Category: Classic Literature

Cranford (1853), Elizabeth Gaskell

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I spent the past week with the ladies of Cranford. It was a delightful time listening to stories of their girlhood friendships and family life and the bittersweet present where many of their dreams were not realized.

Still, I was captivated at this group of women trying to maintain their dignity through the aging process unwilling to lower the standards of status and respectability regardless of the capriciousness of financial matters.

Having known each other all of their lives, they are still competing for dominance, for favor; they argue and infuriate each other, but never hesitate to come together in support at deaths, at changes in finances and to defend each other against gossip and lies.

I would go back if they’d have me….

First serialized in Charles Dickens’ magazine, Household Words beginning in December of 1851, he encouraged Gaskell to write more episodes as the chapters were called. The completed book was published 18 months later.

Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot

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“But now look up the river,” said Mordecai, “See the sky, how it is slowly fading. I have always loved this bridge: I stood on it when I was a little boy. It s a meeting-place for the spiritual messengers. It is true—what the Masters said—that each order of things has its angel…Here I have listened to the messages of earth and sky; when I was stronger I used to stay and watch for the stars in the deep heavens. But this time just about sunset was always what I loved best. It has sunk into me and dwelt with me…it was my own decline:…it waited till at last it brought me my new life—my new self—who will live when this breath is all breathed out.” 

I found this to be an important book for two reasons. Firstly, there are an incredible amount of characters, both main and secondary. Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth both feature at the top, but so do their families and friends, including the Jewish Polish refugee Mirah, her ‘sisters,’ her brother and dear Uncle Hugo. Eliot manages to tell all of their stories without the reader getting confused, because their lives are intertwined and in the grand scheme of the novel, all feed off of and move due to one another.

The second reason I find this book important is because of Daniel and his personal journey that ends in the discovery that he is Jewish. Classic literature is rife with anti-Jewish sentiment and the stereotypes are disappointing. However, I am a very firm believer that context is everything (in this case, that the time period must be taken into consideration) and I can still, for example, enjoy Edith Wharton’s novels despite some nasty anti-semitic barbs. So the positive portrayal Eliot describes of Judaism and the London Jewish community Daniel encounters is surprisingly refreshing.

When the story opens we are introduced Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda who have a chance encounter at a gaming table in the fictional town of Leubronn, Germany. She is winning easily at roulette until the gaze of this stranger unnerves her causing loss after loss. The next day she receives a letter from her mother telling her the family is in financial ruin and she must come home immediately. Without money Gwendolen is forced to pawn a necklace to buy a ticket home. The next day the necklace is mysteriously returned. Daniel, who saw her go in to the pawn shop, paid it off. The story is next told in split flashbacks alternating between the two.

With Gwendolen’s stepfather dead and her mother and sisters without funds her aunt and brother in law finance a very modest home for them, but it doesn’t include their upkeep. Gwendolen is fiercely independent having vowed never to marry, but with no immediate prospects she feels obligated to find some means to support what is left of her family. She is horrified when offered a governess position and frantically makes other plans hoping she can develop her voice into a singing career; when she is heard by a professional musician she is dismayed to learn she has no talent. Just when she comes to terms her life as a governess, she meets Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt a charming, but rather harsh, calculating man.

There has always been an undercurrent of attraction between Daniel and Gwendolen, but when he became involved in discovering his biological family she was in no position to wait. But then Gwendolyn discovers Grandcourt had a mistress, Lydia Glasher, who he is still supporting along with their several children. Shocked, she runs away to her friends in Germany, though soon realizing her independence is fruitless. She returns and concedes to marry Grandcourt with the assurance he will take care of her mother and sisters and hoping she can manipulate him with her her beauty and wit, believing she is to him a prize he won and that will be enough.

It is devastating for Gwendolen when she realizes Grandcourt will forever treat her abominably, knowing she knows about his past and finding ways to throw it in her face. She tries to be brave in this marriage for her mother’s sake, but her life is miserable. However, the resolution for this misery is quite shocking.

Daniel has been raised by his Uncle Hugo, in a kind and comfortable household, but Hugo has always refused to discuss Daniel’s biological parents. Daniel is curious, but has never pushed Hugo to reveal. In what will become a turn of the utmost in his fate, Daniel befriends Mordecai, a Jewish mystic, who sees in Daniel a kindred spirit and spiritual brother who feels Daniel’s Jewishness before he knows it himself. Daniel attends synagogue services, spends Shabbat dinners with Mordecai’s friends, the Cohen family and feels very attracted to their Jewish life. As Daniel is drawn deeper into this community he is keen to study Jewish theology, history and even Kabbalah.

Myles Birket Foster’s Kew Bridge from Strand on the Green

Into the mix comes Mirah Lapidoth. a young Jewish woman, who arrives in London from Poland, after escaping her abusive father. He has always insisted her mother and brother were dead, but she has never believed him. She is penniless and in the futility of the search and her loneliness she attempts to take her life by jumping in to the Thames. She is rescued by Daniel who happens to be rowing past at that exact moment. He takes her to his friends Mrs. Meyrick and her three daughters, who treat her like a part of the family, where she begins to heal her body and spirit. Her Jewishness is acknowledged and though Mrs. Meyrick hopes she will become a Christian it is without deprecation, because Mirah herself could never let that go.

One of the key moments for Daniel is the revelation of his biological parents. Sir Hugo arranges a meeting with his mother and he learns the reasons she abandoned him; that the expectations her strict Jewish father placed on her were impossible for her to fulfill. A free spirit chomping at the bit of marriage, she chose freedom when her husband died, giving up her son to her close friend. The legacy of Daniel’s grandfather is also a discovery that changes his world.

Out of so much tragedy for so many characters, there are happy endings and promises of self-realization for everyone. And I have to say after staying with this bunch for over 700 pages that is fine with me!

Thoughts on the Judaism of this Book

As I said at the beginning, Eliot paints one of the most knowledgeable and sympathetic portraits of Jewish life I have ever read in a classic novel. Of course, I am only speaking to my experience and not “the Jewish question” in classic literature in general. For example, Mordecai’s knowledge of Jewish history and its mystic elements and the sympathetic and detailed life of the Cohen family and the Jewish community of which they are involved is so specific, it made me wonder at Eliot’s preparation for writing the novel.

And that made me remember a book I picked up long ago on George Henry Lewes, Eliot’s romantic partner. George Henry Lewes and George Eliot: A Review of Records, by Anna Theresa Kitchel (1933) is a narrative collection of Lewes diaries, letters and other documents that contains numerous references to George Eliot and her books.

Kitchel uses Lewes’s diary entries during the summer of 1873 on a trip to Germany to describe collecting “data” with Eliot when Daniel Deronda was still in the development stage.

July 28th : Strasbourg. Bought book on Jewish subjects for Polly’s novel.

July 31st: Bought books.

August 15th: Left for Mainz—found synagogue and hour of service.

August 16th: To synagogue—rarity of Jewish type.

It is fascinating for me to read the research methods of authors and in this case, instructive to see how ‘hands on’ Eliot regarded her experience for a factual representation of Judaism and the Jewish community.

I am a Jew….And it’s not only that I am a Jew, but I come of a strain that has ardently maintained the fellowship of our race—a line of Spanish Jews….My grandfather preserved manuscripts, family records stretching far back, in the hope that they would pass into the hands of his grandson. And now his hope is fulfilled, in spite of attempts to thwart it by hiding my parentage from me.

Do not think of me sorrowfully on your wedding-day. I have remembered your words—that I may live to be one of the best of women, who make others glad that they were born. I do not yet see how that can be, but you know better than I. If it ever comes true, it will be because you helped me. I only thought of myself, and I made you grieve….You must not grieve any more for me….it shall be better with me because I have known you. Gwendolen Grandcourt 

Agnes Grey (1847), Anne Bronte

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I was the only person in the house, who steadily professed good principles, habitually spoke the truth, and generally endeavoured to make inclination bow to duty; and this I say, not of course in commendation of myself, but to show the unfortunate state of the family to which my services were, for the present devoted….she [Rosalie] had never been perfectly taught the distinction between right from wrong; she had, like her brothers and sisters, been suffered from infancy, to tyrannize over nurses, governesses, and servants; she had not been taught to moderate her desires, to control her temper or bridle her will, or to sacrifice her own pleasure for the good of others…

On the one hand, Agnes Grey is a simple story about a daughter wanting to help her family when her father’s finances go wrong. Taking a position as a governess, Agnes reasons, will allow her to send money home. On the other hand, I found the book to be a complex account of the clashing of classes, in what constitutes love and marriage and the raising of children, and what makes a moral person.

When 18-year old Agnes leaves home to become a governess, she is leaving a loving, safe environment. She is naïve of the world outside her small village and is full of idealized fantasies that her new life will bring which will be full of good little children and her power to mold them.

But the reality is a shock to her system. The young Bloomfields run wild and have no use for her. To complicate matters, Mrs. Bloomfield has given her strict instructions that she must not discipline them in any way either through strong words or physical punishment. Agnes must do the best she can with the children without parental interest in their instruction or in her as someone they must respect. When the father does take an interest in his children it is through harsh punishment which makes Tom, the oldest boy, fear his father, which he takes this out on his sisters and to Agnes’s horror, small animals. She has no authority to chastise him and when she realizes his father condones this sadistic behavior it is a lost cause. In the classroom, Agnes spends more time chasing the children into their chairs, trying to interest them in anything remotely having to do with studies and generally throwing her hands up as they run out the schoolroom door.

It comes as no surprise to Agnes that she is finally dismissed because ‘she is not giving the children what they need,’ as though parental neglect and a refusal to see their children as they truly are had nothing to do with Agnes’s difficulty with them.

Agnes next finds employment at the wealthier Murray estate. Soon after her arrival the sons are sent to boarding school, so her main charges are 14-year old Matilda, the tomboy, who would rather be helping out at the stables or hunting with the dogs and 16-year old Rosalie who is almost ‘finished.’ Agnes’s instructions with the girls are similar to the ones she was given at the Bloomfields regarding punishment, with the added,

“only to render them as superficially attractive, and showlily accomplished, as they could possibly be made without present trouble or discomfort to themselves; and I was to act accordingly—to study and strive to amuse and oblige, instruct, refine, and polish with the least possible exertion on their part, and no exercise of authority on mine….And make them as happy as you can….”

One of the striking aspects of this book seems to me is a commentary on the upper classes and their frivolity and selfishness, their lack of discipline and moral standards in contrast to the upholding of the working classes as the real bedrock of Christian morality and virtue. Agnes grew up a clergyman’s daughter and her mother modeled for her and her sister all the important values missing in the homes of the upper classes at which she works.

When the Murray daughters visit the cottagers on their estate they do so with irresponsible condescension and the mocking of the sick and poor to their faces. When they break their promises to return to read or visit with them, Agnes takes on this role. The girls did not learn from their parents what their status obliges them to do toward the poor and how to show sincere kindness to others. It is left to Agnes to be the example for them, though it seems to have no effect over the superficialities that take precedence over their lives.

This superficiality is never more striking than in the way Rosalie approaches marriage. She will, of course, marry for wealth and position as her parents see fit. Love is not a factor, nor is Rosalie’s own choice. Agnes watches with grave concern as Rosalie, in acts of rebellion, flirts mercilessly and leads men on, even toward a marriage proposal. It is almost as if she must prove to herself that though the choice of a husband is made for her, she herself could attract any man she wanted. She is mean with her selected prey, almost torturous and not concerned about the devastating hurt she is causing even after Agnes’s warnings.

This book, by the youngest Bronte sister, is often panned or looked upon as a more juvenile effort than her sisters’ books. But there is a wealth of commentary to be gleaned from Agnes’s thoughts and experiences about the intimate life of the upper classes. It is an eye-opening look at the snobbery, the self-importance and dysfunction of that class of family life. Children are left to their own devices by parents who give them over to governesses and nurses who have no power to truly educate or form them. For these twice on Sunday church goers, it is all for show.

Through Agnes’s selfless actions and comforting words with the cottagers and in the cottagers deeds to each other, the reader sees it is the middle and working classes who demonstrate the true teachings of the church, who come to each other’s assistance regardless of what little they have themselves. It is they who make excuses for the bad behavior of the upper class girls. It is in the morality of these classes that fidelity is shown to their husbands and wives, and children toward their parents and in the mutual aid of the cottagers toward one another.

The novel contains more plot lines than I have discussed here, including a happy romantic ending for Agnes and for her widowed mother with whom they both open a school for girls that becomes successful. But it is the issues above that captured my attention in this first reading of Agnes Grey.

Dracula (1897), Bram Stoker

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“We are in Transylvania; and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things.”

Reading Dracula was like reading Little Women. Steeped in the film versions, I thought I knew what I would find in the books. Both were a surprise, even though I know films always change things and leave out a lot. When will I learn not to judge a book by a film?

Dracula is told entirely through the journals of four of the six principal players: Mina Murray, whose best friend Lucy Westenra has become mysteriously sick; Johnathan Harker, Mina’s fiancé then husband; the psychiatrist Dr. Seward, who runs a mental institute and Professor Van Helsing of Amsterdam, Seward’s former professor who is an “obscure diseases” specialist. Lucy’s two suitors, Arthur Holmwood, later Lord Godalming and the American Quincey Morris, make up the final six.

There is literally no straight narrative in the structure of the book. Stoker uses detailed journal entries, newspaper clippings, letters, bills of lading to tell the story. I found this to be extremely effective, because by keeping things in the first person, the story has immediacy and suspense as one ‘scene’ cuts away to another and we see how each experience is seen and interpreted in multiple ways. While this device is sometimes distracting or hard to follow here, each character has a distinct and unique voice, which makes it easy to know which character is writing.

Because I am used to film and popular culture portrayals of Dracula I was shocked at how little Count Dracula personally features in the book. In addition to his human persona he shape-shifts into various creatures, but is mostly absent. The book is really about the quest to find and kill him. It is the lore around vampires, the ancient curse that shows up in the superstitious townspeople, the effect of vampire bites on Lucy and Mina and the knowledge Professor Van Helsing has that forms the story.

In film versions, the suave and charming Count is afforded lots of screen time with special effects liberally showcasing his pointed teeth, lips dripping with blood, the (Bela Lugosi’s) famous accent, the bat persona and the abundance of mist whenever he is about to appear. While in these versions he is sometimes portrayed as a sympathetic character in the book he is an evil creature without any redeeming qualities living only to satisfy his evil desires without regard to the human cost.

I was struck by the technological inventions Stoker makes use of that existed at the end of the 19th century.  They remind me of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and seem to fit right in with today’s Steampunk subculture.

Blood transfusions are given to Lucy as Dracula’s fatal bite causes her body to waste away. Dr. Seward transfuses her with Arthur, Quincey, Van Helsing and himself (without knowledge of blood type?) with limited results.

The typewriter: When it is discovered that Mina is an expert typist, she types up everyone’s journal, in copies, so as to give a cohesive structure as to what each is experiencing; she also types up the notes of their planning meetings.

The dictaphone: Dr. Seward speaks his journal into this machine that records on a record player, which Mina types up.

The London Underground and train schedules: Mina is obsessed with the train schedules of the Underground and suburban/cross country trains and has their timetables memorized.

Hypnotism: In an effort to find the whereabouts of Dracula Professor Van Helsing hypnotizes Mina frequently at sunrise and sunset.

When Dracula flees London for his hometown in Romania, the six follow him knowing they must ritually kill him by stabbing him through the heart and cutting off his head. This is the only way to stop a vampiric future and to save Mina, who although has not ‘changed’ yet, is exhibiting some debilitating symptoms.

As they plan and prepare for their journey in Dr. Seward’s living room, Mina makes a disturbing, but necessary request, of which they all must swear. If she becomes so changed that she poses a threat to herself or to them, they must “drive a stake through me and cut off my head.” And in a scene reminiscent of something out of a Medieval romance where knights on a quest pledge their honor to their lady, the men faithfully drop to their knees one by one and swear, as (“Lady”) Mina asks, to kill her if they are unable to ritually rid the world of Dracula so her soul may rest.

Quincey was the first…He knelt down before her and taking her hand in his said solemnly, “ I am only a rough fellow…but I swear to you by all that I hold sacred and dear that, should the time ever come, I shall not flinch from the duty that you have set us.” And each in turn makes the same vow.

Mention should be made here of Mina. She disparages the ‘New Woman,’ of their independence, their call to buck social convention. Yet, she herself is the prime example of such a woman: smart, intelligent, technologically savvy whose work is key in organizing and pursuing the search for Dracula. It is Mina whose facility with a typewriter and organizational skills, her intelligence and coping mechanism in the face of the horror that is happening to her, her obsession with train schedules that basically saves the day. And apparently, she is also an expert on the the criminal mind through the work of Max Nordau, which Stoker, in a bizarre “show and tell” scene, has her recite his philosophy about criminals in reference to Dracula’s own criminality. The irony of this anti-New Woman aspect about Mina is probably not lost on most readers, so it is curious.

The last quarter of the book does feel to me like knights on a sacred quest to rid the world of evil like Arthur and his knights, or Harry, Ron and Hermione against He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, and of all the films and books where ordinary people band together against the darkness that would overcome humanity.

Sadly, unlike the notoriety of these epic stories, this particular one will forever stay with the six, because it is too fantastical. No one would ever believe them.

When we got home we got to talking of the old time—which we could all look back upon without despair… I took the papers from the safe where they have been ever since our return so long ago. We were struck with the fact, that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of type-writing, except the later notebooks of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van Helsing’s memorandum. We could hardly ask anyone, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story.

I didn’t find Dracula scary. I found it hopeful and encouraging. And nothing like the films….

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Betty Smith

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Johnny: Anybody can ride in one of those hansom cabs, provided they got the money. So you can see what a free country we got here…In the old countries, certain people aren’t free to ride in them, even if they have the money.

Francie: Wouldn’t it be more of a free country if we could ride in them for free?

Johnny: No, because that would be Socialism and we don’t want that here.

About a year and a half ago I heard a program on NPR about the publishing industry and World War II; that publishers put out specially formatted books with thin paper and in a particular size to fit easily into the pocket of a soldier’s uniform. They published classics as well as light reading and were passed from soldier to soldier throughout the fields of battle. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was one of the most requested titles, because it reminded the soldiers of the values they were fighting for.

The Story

It is a Saturday during the summer of 1912 when we meet 11 year-old Francie Nolan. She lives with her brother Neeley and her parents, Katie and Johnny, both born in the United States, from Austrian and Irish backgrounds respectively. They live in a third-story walk up on a street with other immigrant Irish. Johnny is a singing waiter beloved by his friends and family, but alcohol has taken over him so his work is sporadic. Katie has become the breadwinner of the family and works as a ‘janitress’ cleaning homes and offices.

Francie and Neeley are always hungry, their clothes are not thick enough to protect them from the biting cold of winter and their home is not always heated. But they themselves are breadwinners as collectors of bits and bobs that they sell to the junkmen for pennies which will buy stale bread. Saturday afternoon being the most important day of the week, the kids scheme against each other for the best deals at the storefronts where they trade their stashes of rags and bits of metal and anything they can find to sell. With that money they buy food for the family, saving a penny for a sweet or two.

The book is told through budding writer Francie as she watches and observes the people and conditions around her. The narrative is a simple one as Francie grows from an 11 year-old to 17: her father dies of alcoholism, her mother takes on more work, she reads voraciously and realizes there is more to the world than Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York; she falls in love, is jilted, she fears her brother, who likes to sing, will end up like her father; she must give up her education so her work can support her mother and brother, but the desire for education burns so hard she takes college classes at night and during the summer and is able to skip high school altogether and is accepted to a college in Michigan. Her mother remarries and the family moves out of poverty.

Through Francie, Smith writes with such detail about early 20th century Williamsburg and the crushing and demeaning poverty of its inhabitants. She writes with a meticulous hand the strategies the children employ that will get them the most for the items they have collected throughout the week: which stores will pay them the most, whether this shop owner likes girls better than their brothers or that shop owner will give more to the boys, and the pride the children feel contributing to the family bank (a can nailed to the closet floor). When Katie asks Francie to shop for food she is given instructions on what to say and how to approach the butcher, the breadmaker and so on, in order to get the best deal.

My Thoughts

Yet, the story is not just the narrative, but the characters that people Francie’s life: the teacher who at first encouraged her writing until she started writing the truth about her hard life, who then told her writing is supposed to be full of beauty; her aunt Sissy, the ‘floozie’ who married three times, had 10 children that died at birth, yet is the family member everyone turns to in times of crisis; the Jewish and German shop keepers with whom Francie deals, who can be gruff and mean to the poor children one minute only to give them something extra the next; her father Johnny who she is so close to, yet for all his patriotism about freedom, is never able free himself from his addiction; Katie, who wanted to make a different world for her children, took her mother’s advice to read from the Bible and Shakespeare,

“…every day you must read a page of each to your child—even though you yourself do not understand what is written down and cannot sound the words properly. You must do this that the child will grow up knowing of what is great—knowing that these tenements of Williamsburg are not the whole world.

And the titular tree that grows tall throughout Williamsburg like an umbrella, because “it likes poor people” has the tenacity to succeed like the human inhabitants because when it is cut down, will find a break in the cement, push through it and grow again.

The book was published in 1943 when, although the soldiers didn’t know it, was right in the middle of the war. They were not that far removed from their own immigrant past, the tales of the ‘old country’ that were still real for their parents and grandparents. So, it is fair to say that this novel is really a story of immigrant America, how each generation built it up from the succeeding one.

And which may be why the book was so heavily traded among soldiers who saw in the pages their own mother and sister who kept the family together, whose fathers worked any job they could get, a little brother they missed; the same immigrant neighbors, who regardless of their poverty, knew America could give their children freedom, the ability to determine their own destiny which set America a part from the enemies they were fighting.