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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: dickens

Austen’s Powers

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Posted by colincarman in Jane Austen

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austenland, boris johnson, brexit, britain, dickens, frankenstein, gardener, hampshire, Jane Austen, lewis carroll, mansfield park, mary shelley, portsmouth, UK

“You’ve had good weather. Jane is smiling on you.” – the Secretary for the Jane Austen Society of the UK

IS this a novelist or a cult?

If Austen is a writer, she is, according to one visitor at Chawton House today, the “greatest writer in history.” That’s quite a claim! Frankenstein is my favorite novel – it’s the Swiss Army knife of novels, really: you can do anything with it! – but I wouldn’t go so far as to say Mary Shelley was the greatest writer in the language. Have you read Valperga? Bloody hell! If Austen is a cult, it’s a pretty innocuous one: the followers prefer Earl Grey and cakes over Kool-Aid.

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Yesterday was the annual general meeting, or AGM, for the Jane Austen Society of the UK, and my participation was the one requirement of the research grant that I received. The other was that I don’t use too much American academic jargon around the library: please leave your “Anthropocene” and your “queer performativity” in the coat check, thank you very much.

All in all, I didn’t have to do much as the first “bloke” to serve as the International Visiting Researcher here at Chawton House. Finally, my male privilege is paying off. They incorrectly announced that joining them from overseas was Dr. Colin Carman from Colorado University – it’s actually Colorado Mesa University – but I rolled with it. Apparently, Pakistan has just opened a branch of the Jane Austen Society. Elizabeth Bennet in a burqa. Gotta’ start somewhere!

I packed one J. Crew necktie and navy-and-white seersucker pants for the occasion, so I was doubling as a Southern mayor. I was even able to slip away during the lunch break in order to read The Guardian and eat my egg sandwich in the wilderness. “In these great places,” Mary Crawford declares in Mansfield Park, “the gardeners are the only people who can go where they like.” The same is true of college professors. The association’s president Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles presided. He was Britain’s ambassador to Afghanistan. If you can survive that colonial sand trap, surely you can figure out the alternative ending to Persuasion. Below is a picture of me and the “brill” Clio, a graduate student at Southampton University, which we took after I traveled by a vintage coach from Alton. Dating from the 1960s, the coach could have easily doubled as a greenhouse once the sun came out and it was good we had the wind at our back to reach our destination.

(The other picture is of me playing the lap-dancing stan to Charles Dickens in Portsmouth. Chuck looks grumpy, eh? He preferred the company of underage girls; oh wait, that was Lewis Carroll.)

Collage_Fotor

The idea that Austen was somehow divorced from reality, and the political events of her time – oh you know, just those minor skirmishes known as the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and the American war of 1812 – is a myth that stubbornly persists. The fact is that she explored how major historical events affected English people in private. Their reactions to public events always reveal their innermost character. Those who think that Austen toiled away in rural isolation don’t know that her cousin Eliza married a Frenchmen, the Comte de Feuillide, who was later guillotined (outlined in 1794). I hate when that happens. The coquettish life of his widow, Eliza, has been thoroughly researched by Deirdre La Faye (who was missed at this year’s AGM). La Faye made a major and meticulous deposit in Austen studies.

Speaking of the French, the lecture at the AGM was on Austen’s connections to French culture – the “French connection” – and it was an important reminder that Brexit and the premiership of Boris Johnson (or “BoJo” as the tabloids call him) are existential threats to England and globalism more broadly. Austen never crossed the Channel but she did enjoy her many trips (to see her brother) to London, which she described in her letters as the “Regions of Wit, Elegance, fashion, Elephants & Kangaroons” (sic). Did you know that the so-called greatest novelist in the English language had horrendous spelling? There was no auto-correct, of course, and read Love and Friendship to see how she consistently confuses her Is and Es, so “Freindship” over and over again. I before E except after C, June Austin! Here the townie Mary Shelley, whose famous philosopher father, tutored her in their London home, had the country girl beat. Her Monster: “Friend, goooood!”

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At the AGM, the average age of the attendee was 75 and bless their hearts: these devotees train 51 miles SW from London to Alton, bus to Chawton (roughly a mile away), and listen to a guest lecturer carefully selected for his/her lack of jargon. The British approach to literary studies is very different than America’s – they find our research a bit “wacky” and daft – and an Oxbridge professor can get away with an entire essay on the use of dipthongs and assonance in Pride and Prejudice whereas we Americans only take notice when you use “post-structuralist,” “Foucault,” and “Marxian hermeneutics” in a single sentence.

It was in the country village of Chawton that Austen transformed herself into a professional writer. She heavily revised the drafts she had on hand of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility (composed in her birthplace of Steventon), and, over the last eight years of her life, she completed a trio of new works: Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. By then time, Austen was middle-aged (by Regency-era standards) and therefore past the usual age at which an English woman married. “Being now in her twenty-first year, Maria Bertram was beginning to think matrimony a duty” (Mansfield Park 67).

P&P

Shrewdly, she realized that writing for money could be her ticket to ride. In 1814, she wrote her beloved niece, Fanny Knight, to report that there may or may not be a second edition of Mansfield Park, adding: “People are more ready to borrow & praise, than to buy – which I cannot wonder at; – but tho’ I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward calls Pewter too.” Without her novels, Austen would have died penniless.

While we are on the topic of my family, my paternal grandparents were Revolutionary War reenactors. My grandfather would get all dressed up in his three-cornered hat, hunting shirt and matching breeches; my grandmother donned the bonnet and looked like a regular Abigail Adams. I suppose it’s these folks that passed down the DNA for loving history. Austen is synonymous with the Regency period and its frilly fashion. Skip “The Jane Austen Book Club” and watch instead the benignly funny Austenland for a light-hearted romance in which an American girl (Keri Russell) travels to England to immerse herself in her hero’s native countryside and find her very own Mr. Darcy. Along the way, we’re told, she’s excited to meet such Regency-era women as Mrs. Pepper Pot and Mrs. Wigglewam.

Wham, bam, thank you, Ma’am! 

PS: How precious is this quirky English fellow who insists on wearing Regency-period clothing to work?

 

It Takes A Village…or Two…or Ten

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Posted by colincarman in Jane Austen

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british history, british romanticism, charles dickens, dickens, hampshire, horatio nelson, Jane Austen, lord nelson, napoleonic wars, naval history, portsmouth, royal navy, thomas le froy

“With ships and sailors she felt herself at home.” – James Edward Austen-Leigh (JA’s nephew and the family biographer, 1870)

How much is that Austen in the window? The one with the waggly (six) tales? This is Austen (some of Alton’s bread-and-butter) painted rather inexplicably inside a door frame. Kiss it and you’ll be lead off in handcuffs.

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This childhood image of the author is unauthenticated and like so much of her short life blurry at best. As a result, there are the purist Austenites who quote her letters because that’s the “truth” whereas there are the fiction-lovers, like me, who claim that art outlives all things and matters most. But we are all projecting ourselves onto the blank slate that was Austen, the woman, daughter, sister, and friend…but above all else, a true artist.

All that we know for certain is that, and this may sound slightly daft, I truly feel her presence here in the countryside. Her fiction is a gateway into nineteenth-century rural life. A volunteer at Chawton House explained that the ha-ha (funny term, eh?) is a landscaping technique that keeps the livestock out but doesn’t disrupt the vista from the house. In essence, you create a short, gated drop that animals can’t cross and close to, on the grounds of Chawton, what’s termed the wilderness (a wooded spot deliberately kept uncultivated and wild.) “I made it through the wilderness, somehow I made it through…” (know the lyric? I think you do.)

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After lunch, I walked in the wilderness to the south of Chawton House and was suddenly overcome by something quite inexplicable. It was the genius loci, the extraordinary gift that Austen gave us through her fiction, which, when properly read, can be a kind of secular Bible of rights and wrongs, an outcrop of the rural countryside of Hampshire that grew her creative excellence. What a gift for dialogue, plot, pacing, and overall brilliance! “Brill,” or so says a friend at Chawton, as short for the British go-to: “Brilliant!”

“She’s smiling on you,” said the secretary for the Jane Austen Society on Saturday when she attributed the cool, pleasant weather so far to something far more supernatural. Fanny Price, the heroine of Austen’s Mansfield Park, was “almost over-powered with gratitude” – ah yes, being grateful can be as overpowering as feeling loved. My punchiness could be the finally-fading jet-lag; I get a bit weepy when I’m overtired. Then again, literature-lovers tend to be a squishy sort of people.

I’m on foot here in Austenland – the Disneyland for Brit Lit twits – for one major reason:

My driving is rubbish (see, the English colloquialisms are sinking in) and I know how to turn a page better than I do cross the street, especially when everything is backwards. The most valuable lesson I learned back in 1999, when I spent my junior year of college, at Oxford didn’t take place amongst the derisive dons but in the car of my host parents in Herefordshire. They were your classic Britons, what with their figurines of Princess Diana and Florence Nightingale in her china hutch and the pinkish husband in pleated plants who wanted to talk football with me until he realized my knowledge is limited to the arts, oh and DIY anesthesiology (an innocent but illegal hobby of mine). On our drive into town, I felt instantly uneasy being on the “wrong” side of the road and said so, but my hostess replied: “It’s not wrong, darling. It’s just different.” Man, is there a greater lesson in life than those seven words? Just because you don’t agree with or understand something strange to you does not mean it’s bad or wrong; it’s just different. All morality departs from that simple starting-point. Here’s Austen, my life-coach as of late: “My dear child, there must be a little imagination here…you see but half” (Mansfield Park). Translation? We humans, innately selfish and stupid, rarely grasp the big picture: too stuck in ourselves. But you’re reading a stranger’s words and reading is always an adventure into the mind of the other, so you’re already on your way!

Now that I think of it: everything I learned at Oxford was really self-taught. You write long, well-researched essays that you read aloud, in a tutorial, to a tutor who is half-listening and thinking of his/her own work. Is that teaching, really? Man dreams alone and he learns alone. Yes, I’ve had some superb teachers but, as the old saying goes, only when the pupil is ready does his teacher appear.

The Jane Austen House Museum asked me to help in the garden (see below). I was stung, swatted at by a cat, and severely under-caffeinated but all in a day’s work. The cat’s name is Marmite. He local and a sign warns visitors that he can bite. Why, then, on earth does Marmite hang around the place where over 100+ tourists visit a day?

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This is why I was oh so grateful to take not one but two field trips over the weekend. My first was guided by the insanely knowledgeable secretary of the JAS. I learned that I am the first male recipient of this grant. Breaking the Austen ceiling here in Hampshire, baby: getting’ Janey with it! See below for our sundial of sites: Farringdon (a village close to Chawton) and the redbrick home, privately owned today, of the Lefroy family. Born in Limerick, Ireland, Tom Lefroy briefly courted Jane – she would have walked in and out of that front door, and you don’t need the film “Becoming Jane” (2007) to Hollywoodize the matter – but neither were wealthy and it kind of, well, fizzled. Remember that people didn’t marry because they swiped right and found his/her soul mate but because the match was somehow advantageous for one, or both, party and for his/her family.  It was 1796 and the couple, one year apart in age, were in newly twenty-somethings. There was no Thank You, Next.

Below are retirement homes available only here in Alton, so if you’re going a bit gaga, the time to buy is now! Apparently, the Jane Austen House Museum had to prevent people from spreading their ashes on the grounds without permission. I don’t take sugar and milk and my tea, and I certainly don’t take human cremains. Ha-choo! Looking for a retirement home in Alton? Only six units left, so act fast. When Winston Churchill had the flu, his daughter Sarah read Pride and Prejudice to him, which he quite enjoyed: “What calm people!” he remarked. That could be you at Austen Place someday.

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It’s too bad Lefroy didn’t write the account down and detail the memory. Instead, he told a relative before he died that he had a boyhood crush on the Jane Austen. By the time of Lefroy’s death in 1869, more than fifty years after her death at 41, she had gained posthumous recognition and he had to say something about his puppy-love. (When I wrap up this one-moth research residence, I’ll report on her mysterious death and fatal illness.) We wouldn’t even be saying Lefroy’s name, or watching a film like Becoming Jane, had he not crossed paths with the immemorial ironist. Her only second proposal, as is well known, was accepted but, after she slept on it, rejected the day after. Thank you, Next Novel.

The second guide took to me to Portsmouth, a coastal city entirely defined by defenses. Fortress Portsmouth, really. Both of Austen’s youngest brothers, Francis and Charles, were in the navy. I heard twenty-five ways of saying the same thing: Portsmouth had to defend itself from a French invasion and, thus, forts built up north (if and when a powerful little potentate named Napoleon entered England through its east and west coasts) and a thousand ways that the English wished to slow or full-stop invaders through its ports north of the Isle of Wight. I toured the battleship of Lord Horatio Nelson (1758-1805), the HSM Victory, and saw the very spot where the sea captain fell after taking a shot across the bow from the French. Dying, he asked Cpt. Hardy to kiss him, a tale that made the already awkward English even more uncomfortable, so they made up the idea that Nelson said “Kismet” (Turkish for “fate”). At this death, Lord Nelson was blind in one eye and missing an arm from battle. He gave his body and soul to his native England. So, give the man a kiss, would you?!? Sometimes the truth is queerer than fiction.

Nelson’s body was preserved in a barrel of brandy and returned to London for a ceremonial funeral. That’s how I travel to and fro work. Learned lots of fun naval facts in Portsmouth: the “powder monkeys” were the English boys who supplied the cannon powder; “one square meal” comes from the wooden square plate that every seaman and midshipman had for their meal (in addition to a gallon of beer — safer than water at sea); “cat out-of-the-bag” comes from the flogging whip used on Navy men who broke the rules. Tight ship, indeed.

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Above is the birth and death place of a still underrated and relatively unknown novelist named Charles Dickens (1812-1870). Note (up top) the family name in the red  as his father John (a pay officer on the Portsmouth dockyard) was absolute shit with money and landed the whole fam in debtor’s prison. Charles, meanwhile, went from rags to riches and is now synonymous with the industry that is Christmastime.

Dickens died of stroke at his home Gad’s Hill in Kent and the chaise is so stiff that stroke is the only other option, after a terrible neck-ache. I was surprised to learn that tabacco (prior to Dickens’ stroke) was sniffed rather smoked: put on the back of the hand and snorted like a line of cocaine. Hardcore! But what is literature, after all, but yet another powerful intoxicant and distraction from the dreary routine that is life? (Don’t answer that; it’s rhetorical, so just nod your head.) And on that depressing note, I bid you adieu! Now kiss me, Hardy, or is it hardily? Awww Heck, what’s my password for Netflix?

Review: “The Woman In Black”

05 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

ciaran hinds, daniel radcliffe, dickens, dracula, harry potter, haunted house, horror, janet mcteer, susan hill, the woman in black

“Scary Potter”
Grade: B- (RENT IT)

THE VICTORIANS MAY not have invented the tale of the haunted house but they sure as hell perfected it.  There’s the “dreadful house” in Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” – hand-chosen by none other than Mr. Charles Dickens for his journal Household Words in 1852 – outside which an “evil child” lurks in the snow.  Then there’s Dracula’s love-pad which Stoker describes as a “vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky.”

True to vampiric roots, Hollywood has sucked the life out of most, if not all, of the horror tropes bequeathed to us by the Victorians and “The Woman in Black,” director James Watkins’ new film, from a Susan Hill novel from 1983, is no exception.  Set in the early 1900s, it’s as chockfull of clichés – dead kids, rocking chairs, handprints on window panes, doors that grind and groan as they open – as it is candles, antique dolls, and things that go bump in the night.  One more close-up of a cymbal-banging monkey toy and I would have gone bananas.  Nevertheless, the titular woman is one scary chick and proof that a motionless silhouette standing in head-to-toe black amongst headstones still has the power to unnerve us.

The house in question, including its family cemetery, is for sale and that’s where lawyer Arthur Kipps (played by Daniel Radcliffe) comes in:  leaving his son behind, the young widower travels by train to a north England village called Crythin Gifford to prepare the house for purchase.  If the villagers look as if they’ve seen a ghost, that’s because they have. Ignoring their warnings, Arthur traverses the marshlands surrounding the estate and begins poking around.  The only local who doesn’t pull down the shade as Kipps approaches is Mr. Daily (played by the great Ciaran Hinds with his doleful eyes and downturned mouth).  Mrs. Daily (Janet McTeer) is grieving the death of their son Nicholas and carving the image of a hanged woman in her dining room table with a butter knife.  If this doesn’t get those thick eyebrows on Radcliffe raised, the supernatural somersaults he sees once inside the house certainly do.   Yet his friend Mr. Daily remains a skeptic.  “It’s just an old place,” he tells Arthur, “cut off from the world.”

Not so, Arthur learns the hard way, and the best portion of “The Woman in Black” is its last act when all the apparitions come out to play; despite its 95-minute running time, it still feels long, as marshy and slow-going as those wagon wheels stuck in the wetlands outside.  Very little here feels freshly inspired though it manages to get under your skin without a heavy dose of blood and guts.

Consider it Radcliffe’s post-Potter depression.

Review: “Contagion”

13 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

blog, blogosphere, camus, CDC, cliff martinez, contagion, dickens, elliott gould, erin brovovich, fall movies, final destination, griffin kane, gwyneth paltrow, jude law, kate winslet, laurence fishburne, marion cotillard, mary shelley, matt damon, medicine, metaphor, oceans 11, steven soderbergh, the last man, the plague, thriller, WHO, WW II

“Cover Your Cough”

Film Review: “Contagion” (2011)

Grade: B (RENT IT)

“BLOGGING ISN’T WRITING. It’s graffiti with punctuation.”  This from Dr. Ian Sussman (played by Elliott Gould), an epidemiologist scrambling to find a vaccine for the pernicious pandemic known as MEV-1 in the new thriller, “Contagion.”

The blogosphere will certainly admire the fact that the object of Sussman’s invective – a San Francisco blogger named Alan (Jude Law) – is one of the lucky few completely immune to the plague.  Then again, Alan is a sleaze who capitalizes on the crisis by exploiting his readers’ panic  (Too bad I’d need a global epidemic to gain that kind of readership!)  In a Dickensian stroke, Alan’s last name is Krumwiede (pronounced “Crumb-Weedy”) and he’s as slimy as the infection himself.

Before Krumwiede comes on the scene, however, society as we know it quickly unravels after business exec Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns from Hong Kong to her home in Minneapolis.  Husband Mitch (Matt Damon) is devastated when she and son Clark (Griffin Kane) quickly succumb to an illness as inexplicable as it is fatal.  It’s a cool and crestfallen performance from Damon, shot in the oceanic blues favored by director Steven Soderbergh (“Erin Brockovich,” “Oceans 11”).  Watch as his reaction hardens from disbelief to fury as an emergency room doc tells him both his wife and six-year-old son are dead.  The pathogen in “Contagion” doesn’t just infect; it ravages.  With its rapid incubation phase, and 2.5 million dead in just 26 days, MEV-1 makes SARS look like the sniffles.

To the rescue is a team of experts including Kate Winslet (as Dr. Erin Mears of the CDC), Laurence Fishburne (as Ellis Cheever), and the marvelous Marion Cotillard (as Leonora Orantes of the World Health Organization).  One of the numerous subplots involves Leonora’s abduction at the hands of an Asian family man who holds her hostage until his villagers are given the cure.  After a no-nonsense Winslet is shown an empty stadium for treating the sick, she replies: “Good.  Now give me three more just like it.”

Where “Contagion” succeeds in terms of pacing – composer Cliff Martinez provides an electronic score of blips and bleeps, which sounds like call-waiting on Mars – the film never transcends a purely base and biologic level.  The greatest explorations of contagion on page aren’t as modern as you might think.  Mary Shelley’s The Last Man may have been set in the future, but it was published back in 1826 while La Peste (or The Plague) of Albert Camus followed the Second World War in 1947.  What those two novels share is the alertness to contagion as something more than simple transmission.  Yes, a germy handshake can be a weapon, but it’s also a tie that binds.

However slick and satisfying, “Contagion” is more interested in building (then swiftly dissembling) the puzzle-like structure of a medical mystery than it is in the plague as some kind of meaningful metaphor for interconnectivity and a world flattened by travel and globalization.  “Contagion” will make you afraid, but it won’t make you think, and stripped of the idea that illness is always a metaphor, it metastasizes into some soulless installment of “Final Destination” where you end up waiting on the next character to die.

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