that Willy [her husband] had financed with her earnings.

A woman writer athlete! I’d like to know more about women who were writers and intellectuals and also were athletic, especially women from earlier periods when it was more complicated for a woman to be athletic than it is now. One of the things I admire about Mary Wollstonecraft was her insistence that women exercise and gain physical strength at the same time they worked their intellectual muscles. I also admire Dorothy Wordsworth for her amazing feats of walking. Does anyone know of more examples?

Here’s another reason to admire Colette. Again, according to Judith Thurman:

Colette was a pagan whose life and appetites were Olympian in their vitality, as was her oeuvre. She published nearly eighty volumes of fiction, memoir, drama, essays, criticism, and reportage, among them perhaps a dozen masterpieces.

A woman writer athlete who’s also a pagan? I simply must learn more.

Here, perhaps, is a clue to what makes Colette so unconventional. This quotation from Thurman is about Colette’s mother, whom Colette calls Sido:

Sido called marriage, only half-ironically, a “heinous crime,” and would rejoice in Colette’s liaison from 1905-1911 with a cultivated and melancholy lesbian tranvestite, the Marquise de Morny, largely because “Missy’s” generosity and solicitude were so wholesome for Colette’s fiction. Nor was Sido’s “precious jewel,” childless until forty, ever encouraged by her mother to procreate.

Does anyone know if Thurman’s biography of Colette is the best available, or are there other better ones?

I’m almost finished with my novel history book, Licensing Entertainment, and I continue to be fascinated by the controversies over the early novel and its place in culture. Here’s a passage that compares plays to novels, showing some of the sources for this anxiety about fiction:

If plays could cause riots, novels could act at a distance. If plays put too much control in the hands of the playwrights, actors, and directors of the theater, novels put too much power in the hands of the reader, and of those who wrote and sold what they read. If plays offer an unseemly spectacle of vice, novels invite readers to produce this spectacle within their own head. While the play’s concentration of spectacle increased its danger, it opened it to state control. The very diffuseness of novelistic spectacle made its effects uncertain, and its control nearly impossible.

This reminds me of passages in Alberto Manguel’s book A History of Reading, where he discusses the subversive potential of reading. And this fear is a part of the novel’s early history — if you were invested in controlling the public, people’s morals or their actions or their politics, I would think novels would scare you. Once something is out in print, it is nearly impossible to gain control over it — both the book itself and the ideas it contains. Now I like plays a lot, but this comparison shows why, I think, I like novels even better.

People were particularly worried about women reading novels, which the increasing popularity of circulating libraries gave them easy access to. Warner points out that this worry came from two sources:

The first of these is that women’s leisure reading, as evidenced by circulating library use, upset those who wanted women doing useful domestic or commercial work. Second, circulating-library use might not just transmit romance delusions — it could also give women access to reading that could put in question traditional cultural authority.

Women’s relationship to publication and reading is fascinating; so many women in the eighteenth-century and later published anonymously or pseudonymously to avoid being accused of stepping into professional areas they “didn’t belong in” — areas that were designated “male.” And the sight of women reading could make people nervous because they had little control over the content of that reading and the thoughts it might produce. They were at best “wasting time,” and at worst, imbibing ideas that would lead them to having affairs or asking for power and independence.

Warner points out that evidence shows women probably weren’t reading novels in higher numbers than men, but the perception existed that they were, which indicates the extent of this fear.

All this is interesting to think about when we consider issues of gender and reading and publication today — I don’t see evidence that anybody worries too much about the amount of reading women do, but I do think women still often aren’t taken seriously as writers or readers. If you are interested, check out this article from the Guardian on why the Orange prize, a prize for women writing in English, is necessary. The article talks about how prize juries tend to see male writers as the “safe” choice for praise and recognition. And, of course, there’s that New York Times list of the best novels of the last 25 years that includes very few women. I think women readers are often considered as consumers of books — there as a potential market to be exploited, but not to be taken seriously as thinkers. And women writers are often not given the credit they deserve — sometimes because they write about domesticity or family or subjects that aren’t recognized as important.

I haven’t posted on my Virginia Woolf reading for a while, so here are some quotations I’m come across in the last few weeks:

First, a defense of the imagination:

Now I confess that I have half forgotten what I meant to say about the German prisoners; Milton & life … All I can remember now is that the existence of life in another human being is as difficult to realise as a play of Shakespeare when the book is shut. This occurred to me when I saw Adrian talking to the tall German prisoner. By rights they should have been killing each other. The reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one’s imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his life means to him — the infinite possibilities of a succession of days which are furled in him, & have already been spent.

Perhaps this is naively optimistic about the powers of imagination, but I like the idea that the imagination can, possibly, in certain circumstances, make it harder to harm another person. Imagination is no innoculation against violence, but it seems right to me that refusing to think about what another’s life is like would make it easier to destroy it.

Then, some literary criticism, on Paradise Lost:

The substance of Milton is all made of wonderful, beautiful, & masterly descriptions of angel’s bodies, battles, flights, dwelling places. He deals in horror & immensity & squalor & sublimity, but never in the passions of the human heart. Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon one’s own joys & sorrows? I get no help in judging life; I scarcely feel that Milton lived or knew men & women; except for the peevish personalities about marriage & the woman’s duties … But how smooth, strong & elaborate it all is! What poetry! I can conceive that even Shakespeare after this would seem a little troubled, personal, hot & imperfect. I can conceive that this is the essence, of which almost all other poetry is the dilution. The inexpressible fineness of the style, in which shade after shade is perceptible, would alone keep one gazing into, long after the surface business in progress has been dispatched. Deep down one catches still further combinations, rejections, felicities, & masteries. Moreover, though there is nothing like Lady Macbeth’s terror or Hamlet’s cry, no pity or sympathy or intuition, the figures are majestic; in them is summed up much of what men thought of our place in the universe, of our duty to God, our religion.

Could she ever write a diary entry. I love how she can fully appreciate the great things that Milton does, while keeping a keen sense of what he doesn’t do. I suspect if she had to, she’d choose Shakespeare over Milton, but since she doesn’t have to, she can write brilliantly about Milton’s strengths.

Finally, a passage about the writing life:

It’s the curse of the writer’s life to want praise so much, & be so cast down by blame, or indifference. The only sensible course is to remember that witing is after all what one does best; that any other work would seem to me a waste of life; that on the whole I get infinite pleasure from it; that I make one hundred pounds a year; & that some people like what I write.

Indeed, Virginia Woolf, some people do like what you write.