So- What Happened to the Dog?…and other questions in “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

So- What Happened to the Dog?…and other questions in “The Great Gatsby.”

As we  read “The Great Gatsby”, we eventually suspect that F Scott Fitzgerald’s word-puzzle is, ultimately, best  explained by acknowledging the pervasive energies of modernism, with all its inherent ambiguities; we delight in the unravelling, not the solution itself. We are presented with a multi-layered, complex, Russian-doll of a novel.  Yet as the layers are peeled away, the central characters and the world in which they live are exposed, and displayed as superficial and, ultimately, empty.

There are so many tantalising questions that lie unanswered.  Some must remain so;  for example, would Tom ever have sold Wilson a car? Who was Owl-eyes? Whose teeth are on Wolfsheim’s cuffs? What was that “fragment of lost words” that Nick can’t quite recall?  And what DID happen to that dog? But many others can be tackled with relish.

Firstly, what was Gatsby really like?  Nick’s gloss, presenting him as a “gorgeous” dreamer in a pink suit, stretches the imagination a bit too much;  Tom Buchanan’s barbed moniker, “Mr Nobody from Nowhere” is paradoxically both over-simple and a little too existential to be taken seriously.  Nick finds him “sinister”, and the fact that Gatsby  takes his Montenegro medal and Oxford photo on the trip to New York, just to convince Nick to trust him, hints that he might have deeper, darker intentions.   Perhaps the simple idea of an earnestly parvenu “roughneck” with a winning smile, a potential gentile patsy for  Wolfsheim,  is  more fitting;  somehow, luckily, keeping a step or two ahead of the law.  Maybe he simply doesn’t know his geography.  But at the denouement, we’re disappointed with his death and unmasking; what’s “Great” about The Great Gatsby is, of course, the puzzle.  Just like his childish dream of reliving the past, when it arrives, when it’s re-solved-  it’s a let-down. 

So is that it? The notion that, inherent in all dreaming lies ultimate disappointment? Is this the conundrum  that it’s so much fun to grapple with?  I suggest not.  The real joy comes in engaging with all those other little issues that shout out to be clarified. 

For a start, did Jordan cheat at golf?  We like to think so.  She’s far less appealing as an honest woman.  In fact, she’s incorrigible; she won’t even tell her best friend what everyone else knows.  Leaving the roof open on the car in the rain was bad enough, but pretending to like Nick to keep in with the Buchanans is beyond the pale; she, too, remember, is a hit and run driver.   And then, after the fatal crash, she wants to stay over at East Egg.  Why, for goodness sake?  To be nosy.  Nick rightly refuses the invitation to join her, not from any sense of propriety, but because, admiring Gatsby in his pink suit, he realises, in a rare moment of self awareness, he doesn’t belong; being both “within and without”, he’s mostly “without”.

Was Gatsby involved in fixing the 1919 World Series?  It’s likely; Fitzgerald has been uncannily precise with the timings of his return from Europe, and his hiring by Wolsheim is a little too coincidental.  His Oxford stint would have taken him to the late spring of 1919; the baseball scam was in the September.   It’s fraud on a huge scale, a curtain raiser for the criminal excesses of prohibition and Wall Street, and a perfect modernist setting for Gatsby’s relentless rise.

Another unanswered riddle is Tom’s war record, or lack of it.  Nick and Gatsby swell with an understated and quietly shared pride when discussing grey little French villages- but Tom is strangely silent- the only cavalry charges he takes part in are on the polo field.  Clearly he chickened out of the war, sneakily stealing Daisy in the process.  This hulking brute is therefore a shrinking violet; but why doesn’t Fitzgerald explore this fruitful area a bit more?  Maybe in some earlier version he did.

And what of Tom’s racism, or “Nordicism”, as it may have been known at the time? Does this indicate some dubious attitudes towards ethnicity on Fitzgerald’s part?   Daisy mocks  her husband’s enthusiasm for a racist text,  and Nick’s use of the adjective “pathetic” when describing him, suggests that Fitzgerald, in giving such views to an unsympathetic character, could not be racist.  When Tom attacks interracial marriage, Nick describes his views as “impassioned gibberish”.  Tom exploits everyone, including minorities; racism is clearly the voice of a fool. Stoddard’s book on white supremacy, found by Owl-eyes in Gatsby’s library, is “real” enough;  yet it lies ignored and unread, only of value when it’s stuck away on the shelf, gathering dust, only the spine exposed.  The library, like the façade that Gatsby’s image represents, might collapse if the contents are examined too closely.  Furthermore, does the mention of the three chauffeured “modish negroes” on Blackwell’s Island represent a positive acknowledgement that northern, urban social mores are on the move in 1922, or  does Nick’s sense of “haughty rivalry” suggest future racial tension?  Does the juxtaposition of these African-Americans, the “south-eastern Europeans” and the “dead man” in the hearse represent Fitzgerald’s view of the future? “Anything can happen…”  Even for the times, his stereotype of Wolfsheim is particularly anti- semitic.  Part werewolf, part cartoon character, his existence in the novel serves to exacerbate our unease with the author’s intentions.

And then, it seems amazing that Wilson is so poor.  He’s surrounded by rich folk with cars and, apparently, has cornered the market with his garage; and while Nick suggests that there are other “wayside garages” with red petrol-pumps”,  Wilson has the prime location at the junction of the Eggs, by which all the mobile rich must pass, and, seemingly, by which all must park if they catch the train to town.  But this virtual monopoly offers a poor return as Wilson seems almost bankrupt.   His emotional destitution is strangely echoed by his more tangible financial hardship.  Yet it seems unnecessary, almost too obvious, for Wilson to be an unshaven, “anaemic”, grubby loser, “wiping his hands on a piece of waste”.  Today, of course, he’d join forces with Michaelis to open a franchise of some sort to maximise the passing trade, and make a fortune.    

The much-aired debate over the meaning of the T.J. Eckleberg hoarding is strange, in that only Wilson takes much notice of it, and only then when he’s crazy with grief.  In this godless world, no-one any longer worships this idol.  No-one other than Wilson, who’s told he “ought to have a church”, is interested in the shabby sign, or what it represents; but this surely is the greatest metaphor of all- that advertising has very little effect, except upon the deranged.  Nick’s constant awareness of it as our narrator, then, seems to be the most forced of all Fitzgerald’s first-person contrivances. 

And isn’t it an unbelievable coincidence that Daisy should run down Myrtle?  Why would Myrtle dash headlong into the path of Tom’s car?  She rushed outside, seemingly in a temper, “a moment” after telling her husband he was a “dirty little coward”;  she would have had to run across the forecourt, past the petrol pumps, before she reached the road,  yet still, implausibly, failed to notice the approaching yellow car, on a road with hardly any traffic or noise.  J.S. Westbrook argues in favour of “ocular confusion”; that “Myrtle thinks that the yellow car is Tom’s and runs out to stop it”, but he is surely mistaken.  It impossiblethat she could have known what was on the road.  Victor Doyno is more plausible when he calls the incident “highly improbable plot manipulation”; indeed, the whole episode, involving the two-car drive to New York with subsequent vehicle/driver switching, seems to be a major plot contrivance so that this “accident” can happen.   As Doyno explains, we’ve long been prepared for this crash;  Jordan and Nick have discussed bad driving in depth, while Tom’s earlier wheel-losing crash and Daisy’s button-flicking episode created the dramatic irony.  Myrtle’s killing finally signifies the death of Gatsby’s dream, but the relationship was dead way before the fateful crash.

Does Daisy have blonde or dark hair?  Repeated  white and gold imagery points to the former;  as she states, she shares the “yellowy” hair of her daughter.  The “dash of blue paint across her cheek” suggests otherwise, however, and her “dark shining hair” is a prominent feature when she finally kisses Gatsby in Louisville.   Blonde hair might signify “purity and innocence”, according to Joan Korenman, but for a feminist reader to ignore the silent screen iconography suggested by the  blonde starlets who had to fight their way through Hollywood casting seems somewhat naïve and disingenuous.  After all, Anita Loos’ novel “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” was first published in 1925.  The changing colour of Daisy’s hair seems to be another ambiguous modernist device to draw us into Fitzgerald’s web.

Then, what of Nick’s  homoerotic encounters with the photographer McKee?  After a brief attraction to the “young cadet” Jordan, and having spent his college days dealing with the “intimate revelations” of many young men, he ends up in McKee’s bedroom. How on earth did he get there? Why on earth is he there?  He certainly wasn’t forced.  After the bizarre lever-touching lift episode, we are whisked into a boudoir where McKee sits with his “great portfolio” in his hands.  Does he need to be in bed, half naked, to show tipsy Nick his pride and joy?  What has gone on?  Nick’s attraction to the “mustache” of sweat on his mid-west girlfriend’s top lip, and to Jordan’s “erect carriage”, suggests that his hero-worship of the Gatsby myth at the end of the novel is more complex than it appears.

After all these conundrums, the whereabouts of the dog, with its questionable lineage, seems not to matter.  Gatsby himself is the greatest enigma of them all.  Hating his poverty and shabbiness, he gladly reinvents himself as a cabin boy-cum-beneficiary, an Oxford-educated war hero and, finally, as a millionaire aristocrat, his self-loathing growing with his fortune.  Daisy is not his dream;  doesn’t he simply want to go back to a time, epitomised by Daisy, when he was truly a “Platonic version of himself”, in control, with all the world before him, to “recover something, some idea of himself, perhaps”?  In any case, it was just personal. 

 

Patterns in “The Great Gatsby”; Modern Fiction Studies Victor A. Doyno (1969)

“Only Her Hairdresser…Another Look at Daisy Buchanan”  Joan S Korenman, American Literature 46 (1975)

 

“…Looking up at the Stars”; how the writings of romantics and aesthetes inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

“…Looking up at the Stars”; how the writings of romantics and aesthetes  inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  Mike Haldenby

When studying F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, one challenge facing the reader is to explore the  ideas behind the novel- the influences that combined and prevailed to enable Fitzgerald to create his masterpiece. 

His own frenetic life, and his desperate attempt to write a book successful enough to keep the  demanding Zelda in the luxury to which she felt she should be accustomed, has been well documented.  There are many parallels in the text with his own life;  these too have been equally well explored. The Great Gatsby is his “spiritual biography”, says biographer Nicholas Le Vot.  Living the Gatsby lifestyle (without the funding, initially) gave him plenty of material.  Arthur Mizener’s claims, in his 1951 account, that Fitzgerald is an “Original Genius- almost nobody at all influenced the Very Bright Boy” as he was  “hardly aware of his literary sources”.   Yet Fitzgerald was well read, and it seems reasonable to suggest that his favourite authors must have played their part in providing him with themes and ideas.   According to Le Vot,  Fitzgerald read “feverishly” as a student, “plunging” with particular enthusiasm into the work of the great “English aesthetes.”  (Writing a letter in 1939, Fitzgerald admits “the point where the personal note emerges can come very young… long before twenty”).  Comparisons with Henry James have been thoroughly drawn;  Gatsby’s “pathetic” appeal through his “passionate idealism”, finds specific resonance in Daisy Miller (1880), particularly through the “eyes of a spectator” narrative technique, while later critics, such as R.W. Stallman note “numerous”  cadences borrowed from Joseph Conrad;  Marlow’s imaginative narrative in Lord Jim (1899) and his obsession with the enigmatic Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (1902) suggest obvious similarities.  T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) has invited many comparisons, through the barren aridity of Fitzgerald’s valley of ashes and the general modernistic lack of narrative continuity.

 

Keats’ & Wordsworth

Then, it is well known that Fitzgerald’s favourite poet was John Keats.  As well as using the line, “Tender is the Night” as a later title, echoes of Keats’ romanticism surface in Gatsby, particularly in Daisy’s remarkable nightingale, which seemingly crossed from Europe by ship.  Keats is transported by his nightingale’s timeless song and hesitates to accept its mortality while Nick wants his Gatsby not to kiss Daisy as, for him, the dreaming supercedes reality, and the wondrous illusion might disappear in a flash.

Arthur Mizener  cites Keats’ letter  to Benjamin Bailey, in which he states that he sought  a life of “Sensations”—that is, the felt understanding of the imagination—rather than “Thoughts”—the logical conclusions of consecutive reasoning,  leading to Keats’ claim that  “what the imagination seizes as beauty—that is, experienced knowledge—must be true.”  This is at the heart of Fitzgerald’s passion for Keats’ romanticism, but, importantly, it has been filtered through his more recent admiration of Rupert Brooke, whose war poetry, now deemed hopelessly naïve, also struck a chord with Fitzgerald.

And what of the other romantic poets?  Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey explains how the poet  has dealt with “Five years!” away from the beauty of the Wye Valley, which, despite being physically absent, he “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.”  Perhaps it’s no coincidence that it’s five years that Gatsby has been separated from Daisy.  With his exclamation, “Almost five years!” Nick creates a powerful connection between Gatsby’s dream and the way Wordsworth deals with keeping the past alive.  Gatsby doubts his “present happiness”  and seems to prefer  the “colossal vitality of his illusion”; like Wordsworth, Gatsby’s memories seem to propel and inspire him more powerfully than what he has in front of him; his idealised love for what Daisy encapsulated on that balmy evening in Louisville is an embodiment of Wordsworth’s “sense sublime…something far more deeply interfused”-  which sustained Gatsby “mid the din” of the trenches.  In comparison to the power of what the past represents,  the reality of the present pales.  Wordsworth, then, of all the romantics, would have agreed with Gatsby about being able to somehow  recreate the past, although his way was largely cerebral;  with an “eye made quiet by the power of harmony”, as opposed to Gatsby’s more tangible shirts and cars.   Nick, however,  over-romanticises Gatsby’s scheme into a sensual, dreamlike, existential obsession with  Daisy’s voice, the  “deathless song”, calling him back to 1917.

The Influence of Oscar Wilde

There are other claimants with convincing cases.  Fitzgerald’s chosen milieu- the decadent lives of rich, indolent high society acolytes- places Fitzgerald squarely alongside one writer in particular- Oscar Wilde.  This is underlined by the dilemma faced by both writers; their evident fascination for- and, seemingly, disgust at- the excesses of the idle rich.  Both Fitzgerald and Wilde feed off “society”, and cannot do without it, being drawn inexorably to its lack of ordinariness, its moral self-justification, its decadence.  Both men found themselves just outside the aristocratic circles that they aspired to yet were excluded from.  But the comparison goes deeper than that.

Like Wilde, Fitzgerald drew from the Faust legend to create a protagonist so in love with the potential of his own Platonic creation that considerations of integrity and morality are willingly jettisoned to gain the ultimate dream.  While the reminder of  Dorian Gray’s unholy pact  is a constant presence whispering from the attic (a subterranean cellar would surely have been more satanic), Gatsby’s deal is with Wolfsheim, a Jewish anti-Christ,  who, at dinner,  tries to tempt Nick and Gatsby “over the road”- where it’s “hot and small- and full of memories”.  (If Gatsby is later likened to Christ, his refusal to be tempted here is telling).  Wolsfheim sends his own Mephistopheles and Beelzebub in Owl-eyes and Klipspringer to ensure all goes to plan.  The Wildean aphorism “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but to lose his own soul?” is applicable equally to both Dorian Gray and Jay Gatsby.  Dorian Gray dies when he ultimately come face to face with the ghoulish spectre of the painting; Gatsby is killed by the ghostly Wilson, an “ashen, fantastic figure, gliding towards him through the amorphous trees”.

 “To become the spectator of one’s own life,” states Lord Henry Wootton, a clear cipher for Wilde himself in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), “is to escape the sufferings of life.”  Nick, in a nutshell.  Tony Tanner describes him as “a spectator in search of a performer.” He opts out of conscious involvement in the business of others so that he can avoid the exposure of his own lack of substance.  When Wilde retorted to Yeats that “a man must invent his own myth”, Fitzgerald was presented  with the basis for Gatsby, and when Wilde, in defending Dorian Gray, stated that “of all men I am the one who requires least advertisement… I am tired to death of being advertised,” Fitzgerald seized the blueprint for Daisy’s telling denouncement of her old love in the hotel heat of Chapter 5.

The Morality of Aestheticism

Wilde’s first great passion, before Bosie, was for John Gray, who signed his letters to Wilde “Dorian”;  Wilde wrote to him, “The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold.  The curves of your lips rewrite history”.  Gatsby’s love for Daisy, the “golden girl” in immaculate white, reflects a similar, hopelessly romantic but ultimately self-obsessed desire to “repeat the past” and to regain the “real” man, a noble savage that existed before the need for any “Platonic conception”.  Gatsby and Daisy later travel in a yellow car; the colour of eroticism, referencing the “Yellow Book”, a thinly veiled reference to Huysman’s  decadent novel “Au Rebours”,  the erotic inspiration of both Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley.  Colour symbolism permeates Gatsby; it’s an “intimate part …of the book’s substance”, writes Le Vot, with yellow having special meaning. 

Gatsby’s pink-suited gorgeousness is the ultimate aesthetic beauty of immorality, an idealised “Platonic” creation, deeply  flawed yet, for Nick, rising above its corruption, and epitomising Wilde’s typically paradoxical and epigrammatic ideal of beauty separated from moral considerations.  As Richard Ellmann so forcefully puts it in his biography of Wilde, referencing  the “poisonous” “Au Rebours”, “aestheticism is fundamentally an aspiration towards an ideal”; neatly encapsulating both Gatsby’s  dream and Nick’s longing.   It is upon his return to West Egg from his first visit to the Buchanans that Nick initially reaches out for Gatsby, who is standing at night (in a spiritual gutter, but looking up at the “peppery” stars), scanning the sound and seeking, if we accept Nick’s implication, the green light of Daisy’s jetty, “A dreamer … who can only find his way by moonlight”.  Like Wilde, Gatsby represents to Nick " all the sins you have never had the courage to commit."

 

Gatsby himself is no aesthete; his desires are more earthbound.  He recognises quickly and enthusiastically that Daisy’s voice is “full of money”, just like his attempts to be with self- conscious phrases such as “old sport”.  Yet Nick loves the idea of the man more than the man himself, much, as for Wilde, art was more real than life itself.  Gatsby only “comes alive” when Nick realises that his mansion was a magnificent  illusion constructed solely to entice Daisy.  Oscar might have approved.  To the aesthete, to those worshipping gorgeousness, according to Wilde, there is no distinction between moral and immoral acts, only between those that increase or decrease one’s happiness.   Nick, in his love of Gatsby’s dream, reinforces this position.  His decision to reject the offer of quick (probably illegal) profit in chapter 5 gives him a temporary morality later to be swept away by his  more powerful attraction to Gatsby’s useless,  immoral  quest.  Gatsby himself exemplifies the Wildean notion that “the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible...."  Nick’s admiration here is confusing;  clearly, Gatsby uses then dumps Nick.  But it’s too late- Nick is hooked. In looking for Gatsby’s depths, Nick misses the key point – there aren’t any.   At the end of Chapter 1, Nick sees Gatsby, arms “stretched” towards Daisy, standing on his dock in the moonlight; then, like the shadowy cat, he is gone.  Nick wants more; he seeks the visible, tangible Gatsby that he believes promises so much.  In creating Gatsby’s  Platonic identity, Fitzgerald is diving deep into the very exploration of aesthetics that lies at the heart of Wilde’s most successful work. 

 

Fitzgerald was in tune with Wilde’s own development.  For both The Great Gatsby and Dorian Gray ultimately refute the idea that art transcends responsibility.  Reflecting Wilde’s philosophical volte-face, and presenting a strong case for the inherent immorality of purely aesthetic lives, Gatsby’s death seems to restore a natural order.  When Daisy finally deserts him again, he realises that his dream has dissolved; all the artifices of his life have been stripped away to reveal a world where roses are “grotesque” and leaves, until then growing wildly in blue bursts,  are “frightening”.  There is even beauty in Gatsby’s death, with the glorious description of the pool and its “little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves”.  This is release. In his creation of Gatsby, Fitzgerald assiduously sticks to Wilde’s revised template of the aesthetic ideal.

The Great Gatsby is, of course, about dreaming, the final emptiness of the American Dream, and the hollow materialism of the age.  But Fitzgerald’s masterpiece can also be read as an acknowledgement of the debate over aestheticism, inspired by Walter Pater, developed by Whistler and made famous by Wilde.  Fitzgerald has Nick present us with Gatsby, who becomes the perfect aesthetic creation; art and morality are kept separate as Nick’s love requires that he distances himself from Gatsby’s immorality.  He tells Gatsby, gushingly, “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together”, while having paradoxically “disapproved of him from beginning to end”. 

Both Oscar Wilde and Jay Gatsby pay the ultimate price for the dream of a love that dare not speak its name; they are plaintiffs found guilty at kangaroo courts of their own making.  If he accepts that “society often forgives the criminal but never forgives the dreamer”,  Fitzgerald also takes from Wilde the notion that the dreamer’s punishment is that he sees “the (reality) of the dawn before the rest of the world”- yet is unable or unwilling to act upon it.

 

 

F Scott Fitzgerald: Nicholas Le Vot  Allen Lane 1979

John Keats: Letter to Benjamin Bailey, (1817)

Scott Fitzgerald and the 1920’s: Arthur Mizener  Minnesota Review, I (Winter 1961).

 “Conrad and The Great Gatsby”  R W Stallman Twentieth Century Literature   Vol. 1, No. 1, Apr.,  1955 Hofstra University

Introduction to The Great Gatsby: Tony Tanner Penguin 1990

Oscar Wilde: Richard Ellman XXX 199x

American Dreams, American Nightmares, ed. by David Madden, 1970.

“Cadences”  Gilbert Seldes “Spring Flight” The Dial (1925)

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Letter to Morton Kroll, August 9, 1939.

William Wordswoth  Tintern Abbey 180?

Nature and Optics in “The Great Gatsby”, J.S. Westbrook, American Literature (1960/61)

EDWARD THOMAS “I CANNOT BITE THE DAY TO THE CORE.”

EDWARD THOMAS   “I CANNOT BITE THE DAY TO THE CORE.”

Mike Haldenby explores the tensions and contradictions in the life of Edward Thomas that, ironically, inspired him to write some of the most memorable poetry of the 20^th Century.

Edward Thomas’ life (1878-1917) was one of uncertainty, vacillation and misunderstanding.  He was a writer, but for years hated what he wrote. He loved the countryside, but couldn’t understand why.   He wanted to fight in the Great War, but resisted enlisting.  He loved his family but couldn’t live with them, preferring his own company.  He was a poet, and he didn’t know it.  Yet the poems that he wrote between December 1914 and  January 1916- none published under his own name during his lifetime- have been praised widely, not least for their “unflinching emotional honesty” (Scannell, p.21). 

Thomas wrote in the “shadow of his brooding preoccupation with impermanence and mortality”(Lucas, p.82); yet, according to John Lucas “bright images gleam in the shadow” (ibid).  He wrestled with his contradictions and paradoxes for years; yet these very tensions are, arguably, what make him a great poet. The quest to “possess experience” yet “failing to do so” ( ibid.) provided him with the inspiration to write, and to continue to write.  

“Edward Thomas is a nature poet, but we cannot call him that.” R. Kirkham¹

To attempt to define and categorise the poetry of Edward Thomas causes problems.  Convinced by his great friend Robert Frost that he should rewrite his imaginative and poetic prose as verse, Thomas, like Frost, valued “the speech of life” as the “speech of poetry” (Motion,p.60) ; he saw little value in “poetic” language. In other words, he was out of step with the literary establishment of the day. He could not become part of the mainstream Georgian movement of Edwardian England, with its idealised portrayals of nature. Yet he was not, strictly, a modernist, or “Imagist” either, despite his radical, stripped-down approach and being in “critical dialogue” (Longley, p. 11) with radical poets such as Ezra Pound. Contemporary literary critics were uncertain about Thomas; the poet, himself a critic for many years, was also far from sure of his own ground.

He never really believed that he was a poet, or could write poetry.  When Robert Frost told him that his prose was “as good a poetry as anyone alive”, it helped encourage Thomas to begin to write verse, although, crucially, it never defeated or even alleviated the depression that was to continually haunt him. As the war in Europe looked likely to continue long past Christmas 1914, his poetic output grew in both intensity and variety as reports of injury and death among his generation became more and more commonplace.  Ironically, he spent early 1915 “wounded” with an injured ankle, which delayed any decision about enlisting and channelled his energies towards his poems.

“To scare myself with my own desert places” Robert Frost ²

Sharing Frost’s determination to write with the natural cadences of ordinary speech, as Spring 1915 grew toward Summer Thomas found inspiration in his first love; the countryside.  Unsuccessfully fighting bouts of his “poets’ disease” (depression was then then called “neuralgia”) and tramping solitary miles through the lanes and woodland surrounding his cottage in Steep, Hampshire, he absorbed the abstract sounds of the wind, the joyful music of birdsong and the savage beauty of the seasons. Yet whether he was writing prose or poetry, he was always striving, usually unsuccessfully, to understand and process the significance of his experiences; his writing reflected “the hesitation and doubt that he found so disabling in his own life”  (Hollis, p.196). He knew that he wanted to somehow protect the land he loved from destruction, yet at thirty-six felt that he had little to offer the military, even if his ankle healed successfully.  An inveterate wanderer, it is no accident that his poems often find him travelling down unmapped, stumbled-upon pathways; it seems that he was looking for direction, searching (continues Lucas), “(for) the secret heart of England…which seems to hoard a secret meaning”.  (ibid. p.84) Yet if he ever found a meaningful pathway, Thomas failed to follow it.  His depressions deepened; he grew distanced from his wife and family, and more than once thought of suicide.

“When a man is unhappy, he writes damn bad poetry” Coleridge ³   

These frustrations did not harm his poetry. On the contrary, the tensions arising from his uncertainties provided him with a unique voice. He strove to find purpose and meaning in the powerful, almost spiritual experiences and beliefs that, when immersed in the countryside, he sensed but could not rationalise. He seemed, paradoxically, to draw strength from this lack of understanding;  it “signalled a kind of withheld power and undeniable if unattainable reality” celebrating “absent presences, intimations glimpsed, nearly held, tracked almost to their sources” (Lucas p. 83). Thomas hints at this himself, in “Melancholy” (April 1915): “Naught did my despair, but sweeten the strange sweetness.”

This sense of unknowable power did not summon up in the atheist/agnostic Thomas the view that nature was evidence of an all-encompassing God, however; Thomas centred his obsession with the indefinability of nature upon himself. In “The South Country” (1909) he had written that literature sent us to nature for both “the joy of the senses…and of the soul, which if found complete …might be called religious” (p.142).  We are reminded here of Wordsworth’s thought processes in “Tintern Abbey” in which the his pantheistic love of nature manifests itself on two distinct levels; as, simply, “beauteous forms” which delight the senses as “on the banks of this delightful stream/ we stood together”, but also in a deeper sense, as memories, providing reserves of positive energy to be drawn upon when spirits are low; “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart”.  In “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth does not try to understand or apply logic to the power of his memories but, upon recall, seems to find them more evocative, powerful and transformative than the experience itself:

“To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened…”   (Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey l.38-43)

“I would rather give up others more sweet” Edward Thomas  ⁴  

Despite findings connections of a spiritual (if not religious) kind in “The South Country” Thomas, growing frustrated at his shortcomings of perception, expressed these concerns regularly in his poems.  In “The Unknown Bird” (Jan. 1915) he laments, “he never came again”;  “The Path” (March 1915) again offers him direction until “sudden, it ends”;  “what I desired, I knew not, but whate’er my choice, vain it must be, I knew” reflects the poem’s title, “Melancholy”, and despite being surrounded by “the glory of the beauty of the morning” (“The Glory”, May 1915) Thomas must “be content with discontent” not knowing “what is meant by happiness”.  He cannot understand “Beauty” (Jan. 1915) (“What does it mean?”); he “cannot bite the day to the core” (The Glory) because, unlike Wordsworth, when he is “fast-pent,” his time is “dreary-swift”; he has “naught to travel to” (Tintern Abbey).

However, the poem “Old Man” (Dec. 1914) is strangely contradictory in this sense.  It reminds us of the power with which sensual memories  spontaneously recreate vividly powerful feelings, and seems to echo Wordsworth’s belief that happy memories can be transcendental in their power to rejuvenate, reinvigorate and replenish. Indeed, as he writes, Thomas seems to be optimistic that, in future, his daughter will be transported back to the (hopefully) happily-remembered days of her childhood each time she smells the herb. Like Wordsworth, Thomas realises that such a memory will, in all likelihood, be rose-tinted in that it will filter out any negativity in recapturing a mood or a feeling- in this case, the innocence and joy of a carefree childhood.  Yet this gives Thomas himself little pleasure.  While being able to understand Wordsworth’s concept of the regenerative “sensations sweet”, Thomas confesses that he himself “has mislaid the key” to this sort of fulfilment.  Frustratingly, he cannot access the treasure trove that falls so naturally to Wordsworth. While he can recognise the scent of “Old Man’s Beard”, the neurological bonds that the rest of us use to draw upon our memories have, for Thomas, somehow become broken, and this disability becomes the emphasis of the poem.  Despite beginning with another path, this time a hopeful one (“a bent path to a door”) he ends with the dead-end knowledge that no memories will ever be sparked when he catches a random whiff of the herb; and that such inability can only result in “an avenue, dark, nameless and without end”, that, as in “Lights Out” (Nov. 1916), one of his last poems, “suddenly now blurs”.  He chooses to place the focus of “Old Man” on his own shortcomings, not the delights that his daughter will experience in years to come. 

“ The outward scene is accessory to an inner theatre.” F.R. Leavis ⁵

Leavis describes Thomas’ writing as trying “to catch some shy intuition on the edge of consciousness” (ibid. p.69) implying, like Coombes, that he was “a poet who never fully satisfies himself as to the cause of his most characteristic mood” (p.198) – ie, his melancholy.    Yet there seems to be evidence that perhaps Thomas could come to an understanding of his relationship with his environment. Time and time again, we feel, hopefully, that Thomas’ memories do provide him with positive images of strength and support. In “Birds’ Nests” (Dec. 1914)he concludes that “seeds found soil and grew”; “Adelstrop” (Jan. 1915) swells to a climax with soaring hyperbole as Thomas reaches out to “all the birds/Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire” and in “Tears” (Jan. 1915), which focuses on two specific memories, Thomas is moved by “truths I have not dreamed”.  

Yet, in the final analysis, it was Thomas’ solipsistic views of himself that counted; views which ignored the protestations of friends and family, denied the possibility of redemption and ruled out any sense of personal peace. 

“The glory invites me, yet it leaves me scorning                                                                                                  

All I can ever do, all I can be…”                                              (“The Glory”)

 

 

 

Edward Thomas, “The South Country” 1909

Vernon Scannell  http://www.questia.com/read/95950251/edward-thomas p.16

William Cooke “Edward Thomas- A Critical Biography” Faber & Faber 1970

Andrew Motion “The Poetry of Edward Thomas” Routledge & Kegan Paul 1980

H. Coombes “Edward Thomas” London, 1956

Matthew Hollis “Now All Roads Lead To France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas” Faber & Faber 2011

John Lucas “Modern English Poetry” Batsford 1986

Edward Thomas “Collected Poems” Edited by Edna Longley Bloodaxe 2008

“A Mosaic Hurriedly Made…” Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

“A Mosaic Hurriedly Made…”

Mike Haldenby examines how Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray- became a modern classic, despite a number of shortcomings. 

Much has been written about both Oscar Wilde and his novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1891). Despite decades of infamy, it is now, belatedly, accepted as a groundbreaking, daring, fin-de-siecle masterpiece, heralding the advent of modernism.  Critics celebrate it as a brilliantly designed puzzle; in 2007 Irvine Welsh praised it as a “truly great and essential novel”. Yet, according to many critics and commentators, it is far from perfect.  Richard Ellman, Wilde’s most esteemed biographer, conceded that “parts of it are wooden, padded, self indulgent.  No-one could mistake it for a workmanlike job.”  Sheridan Morley’s 1976 study calls it an “overblown melodrama”.  More specifically, Frank Harris, a biographer who actually knew Wilde,  stated confidently that while much of the first half of the novel is an “…excellent reproduction of Wilde’s ordinary talk…the latter part of the book…tails off into insignificance.  The first hundred pages held the result of months and months of Oscar’s talk, the latter (was) written offhand to complete the story.”

 Harris’ curt but informed dismissal of the second half presents us with a dilemma. How does a work which seems to have as many flaws as strengths justify the critical acclaim of the late twentieth century? 

While late-Victorian disgust at the novel was more a reflection of the social values of the age than the quality of the writing, even Wilde’s creative genius went unappreciated.  This contemptuous traditionalist indignation seems to have been the forerunner of the many bewildered responses to modernist texts of the early twentieth century, bearing in mind that Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring provoked a riot among Paris’s staid concert-goers in 1913, and Matisse commented on the “ugliness” of Picasso in 1907.  Wilde’s work was largely ignored by early 20^th century critics who found him “amusing, but trivial” (Harris). It was not until the more freethinking, sexually liberated 1960’s that The Picture of Dorian Gray became accepted and recognised as a classic.

It is a remarkable novel for a number of reasons, not least being its ability to offend and outrage a sector of society hide-bound by an overdeveloped sense of morality.  This, of course, was one of Wilde’s intentions.  Yet in addition to both explaining (and, ironically, in places undermining)  his own obsessions with aestheticism, sexuality and artistic freedom, the author seems to lose interest about half way through.  Like a rock star wanting to break with his record label with one album to go on his contract, Wilde begrudgingly produced a final draft some months later than agreed, while barely meeting the  minimum word-length demanded by the publisher.  He was clearly running out of enthusiasm as the novel developed; apart from the stunning denouement, and some moments of wonderfully acerbic language, the second half disappoints; it is almost as if Wilde had become dispirited by the daunting task in front of him. 

The novel did not have an auspicious beginning.  On 31 August 1889, the Philadelphia publisher J M Stoddart invited Oscar Wilde to dine with himself and Arthur Conan Doyle at Langham’s Hotel.  Stoddart was anxious to feature bold, contemporary short novels in the recently-established UK version of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, and both authors, on the threshold of their writing careers, seemed to fit Stoddart’s conception of what he felt Lippincott’s British readership would demand.  While Wilde was already a celebrity and a prolific producer of articles and short stories, Conan Doyle’s reputation in America was growing, and he was anxious to follow up his first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet. At dinner, he spoke volubly about his second Holmes adventure, The Sign of Four. 

This bullishness put Wilde in a difficult position. He did not have anything fully formed to sell, yet, undoubtedly, was unwilling to admit it.  Wilde had never written anything like a full length novel; it was not his chosen milieu.  He had never attempted such a formidable task, admitting that in the past he had lacked the staying power. Indeed, as Frank Harris, noted, these concerns were well grounded; “he did not know life well enough or care enough for character to write a profound psychological study; he was at his best in a short story or play.” (p.70) However, not to be outdone by the ebullient Conan Doyle who was enthusing over well-formed ideas for his new detective mystery, Wilde countered by outlining- in probably more vague terms than his dinner partner- his own “insoluble mystery”- The Picture of Dorian Gray.

He may have been a little hasty.  The competitive tension had, perhaps, provoked Wilde to gloss over the fact that this “novel” was no more than a melange of ideas that he had been mulling over for some time.  He probably had little more than a short story up his sleeve.  Yet cash-flow was always a problem for Wilde; when both he and Conan Doyle were offered a substantial advance, the die was cast.  Stoddart asked both for 100,000 words by October. Wilde took stock; his cabled response gives an early indication that his commitment to writing a full-length novel was less than total. He replied “…there are not 100,000 beautiful words in the English language.”  Throughout the winter, Wilde struggled to concentrate and maintain focus upon what seemed to him to be a mammoth task. “It gave him much trouble”, wrote Richard Ellman;  Andre Gide noted that he made “several comprehensive rewrites.”

What happened, of course, was that Wilde produced a novel which was almost universally vilified.  The original, shorter version printed in Lippincott’s in June 1890 was received with outrage, forcing Wilde to face the unthinkable – to compromise, if he wanted wider publication.  As he conceded in his trial in 1895, he had to tone down some of the more sexually explicit passages, which were, as he conceded, “liable to misconstruction.” Wilde believed, wrongly, that a preface of obscure and ambiguous epigrams, presented in March 1891, would explain matters. They simply muddied the waters. He then decided that he would have to develop the plot along more traditional lines by adding chapters.  As the novel appears now, chapters 3, 5, 15, 16, 17 and 18 are additions made for April 1891; these fundamentally change the narrative flow of the novel.  While developing the story of Sibyl Vane’s brother, James, they also give the second half of the novel an unbalanced feel; the reader may be forgiven if it seems as if a series of unconnected short stories is being presented.  After years defending the importance of an artist’s integrity, Wilde’s capitulation must have been a painfully arrived at decision based upon much anguished soul-searching.

Despite these concessions, the second half of the novel has much to enjoy.  Chapter 17 introduces The Duchess of Monmouth, an intelligent, perceptive and articulate aristocrat whose sharp dialogue and probing questioning of Dorian refutes suggestions that the novel is misogynistic and purposely lacks an independent female character.  Yet, the chapter feels like an afterthought and it is difficult to escape the feeling that each one of these later chapters is too detached.  In Chapter 11, Wilde’s self indulgent categorization of good taste is rather bewildering in its detail; The visit to dark and squalid Limehouse in Chapter 16, complete with Dorian’s brush with James Vane and a now-aged old crone and former sexual conquest, sits alone and feels like a melodramatic afterthought. 

Yet Dorian’s murder of Basil Hallward in Chapter 13 is completely in keeping with the integrity of the emotional narrative of the first half of the novel. In trying to remove another reminder of his nagging conscience by silencing Basil, Dorian descends further into meaningless, hedonistic hell.  The dead artist’s body lies alongside his covered portrait, doubling rather than eradicating Dorian’s feelings of guilt and responsibility. It threatens to stir his remaining scraps of conscience, and needs to be removed.  Yet disposing of Basil’s body proves to be a problem for Wilde, and the methods Dorian employs for its removal lack the imagination of much of the rest of the story.

The essence of the novel is expressed during its first half.  As early as Chapter 1 we are deluged, in the words of Arthur Ransome, with the richness of Wilde’s description, a “delight in colour and fastidious luxury”; he then develops his triangle of characters with impressive frankness and subtlety. Lord Henry Wotton, Basil Hallward and Dorian Gray are intertwined gradually, the fates of all three locked together by Wilde’s own personality.  The early chapters of the novel develop these three characters, subtly and gradually; Dorian’s aesthetic obsession with the art of Sibyl Vane divides Wotton and Hallward, as does his heartless treatment of her.  The reader is drawn into the world of Wilde’s demi-monde, juggling the conflicting values of all three men, the shifting of perspective occurring imperceptibly, making any hard and fast attitude difficult to sustain.  We realise, slowly, that Hallward is right in that Wotton is a man who has much to say- but little to back it up with.  

Dorian’s descent into perdition, engineered by Wotton, is lamented by Basil Hallward.  It seems that as Dorian is becoming the master of his own destiny, and is making his own way in the world, the narrative fragments.  The tight, incestuous, three-way moral vortex that has spiralled around the three men dissipates as Lord Henry throws in the towel and plays second fiddle.  No more do we revel in the deliciously provocative epigrams and paradoxes.  Wotton gives Dorian a book, and that seems to be that. 

The “Yellow Book”, much referred to as a source of immorality at Wilde’s 1895 trial, goes on to give Dorian deeper and more profound schooling than Lord Henry’s arch suggestions, but its introduction results in the diminution of the book’s most attractive character.  In doing this, Wilde also seems to be contradicting his bold aesthetic assumption of the preface- that there is “no such thing as a moral or immoral book”.  Did this ambiguity also give his critics the ammunition to successfully attack the moral implications of The Picture of Dorian Gray and, ultimately, by association, its author as well?

The revisions, the preface and the extra chapters render the novel “unbalanced…with a lack of proportion, and of cohesion, that mars- but does not spoil- Dorian Gray”. Perhaps Ransome’s views here offer the best way to understand.

Wilde’s novel has become one of the most quoted in the English language.  Many of its sayings and epigrams have entered everyday common usage, and its central image- Dorian’s portrait, magically ageing in his attic- is now legendary.  Clearly, despite any perceived shortcomings, The Picture of Dorian Gray has the depth and capacity to continue to be read, enjoyed and interpreted widely, particularly so in a modern society with increasingly tolerant and understanding values.  Aspects of structure criticised on one hand as flaws may be deemed relatively unimportant when set against the massive cultural effect of the novel’s wider themes.  This repute came at a price; Wilde certainly suffered for his brave words at his trial in 1895, when much of the novel was quoted to the detriment of his reputation.  He would undoubtedly be pleased that, over time, his integrity had been vindicated.

 “It is a mosaic hurriedly made” concluded Ransome, “by a man who reached out in all directions and took and used in his work whatever scrap of jasper or broken flint that was put into his hand.”  Lord Henry claims in the text that he would have “liked to have written a novel …as lovely as a Persian carpet, and as unreal.” Here Wotton’s voice is unmistakeably that of Wilde.  He very nearly succeeded. 

__________________________________________________________________________________

 

Further Reading:

Arthur Ransome “Oscar Wilde” Methuen 1913

Frank Harris “Oscar Wilde” New York 1916

Hesketh Pearson “The Life of Oscar Wilde” Methuen 1946

Sheridan Morley “Oscar Wilde” Pavilion 1976

Richard Ellman “Oscar Wilde” Hamish Hamilton 1987

Dr. Faustus (Christopher Marlowe) - A Thoroughly Modern Man

Dr. Faustus- A Thoroughly Modern Man                                                                 Mike Haldenby                                       

It seems axiomatic that any study of literature must take into account the demands placed upon the  writer by his or her political environment.  Spenser’s flattery of Elizabeth 1 in The Faerie Queen; the political angst of Milton’s Paradise Lost; Wordsworth’s revolutionary fervour , Dickens’ Victorian social conscience; all benefit from our understanding of contemporary values.   But what of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus?  Drawing upon mediaeval myth, renaissance freedoms and religious uncertainty, Marlowe also suggests a future with mankind standing, frighteningly, toe to toe with his God. The play seems, excitingly, to lend itself to modern interpretations that might be coloured and informed by our awareness of late sixteenth century influences but are not , necessarily,  limited by them.

And is this not perhaps the mark of any great work?  That it stands up in any context, and can be read, staged, or understood, from all perspectives?  Hamlet’s procrastination, Keats’ intense sensitivity, Wilde’s perception; all have a resonance today- different to,  but as compelling as when first read.  The appeal of Dr Faustus resides in its inherent transmutability.  Faustus himself can mean as much to modern man as he did to an Elizabethan audience…if not more.  His plight, while showing us the dangerous potential of a truly renaissance man, can resonate through the ages to represent  the trials and tribulations faced by us all in our modern lives.

Faustus is the gifted student who can’t bring himself to put Law or Medicine on his UCAS form.  Too much like hard work, too conventional.  He thinks that he is better than most- no, he’s confident he’s the best of them, and needs to have it recognised, even if it costs him everything.  His confidence is huge but there’s no Cassius Clay-style irony.  He really knows it all; his opening soliloquy is best summed up as “been there, done that”.  His fateful slide towards the gloomy cul-de-sac offered by necromancy is inexorable and inevitable.  As Cleanth Brooks nicely puts it, he’s “all dressed up with nowhere to go.” Like a demanding toddler, he asks questions to which he already knows the answers, and like two mates mixing up the party punch, Cornelius and Valdez egg Faustus on to do what they themselves dare not- then step back out of sight when hell breaks loose.  He’s on his own to face the music.   With the bravado of a joyrider, he can’t conceive of any form of responsibility, any boundaries to his excess.  It’s only when the boss comes down to threaten him with the sack that Faustus mumbles insincere acquiescence.  The boss, of course was only bluffing- good new staff are so hard to find.  Better the devil you know.  After watching a health and safety DVD, he’s passed the risk assessment and is back on the strength.  For now.

In our ever more secular society, we view Faustus’ “old wives’ tales” dismissal of a fire and brimstone hell as nothing exceptional.  When we are told, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it,” we understand, being saturated by images of horror on a daily basis.  Milton’s view in Paradise Lost, eighty years later, seems to owe much to this existential hell of Marlowe’s: "The mind is to its own place, and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven".   It’s the lingua franca; Neighbours from Hell; Heaven is the back seat of my Cadillac.  Hell and back.  Heaven sent.  It seems that today we have the freedom to play with and alter the meanings of what was sacredly set in stone five hundred years ago.   Mephistopheles retorts that, like graffiti art  praised for its anonymity, hell is defined not by what is IS, but by what it ISN’T; “all places shall be hell that is not heaven” - and in true modern terms dissuades Faustus from holy matrimony: “She whom thine eye shall like, thy heart shall have”, he states, defining modern relationships like a hippie from the summer of love turned loose in the Playboy mansion.   When he makes his offer to Faustus of countless “fairest courtesans”, Mephistopheles takes Faustus’ silence as acceptance.  Marriage is ditched in favour of promiscuous and unprotected  sex.  Maybe some tax breaks would have helped.

Tomorrow is sacrificed for today; the deceitful promise of power and freedom here and now is quickly accepted.  It is safe to say that Faustus has no pension  plan.  Taking on a 1000% short-term loan (no security required), Faustus signs in blood with the confidence and commitment of a conman’s victim, and in doing so accepts that he must pay in kind;  but like the warranty on your toaster, the bloody bond is worth less than the skin it’s written on.  It’s as flimsy as a Premier League footballer’s contract. And Faustus is conned by the legal jiggery-pokery, the small print. Pitifully, as the days draw to a close, he believes he is liable, legally, despite Lucifer’s clear failure to honour even the most basic clauses.  The deal was a non-starter from the off-  yet the loanshark’s finger hovers over the doorbell and the big boys in sunglasses get ready with baseball bats .  

When Faustus wastes his gifts, as we know he must, his slave becomes his master, his lottery winnings are spent on an overpriced and crumbling villa on the Costa Brava, sliding into negative equity.  He can’t sell it, and his Mercedes is going rusty.  He baits the Pope like a football supporter at an Easter game, (he’s a “good Protestant”, claims George Santayana), backs the wrong horses and surrounds himself with the sort of “friends” you discover you have the day after you win the lottery; they wind him up enough to provide the floorshow, which he weakly agrees to; and of course, he ends up with the strippagram himself, covered in foam, sick in the gutter.  His big ideas are pub-talk. The good angel has all the potency of a feeble Jerry Springer, an agony aunt Faustus studiously ignores; the old man becomes an impotent Victor Meldrew .  Helen of Troy  turns out to be the internet-sourced Thai-bride from hell;  but Lucifer’s impressively impatient interruptions are surely delivered complete with some 360 degree head rotating, Exorcist-style, splashed with green vomit. 

When all his credit is exhausted and nothing more can be sold on ebay, Faustus faces the final reckoning.  Buying round after round at the Last-Chance Saloon, Faustus is given many opportunities to accept and address his plight; he knows he’s on a suspended sentence and facing the ultimate penalty, but he just can’t see that the kind policeman with his well-judged warnings will soon be losing his patience .  It’s not his fault; he can blame society, astrology and his parents.  He didn’t ask to be born, did he?   When the crunch comes, he can always pull up the bedclothes and hide under the duvet.  Surely then everything will go away.  And when that crunch does come, and he sees what he’s done and what is left; “see, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament…” he’s too pig headed to accept he’s in the wrong.  He’d sooner burn the house down than give it to the wife in a divorce settlement.  His premature despair is the resignation of the football manager condemned to relegation by the numerous biased decisions of a bespectacled referee.  Obviously.

Dr Faustus works marvellously well for a modern audience.  In the past, critics have fallen over themselves  to define Faustus’ sins in terms of mid-twentieth century perspectives; Cleanth Brooks, in 1966, suggested somewhat nobly that Faustus damns himself by his “sense of legal obligation”, while Greg (writing in 1946) would have us believe that illicit sex, or “demionality” is his downfall.  In 1954 Harry Levin let Faustus off, and placed the blame squarely on the “threatening” Mephistopheles  and the “enticing” Helen.   Yet these don’t go far enough, surely.  Nicholas Brooke perhaps gets closest when he writes that Faustus cannot repent, because “his mind is directed at independence still” (1952).  In 2011, for “ independence” read arrogance; no one can tell Faustus what  to do, thank you very much.  He’ll leave the engine running while filling up at the Shell garage if he feels like it; he’ll use his mobile on the plane.  He’ll play his music as loud as he wants.  His carbon footprint is the size of a Hummer; he’ll leave off his seat belt and smoke sixty fags a day. 

Just because he can.

George Santayana “Three Philosophical Poets” (1910) pp.147-9

Cleanth Brooks, “The Unity of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus” (Faber 1966)

Harry Levin “Science Without Conscience”  from “The Overreacher” (1954)

W. W. Greg “The Damnation of Faustus” from “Modern Language Review”, XLI (1946)

Nicholas Brooke, “The Moral Tragedy of Dr Faustus”, Cambridge Journal V (1951-2)

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1

 

“Restraint she will not brook…” Milton’s Depiction of Eve in Book 9 of “Paradise Lost”.

Milton’s depiction of Eve in Paradise Lost, particularly in Book 9, continues to fascinate.  Attitudes to Eve and the part she played in the fall of man vary considerably; Milton’s intentions remain unclear. Today, Eve is seen by many as an existential rebel and a martyr to the oppressed. In an age more secular and less tolerant of discrimination her assertively defiant behaviour displaying resistance to patriarchal subjugation has, for some, come to represent nothing short of heroism.  Indeed, many late 20^th century readings can be unequivocal;  Paradise Lost is now often seen as “an epic in which a male God…continually warn(s) a male human being not to be deceived by the outward charms of a not very bright female” (Gilbert, 1978).  The accusation that Milton’s epic expresses “institutional and often elaborately metaphorical misogyny” (ibid.) has now become an accepted response to the Milton’s portrayal of Eve. 

There are counter-readings, of course; Adam’s identity, for example, presents much ambiguity and confusion.  It might be argued that Eve’s virtues are different to Adam’s without necessarily being  inferior; that her “subordination” to Adam does not necessarily mean that Milton sees all women as subordinate.  Following this line, Adam is seen to be more of a parent and less of a partner to Eve, replicating his relationship with God; “Eve’s subordination indicates…that of the daughter to her parent” (Tanimoto, 2011).  As a parent, his control over her is intuitively more dutiful; Eve’s obedience in this sense might not necessitate giving up her identity as a woman.  Adam’s advice to stay, then, is the warning of a father who, needs must, has authority over his “child”.  Yet, according to Tanimoto, Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Nagoya , to “deny Eve her free will means to go against God, who created Eve as an autonomous being…Adam does not have the right to violate Eve’s authority” (ibid.); yet as a parent, surely Adam DOES have that right.  

Another ambiguity arises if we feel that Adam is censured by God far more than Eve, leading us to the possibilty that Milton intends Adam, “consumed with self-love”, to take responsibility for the fall (see Gallagher, 1978). Whether as an over-permissive parent or a husband unwilling to be seen as overbearing, Adam’s attitudes are complex.  But, according to Tanimoto many readers ultimately still find it difficult to come to terms with Eve’s treatment by Milton who has “deprived her of her autonomous identity and trained (her) to be obedient to men by male power.” ( ibid.)

The catalyst for this modern opprobrium for Milton can be traced back to the phrase “Milton’s Bogey”- this was Virginia Woolf’s term, from “A Room of One’s Own” (1929). She left this expression unexplained, suggesting that her meaning was obvious;  that Milton’s negative depiction of women is largely offensive, making it difficult for her to enjoy the poet’s work.  While Sandra Gilbert explores a range of more ambiguous possible meanings- arguing that Woolf’s intent might not have been quite so cut and dried- she leaves us in no doubt that Milton’s depiction of Eve has left many readers, particularly “literary women…confused and intimidated”.   

Accusations of misogyny and “patriarchal aetiology” have been levelled at Milton through the ages by commentators.   In a seventeenth century culture where, typically, a husband’s “rule” over his wife was seen as an analogous to a king’s paternal sovereignty over his people (“a manifestation of a hierarchy constituted by God” (Brabcova) we might explain Milton’s inherent beliefs- without pardoning him.  Was Milton was even more rabidly patriarchal and hierarchical than his peers? And if so, to what extent did this prejudice influence, consciously or otherwise, his portrayal of Eve in Paradise Lost?  Milton’s views in his epic may be unacceptable by any standards, but, as Le Comte claims in 1947, he was, for 1660, “more moderate than many.”  The debate seems to be more about the extent to which Milton’s Chauvinism- his prejudiced belief in the superiority of his own gender- influenced his depiction of Eve, and if so, to what degree.

Accusations of overt Chauvinism can be traced back well before Paradise Lost. Readings of Milton’s History of Britain (published 1670, but written much earlier) suggest that “the consistent whole is that any manifestations of female ambition stirs, in Milton, disdain” (Le Comte, 1947).  In History he claims that under the female queen Boadicea, Britons became “Barbarians”, as there was “nothing more awry” than the notion of having a Queen on the throne. We are led to believe that Milton’s is “the voice that speaks out on the inferiority and proper subjection of women” ( Le Comte, ibid.).

The fact of his attitude, when it is related to a seventeenth century Puritan, or, more broadly, to a man of the Renaissance, calls for no apology. In common with the men of his time and those of preceding periods, and more moderately than many, he did believe that women had their "not equal" place- and should keep it. (Le COMTE, ibid.)

The tone of Samuel Johnson’s 1779 unflattering biography, “Life of Milton”, advances the theory that Milton’s relationships with women were unsuccessful; Johnson reports as typical an “obscure” remark made by Milton to his third wife: “You, like other women, want to ride in your coach; my wish is to live and die an honest man.” Johnson, later in The Life, states that Milton was “severe and arbitrary…(with a) Turkish contempt for females…”  and, possibly referring to his depiction of Eve, “thought women only made …for obedience”.  Edward Le Comte’s summary seems conclusive: “to heap up discredit upon what John Knox called ‘the monstrous regiment of women’, he will go out of his way.” (Le Comte, ibid.)

Yet by the time he immersed himself in Paradise Lost (suggests Le Comte) this bitterness against “presuming womankind” was gone, “all passion spent” (ibid).  In Divorce (1643) while his criticism of forced marriage as “savage inhumanity” is hardly revolutionary, Milton does insist upon equality in terms of divorce on the grounds of and that both men and women should be equal in this; “husband and wife stand on the same level of privilege.” But a searching cross examination might set this against comments such as “…who can be ignorant that woman was created for man, and not man for woman? “(Milton, ibid.).  And of course it is dangerous to assume that Milton was incapable of divorcing his personal beliefs from his work.  Le Comte’s point is a fair one:  “the poet in the angry outbursts of Adam…..was not ostensibly speaking in his own person but rather writing as a dramatist” (Le Comte, ibid). 

In the early part of the last century, the view that “Milton's biographers have not studied his treatment of women so thoroughly and critically that their conclusions can be relied upon” (A.Gilbert, 1920), was challenged by those such as Virginia Woolf.  We might decide that “Milton’s bogey” was coined by Woolf on the one hand in acknowledgement of the poet’s stature, but on the other to state that Milton’s position on women- as evidenced by his attitude to Eve over the fall in Book 9- prevented her from ever really embracing him.

It is in this context, then, that Milton’s Eve might be best examined.  As we have seen, much of the debate seems to suggest that Milton did not play fair and square with her. Indeed, not much of this discussion reflects well upon the poet, particularly concerning the period just after the fall, where Milton is apparently unequivocal:

                                         Thus it shall befall                                                                                                                                              Him who to worth in women overtrusting                                                                                                     Lets her will rule; restraint she will not brook,                                                                                              And left to herself, if evil thence ensue,                                                                                                        Shee first his weak indulgence will accuse.      (Book IX, lines 1181-85)                                   

 Milton gives Eve the blame, not only for selfishly seeking independence, unnaturally invading the male province of logic & reason (and being tricked easily by a talking snake!), but also for trying to pass the blame off onto Adam. 

By and large, critical analysis over the years has agreed that Eve shouldn’t take ALL the blame for the fall; yet any reprieves for Eve are only usually granted at the cost of her accepting a plea for  diminished responsibility.  A successful defence of Eve,  clearing her of the major charge, seems to necessitate accepting Milton’s suggestions that, well,  if she’s not guilty of a Machiavellian, premeditated rebellion, she must be gullible, naïve,  self-obsessed, over-trusting, headstrong, capricious, manipulative…the list goes on.  To avoid blame here, she might have to take the blame for other, more minor offences, but in the end it seems that she can’t escape shouldering a hefty burden of guilt, one way or another.

So what of the text of Book 9 itself?  At line214, ostensibly in her desire to serve God better, Eve asks Adam if they might “divide our labours”.  Is her request genuine or does it come from some deeply held desire- felt perhaps subconsciously- to seek some personal freedom?

If we now explain Eve’s behaviour as an intuitively female and subconscious response to the restraints of her patriarchal context, traditional views imply the very opposite.  Tillyard’s ‘masculinist’ reading confidently states that Eve’s request is “not sincere”. Rejecting any possibilty that she and Adam are to be seen as anything other than lovers, with Adam naturally adopting the dominant role, Tillyard believes Eve responds in the role of a submissive wife, and that her request to work alone is a teasing and coquettish example of perversity, that being “still in the honeymoon stage…the last thing that Eve wanted was to be separated” (1930).  Eve’s game leads to trouble, for Adam clearly disappoints in his response….whether we see him as husband or father.

The debate will, of course go on.  Most aspects of Paradise Lost provoke a wide range of responses, all of which taunt and tempt the reader into trying to clear the fog of ambiguity from the text.  Yet uncertainties over Eve’s guilt, Adam’s shortcomings, Satan’s guile and Milton’s motives tend to render that an impossibility.

 

“Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost” Chikako Tanimoto, University of Nagayo, 2011

“Milton's Attitude Towards Women in the History of Britain” Edward S. Le Comte  PMLA, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Dec., 1947), pp. 977-983

“ Milton on the Position of Woman”  Allan H. Gilbert The Modern Language Review, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Jan., 1920), pp. 7-27

“Marriage in Seventeenth-Century England: The Woman’s Story” Alice Brabcová

University of West Bohemia, Plzeň