How Can Historical Fiction Be Feminist?

Essays
July 21, 2017 | 9 4 min read

Hilary Mantel, twice awarded the Booker Prize for her detailed fictional explorations of the court of Henry VIII, recently remarked that “women writers…can’t resist retrospectively empowering” women of the past in historical fiction. She presents us with a false choice: “If we write about the victims of history, are we reinforcing their status by detailing it? Or shall we rework history so victims are the winners?”

Historical fiction poses unique challenges and opportunities. Writing a historical novel requires all the same things writing a contemporary novel does—intelligence, dedication, research, and a whiff of heedless optimism—as well as a fine-tuned commitment to not betraying the “historical” elements for those better fit by the label “fiction.”

Writing feminist historical fiction adds another layer of complexity. Any historical novel worth its salt has to address society’s expectations of women at the time it’s set. Some authors focus on ordinary women, some on extraordinary ones; both options offer countless possibilities for advancing or contradicting feminist viewpoints. But knowing one’s time period is essential, no matter what. A historical novel in which women play key roles doesn’t resonate unless the author can faithfully and honestly depict ordinary women, and ordinary men, of the time.

Reducing the possibilities of historical fiction to two options, as Mantel does, represents a failure of imagination. The good news is that the imaginations of many writers, women and men alike, are up to the task of telling stories set in the past that are both faithful and feminist.

covercovercoverDid Amy Stewart have to “retrospectively empower” Constance Kopp to make her a law enforcement pioneer, appointed the first female undersheriff of Bergen County, N.J., in 1915? Not a bit. Kopp’s cases were well-documented in the newspapers of the day, and Stewart has woven her stories into three novels so far: Girl Waits with Gun, Lady Cop Makes Trouble, and the upcoming Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions. Kopp was quoted by a reporter as saying “Some women prefer to stay at home and take care of the house. Let them. There are plenty who like that kind of work enough to do it. Others want something to do that will take them out among people and affairs. A woman should have the right to do any sort of work she wants to, provided she can do it.” Ahead of her time, yes, but still someone who made her way within it.

coverStewart was a non-fiction writer before she was a novelist, and sticks close to the known facts with her novels, but that’s far from the only approach. On the more fictional end of the spectrum is Kate Quinn’s new novel The Alice Network. Its historical kernel is a real-life World War I spy ring run by and consisting of women, named for its leader, whose code name was Alice Dubois. Quinn interlaces the war story with a second timeline, this one centered on a fictional, pregnant protagonist searching for a lost cousin. Quinn’s book offers an unusually entertaining way to examine how women, both ordinary and extraordinary, are called upon to act in the world during wartime.

covercovercoverNaturally, the historical novels it’s easiest to recognize as feminist are those written about women who explicitly fought for women’s rights and women’s issues, like Terrible Virtue, written by Ellen Feldman about reproductive rights pioneer Margaret Sanger. Similarly, novels that center on women adjacent to more famous men—Rodin’s Lover by Heather Webb (artist Camille Claudel) or The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict (physicist Mileva Maric)—argue without stating outright that in a fairer world, these lesser-known female subjects would be as famous and renowned as their better-known partners. Biographies can make these arguments too, but fiction puts us there in the moment, breathing and crying and cheering with these women. Paula McLain, whose biographical historical novels The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun are some of the best-known in the genre, was quoted in Vanity Fair as saying “We love to learn about history, but don’t we love to get close to it?”

coverReturning to Mantel for a moment, she takes issue with “women writers who want to write about women in the past,” implying that male writers are in some other category, possibly exempt from the “persistent difficulty” of wanting to write female characters of action and agency. But it’s hard to think of a book that takes its heroine’s part more wholeheartedly than Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night, which is by turns rip-roaring, tragic, giddy, dramatic, and delightful, but never loses its keen awareness that its extraordinary heroine, soprano Lilliet Berne, operates within the constraints of a man’s world. Her fate is changed at every turn by men’s decisions, men’s gifts, men’s egos, men’s wars. And her journey is all the more riveting because of it. Chee’s heroine was inspired by real-life opera singer Jenny Lind, known as “The Swedish Nightingale”; Lilliet Berne is fictional. But this is what the best historical novels do—blend fact and fiction in a way that sweeps us into the world of the past and informs our experience of the present.

The characters above could be considered extraordinary women of their time—historical novels can also focus on ordinary women without, as Mantel suggests, reducing them to “victims.” The very act of centering a novel on a woman’s story, of giving her the same respect and attention men’s stories have traditionally received, can be feminist. The women of the distant past may only appear in sepia-toned photographs today, but when they lived, they lived in full color. Historical fiction and feminism can work hand in hand, and novels may in fact be the best delivery mechanism for certain stories. The question then becomes not whether or how historical fiction can be feminist, but which feminist historical novel you’ll choose to read and recommend next.

Image Credit: Pixabay.

is a poet, short story writer, playwright, and novelist who earned her MFA in Creative Writing from American University. Her debut novel, The Magician's Lie, was a USA Today bestseller, an Indie Next pick, and a Target Book Club selection. It has been optioned for film by Jessica Chastain's Freckle Films. Her new novel, Girl in Disguise, also an Indie Next pick, was inspired by the real-life first woman detective in the U.S., Kate Warne, who was hired by Allan Pinkerton in 1856 Chicago to solve cases and fight crime. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called it "Loaded with suspense and action" and "a well-told, superb story."

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Essays

What I Read on My Summer Vacation

Essays
August 24, 2009 | 8 5 min read

At the end of July, I went to North Carolina for my family reunion.  Every other year, we rent houses on the beach in Ocean Isle, and for one week we swim in the ocean, drink, play boardgames,  and eat boiled peanuts.  It’s divine. As with all of my vacations, I take time to log the books I spot.

I’m happy to report that, for 2009, literacy is alive and well on the east coast!  I saw people reading!  The woman next to me on the eastbound flight chuckled at an Onion article on her Kindle, and then turned (clicked?) to Finn by John Clinch, and kept murmuring with admiration.  (I made a mental note to check this title out.)  A businessman across the aisle read a hardcover about smart management. I think another woman nearby was reading The Bible, though part of me wanted it to be a tattered first-edition of some Henry James novel.  Mass market mysteries abounded, as did self-help books like The Power of Now.  A mysterious man in the Charlotte airport perused a collection of T.S. Eliot poems.

My grandmother–whom we call Grammie Kids because she is a mother of six–was reading an issue of Reader’s Digest and an old mass market edition of Skipping Christmas by John Grisham.  She said Granddaddy wouldn’t let her pack anything else, and that he had only allowed her to bring light and thin books.  (Her revenge?  She “forgot” to pack his underwear.)

My eighteen-year-old sister flew through a few books while we were there, namely American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld and Frenemies by Megan Crane.  She reads about a book every two days over the summer, and when I ask for a review she always says, “Good.”  As is the case with nearly every family vacation, people passed around Philippa Gregory’s books  like they were crack; I haven’t tried them yet, namely because my mother describing the plot of The Other Boleyn Girl (“And then…!”) is about all I can handle.  My poor sixteen-year-old brother–who will probably be valedictorian–insisted on bringing his school assignments, and spent two weeks not-reading a brief history of FDR’s first 100 days. (I remember in Hawaii he read The Autobiography of Malcolm X; the spine fell apart after the first couple of days and so he started bringing individual chapters to the pool.)  In Ocean Isle, he spoke longingly of the Sookie Stackhouse series–those “True Blood” books–that he wanted to start.

Someone in my extended family was reading Finger Lickin’ Fifteen by Janet Evanovich (she’s from South River, New Jersey, where my dad’s from, although this isn’t his family we were visiting). Everyone was passing around a memoir about fishing; the title escapes me, but I do remember that the author grew up in Spotswood, New Jersey, just like my mom and her siblings.  At the end of the trip, my mom started The Condition by Jennifer Haigh. She bought it because, except for a single letter, the author’s name is identical to my aunt’s.  The marketing department couldn’t have predicted that, could they?  My mother had also recently finished The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff and kept referring to my Aunt Jennifer as her “sister wife.”

And me?  I read three books on the trip.  The first was Woodsburner by John Pipkin, recommended to me by my friend Steve.  This wise debut novel is inspired by a little-known event in Henry David Thoreau’s life: a fire he accidentally started in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts, a year before he built his cabin on Walden Pond.   Not only do we get a fictionalized Thoreau who, “hugs his knees tightly, watches the half-mile-wide fire, and considers the many individual acts that led to this moment,”  but we get a cast of other characters also affected by the conflagration. My favorite is Oddsmund, a Norwegian immigrant with a “dead infant tooth wedged alongside his adult incisors like a misplaced apostrophe.”  He’s so in love with his employer’s wife that his lust leads to a night-time liason with a pumpkin.  Predictably, this was the point in the book where I decided I loved it.  (On Goodreads, someone suggested that if the novel were called Pumpkinfucker, sales might improve.)

My next book was The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. The hype on this Swedish thriller is well deserved. After a boring opening chapter about finance scandals (really, it was awful), the story picked up, and, man oh man, it didn’t let me go.  The plot is terrifically constructed–I’m certain I learned something about the beauty of story–and I loved the cold weather, the aquavit, the endless cups of coffee.  I’m not sure I can wait for the sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, to come out in paperback. (Although, and I must say it:  I did wonder if the cliches in the book, like “pretty as postcard,” were exact translations.  I’ve heard Sweden is boring, but, really?  In the prose department, I wasn’t wowed.  But, and maybe for the first time in my life as a reader, I didn’t really care! )

There was also a real pleasure in reading a popular book.  Usually, I’m reading something no one has ever heard of, and I’m occasionally ignorant of huge bestsellers.  When Grammie Kids described to me the runaway hit The Shack by William P. Young (“And God is a black woman.  She looks like Maya Angelou!”), I had never heard of it; cut to a week later, I’m at the airport, and I count two copies in my gate alone.  Sometimes I feel like everyone’s eating this thing called scrambled eggs (What are those, I wonder.  They look good.), while I’m enjoying a delicious chantarelle and pecorino frittata. What a snob I am.

My last book was Bonsai by Alejando Zambra, from the Contemporary Art of the Novella Series published by Melville House.  This is a beautiful-looking gem-of-a-book, which I read–tired, sunburned on my kneecaps, and terrifyingly freckled–during my flight home.  Actually, it was so short, I read it as I enjoyed my $8.00 in-flight meal.  I was smitten by Bonsai, with its story-within-a-story-within-a-story, and confounded (in the best way) by its end.  I need to re-read it, if only for sentences like this one:  “Julio and Emilia’s peculiarities weren’t only sexual (they did have them), nor emotional (these abounded), but also, so to speak, literary.”  Ah, chantarelles!

For Book-Spying-Trip #2, I went to Laguna Beach.  I’m sorry to say that I spotted very few readers there.  (Oh, California, I thought, don’t embarrass me further.) Most of the adults were too busy swimming or chasing little kids around.  The teenage girls spent a lot of time spraying Sun-In into their roots as their male counterparts tried to make them laugh.  There was one gorgeous sixteen-year-old girl whom I was mentally casting in a French film.  She might have been wearing lipstick.  On the beach!  Almost all of the teenagers were tattooed (none with dragons); one girl, she couldn’t have been more than fifteen, had a tramp stamp. Really. Clearly, I wasn’t doing much reading myself.  The man next to us, however, was very studious with copies of Hemingway and Arthur Miller, and he wore a beanie like an old-timey Stevedore.  I made up all kinds of stories about him: his delicious loneliness, his journal of beautiful sentences by dead authors, his tiny sand-crusted apartment with the bad overhead lighting.   That was a good novel, this one I was writing in my head.  On sale, summer 2012.

Essays
| 8 5 min read
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Essays

On Epigraphs

Essays
March 11, 2010 | 20 6 min read

0.
PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.
(The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain)

1.
The best prologue I ever read was an epigraph. The book in question was from my early reading days, before I had come to understand that epigraphs were a common thing. The quote was a prelude to a ripping fantasy yarn by Raymond Feist and was from the pen of Shakespeare:

We were, fair queen,
Two lads that thought there was no more behind
But such a day to-morrow as to-day,
And to be boy eternal.

The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare

I would never hold that book up to any critical scrutiny today, but Feist’s talent for setting off an epic coming-of-age story with quotes about how great it was to be young—and to imagine anything was possible—had a kind of perfect intonation.

Having taken up the mantle “writer,” epigraphs have taken on a significance of another sort. Just what purpose epigraphs serve, where they come from, and how the source from which they were drawn affects the story in which they are embedded have all bubbled to the surface. Among the most pressing questions for me: should epigraphs be thought of as part of the text, a sort of pre-modern, post-modern device, like tossing a newspaper clipping into the body narrative? Or are they actually a direct invitation by the author, perhaps saying, “Look here, for from this inspiration came this tale?”

Put another way, are they part of the book or part of the author, or both, or neither?

People love to call epigraphs a bundle of things, an “apposite quote that sets the mood for a story and to give an idea of what’s coming” or “a quote to set the tone like a prelude in music” or as a “foreshadowing mechanism” or “like little appetizers of the great entrée of a story” meant to illuminate “important aspects of the story [and] get us headed in the right direction.”

Humbug, say I. Humbug.

2.
Epigraphs have a long history. As early as 1726, one can find in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels the cousin of the epigraph, a fictitious “note from the publisher” explaining that Gulliver is in fact a real person and these his true papers. Yes, Lolita got that from somewhere. But even Gulliver’s fictionalized note, that cousin to the epigraph, can be traced to Cervantes and Don Quixote (published in 1605) wherein the author assures us that:
My wish would be simply to present it to thee plain and unadorned, without any embellishment of preface or uncountable muster of customary sonnets, epigrams, and eulogies, such as are commonly put at the beginning of books.
Author’s Preface to Don Quixote (following, one should note, several sonnets, epigrams, and eulogies)

And so it is certain that even in the time predating the texts which we now call the canon, and some would assert Don Quixote the first “novel,” the epigraph and its ilk were widely entrenched into the formula for literature.

The point is, of course, that epigraphs have been around for a long time.

3.
So to the question of how we are to read epigraphs, one must first decide whether there are ‘bad’ epigraphs and ‘good’ epigraphs, and if so, how these categories might arise.

I have already described something which many would characterize as an example of a good kind of epigraph, that quote which seems to connect in a fundamental way with the text. Like, perhaps, “Vengeance is mine, I shall repay.” Yet, of course, epigraphs cannot be too explicit, too clear or too thematic or it ruins the whole endeavor. If the author gets up on a soapbox and declares “this is an important novel” well then the ship’s sailed. That’s why William Styron starts Sophie’s Choice with this quote from André Malraux: “…I seek that essential region of the soul where absolute evil confronts brotherhood.”

Clearly these are not the only types of epigraphs that succeed. Nabokov hit a home run with his epigraph for The Gift with this quote from a Russian school-book: “An oak is a tree. A rose is a flower. A deer is an animal. A sparrow is a bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable.” Which reveals that sometimes it is enough to be clever. Ander Monson’s Neck Deep and other Predicaments has an epigraph from the Chicago Manual of Style: “A dedication intended to be humorous will very likely lose its humor with time and so is inappropriate for a serious book destined to take a permanent place in the literature.” Again, very clever. So clever epigraphs work.

However, two kinds of epigraphs do not work. The first is any serious literary epigraph to a Harry Potter book, like for instance, this one from The Deathly Hallows

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.
William Penn, More Fruits of Solitude

Perhaps one will call me hypocritical for allowing a quote from Shakespeare to grace a munchy fantasy novel and then to turn around and say that the epigraph to a Harry Potter book falls flat. I would simply note that the fantasy novel in question actually took itself seriously whereas Harry Potter tried to have it both ways—and the William Penn quote is about life and death, which would have been inappropriate to any book that wasn’t. Rowling should have selected something on the theme of love and friendship to be true to the work she published.

Another sort of epigraphical failure is in Blood Meridian. McCarthy uses one of those triple-epigraphs which I’ll address in a moment, and the third epigraph, after two highfalutin contemplations on darkness and death he adds this:

Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.

THE YUMA DAILY SUN

McCarthy has an important point here, which is that people have been scalping each other since forever. Unfortunately, it would have come out more candidly through the mouth of one of his characters. The big problem is that in a semi-biblical masterwork, the only part of the entire overarching text that ever makes any reference to normal-sounding speech is this tiny bit of a 3-part epigraph.

So this sets out an objective standard. Epigraphs must count as part of the text because they affect the way the text is read, and therefore are tied more to the text than to the author. They belong to the text, regardless of the way the author feels. Also, as these epigraphs make clear, they are clearly not sources of inspiration for the story. Quite often they are tacked on.

4.
So epigraphs abide by certain principles, and they do not always work. Quite often they come across like throat clearing, sort of a “here it goes” before the author gets into the work. Especially when an author has more than one epigraph, which seems to have become only more common. So when searching for an epigraph, the most important part of the endeavor should be how the quote integrates with the novel as a whole. Does it fit the tone, and does it take on a deeper meaning, or lend a deeper meaning, because it’s there?

(As a quick aside, I would like to say that overt references to Dover Beach should be restricted to epigraphs. In a striking number of novels, the poem is actually a plot point giving rise to a significant epiphany. I’m looking at you Fahrenheit 451 and most especially Saturday.)

But the question remains: How does one determine precisely the tone an epigraph should take? Herman Melville in Moby-Dick has probably one of the longest and most interesting (and most tonally consistent) epigraphs ever. He spends several pages just talking about Whales. But again, isn’t it just—too much? Would it not have been a better epigraph if he had simply included only this one from among all his myriad quotations:

October 13.  “There she blows,” was sung out from the mast-head.
“Where away?” demanded the captain.
“Three points off the lee bow, sir.”
“Raise up your wheel.  Steady!”  “Steady, sir.”
“Mast-head ahoy!  Do you see that whale now?”
“Ay ay, sir!  A shoal of Sperm Whales!  There she blows!  There she breaches!”
“Sing out! sing out every time!”
“Ay Ay, sir!  There she blows! there–there–THAR she blows–bowes–bo-o-os!”
“How far off?”
“Two miles and a half.”
“Thunder and lightning! so near!  Call all hands.”
–J. ROSS BROWNE’S ETCHINGS OF A WHALING CRUIZE.  1846.

A similar question of “too much” arises in Sophie’s Choice and other texts in which the author seeks to use an epigraph in another language. Given the fact that most readers will not be speakers and therefore cannot see the intricacies in tone and the shades of meaning in that other language’s words, one wonders whether the author is writing the epigraph to himself or to the reader. If we are to think of epigraphs as part of the main text, then this foreign-language snippet needs to stand on its own, it can’t just be authorial vanity, right? Although, since his editor let him plant it there in the original German or French, one wonders if this means that epigraphs are thought to be more like dedications in the publishing world than the main text.

5.
Finally, one wonders why epigraphs are always at the beginning of the book. Some stories end and make you want to hold the book to your chest and absorb it directly into your very soul. How moving it would be to me to finish a book and turn the page, sad that it’s all over and read an epigraph that reflects on all that’s come before.

Essays
| 20 6 min read
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9 comments:

  1. Good points made.There are plenty of women from the past who did all sorts of things on which to base stories.Many have been forgotten and need to be rediscovered and written about.Feminist treasure trove of subject matter!

  2. Philipa Gregory has written many wonderful epics of British history from the woman’s POV. I highly recommend them.

  3. It is true in history some women have been autonomous and brave, but when one considers that women in the West have only had the vote for a mere century, Mantel’s comment is put in context. I think a lot of the essay’s examples to refute Mantel’s statements are (to me) “cosy” fiction. When you look at the big picture of women in history, it would be difficult to find any political period where women had voices. I think Mantel’s statement is correct.

  5. I think there’s a fairly substantive problem here. It’s not only feminism. The problem is with almost all historical fiction – people in the past did not think like we do. The way they did think is in many ways fundamentally opposed to us at basic levels. When you’re trying to use a historical character to try to make them dance to our tunes, it so often rings false – not only in the historic sense, but also fictional sense.

    What we tend to do is assume that people in the past were just stupid, for lack of better words. But – not only is that false – it’s often true that many historic persons or eras had as good or even better understandings of themselves than we do of ourselves. Examples: how many people write stuff set in the late Middle Ages (basically portraying them as effectively barbarians) when they themselves are not smart enough to understand the extremely sophisticated philosophy, writing, symbolism and religion of the time? How many current writers are simply too dumb to understand even basic textbooks of that time (people forget that things like Aquinas’ Summa or Peter Lombard’s Sentences were introductory textbooks for beginners, not advanced texts at all.)

  6. Kind of like “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there”. L.P. Hartley, author of the outstanding novel “The Go Between”.

  7. I listened to Hilary Mantel’s comments, quoted in this piece, as part of her Reith Lecture talks. I was rooting for Hilary, whom I admire, while also feeling she was in the awkward position of defending her trade in a way that writers of contemporary fiction generally aren’t required to do. In Britain, there is a divide between literary fiction (respectable) and populist fiction (not respectable). Historical fiction, even that of a literary tone, slides by default into the ‘not-respectable’ category. Ms Mantel vigorously defended her right to write historical fiction without being questioned, or downgraded. She gave brisk shrift to a professional historian (respectable) who tried to imply that her historical perspective was inevitably second-rate for being fictional. If I understood her response, she believes that her work delivers reality and truth to readers, by another means.

    Can historical novelists be feminist? I am one, and when I’m asked if I’m a feminist reply ‘Of course I am. All women who think are feminists.’ (I developed this response to checkmate the men who liked to say ‘My wife isn’t a feminist, she doesn’t feel the need to be.’) But I digress. My personal brief when writing my commercial historical novels (not respectable, sadly) is that the era in which they are set dictates the moral atmosphere. Victorian females did not generally kick people’s backsides and demand careers. Yet many of them were pioneers, travellers and business women. Their struggle to be so IS the story. My own female forebears raised families through war and grinding poverty. It’s unlikely they’d have thought of themselves as feminists as the concept was a rarefied one at the time. I think of them as sisters, and their lives worthy of scrutiny. We living in the second millenium can learn much from them and if our learning is through fiction, then more power to the genre. In a hundred years time, someone might look at my life, or yours, and use it as the inspiration of a novel.

  8. Natalie Meg Evans – excellent comment. When I think of women who kicked ass, I think of Gertrude Bell, Mary Kingsley and Florence Nightingale, for example, and other explorers who were not afraid to satisfy and induldge their curiosity with the intent to help society and not to colonize it. These are women I aspire to emulate, if only I were brave enough. Regarding Mantel, 8 months on Gaza Street and A Place of Greater Safety, show how women can write historical fiction with empathy, yet without sentimentality. Rose Tremain does a great job with historical fiction as well. Highly literary and without “pandering” to women readers. Pandering is in quotations because I despise that word, used by some male writers regarding fiction that interests women, in the most obnoxious and condescending way.

  9. Historical fiction can certainly be feminist and there are many ways to make it so. However, one of the most effective ways is to allow your female lead to tell the story. I like first person narratives because they allow you into an internal world and to make the voice female gives the narrative a distinctly female point of view.
    With historical fiction the external details may be historically accurate, however what fiction enables you to do is to present the constants in new ways and challenge accepted interpretations – particularly useful in giving women of history back their voices so that women of today and tomorrow won’t risk losing them in the first place.

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Essays

The Right Book at the Right Time

Essays
January 3, 2017 | 7 8 min read

For well over a year people have been trying to make me read A Little Life. I will not. I believe them when they say that it’s good, and that they loved it, and what an epically harrowing experience the whole thing is. Still. Can’t do it. Don’t want to. Don’t even know why I don’t want to. Just don’t. This would not be any kind of an issue, were it not for the fact that people keep trying to set me up with it. They want me to read it so badly! They are adamant in their belief that it is the book for me. My resolve is only hardening. I have about me the look of a person who will never read A Little Life. The look of a person at peace with herself.

I know what will happen though. At some unspecified point in the future, I will walk past A Little Life on my bookshelf and I will stop, because it will suddenly be the right time. I have come to recognize the feeling. It will be a terrible and perfect marriage of my weird mood and this undoubtedly weird book. I’ll start to read and I will be immediately gripped, instantly crazy about it. I will try force people to read it and when they say they don’t want to, I will say that they are wrong. It always happens like this, with the right book at the right time.

The only thing I can compare it to is falling abruptly in love with someone you have been distantly aware of for years. You have seen the point of them in general, but nothing more. They were just there, going about their lives, greeting you politely at parties. They seemed nice, in a remote sort of way. Then something happens, there is an audible click, and there they suddenly are, in front of you, ready to be adored in all their weirdness. Their personality seems to have been engineered in a lab to please you. It’s awful, because you think at once about what a close thing it was, and how hideously perilous love is in general. They had been under your nose this whole while. What if you had missed them? What were you thinking, overlooking them? It’s no good berating yourself about time wasted, though. It’s not that you had overlooked this person, it’s that you weren’t ready for them. You needed a few bitter experiences under your belt first — one or two awful break-ups, a few incidents where you see your own flaws with searing clarity, some moments of pure, high boredom. It’s only now that you are prepared, that you can see them properly.

It happened to me first like this with Middlemarch. If you spend any length of time in an English department, you will be obliged to have an opinion on Middlemarch, whether or not you have read it. My opinion, for many years, was that I hated the very idea of it. Everything I read about it got right on my nerves, beginning with Dorothea. I couldn’t understand why people seemed to love her so much, so Spartan and always reading a boring book. I took her very personally. Why always Dorothea? I did not like the sound of Lydgate either, or think that I could mind very much about a vaguely thwarted country doctor. The historical backdrop did not strike me as very interesting (I still don’t really know or care what a rotten borough is), and it didn’t have any good wars. It also seemed too long, and by all accounts there weren’t a lot of parties. My whole soul shied away. People kept telling me to read it. My mother, especially, who knows me better than anyone. Read it, she kept saying, and you’ll understand.

I couldn’t and I couldn’t, for about six years, and then one day I could. Some things had happened. I had broken some people’s hearts, and I had had mine broken in return. I had gone through a period of severe underemployment, related directly to my inability to pull myself together. I had realized that existing in the world with other people meant understanding that we were not the same as each other, and that we were all just trying our deeply inadequate best. I had realized, further, that knowing this is not the same thing as being able to do anything about it. What I am saying is that I was finally ready to listen to what Middlemarch had to tell me. I just picked it up, like it was no big deal, like I hadn’t spent years and years resisting it, and I was done for. That first time reading it, I kept looking around like Jesus, will you please get a load of this? Does everyone know that Middlemarch exists and that you can go ahead and read it just whenever you please? I couldn’t believe how good it was, how much I felt that it was speaking directly to me.

This is of course a definitive feature of the novel — the narrator’s inclusive, confiding address to the reader. I felt that it had been written for me, that it was mine. Again, this is the same thing as falling in love very hard, with all the egotism behind the outlandish notion that a) the person was put on this earth for you, and b) they are objectively the best person to ever exist in the sorry history of the human race. Love! What would we do without it? I couldn’t talk about anything else for weeks. I found a way to bring it up in all kinds of situations, to tilt the angle of my conversation so that it flowed straight back to Middlemarch. It is amazing how many reasons one can find to bring up the pier glass bit, for instance, or to talk about what a nice man Caleb Garth is. He really is very nice, and we should all strive to be more like him. I developed my own understanding of the novel’s co-ordinates, my own greatest hits collection. I still, for example, don’t really care about Dorothea. She is not my scene, in the same way that Jane Eyre is not my scene. Too severe. I still also don’t care about Lydgate, although I can feel that changing. Better to say that I don’t care about Lydgate yet. Fred Vincy, though, my God. I cared about him a lot from day one. It is not an exaggeration to say that Fred Vincy changed my life.

Middlemarch’s narrator has been accused of being overly partial to Fred, the implication being that he is not all that wonderful or deserving of the narrator’s time and attention. This accusation is false and I resent it. He is selfish and frivolous, yes, and almost unmatchedly entitled, but he is also a person capable of being redeemed by love. He is good not because of anything intrinsically fine in his character, but because of who he chooses to care about most. I mean, he is okay, but the reason he is good is because he wants to be good enough for Mary Garth. We do not speak of him enough. Fred Vincy: good humoured, a tiny bit silly, a tiny bit too interested in fun. Fred Vincy: the man responsible for me finally getting a grip.

I was enduring, as I said, a period of underemployment that was only and entirely my fault. I was trying to be good but I just couldn’t. Is it enough to say that I was 25? Everyone around me was working, and getting on with things, taking their lunch breaks and being responsible for their little sisters, and I was just…not. Fred Vincy and I, messing everything up, with our self-absorption and our quiet belief that other people would sort things out for us. It was at about age 25 that I realized, to my horror and distress, that no one was going to come riding in and fix my life for me. The injustice of this only enervated me further. It was bad, and then I read Middlemarch.

Chapter 25, and the bit where Fred comes over to tell Mary Garth that he has landed her father in debt, a debt which he knows Caleb Garth will find nearly impossible to pay. Mary looks at him with first alarm, and then, worse, dismissal. He asks him to forgive her and she asks him what difference her forgiveness would make, given that it would not alleviate a single one of his fuck-ups. He says, infuriatingly, that he is “so miserable, Mary — if you knew how miserable I am, you would be sorry for me.” A great man for missing the point. He says, panicked, that he is “going now”, and that “I shall never speak to you about anything again.” I read all this with the particular kind of mounting alarm that comes with being recognized. Not even recognized: accused. I knew this particular movie so well, and had starred in it too many times.

And then, Mary says, “How can you bear to be so contemptible, when others are working and striving, and there are so many things to be done — how can you bear to be fit for nothing in the world that is useful?” That’s all she says, and that’s all it took. It was as if George Eliot had reached into my brain and jiggled it around a bit. It seems like a small thing, but it really wasn’t, because how could we bear it? We were better than that, surely? It was the thing I was finally ready to hear, after years of Vincy-ing around.

The change did not come overnight, not for Fred Vincy or for me. He goes away from that meeting with Mary still needing to spend many pages getting over himself. I needed a few more months before I was ready, too. But I swear to God it was the seed for us both. Fred Vincy was made better by Mary Garth; I was made better by Middlemarch. He spends most of the novel getting to a point where he is good enough for her, and good enough even to love her properly. I spent half my twenties getting to the point where I was grown up enough to receive the medicine Middlemarch was determined to administer.

I’ve had this with other books since. Blood Meridian was a good one. It sat on my shelf for years, giving me no good reason to read it. Friends had loved it, but it sounded ridiculous, mostly, and over the top, all that stuff about “he went forth stained and stinking like some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself.” Come on. It seemed rude, also, to entirely disregard humor as a mechanism. And then, I went through a period where I don’t remember smiling for about two months. Some bad stuff happened, some massively over-the-top stuff, and the funny or ironic side of things remained obscured. I felt extremely dramatic, as ancient as the hills, and do you know what is a good book for a mood like that? Why, Blood Meridian. I devoured it, reading long sections about scalping out loud. I have the last lines of the novel pinned above my desk, now, the bit about the judge dancing and saying that he will never die, and I look at them every day. He is a great favorite, the judge. That ending: so scary, so serious and devoid of irony, and so fine with that approach. It knocked me out then, and it knocks me out today. I needed a book that confirmed my sense that things were bad, and getting worse, and while this may sound counter-intuitive, it did make me feel better. I wish I was reading it right now. I think about Toadvine’s ear necklace all the time.

Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters got me for the opposite reasons. It is often dismissed as quaint, and it is, a bit. It is small, and focused on small things. Not grand in any sense except that it is in love with the world. I had read it once before, and liked it fine, and then I fell in love in that way which does not confine itself to the person but spills out onto everything and everyone. I chose a strange moment to feel this way, because the world at that time was presenting itself as an objectively unlovable place. Almost everyone I knew was focusing on the bigger picture, and was being made desperately unhappy by this. I was happy, though, because I was in love, and I badly needed a book which would tell me that it was fine to focus on small things, to see the whole universe in one car journey, one disastrous wedding, one drink. The world can only be kept at bay for so long, but inside the car, with Buddy Glass narrating, it felt briefly okay.

Some books you know you will love straight away, and other books you need to sit on for a while. You need to coexist with the book for some time, resenting it, maybe, assuring yourself that it is not for you. Rolling your eyes when it comes up in conversation etc. Saying oh PLEASE when it’s mentioned. Talking about it at dinner parties in a way that is actually a bit strange. Are you sure you’re not in love with the book? You are certainly talking about it a lot, for someone who says that they hate it and they wished no one had ever read it. Are you sure you don’t, at least, have a bit of a crush on the book? Hmm? You and the book, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Admit it. You secretly love the book and you know it.

Image: Wikipedia

Essays
| 7 8 min read
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Essays

On the Fall of the House of Orwell

Essays
May 2, 2013 | 17 5 min read

On June 25, 1903, in the tiny town of Motihari amid the torrid heat of the Indian plains, Ida Mabel Blair delivered her second child, a son. Her husband Richard was an Assistant Sub-Deputy Agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service of the British Raj. The opium trade between British India and China had been legalized since 1860 (although opium was still illegal in India) and the government had a whole department to attend to cultivating and exporting it. The Blairs named their newborn Eric. Eric Blair would go on to become one of the greatest writers of the century, an acknowledged master of prose who would be known in all corners of the globe, not by his given name but by his pen name: George Orwell.

Richard Blair’s position in the government was not high, and their house, an unadorned single-storey colonial bungalow, reflected this. Motihari those days was an outpost that was slap-bang-wallop in the wilderness. The local people struggled to eke a living making mats, rugs, cooking oil, and string bags. Social life for an English couple was virtually non-existent if they had to keep apart from the locals, as the British almost always did. The two-roomed brick house, with whitewashed walls and a tiled roof, housed Richard and Ida, their children Marjorie and Eric, and an ayah, or servant. In a photograph taken in the house, Eric is in his mother’s arms, a chubby baby dressed in a gown with a lace collar. He is near-bald with a lick of wavy hair brushed back from above the forehead, and is trying to timidly turn away from the camera. In another photo, he is held by an ayah. You could never tell this baby would turn into the tall and lanky George Orwell with his clump of stiff, black hair.

Officials in Bihar (the Indian state that is home to Motihari) now harbor designs to develop a park dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi that would entail demolishing this building. Bihar’s urban development minister took everybody by surprise by laying the foundation stone of the park on April 13.

As it is, Orwell’s birth home has languished in dilapidation for decades. Damaged by an earthquake in 1934, it deteriorated into a derelict building that stray animals sheltered in at night or during inclement weather. The homeless also used it; it became a place for people to gather to drink and gamble. A statue of Orwell on the premises was vandalized. After sustained efforts by campaigners, the government announced four years ago that it would restore the dwelling. But nothing was done. The house continues to be scorched by the sun, drenched by the rain, and battered by the wind. Part of the roof has caved in and a grapefruit tree has weakened the southern wall. For decades, one could pass by the house and never know that Orwell was born here until Debapriya Mukherjee, head of the local Orwell Commemorative Committee, got the Rotary Club to put up a board indicating that fact in Hindi and English. A small bust of Orwell with a plaque was also installed. Now thanks to fresh protests by Mukherjee and his dedicated group, District Magistrate Vinay Kumar directed the officials to place the plan for the Gandhi Park on hold. So Orwell’s birth house has been saved — at least for now.

Orwell lived in this house for the first year of his life and was then taken to Oxfordshire, England, by his mother, while his father continued in government service. This was not unusual; Kipling, Thackeray, and Lawrence Durrell were all born in India and, at various ages, went to England for their education, and Orwell’s sister Marjorie was already six. In 1905, when Eric was 18 months, he was misdiagnosed with bronchitis by a local Oxfordshire doctor. It was, in fact, tuberculosis, an ailment that relentlessly clung to him until it finally killed him at age 46. Whether he contracted it in Motihari or in England is not known, but the switch from sultry India to damp England certainly would not have helped.

After his family had departed for England, Orwell’s father was transferred to Burma, and the house in Motihari became a storage facility for opium, which had by now become the region’s main cash crop. The Blairs never returned to the house.

Orwell eventually opted to join the Indian Civil Service. After all, he had been born in India and his father had served the Raj. He had been brought up to believe that the British rule of India and other colonies was moral and right. He was posted to Burma; his time in that country not only opened his eyes to what imperialism really entailed, they also irrevocably shaped him as a writer. Eric Blair began turning into George Orwell.

The panjandrums who want to establish the Gandhi memorial park know a lot about Gandhi. But how much do they know of the man they have belittled by neglecting his birth home for decades, the home they now might do away with altogether? How do they view Orwell? Do they just see him as a white man who, as an infant, crawled on the floor of this house before leaving for some other place, where he then wrote a few books, and all of this over half a century ago?

Surely it must be a matter of pride that such a writer was born in one’s own little corner of this vast planet? Surely it would be more than worth it to take the little effort required to keep his birth home in a respectable shape, nay, convert it into a well-maintained heritage site? Indeed, there are many in Motihari who heartily endorse such sentiments. The local government obviously thinks differently and seems blind to the tourism potential here with the accompanying boost to the local economy.

“That seems to be a fixed rule in London: whenever you do by some chance have a decent vista, block it up with the ugliest statue you can find,” wrote Orwell. But those erecting the statue he was referring to probably did not consider it ugly nor did they realize (let alone have any qualms) that they were diminishing something of beauty that already existed at that site. Likewise, the local government in Motihari may have little idea of the extent of what the demolition of Orwell’s birth house entails, although the protestations have given it pause.

Gandhi had no connection with this house, so why is he in the picture? In the early 20th century, the British forced the farmers in this district to stop growing food crops and to instead grow indigo, which they bought at throwaway prices. When famine struck, the impoverished farmers had no food; instead of providing it, the British raised taxes. Gandhi visited the district in 1917 to start a mass protest movement. The government wants to commemorate this, but such a memorial could technically be located anywhere in the district. Motihari was chosen as it was the biggest town and there was open land adjoining Orwell’s house. Gandhi’s name has a strong emotive pull and having announced that there will be a Gandhi memorial park, the government cannot drop the plan without losing face. But it can certainly choose another location or at least let the boundary of the park stop short of Orwell’s house.

Today, India seeks an increasingly larger role on the world stage. Its economic clout propels it, but as any successful diplomat can tell you, to win friends and influence people it helps enormously if you are liked. Preserving an edifice on your territory that means something to literary enthusiasts in all nooks of the globe has its endearing side. But if Motihari’s authorities manage to slither around the current judicial restraining order and Orwell’s house falls, with every brick that is ground into the dust, many people the world over will like India a little less.

Essays
| 17 5 min read
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