8 posts tagged “reason”

[I have NO idea why VOX is creating these red fonted underlines! Drives me crazy. I can't get rid of them]

I wish I could figure out a way to combine the benefits of watching a movie based on a novel and reading the novel itself. I confess, I enjoyed the dramatized version of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga: A Man of Property, and I found a good deal of the novel tedious when I read it. But there are some passages in the novel that don’t make it through into the film that are really well written. Galsworthy is one of the first writers of the Edwardian Era to begin to seriously challenge the “suffocating” morality of the Victorian Age (and I realize that one could also parse that sentence differently and say that John Galsworthy is one of the first writers to undermine the sanctity of the Victorian family.) Passion and social order are two trains and authors like Galsworthy insist that if you can only get on one, you should choose passion. He himself had an affair and later married his cousin’s wife.

In many respects, he can be placed in the same category as Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and E.M. Forster. He’s a Rousseau who will follow through with his principles, society be damned.

In many ways, the The Man of Property could be an effective tool for teaching Victorian moral sensibilities and values. The basic story involves a wealthy family (the Forsytes) that represent what, to Galsworthy, is the problem with the Victorian family and society. They have honed their capitalist skills and neglected to invest the time it takes to be emotionally and relationally wealthy. Two cousins, Jolyon and Soames Forsyte take opposing approaches to the way they value people, things, reputation, and happiness. Soames marries to possess a beautiful woman whose principle function in his life revolves around status. Jolyon leaves his wife and is excommunicated from the family in pursuit of a natural affection he has for a domestic servant. The novel traces the arc of wisdom and/or foolishness in these two men’s lives by focusing on the life and hearts of Soames’ wife Irene and Jolyon’s daughter, June.  Through these two characters, we are given to understand how painful the life of passion can be, and yet Galsworthy would seem to indicate that there can be no other alternative if one is to live.

Throughout the novel, Galsworthy keeps returning to the Victorian perception of marriage as a matter of contract and ownership and critiquing it. Soames instinct for “possessing” his wife exceeds his momentary and ephemeral feelings of love for her. Jolyon wishes to own and be owned by no one. His soul is in his feelings and passions and he will sell them for no amount. Irene must decide if she will or will not do the same.  June has her father, Jolyon’s predisposition to throw herself entirely into her love for her beau but she suffers the excruciating agony of having done so for a man who has his heart attached elsewhere.

“But this long tale is no scientific study of a period,” we read in the preface,

“it is rather an intimate incarnation of the disturbance that Beauty effects in the lives of men. . . . The figure of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed, present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world.”

One sees this even in Soames’ proposal to Irene: “Will you do me the honor of becoming mine.” He asks. Her financial situation leaves her desperate to say no but inclined to say yeas.

“I will marry you Mr. Forsyte” she replies. HE is not her lover. He is an insurance policy.  

But unlike a piece of property, a human being is not something you own just because you buy it. “Why do you never look at me like you look at him?” Soames asks his wife years later.  “Readers, as they wade on through the salt waters of the Saga, are inclined more and more to pity Soames,” the preface explains,

“and to think that in doing so they are in revolt against the mood of his creator. Far from it! He, too, pities Soames, the tragedy of whose life is the very simple, uncontrollable tragedy of being unlovable, without quite a thick enough skin to be thoroughly unconscious of the fact. . . . taking sides, they [the reader] loses perception of the simple truth, which underlies the whole story, that where sex attraction is utterly and definitely lacking in one partner to a union, no amount of pity, or reason, or duty, or what not, can overcome a repulsion implicit in Nature. Whether it ought to, or no, is beside the point; because in fact it never does.”

As one of the characters explains, “But it’s the spark. It’s the spark you need.”

Galsworthy characterizes the marriage between Irene and Soames in the following way:

“He had left his wife sitting on the sofa in the drawing-room, her hands crossed in her lap, manifestly waiting for him to go out. This was not unusual. It happened, in fact, every day.

He could not understand what she found wrong with him. It was not as if he drank! Did he run into debt, or gamble, or swear; was he violent; were his friends rackety; did he stay out at night? On the contrary.

The profound, subdued aversion which he felt in his wife was a mystery to him, and a source of the most terrible irritation. That she had made a mistake, and did not love him, had tried to love him and could not love him, was obviously no reason.

He that could imagine so outlandish a cause for his wife's not getting on with him was certainly no Forsyte.

Soames was forced, therefore, to set the blame entirely down to his wife. He had never met a woman so capable of inspiring affection. They could not go anywhere without his seeing how all the men were attracted by her; their looks, manners, voices, betrayed it; her behavior under this attention had been beyond reproach. That she was one of those women--not too common in the Anglo-Saxon race--born to be loved and to love, who when not loving are not living, had certainly never even occurred to him. Her power of attraction, he regarded as part of her value as his property; but it made him, indeed, suspect that she could give as well as receive; and she gave him nothing! 'Then why did she marry me?' was his continual thought. He had, forgotten his courtship; that year and a half when he had besieged and lain in wait for her, devising schemes for her entertainment, giving her presents, proposing to her periodically, and keeping her other admirers away with his perpetual presence. He had forgotten the day when, adroitly taking advantage of an acute phase of her dislike to her home surroundings, he crowned his labors with success. If he remembered anything, it was the dainty capriciousness with which the gold-haired, dark-eyed girl had treated him. He certainly did not remember the look on her face- -strange, passive, appealing--when suddenly one day she had yielded, and said that she would marry him.

It had been one of those real devoted wooings which books and people praise, when the lover is at length rewarded for hammering the iron till it is malleable, and all must be happy ever after as the wedding bells.

The imagery is instructive. Irene is a castle besieged and taken. How dare she not then belong to he who breached her defenses to possess? Soames’ solution to his wife’s indifference to him is to isolate her. Essentially, to take away any other option to his company. To drive her to him by deprivation of all other sources of affection.

“To get Irene out of London, away from opportunities of going about and seeing people, away from her friends and those who put ideas into her head! That was the thing!”

In short, his goal is possession not love and for that reason, his chances of possession are doomed.

“Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its deep tints, the starry, soft-petalled roses, the ruby-coloured glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it? Gratitude was no virtue among Forsytes, who, competitive, and full of common-sense, had no occasion for it; and Soames only experienced a sense of exasperation amounting to pain, that he did not own her as it was his right to own her, that he could not, as by stretching out his hand to that rose, pluck her and sniff the very secrets of her heart.”

Galsworhty keeps returning to the theme, illustrating, by means of his ability to let us see into the mind of Soames and Irene why this marriage is not working.

“Out of his other property, out of all the things he had collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments, he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none.”

“In this house of his there was writing on every wall. His business-like temperament protested against a mysterious warning that she was not made for him. He had married this woman, conquered her, made her his own, and it seemed to him contrary to the most fundamental of all laws, the law of possession, that he could do no more than own her body--if indeed he could do that, which he was beginning to doubt. If any one had asked him if he wanted to own her soul, the question would have seemed to him both ridiculous and sentimental. But he did so want, and the writing said he never would.”

“She was ever silent, passive, gracefully averse; as though terrified lest by word, motion, or sign she might lead him to believe that she was fond of him; and he asked himself: Must I always go on like this?”

“Like most novel readers of his generation (and Soames was a great novel reader), literature coloured his view of life; and he had imbibed the belief that it was only a question of time.”

“In the end the husband always gained the affection of his wife. Even in those cases--a class of book he was not very fond of-- which ended in tragedy, the wife always died with poignant regrets on her lips, or if it were the husband who died-- unpleasant thought--threw herself on his body in an agony of remorse.”

“In Montpellier Square Soames, who had come from the picture room, stood invisible at the top of the stairs, watching Irene sort the letters brought by the last post. She turned back into the drawing-room; but in a minute came out, and stood as if listening. Then she came stealing up the stairs, with a kitten in her arms. He could see her face bent over the little beast, which was purring against her neck. Why couldn't she look at him like that?”

Over and over again, he says to his wife “I love you” but acts in such a way as to convey to her in no uncertain terms that she is his possession and that he loves himself.

“The Buccaneer [the architect who is in love with Irene] asked after you more than once,” he [Soames] said suddenly. And moved by some inexplicable desire to assert his proprietorship, he rose from his chair and planted a kiss on his wife’s shoulder.”

Does he think that she cannot feel what he is saying? Why can’t she look at him with affection? He keeps asking the question but can never seem to answer it. The answer of course is that Soames has banished passion from his conscious life. And without it, he does not really exist. And without existing, he really can not hope to be noticed, much less loved or adored.

“Forsytes, as is generally admitted, have shells, like that extremely useful little animal which is made into Turkish delight, in other words, they are never seen, or if seen would not be recognized, without habitats, composed of circumstance, property, acquaintances, and wives, which seem to move along with them in their passage through a world composed of thousands of other Forsytes with their habitats. Without a habitat a Forsyte is inconceivable--he would be like a novel without a plot, which is well-known to be an anomaly.”

The long and the short of it was that Irene married Soames for all sort of excellent Victorian reasons. He was wealthy. She was destitute. Her beauty for his protection. The marriage was more a business deal than an affectation from the very beginning. I often wonder, when the Bible says “What God has joined together, let no man separate” is it also implying that what God has not joined together should not be joined in marriage? When God places an attachment between people, does it happen at the ceremony or long before?  In the case of Irene and Soames, Irene knows it is a mistake. But Victorian society gave her no skills, no means of independent sustenance. All she can do is enter the arrangement with a promise from him that he will let her out if she cannot make it work.  “Will you let me go?” she later pleads with Soames, “You promised you would let me go if our marriage was not a success. Is it a success?”

“Behave yourself and it would be.” He replies.

To which she can only say “Of course I won’t.”

One of my favorite passages in the novel expresses Galsworthy’s conviction that love has a will of its own. It cannot be bought or purchased in the market. It is not for sale and it is not the servant of anyone’s whim, whether they have money or not.

“The situation which at this stage might seem, and especially to Forsyte eyes, strange--not to say 'impossible'--was, in view of certain facts, not so strange after all. Some things had been lost sight of. And first, in the security bred of many harmless marriages, it had been forgotten that Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and color are always, wild! And further--the facts and figures of their own lives being against the perception of this truth--it was not generally recognized by Forsytes that, where, this wild plant springs, men and women are but moths around the pale, flame-like blossom.”

“There is a line in the world,” one of my mentors once told me. “Above the line are people. Below the line are things. People are to be loved. Things are to be used. One should never confuse the two.” There are few people who can live on a diet of being used as though it were a diet of being loved and Irene is not one of them.

Jolyon had paid dearly for his decision to “give all for love” but years later, the family members that cast him out for his refusal to follow out his duty in his loveless marriage slowly come to question the rightness of their decision. James Forsyte is a case in point.

“James had passed through the fire, but he had passed also through the river of years which washes out the fire; he had experienced the saddest experience of all--forgetfulness of what it was like to be in love. Forgotten! Forgotten so long, that he had forgotten even that he had forgotten.”

Again, Galsworthy lets us in on the Victorian mind of Soames Forsyte as he contemplates the possibility of divorce.

“A scandal! A possible scandal!

To repeat this word to himself thus was the only way in which he could focus or make it thinkable. He had forgotten the sensations necessary for understanding the progress, fate, or meaning of any such business; he simply could no longer grasp the possibilities of people running any risk for the sake of passion.

Amongst all those persons of his acquaintance, who went into the City day after day and did their business there, whatever it was, and in their leisure moments bought shares, and houses, and ate dinners, and played games, as he was told, it would have seemed to him ridiculous to suppose that there were any who would run risks for the sake of anything so recondite, so figurative, as passion.

Passion! He seemed, indeed, to have heard of it, and rules such as 'A young man and a young woman ought never to be trusted together' were fixed in his mind as the parallels of latitude are fixed on a map (for all Forsytes, when it comes to 'bed-rock' matters of fact, have quite a fine taste in realism); but as to anything else--well, he could only appreciate it at all through the catch-word 'scandal.'”

What is fascinating is that even as the pursuit of passion seems to destroy the lives of the people in the novel who pursue it, the author celebrates the pursuit even more. The musical score of the film is always celebratory when people live out their “real” [read, emotional] intentions. “There are moments when Nature reveals the passion hidden beneath the careless calm of her ordinary moods” writes Galsworthy,

“--violent spring flashing white on almond-blossom through the purple clouds; a snowy, moonlit peak, with its single star, soaring up to the passionate blue; or against the flames of sunset, an old yew-tree standing dark guardian of some fiery secret.”

But Soames cannot see this. There is no place for this sort of chaos in his ordered universe.

“God forbid that he should know anything about the forces of Nature! God forbid that he should admit for a moment that there are such things! Once admit that, and where was he?”

Forsytes are deceived by their economic and class advantages into believing that they are a superior species to the “commoners” that live on the lower plane of human instinct and passion. They have “risen above all that”. They shrink from the notion that they are every bit the equal of the lower classes as a bat would shrink from noonday sun.  

“The look which June had seen [in the affection between Irene and the architect, Bossiney], which other Forsytes had seen, was like the sudden flashing of a candle through a hole in some imaginary canvas, behind which it was being moved--the sudden flaming-out of a vague, erratic glow, shadowy and enticing. It brought home to onlookers the consciousness that dangerous forces were at work. For a moment they noticed it with pleasure, with interest, then felt they must not notice it at all.”

To Jolyon, the order loving Forsytes are crucial to the functioning of society. Their virtues are precisely what leads to the money that funds the people who want to live their lives in more passionate pursuits. “At a low estimate, three-fourths of our Royal Academicians are Forsytes,” Jolyon tells Bosinney,

“seven- eighths of our novelists, a large proportion of the press. Of science I can't speak; they are magnificently represented in religion; in the House of Commons perhaps more numerous than anywhere; the aristocracy speaks for itself. But I'm not laughing. It is dangerous to go against the majority and what a majority!" He fixed his eyes on Bosinney: "It's dangerous to let anything carry you away--a house, a picture, a--woman!"

Dangerous. But perhaps not prohibitively so. As Jolyon knows, it is also dangerous NOT to go against the majority and the Forsyte ethic or self-protection and emotional restraint.

"My people," replied young Jolyon, "are not very extreme, and they have their own private peculiarities, like every other family, but they possess in a remarkable degree those two qualities which are the real tests of a Forsyte--the power of never being able to give yourself up to anything soul and body, and the 'sense of property'."

Once again, Galsworthy returns to the subject of marriage as ownership. Jolyon gets into a Tevya-like Fidder-on-the-Roof style “on-the-other-hand” argument with himself about what to advise Bosinney.

“Then, too, he distrusted his judgment. He had been through the experience himself, had tasted too the dregs the bitterness of an unhappy marriage, and how could he take the wide and dispassionate view of those who had never been within sound of the battle? His evidence was too first-hand--like the evidence on military matters of a soldier who has been through much active service, against that of civilians who have not suffered the disadvantage of seeing things too close. Most people would consider such a marriage as that of Soames and Irene quite fairly successful; he had money, she had beauty; it was a case for compromise. There was no reason why they should not jog along, even if they hated each other. It would not matter if they went their own ways a little so long as the decencies were observed--the sanctity of the marriage tie, of the common home, respected. Half the marriages of the upper classes were conducted on these lines: Do not offend the susceptibilities of Society; do not offend the susceptibilities of the Church. To avoid offending these is worth the sacrifice of any private feelings. The advantages of the stable home are visible, tangible, so many pieces of property; there is no risk in the statu quo. To break up a home is at the best a dangerous experiment, and selfish into the bargain.

This was the case for the defense, and young Jolyon sighed.

'The core of it all,' he thought, 'is property, but there are many people who would not like it put that way. To them it is "the sanctity of the marriage tie"; but the sanctity of the marriage tie is dependent on the sanctity of the family, and the sanctity of the family is dependent on the sanctity of property. And yet I imagine all these people are followers of One who never owned anything. It is curious!

And again young Jolyon sighed.”

Property. Ownership. Can real relationships really thrive in the formaldehyde of this kind of social bondage? The relationship between Soames and Irene is Galsworthy’s answer.

“Soames was silent for some minutes; at last he said: "I don't know what your idea of a wife's duty is. I never have known!"

He had not expected her to reply, but she did.

"I have tried to do what you want; it's not my fault that I haven't been able to put my heart into it."

"Whose fault is it, then?" He watched her askance.

"Before we were married you promised to let me go if our marriage was not a success. Is it a success?"

Soames frowned.

"Success," he stammered--"it would be a success if you behaved yourself properly!"

"I have tried," said Irene. "Will you let me go?"

Soames turned away. Secretly alarmed, he took refuge in bluster.

"Let you go? You don't know what you're talking about. Let you go? How can I let you go? We're married, aren't we? Then, what are you talking about? For God's sake, don't let's have any of this sort of nonsense! Get your hat on, and come and sit in the Park."

"Then, you won't let me go?"

He felt her eyes resting on him with a strange, touching look.

"Let you go!" he said; "and what on earth would you do with yourself if I did? You've got no money!"

"I could manage somehow."

He took a swift turn up and down the room; then came and stood before her.

"Understand," he said, "once and for all, I won't have you say this sort of thing. Go and get your hat on!"

She did not move.

"I suppose," said Soames, "you don't want to miss Bosinney if he comes!"

Irene got up slowly and left the room. She came down with her hat on.

They went out.

Property. Contracts. Reason. Order. Duty. Listen to this description of Mrs. Baynes, Bosinney’s aunt:

“She believed, as she often said, in putting things on a commercial basis; the proper function of the Church, of charity, indeed, of everything, was to strengthen the fabric of 'Society.' Individual action, therefore, she considered immoral. Organization was the only thing, for by organization alone could you feel sure that you were getting a return for your money. Organization--and again, organization!

“The enterprises to which she lent her name were organized so admirably that by the time the takings were handed over, they were indeed skim milk divested of all cream of human kindness. But as she often justly remarked, sentiment was to be deprecated. She was, in fact, a little academic.

This great and good woman, so highly thought of in ecclesiastical circles, was one of the principal priestesses in the temple of Forsyteism, keeping alive day and night a sacred flame to the God of Property, whose altar is inscribed with those inspiring words: 'Nothing for nothing, and really remarkably little for sixpence.' . . . People who knew her felt her to be sound--a sound woman, who never gave herself away, nor anything else, if she could possibly help it.”

Property. Contracts. Expectations. Duty. Forsytes and their friends expect to pay something and get something. They do not enter into relationships on some tidal wave of passion that they cannot predict.

“Nothing in this world is more sure to upset a Forsyte than the discovery that something on which he has stipulated to spend a certain sum has cost more. And this is reasonable, for upon the accuracy of his estimates the whole policy of his life is ordered. If he cannot rely on definite values of property, his compass is amiss; he is adrift upon bitter waters without a helm.”

And for this reason, they cannot understand those whose hearts must have all of life and all of their lover’s love or nothing. James, a friend of the Forsytes, takes Irene out for a drive to see if he can talk some Victorian sense into her. The following conversation ensues.

“It was not before he had got her more than half way that [James] began: "Soames is very fond of you--he won't have anything said against you; why don't you show him more affection?"

Irene flushed, and said in a low voice: "I can't show what I haven't got."

James looked at her sharply; he felt that now he had her in his own carriage, with his own horses and servants, he was really in command of the situation. She could not put him off; nor would she make a scene in public.

"I can't think what you're about," he said. "He's a very good husband!"

Irene's answer was so low as to be almost inaudible among the sounds of traffic. He caught the words: "You are not married to him!"

"What's that got to do with it? He's given you everything you want. He's always ready to take you anywhere, and now he's built you this house in the country. It's not as if you had anything of your own."

"No."

Again James looked at her; he could not make out the expression on her face. She looked almost as if she were going to cry, and yet....

"I'm sure," he muttered hastily, "we've all tried to be kind to you."

Irene's lips quivered; to his dismay James saw a tear steal down her cheek. He felt a choke rise in his own throat.

"We're all fond of you," he said, "if you'd only"--he was going to say, "behave yourself," but changed it to--"if you'd only be more of a wife to him."

Irene did not answer, and James, too, ceased speaking. There was something in her silence which disconcerted him; it was not the silence of obstinacy, rather that of acquiescence in all that he could find to say. And yet he felt as if he had not had the last word. He could not understand this.”

It is only a matter of time before Soames begins to reveal the actual nature of his relationship with his wife -What Irene has known almost from the beginning. What the Forsyte family has been able to avoid seeing, in time, comes to the surface.

“Soames gripped her arm. "A good beating," he said, "is the only thing that would bring you to your senses," but turning on his heel, he left the room.”

When he thinks of the possibility of divorcing or being divorced, he again cannot seem to think of it in any other terms but that of a “loss of property.” To him, she is a painting that he should hate to have stolen from him. He likes to look at it. To have it.  

“A divorce! Thus close, the word was paralyzing, so utterly at variance with all the principles that had hitherto guided his life. Its lack of compromise appalled him; he felt--like the captain of a ship, going to the side of his vessel, and, with his own hands throwing over the most precious of his bales. This jettisoning of his property with his own hand seemed uncanny to Soames. It would injure him in his profession: He would have to get rid of the house at Robin Hill, on which he had spent so much money, so much anticipation--and at a sacrifice. And she! She would no longer belong to him, not even in name! She would pass out of his life, and he--he should never see her again!”

Soames Forsyte’s next step is critical. He opts to exert his “ownership rights.” She elects to respond by leaving. And in an act of unmistakable symbolic expression, she asserts her refusal to be owned by taking none of his resources with her.

“He stooped over the drawer where she kept her jewels; it was not locked, and came open as he pulled; the jewel box had the key in it. This surprised him until he remembered that it was sure to be empty. He opened it.

It was far from empty. Divided, in little green velvet compartments, were all the things he had given her, even her watch, and stuck into the recess that contained--the watch was a three-cornered note addressed 'Soames Forsyte,' in Irene's handwriting:

'I think I have taken nothing that you or your people have given me.' And that was all.

He looked at the clasps and bracelets of diamonds and pearls, at the little flat gold watch with a great diamond set in sapphires, at the chains and rings, each in its nest, and the tears rushed up in his eyes and dropped upon them.

Nothing that she could have done, nothing that she had done, brought home to him like this the inner significance of her act. For the moment, perhaps, he understood nearly all there was to understand--understood that she loathed him, that she had loathed him for years, that for all intents and purposes they were like people living in different worlds, that there was no hope for him, never had been; even, that she had suffered--that she was to be pitied.

In that moment of emotion he betrayed the Forsyte in him--forgot himself, his interests, his property--was capable of almost anything; was lifted into the pure ether of the selfless and unpractical.

Such moments pass quickly.”

A Man of Property ends with Soames trying to understand the relationship between his view of Irene and his pain.

“And Soames thought: 'Why is all this? Why should I suffer so? What have I done? It is not my fault!'

Soames thought: 'Suffering! when will it cease, my suffering?'

If only he could surrender to the thought: 'Let her go--she has suffered enough!'

If only he could surrender to the desire: 'Make a slave of her-- she is in your power!'

If only even he could surrender to the sudden vision: 'What does it all matter?' Forget himself for a minute, forget that it mattered what he did, forget that whatever he did he must sacrifice something.

If only he could act on an impulse!

He could forget nothing; surrender to no thought, vision, or desire; it was all too serious; too close around him, an unbreakable cage.”

And that, I suspect, is how John Galsworthy viewed Victorian society.

As anyone who reads this blog will know, I have an interest in historical drama and a particular interest in the subject of how directors seek to contain their interpretations to historical accuracies or to simply make use of history as they receive it for ideas about good plot lines. Napoleon is famous for saying that History is the set of asserted facts that people agree to accept and so it is particularly intriguing to watch a movie about the last days of Napoleon that basically conforms itself to the director's emotional wishes. Monsieur N is filmed on St. Helena and gives a profoundly accurate picture of what Napoleon's life in exile would have looked like while at the same time constructing a story that considers the possibility that he escaped to live a life of ease on a Louisiana plantation.

The central non-Napoleonic character in the movie is the the young aide de camp, Basil Heathcote who many years later pieces together evidence to suggest that Napoleon may well have bribed and conned his way off St. Helena. Basil would have it so and explains why in the movie's final words.

"Why was my mind trying to gather so much evidence [that Napoleon had escaped]? Why was it stubbornly turning its back on reason? Was it, as the emperor used to say 'man's passion for the fabulous working within me?' If my mind were to prove that part of my being still poisoned by reason that all this was not merely a dream? Who then was this Mr. Labell whom I had so easily started calling Mr. Abbe so delighted I was by the metaphor? I wanted to believe that the emperor didn't die stupidly at St. Helena. Had he won his final battle? Had he died a free man or rather chained to his rock? My mind still refuses to answer that question today. Choosing would mean accepting to become reasonable and I wish the limits of that prison on no man."

Western societies have, since the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, felt a certain amount of loyalty to reason - to evidence - to facts. "Facts are stubborn things" said John Adams in his unpopular defense of the British soldiers who fired their guns in self-defense at the "Boston Massacre" ... and the implication is that they should be. Monsieur N asks us to consider working backwards into the evidence from our wishes. Director by Antoine de Caunes does not want someone as great as Napoleon wasting away in a useless exile on St. Helena and thus he constructs a story that resists that conclusion. In short, he refuses to become reasonable, finding the imposition of such limits a prison that no man should accept - at least not easily. If there is the slightest hope that things happened differently than the official story says they did, why not take advantage?

It begs the question. Has our commitment to reason become an exile from happiness? Are we likely to live happier lives unharnessed from evidence?

Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway can, I confess, be tedious to read. Indeed, it was tedious. Sometimes, it felt like I imagine a hunter might feel like, sitting in a tree stand scrutinizing the forest for every movement for hours on end, wondering when a particular movement will turn out to not be simply a breeze in the trees but an actual deer. You look up to take aim and it is gone, a moment of meaning-rich opportunity in a landscape of triviality. Single moments of what one wishes all of life could be.

Throughout the novel, the brains of the characters are constantly chattering and murmuring like the never-ending sound of a brook running or like the chimes of a clock you hear so often you stop hearing . . . and every so often, the heart can be seen through it if the rest has not put you to sleep. A s Lady Rosseter says right at the end, “What does the brain matter, compared with the heart?"

“For this is the truth about our soul, [Peter] thought, our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves ...”

It is hard to think of a better way to describe what it feels like to read this novel. Flashes of pure heart are revealed in a sea of internal and external conversation that can hardly be distinguished from “noise”. “Nothing has really happened until it has been described” Virginia Wolf once said, but so much of what she describes seems so abominably unworthy of remembering (to me). People in the novel are grasping at the moments of their lives that gave them joy and regretting the rest – they simply pass time. Do I really need to know everything that everyone is thinking in this novel? When it barely matters to them? As Woolf wrote to painter Jacques Raverat, it is "precisely the task of the writer to go beyond the formal railway line of sentence and to show how people feel or think or dream . . . all over the place.'"

At the heart of this story lies two people who had once been in love (perhaps), reflecting years later, on what they meant to each other, why they had acted as they had in forsaking one another, and what they were to each other now. It seems evident that Clarissa thinks her greatest happiness would have been found in a life with her best friend Sally (who she thinks of when thinking back to her happiest memory) but as this cannot even be considered, she ruminates about her decision to marry Richard Dalloway instead of Peter Walsh. Clarissa explains her decision to herself in the following words:

“So she would still find herself arguing in St. James's Park, still making out that she had been right--and she had too--not to marry him.  For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.  (Where was he this morning for instance?  Some committee, she never asked what.)  But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish; and then the horror of the moment when some one told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the boat going to India!”

“She could see what she lacked.  It was not beauty; it was not mind.  It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. . . . They had always this queer power of communicating without words.”

In their brief meeting, her conscious thoughts wander from reminders of why she could not have lived with Peter to the conviction that she had never been able to live without him:

“Feeling as she sat back extraordinarily at her ease with him and light-hearted, all in a clap it came over her, If I had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day! It was all over for her.”

And though he speaks to her in the same meeting of his work, his travels, his marriage, his present affections for another woman, he can't escape what he has never been able to escape:

“Beneath, she was . . . purely feminine; with that extraordinary gift, that woman's gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be.  She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her.  But it was Clarissa one remembered. . . . Clarissa was pure-hearted; that was it.  Peter would think her sentimental.  So she was.  For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying--what one felt.  Cleverness was silly.  One must say simply what one felt. . . . One could not be in love twice, he said.”

Niether of them  really escape the first original “something” that had been there from the start. Despite years of burying it in other things, in activity, in other people, in endless hours of reflections about life, about people, about the environment, the weather.

“After that, how unbelievable death was!--that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . .”

The novel ends with the following lines.

"I will come," said Peter, but he sat on for a moment.  What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself.  What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.

For there she was.”

The fact that Clarissa is probably gay (as was Virginia Woolf) would have made it all impossible though and for that reason, I find myself asking “Why read this novel” - so full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

Earlier today, I watched the movie The Hours (the original title of Virginia Woolf's novel). It is a story about three women in three different eras. They each find themselves “stuck”. They each loved by someone who deserves their love but who they cannot love completely and unreservedly. Virginia Woolf (played by Nicole Kidman) has a husband who is devoted to her but she cannot reciprocate his devotion. He has permission to try but not to succeed. I felt for him. Laura Brown (played by Jullianne Moore) has a husband and child who adores her but she cannot reciprocate. He too has permission to try but not to succeed. Clarissa Vaughn (played by Meryl Streep) loves her best friend, Richard, but the two of them were apparently unable to navigate their attractions to people of their own respective genders and cannot be everything to each other as one suspects they would have wanted to.
 
It is a profoundly sad movie really. It is about the horrible dilemma of people who find themselves trapped loving those they cannot love entirely, being loved by those who they cannot respond in kind to. Commitments that can never work. It is about the pain of abandoning what you love more than anything else.

If the book and the movie can help people to navigate out of this swamp, more power to them.

Question for Comment: In Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Bottom tells Tatania that "reason and love keep little company together now-a-days". Is this still the case?

"Because how much you are to me depends upon how much I am to you," said she in low tones.

Ahhh … Under the Greenwood Tree. Another period piece inspired by, but not following too closely, the story of the same name written by Thomas Hardy. Like many novels of the period (1872), Hardy’s work challenged the conventions of Victorian-era matchmaking – conventions that require one to marry “at level or up” and almost always with parental permission and subsequent to some form of negotiation, not simply between the lovers but principally between the suitor and the suitor’s object’s father. Invariably, the young maiden must face her perilous choice, and Miss Fancy Day, “as neat a little figure of fun as ever I seen, and just husband-high” of this story is no different.

Will she have the virulent (but poor) man (Dick Dewey), the wealthy (but aged) man (Mr. Shiner), or the cultured (but reticent) man (Parson Maybold)? I would of course not wish to spoil the plot for anyone interested yet uninitiated so I will not reveal the secret here. But suffice it to say that the one that says “so much for propriety and convention” is the one that wins out in the end. A warning to all those who make or follow rules for love perhaps?

Thomas Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure, ironically, apparently violated so many Victorian principles and was so strongly condemned that Hardy never wrote another. I would just note in addition that Thomas. Hardy married his secretary, 39 years his junior when he was 74 and they were married for 13 years. One wonders if Hardy believed that all rule-making in affairs of love and passion were doomed to be detrimental to people or just Victorian rules. It is an interesting question. If you watch the movie, you will see that there is a good deal of passionate “cart” going on before the marital “horse” but the book seems to indicate in subtle inflections that things between the young lovers were a bit more energetic that even the movie lets on.

Much of the plot of the book revolves around music and music serves as Hardy’s metaphor I think for other changes that he is proposing. Even as a new instrument is installed in the church for music, discarding the “town band”, new ideas for matrimonial pair-bonding are being introduced and experimented with by the villages youth.

“Fancy was dancing with Mr. Shiner.  Dick knew that Fancy, by the law of good manners, was bound to dance as pleasantly with one partner as with another; yet he could not help suggesting to himself that she need not have put quite so much spirit into her steps, nor smiled quite so frequently whilst in the farmer's hands.”

And thus you can see the plot line unfolding. When did love ever agree to play by convention? After the dance, Dick bemoans the fact that dance rules do not apply to life:

“"What a difference!" thought the young man--hoary cynic pro tem.  "What a miserable deceiving difference between the manners of a maid's life at dancing times and at others!  Look at this lovely Fancy!  Through the whole past evening touchable, squeezeable--even kissable!  For whole half- hours I held her so chose to me that not a sheet of paper could have been shipped between us; and I could feel her heart only just outside my own, her life beating on so close to mine, that I was aware of every breath in it.  A flit is made upstairs--a hat and a cloak put on--and I no more dare to touch her than--"  Thought failed him, and he returned to realities.”

What are the “realities” of love at this age? I think Thomas Hardy’s message is that love of the physical and even erotic kind cannot be “civilized” into Victorian conventions and that perhaps, there is something even in the young women who wish to be seen playing by the rules, that is attracted to the boys that don't. In his book, Jude the Obscure, Hardy invents the word “erotolepsy” to describe the feeling of being physically crazy with wanting someone. (This should not be confused with the actual word, “erotomania” which simply means that you suffer from delusions of being loved” - something that I cannot confess to suffering at the moment. Grin.) What I find interesting about the novel is not simply the way that Miss Day flirts with and doesn’t flirt with each of these three gentlemen, testing their various passion levels and side benefits, but also the way they seem to respect or refuse to respect each other in their suits. Mr. Shiner is dismissive of Dick Dewey but he does have good manners enough to take “no” for an answer, (unlike Dick Dewey). Parson Maybold on the other hand is respectful of Mr. Shiner and of Mr. Dewey when he learns of him. Perhaps even too respectful.

“But this was an endurable misery in comparison with what followed.  Mr. Shiner and his watch-chain, taking the intrusive advantage that ardent bachelors who are going homeward along the same road as a pretty young woman always do take of that circumstance, came forward to assure Fancy--with a total disregard of Dick's emotions, and in tones which were certainly not frigid--that he (Shiner) was not the man to go to bed before seeing his Lady Fair safe within her own door--not he, nobody should say he was that;--and that he would not leave her side an inch till the thing was done--drown him if he would.”

I cannot I fear continue without plot spoiling so, reader be warned. Each of these suitors has something going for him but only Dick Dewey has the requisite amount of infatuation stupidity. That’s the short of it. He TRIES to be appropriate. He really does. But ultimately, his affections make him fearless of being silly. “But the hour came when the patience of love at twenty-one could endure no longer.” And it is this impatience that Fancy Day appears to succumb to.  

“Dick wondered how it was that when people were married they could be so blind to romance; and was quite certain that if he ever took to wife that dear impossible Fancy, he and she would never be so dreadfully practical and undemonstrative of the Passion as his father and mother were.  The most extraordinary thing was, that all the fathers and mothers he knew were just as undemonstrative as his own.”

Much there is in this observation for discussion between the young and their parents. Dick Dewey confesses that his mind was “a chaos of imagery and excitement.” Both Mr. Shiner and Parson Maybold include with their suits ample assurances that they are thinking about Fancy Day’s future and how to make it a happy one. Dick Dewey … well … He just wants her and can’t imagine anyone being happier than they will be when they are with someone that wants her as much as he does. That seems to be his argument.

His own father is somewhat amazed at the power of his romantic enthusiasms. Perhaps because he [the father] envisions a world, fast receding into obscurity, where young women make decisions with their fathers in rational ways. “When I eyed the blue frock and light heels o' the maid, I had my thoughts directly,” he says, “ 'God bless thee, Dicky my sonny,' I said to myself; 'there's a delusion for thee!'"

Mr. Shiner and Parson Maybold are smitten, but Dick is a lost man!

“”Ay," said the tranter, still gazing at Dick's unconscious advance. "I don't at all like what I see!  There's too many o' them looks out of the winder without noticing anything; too much shining of boots; too much peeping round corners; too much looking at the clock; telling about clever things she did till you be sick of it; and then upon a hint to that effect a horrible silence about her.  I've walked the path once in my life and know the country, neighbours; and Dick's a lost man!"

Ultimately, trying to make a pair bond while you are overflowing hormones out the bilges is probably not unlike trying to dock a sailboat in a hurricane. Everything keeps moving too fast, sometimes too fast to think. “Now, Dick, this is how a maid is,” says the tantor,

“She'll swear she's dying for thee, and she is dying for thee, and she will die for thee; but she'll fling a look over t'other shoulder at another young feller, though never leaving off dying for thee just the same."

"She's not dying for me, and so she didn't fling a look at him."

"But she may be dying for him, for she looked at thee."

"I don't know what to make of it at all," said Dick gloomily.

"All I can make of it is," the tranter said, raising his whip, arranging his different joints and muscles, and motioning to the horse to move on, "that if you can't read a maid's mind by her motions, nature d'seem to say thou'st ought to be a bachelor.  Clk, clk!  Smiler!"  And the tranter moved on.”

I will say it again. Mr. Shiner and the Parsons, they are disappointed when they come to the realization that Fancy Day fancies someone else. But Dick Dewey doesn’t bother being disappointed because for him, she is a matter of life and death. He doesn’t bother to fathom not having what to him is non-negotiable. He is, in other words, “lost”.

"Fancy, why can't you answer?" he repeated [when she is asked about her feelings about Mr. Shiner],

"Because how much you are to me depends upon how much I am to you," said she in low tones.

"Say you love me, Fancy."

"No, Dick, certainly not; 'tisn't time to do that yet."

"Why, Fancy?"

"'Miss Day' is better at present--don't mind my saying so; and I ought not to have called you Dick."

"Nonsense! when you know that I would do anything on earth for your love. Why, you make any one think that loving is a thing that can be done and undone, and put on and put off at a mere whim."

"No, no, I don't," she said gently; "but there are things which tell me I ought not to give way to much thinking about you, even if--"

"But you want to, don't you?  Yes, say you do; it is best to be truthful. Whatever they may say about a woman's right to conceal where her love lies, and pretend it doesn't exist, and things like that, it is not best; I do know it, Fancy.  And an honest woman in that, as well as in all her daily concerns, shines most brightly, and is thought most of in the long- run."

"Well then, perhaps, Dick, I do love you a little," she whispered tenderly; "but I wish you wouldn't say any more now."

"I won't say any more now, then, if you don't like it, dear.  But you do love me a little, don't you?"

"Now you ought not to want me to keep saying things twice; I can't say any more now, and you must be content with what you have."

Dick Dewey is not the sort to be contented. He does not have an “approach”. He does not come with a “suit” or a “proposal” or an “offer.” He comes with desire traveling faster than the speed of sound and leaves a trail of sonic booms behind him. Upon Fancy’s confession of her affection for him, Hardy writes:  

 “It is scarcely necessary to add that Dick renounced his freedom there and then, and kissed her ten times over, and promised that no pretty woman of the kind alluded to should ever engross his thoughts; in short, that though he had been vexed with her, all such vexation was past, and that henceforth and for ever it was simply Fancy or death for him.”

 Really, the whole matter is summed up nicely in the conversation that Fancy has with Mr. Shiner  about his proposal:

"You don't accept attentions very freely."

"It depends upon who offers them."

"A fellow like me, for instance."  A dead silence.

"Well, what do you say, Missie?"

"It then depends upon how they are offered."

"Not wildly, and yet not careless-like; not purposely, and yet not by chance; not too quick nor yet too slow."

"How then?" said Fancy.

"Coolly and practically," he said.  "How would that kind of love be taken?"

"Not anxiously, and yet not indifferently; neither blushing nor pale; nor religiously nor yet quite wickedly."

"Well, how?"

"Not at all."

"Not at all" This is the difference between St. Preux and Mr. Wolmar in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s The New Heloise [See HERE]. Womar’s love makes sense to him. St. Preux’s wrecks havoc on him.

I need to draw this to a close. There is one respect in which the movie and the book differ significantly and I think it needs to be pointed out. In the book, Fancy Day, enamored of the possibilities of travel and culture and status, accepts Parson Maybold’s proposal (in the movie, she doesn’t). It takes her somewhat by surprise, “As a person who has been idly amusing himself with rolling a snowball might start at finding he had set in motion an avalanche, so did Fancy start at these words from the vicar.” But within the day, she has recovered her senses (or lost them depending on whether you follow the St. Preux School or the Wolmar school of romantic notions) and she writes him a fine letter of retraction. "DEAR MR. MAYBOLD,” she writes:

“--I have been thinking seriously and sadly through  the whole of the night of the question you put to me last evening and  of my answer.  That answer, as an honest woman, I had no right to  give. It is my nature--perhaps all women's--to love refinement of mind and manners; but even more than this, to be ever fascinated with the idea of surroundings more elegant and pleasing than those which have been customary.  And you praised me, and praise is life to me.  It was alone my sensations at these things which prompted my reply.  Ambition and vanity they would be called; perhaps they are so. After this explanation I hope you will generously allow me to withdraw the answer I too hastily gave. And one more request.  To keep the meeting of last night, and all that passed between us there, forever a secret.  Were it to become  known, it would utterly blight the happiness of a trusting and generous man, whom I love still, and shall love always.--Yours   sincerely,

FANCY DAY.”

As she says in the movie, ““I do believe I know what love is and what I feel for you is not it. Forgive me.”

Question for Comment: It seems like many an unsatisfying relationship has been the result of too little respect for Jean Jacques Rousseau’s elevation of romantic and passionate intensity in evaluating suitors. Perhaps it can also be said that many an unsatisfying relationship has been the result of too much respect for the same. Which do you think is the greater danger for a young person in that phase of life?   

“Passion is sanity” says Mr. Emerson in E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View. I was reminded of that scene in Star Wars where the spirit of Obi Wan Kenobe tells Luke Skywalker to shut off his X Wing fighter’s instrumentation panel and “trust his feelings” to find the precise moment to launch the missile that will destroy the Death Star and Save the Resistance from annihilation. “I forbid you to consult the Baedeker. You should consult your feelings here” Lucy Honeychurch is advised in A Room With a View, and the advice Lucy is given throughout the novel is consistent with that simple injunction, though with the understanding that “Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”

Forster keeps returning to the use of the word “muddled” as he brings his main character, Lucy, through the stormy sea of late adolescence and early adulthood. She is sent to Italy with a chaperone and the clear instruction to find a perfect Victorian husband with whom to live a perfect Victorian life and yet she discovers that Italy and the people that she meets there muddle everything. Her feelings don’t follow the channels that her society has dug for her to run into. Everyone, it seems, has a different idea about how she gets muddled, but they all know that she is getting so. Here are just a few examples.

“It isn't possible to love and to part. You will ... wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal” (19.42).

“[…] let yourself go. You are inclined to get muddled, ... if I may judge from last night. Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them” (2.43).

“And she spoke so seriously that the risk became a certainty, and he, lifting his eyes, said: “You are leaving him? You are leaving the man you love?”
I—I had to.
“why, Miss Honeychurch, why?”
Terror came over her, and she lied again. She made the long, convincing speech that she had made to Mr. Beebe, and intended to make to the world when she announced that her engagement was no more. He heard her in silence, and then said: “My dear, I am worried about you. It seems to me” — dreamily; she was not alarmed — “that you are in a muddle.
She shook her head.
“Take an old man's word; there’s nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. lt is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror — on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle.”

What clearly needs to happen before Lucy Honeychurch starts making decisions and promises that affect other people is this. She needs to figure out, in the abstract, what weights she will place on the various influences that affect her decisions. Will her feelings weigh 50%, her familiy’s opinions weigh 30% and her reason weigh 20%? Or will she construct some other recipe more like 30-30-30? “This solitude oppressed her;” the character, Lucy observes. “She was accustomed to have her ... thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted; it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.”

And there is the rub, Lucy. There is no weighting of influences that will provide you with a right answer every time. So in matters of the heart, where no retreat from the decision is possible, aim to have your head, your heart, and your family all at a 100% agreement. And have a good reason why not if that can’t be the case.

In the end, E.M. Forster speaks through Mr. Emerson (a slightly veiled allusion to Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote the Bible of the transcendental self making decisions in his essay Self Reliance), the essential thing is to know that you love and are loved:

“When I think what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; Marry him; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”

Or as the book of Song of Solomon puts it “I am my beloved’s and he is mine” … It seems like that is the sort of love that even God cannot help but celebrate. And I guess He should weigh more than anyone.

Think, feel, pray, listen … do all these things. Just don’t pretend.

“It did not do to think, nor, for the matter ... of that to feel. She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue […] Lucy entered this army when she pretended to George that she did not love him, and pretended to Cecil that she loved no one. The night received her, as it had received Miss Bartlett thirty years before (17.54-5).

One must assume that on the way to truth there will be muddlement. We must bear with it long enough to be allowed to see. To be allowed to grow up. Which is really simply the act of coming to see. Like learning to wait before walking after getting dizzy.

“Lucy cried aloud: “It isn't true. It can't all be true. I want not to be muddled. I want to grow older quickly.”

In response to the advice “beware of muddle” I think I would say “was there ever a different way to finding the truth?” As Oscar Wilde says “Only the shallow know themselves.” Muddled? Welcome to class.

Question for comment: We all get muddled sometimes. Do you tend to remain so longer than most? Why?

“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!”

I realize that I have reviewed Jane Austen’s Persuasion before but after reading through it again with the boys, I feel the need to add another layer of thought on it. I fear that my altogether-too-cynical-sometimes charges have affected my viewpoints on a number of matters and it may turn out that you readers will wish I had left well enough alone. Grin. I will just say that I am not sure I agree with my interpretation here when I was done but I found it interesting and so I shall leave it as is.

The psychological truth that seems to be manifesting itself upon this latest reading involves the relationship between attraction as an emotional or physiological state and observation. In short the question that arose in the context of my most recent conversations about the novel have to do with whether our observation is as much affected by our attractions as our attractions are affected by our observations? Might it be said, for example, that Anne Elliot is attracted to Captain Wentworth because she observes that he is an honorable man with impeccable integrity? Or, does she see Captain Wentworth as such because she is attracted to him? Similarly, is Captain Wentworth attracted to Anne Elliot because she has a superlative character? Or does he will her to have such a character because he is attracted?

Do Anne and Frederick Wentworth give each other “free passes” on some moral and ethical and character issues because they want the relationship to work out while refusing to give similar quarter to other suitors and debutantes who they are not attracted to? Will they, as it were, “cook the books”? Do the two of them hold to absolutes on some occasions that they quite shamelessly discard when to not do so might jeopardize their prospects with each other?

Some examples may suffice.

Captain Wentworth makes it clear to Louisa that he has no use for people who do not “stick to their guns” and act in accordance with their convictions despite social pressures. "My first wish for all, whom I am interested in, is that they should be firm,” he insists. And yet later, when speaking with Anne about why he remained so distant from her and seemingly committed to Louisa Musgrove, he explains that it was entirely on account of his concern for his reputation as an honorable man in the public. Needless to say, he laces this explanation with numerous references to Anne’s superlativeness among all the women he has ever known and she seems to accept this explanation because it is consistent with her desire to always see him as honorable and herself as irreplaceable.

“Of what he had then written, nothing was to be retracted or qualified. He persisted in having loved none but her. She had never been supplanted. He never even believed himself to see her equal. Thus much indeed he was obliged to acknowledge--that he had been constant unconsciously, nay unintentionally; that he had meant to forget her, and believed it to be done. He had imagined himself indifferent, when he had only been angry; and he had been unjust to her merits, because he had been a sufferer from them. Her character was now fixed on his mind as perfection itself, maintaining the loveliest medium of fortitude and gentleness

In his preceding attempts to attach himself to Louisa Musgrove (the attempts of angry pride), he protested that he had for ever felt it to be impossible; that he had not cared, could not care for Louisa; though, till that day, till the leisure for reflection which followed it, he had not understood the perfect excellence of the mind with which Louisa's could so ill bear a comparison

There, he had seen everything to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost, and there begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way. . . .

From that period his penance had become severe. He had no sooner been free from the horror and remorse attending the first few days of Louisa's accident, no sooner begun to feel himself alive again, than he had begun to feel himself, though alive, not at liberty.

"I found," said he, "that I was considered by Harville an engaged man! That neither Harville nor his wife entertained a doubt of our mutual attachment [speaking of Louisa and Wentworth’s]. I was startled and shocked. To a degree, I could contradict this instantly; but, when I began to reflect that others might have felt the same--her own family, nay, perhaps herself, I was no longer at my own disposal. I was hers in honour if she wished it. I had been unguarded. I had not thought seriously on this subject before. I had not considered that my excessive intimacy must have its danger of ill consequence in many ways; and that I had no right to be trying whether I could attach myself to either of the girls, at the risk of raising even an unpleasant report, were there no other ill effects. I had been grossly wrong, and must abide the consequences."

He found too late, in short, that he had entangled himself; and that precisely as he became fully satisfied of his not caring for Louisa at all, he must regard himself as bound to her, if her sentiments for him were what the Harvilles supposed.”

"You who speak languages," writes Orson Scott Card, "You are such liars." As if to say “I have always loved you Anne, but being an honorable man who would never lead someone on or be perceived to, I would have married Louisa rather than seem inconstant”. One recalls that earlier in the novel, Anne had been precisely concerned that Captain Wentworth might be stringing both Musgrove sisters along in what was perilously close to a shameful manner.  His explanation for all these attentions covered marvelously and she does not seem to mind supporting the effort. “A man does not recover from such a devotion of the heart to such a woman!--He ought not--he does not," she had once said. It simply would not do if the reality was that he really had honestly ever been attracted to Louisa Musgrove. Truly noble men never lose their unflagging devotion to the women they first fall in love with, right? And thus the narrative that allowed for those attentions and attachments to be only a matter of duty resolve the problem perfectly.

It is absolutely true that at one time, Frederick Wentworth thought quite disparagingly of Anne Elliot for the way that she had been so completely influenced by the persuasive abilities of Lady Russell and her father. And yet he later is willing to accept Anne’s explanation that though not proud of what she had done, it should at least be seen in light of character strength and not a weakness.

“I mean,” Anne explains in her defense in the last chapter,

“that I was right in submitting to her [Lady Russell], and that if I had done otherwise, I should have suffered more in continuing the engagement than I did even in giving it up, because I should have suffered in my conscience. I have now, as far as such a sentiment is allowable in human nature, nothing to reproach myself with; and if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman's portion."

In short, “I am sorry that I dumped you because Lady Russell approved but would you mind terribly incorporating what I did into the eulogetic narrative you have constructed of me? Would you, dear Frederick, be willing to see it as some sort of good thing, for my sake?” What is happening here? What is happening is a process by which two people who have determined on being with someone they wish to regard as impeccably honorable, liquidate for each other the obviously reasonable judgments that have against one another’s failings in life.

One clearly sees this in the following rather humorous exchange:

"I was six weeks with Edward," said [Wentworth], "and saw him happy. I could have no other pleasure. I deserved none. He enquired after you very particularly; asked even if you were personally altered, little suspecting that to my eye you could never alter."

Anne smiled, and let it pass. It was too pleasing a blunder for a reproach.”

She knows that his actual comment had been to the effect that she had altered almost beyond recognition. But she prefers the airbrushed version and lets it pass as the official history of his feelings towards her. And this is my point. Being attracted to Captain Wentworth, Anne Elliot will always chose to believe the best of his character, sometimes even to the detriment of accuracy. Not being attracted to her other suitors, Mr. Elliot for example; she is always inclined to suspect them to be worse than they appear and almost content to find out that they are. Other suitors have, as I sometimes say “permission to try but not to succeed” to impress her. Frederick Wentworth on the other hand, has “permission to try but to not succeed” to disillusion her.

And that is how attraction interferes with observation. But perhaps another illustration will help. When Anne considers the possibilities of marrying someone she is not attracted to, the obstacles that are created by differences of temperament, personality, or station are deemed insurmountable. She does not think that anyone should expect her to partner with someone who is obviously incompatible. But the moment that she finds out that Captain Benwick has proposed to Louisa Musgrove, her principle rival for the affections of Captain Wentworth, her core convictions about this matter alter somewhat.

“Captain Benwick and Louisa Musgrove!” she exclaims when she is told the news,

“The high-spirited, joyous, talking Louisa Musgrove, and the dejected, thinking, feeling, reading Captain Benwick, seemed each of them everything that would not suit the other. Their minds most dissimilar!”

But does she plan to go warn the poor Louisa Musgrove of the certain mistake she is making. Oh no! “ . . . He had an affectionate heart. He must love somebody” she says. And then you begin to see the rationalizing heart go to work on the struggling-to-remain-true-to-reason head:

“She saw no reason against their being happy. Louisa had fine naval fervour to begin with, and they would soon grow more alike. He would gain cheerfulness, and she would learn to be an enthusiast for Scott and Lord Byron; nay, that was probably learnt already; of course they had fallen in love over poetry. The idea of Louisa Musgrove turned into a person of literary taste, and sentimental, reflection was amusing, but she had no doubt of its being so.”

In short, her attractions have harnessed up her observations and taken them for a ride. With regard to her own affections, she will assert that no one but her heart’s perfect counterpart will do

“More than seven years were gone since this little history of sorrowful interest had reached its close; and time had softened down much, perhaps nearly all of peculiar attachment to him,--but she had been too dependent on time alone; no aid had been given in change of place, (except in one visit to Bath soon after the rupture,) or in any novelty or enlargement of society.--No one had ever come within the Kellynch circle, who could bear a comparison with Frederick Wentworth, as he stood in her memory. No second attachment, the only thoroughly natural, happy, and sufficient cure, at her time of life, had been possible to the nice tone of her mind, the fastidiousness of her taste, in the small limits of the society around them.”

 But when thinking about other people’s romances, she will allow a great deal of slack to be made:

"There is hardly any personal defect," replied Anne, "which an agreeable manner might not gradually reconcile one to."

What is perhaps most delightful, is how Jane Austen lets Anne Elliot’s self awareness peek above the surface of consciousness every once in a while. Austen will sometimes let the unconscious emotional self be spotted by her principle character in a way that one suspects she expresses through her characters. The following examples from the novel will have to suffice.

“Alas! with all her reasoning, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.”

“But neither Charles Hayter's feelings, nor any body's feelings, could interest her, till she had a little better arranged her own. She was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of being so nervous, so overcome by such a trifle; but so it was; and it required a long application of solitude and reflection to recover her.”

“She hoped to be wise and reasonable in time; but alas! alas! she must confess to herself that she was not wise yet.”

 “No, it was not regret which made Anne's heart beat in spite of herself, and brought the colour into her cheeks when she thought of Captain Wentworth unshackled and free. She had some feelings which she was ashamed to investigate.”

How she might have felt, had there been no Captain Wentworth in the case, was not worth enquiry; for there was a Captain Wentworth.”

It is hard to state my thesis more clearly than this last sentiment expresses it. If we are attracted to someone, it will affect the way that we see others. Our affective selves will color everything that is observed by our reflective selves, or so the theory I am prosing says. I suspect that this is what so many people find so delightfully amusing about Jane Austen’s characters sometimes. They play at the surface of consciousness, knowing and not knowing themselves at the same time and allowing some things to remain unknown for the sake of love and other things to become known for the same reason.

In the introduction to the novel that was written by Jane Austen’s brother Henry Austen, he explains how deft Jane, like Anne Elliot the character, was at being in the know and out at the same time. She had that combination of grace and wit that could intuit precisely what was going on (and had gone on) but that could help maintain the secret even from the conscious self, not to mention others. “Though the frailties, foibles, and follies of others could not escape her immediate detection,” Henry writes of his deceased sister,

“Yet even on their vices did she never trust herself to comment with unkindness. The affectation of candour is not uncommon; but she had no affectation. Faultless herself, as nearly as human nature can be, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget. Where extenuation was impossible, she had a sure refuge in silence. She never uttered either a hasty, a silly, or a severe expression. In short, her temper was as polished as her wit. Nor were her manners inferior to her temper.”

If this is so, if we all our observations are distorted by our affectations, how can any of us trust our judgments? One might well ask along with Captain Harville, "But how shall we prove any thing?" To which Anne responds,

"We never shall. We never can expect to prove anything upon such a point. It is a difference of opinion which does not admit of proof. We each begin probably with a little bias towards our own [position], and upon that bias build every circumstance in favour of it which has occurred within our own circle.”

My hat is off to Jane Austen. She seems to be someone who could look into her own soul or into the lives of others or into the universe itself and find what truths might be helpful to the creation of a happy life . . . and make those observations conscious. Similarly, she seems to have been able to look into her soul or the lives of others or into the universe and when she found that which would bring pain or sorrow, leave what she found in such a way that no one would ever know she had ever found it.

"This," Anne Elliot says to Mr. Elliot, "is nearly the sense, or rather the meaning of the words, for certainly the sense of an Italian love-song must not be talked of.”

As if to say, I can only tell you what is appropriate to say and ask you to understand that there was more.

"But I am getting too near complaint,” she wrote as she was dying, “It has been the appointment of God, however secondary causes may have operated."

She was 42. To the last, affectation, desire, the longing for something, in this case, immortality, was influencing and dare I say persuading observation which, for all intents and purposes, would have left her crying out, “My god, My god, Why have you forsaken me?”

Question for comment: Would it bother you to discover that your emotions and desires affected your observations more than you think they do?

IT is interesting how often my disparate interests coincide or collide with each other at times. Tomorrow, I a teaching a class about the Greeks and the elevation of reason above instinct in the world of Classical philosophy. When Socrates represses instinct (survival) for principle, and thereby agrees to drink his Hemlock, was he doing our civilization a favor? Freud would say “no”. In my World History class, I am presently discussing the various “isms” that slowly took over the place that religion had played previous to the French Revolution. Among the many we have examined have been Romanticism, Rationalism, Socialism, Communism, Liberalism, Darwinism, Racism, and etc. This week I will be covering the influence of Sigmund Freud in understanding the modern world and so I have chosen one of the works I have never read in entirety to read today: Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis, a set of lectures Freud gave in the early 1900’s.

What is ironic is how his description of the psychoanalytical process mirrors the work I have been doing in trying to get a better understanding of Greek tragedy. It is all about the question of ignorance and illumination and if the moment that we become aware is always a liberating moment or an excruciating moment. Maybe it is always both? “The problem was this” Freud writes: “to find out something from the patient that the doctor did not know and the patient himself did not know.”

Freud insists that repression is a perfectly understandable response to the inability to reconcile opposing desires.

“In all those experiences, it had happened that a wish had been aroused, which was in sharp opposition to the other desires of the individual, and was not capable of being reconciled with the ethical, aesthetic and personal pretensions of the patient's personality. There had been a short conflict, and the end of this inner struggle was the repression of the idea which presented itself to consciousness as the bearer' of this irreconcilable wish. This was, then, repressed from consciousness and forgotten. The incompatibility of the idea in question with the "ego" of the patient was the motive of the repression, the ethical and other pretensions of the individual were the repressing forces. The presence of the incompatible wish, or the duration of the conflict, had given rise to a high degree of mental pain; this pain was avoided by the repression. This latter process is evidently in such a case a device for the protection of the personality.”

In short, people do not LIKE living in the sort of psychic tension that the Greek dramatists portrayed their main characters living in. They find such tensions to be shattering and thus they eliminate them by pretending to eliminate one of the forces that causes them (as if they could).

Freud argues that the repressed forces of the personality simply convert into other coin and express themselves in other less obvious ways, through the proverbial “Freudian slips” and dreams in particular, the latter, he calls the via regia (the royal road) to the subconscious. To Freud, there are no mistakes, no errors. Everything is intentional and simply waits to be noticed by the observer who knows that the subconscious is talking.

It is here that Freud delves into his well-known assertion that human beings are principally sexually motivated and that even children manifest instincts that are only later given an avenue of socially approved expression.

“The conduct of the patients does not make it any easier to convince one's self of the correctness of the view which I have expressed. Instead of willingly giving us information concerning their sexual life, they try to conceal it by every means in their power. Men generally are not candid in sexual matters. They do not show their sexuality freely, but they wear a thick overcoat -- a fabric of lies -- to conceal it, as though it were bad weather in the world of sex. And they are not wrong; sun and wind are not favorable in our civilized society to any demonstration of sex life. In truth no one can freely disclose his erotic life to his neighbor. But when your patients see that in your treatment they may disregard the conventional restraints, they lay aside this veil of lies, and then only are you in a position to formulate a judgment on the question in dispute.”

Thus, Freud defines the “sickness” in society as existing in the repression, not in the instinct repressed. And it will be on this cultural pivot point that much in Western Civilization will turn with his theory. Freud will insist that these “natural” interests, curiosities, desires, and passions should and must be granted a place at the table of the public personality. “One is afraid of doing harm by psychoanalysis, “ Freud suggests because one is concerned that unrepressed desires will not be able to find an outlet in society as it is. The implication is that society must change and become more open to and tolerant of human beings obtaining that which they desire.

“One is anxious about calling up into consciousness the repressed sexual impulses of the patient, as though there were danger that they could overpower the higher ethical strivings and rob him of his cultural acquisitions. One can see that the patient has sore places in his soul life, but one is afraid to touch them, lest his suffering be increased.”

In the conclusion of his lectures, Freud makes his social argument most succinctly:

A certain part of the suppressed libidinous excitation has a right to direct satisfaction and ought to find it in life. The claims of our civilization make life too hard for the greater part of humanity, and so further the aversion to reality and the origin of neuroses, without producing an excess of cultural gain by this excess of sexual repression. We ought not to go so far as to fully neglect the original animal part of our nature, we ought not to forget that the happiness of individuals cannot be dispensed with as one of the aims of our culture. The plasticity of the sexual-components, manifest in their capacity for sublimation, may cause a great temptation to accomplish greater culture-effects by a more and more far reaching sublimation. But just as little as with our machines we expect to change more than a certain fraction of the applied heat into useful mechanical work, just as little ought we to strive to separate the sexual impulse in its whole extent of energy from its peculiar goal. This cannot succeed, and if the narrowing of sexuality is pushed too far it will have all the evil effects of a robbery.

I do not know whether you will regard the exhortation with which I close as a presumptuous one. I only venture the indirect presentation of my conviction, if I relate an old tale, whose application you may make yourselves. German literature knows a town called Schilda, to whose inhabitants were attributed all sorts of clever pranks. The wiseacres, so the story goes, had a horse, with whose powers of work they were well satisfied, and against whom they had only one grudge, that he consumed so much expensive oats. They concluded that by good management they would break him of this bad habit, by cutting down his rations by several stalks each day, until he had learned to do without them altogether. Things went finely for a while, the horse was weaned to one stalk a day, and on the next day he would at last work without fodder. On the morning of this day the malicious horse was found dead; the citizens of Schilda could not understand why he had died. We should be inclined to believe that the horse had starved, and that without a certain ration of oats no work could be expected from an animal.

I thank you for calling me here to speak, and for the attention which you have given me.”

 I suppose therein lies the debate in many an American generational war. Should instinctual life be repressed, suppressed, subliminated, anesthetized, euthanized, channeled, expressed, stoked, exhausted, ignored, fought, indulged, guarded, acknowledged, forgotten, shamed, shot, celebrated, nurtured, broken, flogged, torn out, counseled, or fulfilled? What verbs should be applied to human sexuality, how energetically, for how long, and for what purpose? These are all questions that teenagers and their parents are still asking. In some ways, we have Freud to thank for that discussion.

Question for comment: The Greeks after Socrates, call instinct, emotion, and passion into question and suggest that the civil society and the good life are products of the rational self being granted hierarchical status over the emotional and instinctual self. Have we as a culture benefitted or suffered from this approach?

Boys and I had at least two really good conversations today. We were talking about the difference between Brutus' and Antony's perceptions of the crowds in Julius Caesar. Brutus is a man of reason and principle. Our reasons are so full of good regard" he says "That were you, Antony, the son of Caesar, You should be satisfied. . . ."

By your pardon;
I will myself into the pulpit first,
And show the reason of our Caesar's death:”

He believes that since HE cares more about principle and logical consistency, others can be expected to think and act in the same way. Indeed, Brutus would kill himself if his principles dictated that he do so.

"With this
I depart,--that, as I slew my best lover for the
good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself,
when it shall please my country to need my death."

 Instinct means nothing to him. Emotional bonding, also nothing. Ties of friendship? A third time nothing. He expects the crowd to be the same way ... and to some extent, they are. They do respond to his reasoning power. But this reasoning is buried like Pompey under Vesuvius lava within a few minutes of Antony's opportunity to speak. Why? Does Antony counter Brutus' reason with reason? No. He doesn't bother. He counters Brutus' reason with tone of voice, with immediate experience, with emmotion, instinct, and appeals to the self-interest concerns of the crowds.  The crowds go from "Live, Brutus, Live" to "Burn their houses" in a matter of minutes. Crowds, Shakespeare seems to be saying, are not controlled by logic but by a far more inherent instinctual collective id. How am I affected NOW? What can I see, hear, smell, taste NOW? What do I feel NOW?

Is he right? Is a person who learns to think, to summarize information, break information down into smaller parts, put information and perspectives together, evaluate arguments, identify basic assumptions, compare and contrast arguments, short-circuit group thinking tendencies, ask questions, identify important but ignored questions, construct visions, follow ideas to logical conclusions, trace cause and effect patterns, predict unseen side effects to policy decisions, admit mistakes, explain failures, assimilate contradictions, solicit alternative perspectives, undermine oppositional ideas, build communities, integrate cultural core beliefs, identify problems, and communicate creative solutions among a thousand other things that brains are capable of simply learning how to use a sword in a world of machine guns (people who can manipulate others with emotions?

Question for Comment: Are we doomed to be ruled by those who master the art of  appealing to the instinctual programing of human motivation? Should I quite trying to be a critical thinking teacher and learn to be less like Brutus and more like Antony? Is a person who can think always going to be like that poor sword wielding Ninja guy in Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark?