Kirsten Dunst, Gender, and Too Many Victorian Novels on My Kindle

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Apparently I am stingy, because I feel that intangible ebooks should be cheaper than tangible, second-hand paperbacks. This means that much of my Kindle reading involves free or cheap files filled with long-forgotten fiction of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Most of it was forgotten for a reason.

Oh, my gosh. So… much… melodrama. The “Greatest Mystery Collection, Volume 2” contain gems like this: Imagine a mystery novel in which it turns out that the victim, a philanthropic and lovely older woman, actually stabbed herself in the heart. This was because she saw her adult son burst into her house (he didn’t know that she was his mother—all of her previous babies had died under what she felt was a curse, so she gave him to another woman to adopt in order to save his life, and herself took that other woman’s dead infant in exchange so that the other woman’s husband would think the babe was his). She is convinced, from the wild eyes of her unfortunately somewhat disreputable but handsome son, that he intends to rob her of the large sum of money which is concealed in her cupboard. In order to save him from committing such a vile deed and thereby descending along the path of wickedness, she stabs herself. Motherlove! When all is revealed and he is finally acquitted of having murdered her (apparently she forgot to think about the legal issues surrounding her noble deed), he honors her forever and goes every year to weep upon her grave. The text even tells us that she is the only woman whose memory is more dear to him than his love for his lovely young wife, and the wife is apparently totally OK with this. I could go on, but this gives you an idea of the style of Agatha Webb by Anna Katherine Green.

Even in the less sentimental, more humorous stories of the early Twentieth Century, such as Seven Keys To Baldpate by Earl Derr Biggers, one finds beautiful blond girls who do things like tell random young men (I paraphrase), “You must trust me, and steal the money for me with no explanation. I will sit about helplessly and berate you as a traitor every time you fail. In the end, you can propose to me. I will point out that we just met, and you will say that doesn’t matter. I will finally surrender and go limp in your arms. The end.” I must mention that in his last and final proposal, the young man’s endearing argument against the girl’s hesitation over the fact that he doesn’t even know her last name is to tell her, “That’s women’s logic.” I rather like old-fashioned values, but this is too much for me.

Such books appear at first glance to be the antithesis of modern feelings about gender roles, romance, and correct behavior. It is easy to read this stuff and be glad that modernism brought us out of the age of swooning and sentimentality. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that we are not as different from the Victorians and their Edwardian children as we think we are.  

Did You Know That You Are Crazy?

Then I heard the ol' man say

God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy

From People are Crazy by Bobby Braddock and Troy Jones (sung by Billy Currington)

The human mind is a chamber of conflicting desires and hidden belief. Our minds play tricks on us. Sometimes they lead us to eat ice cream when we want to lose weight. Sometimes they let us confess secrets to an untrustworthy confidant. Sometimes they tell us that the rules needn’t apply to us, specifically, in our unique situation, and so it would be O.K. to pinch the office postage or cheat on our spouse even though we generally abhor stealing or cheating.   

We use the oddness of our mind to avoid obligations that loom too onerously. One age-old avoidance mechanism of mankind has been to romanticize the things that we do poorly. Consider our modern approach to marriage. We have raised the romance bar so high that a spouse must be our eternal soul-mate; our wedded life must be perpetual emotional bliss; and we mustn’t risk committing to anyone until we've dated and/or lived with them for years. In celebration of this marriage concept we spend an average of over $28,000 on each wedding: gowns, gazebos, D.J.s, and all that jazz. We glorify the beaming bride as if she were a combination of Nobel Prize winner, actress, and heir to the throne simply for accepting a diamond ring. We make far more of a fuss over the marriage ceremony than did previous generations, yet our rate of divorce is far higher than theirs. We are not the first culture to romanticize our weaknesses. Consider the ancient Romans: they did not write the Aeneid, that paean to olden virtue and strict duty, during their supposed glorious age of moral uprightness. Instead it was written in the "decadent" generation of Augustus. Did his patricians give up their self-indulgent lifestyle just because they enjoyed the epic tale of Aeneas? No (much to the great Caesar’s regret), but they were quite happy to glorify the virtues of the past.

The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth Century Portrait Gallery (Review)

by Edward Hallett Carr, 1933

(Biography)

ro·man·ti·cism (noun)

1 a :  a literary, artistic, and philosophical movement originating in the 18th century, characterized chiefly by a reaction against neoclassicism and an emphasis on the imagination and emotions, and marked especially in English literature by sensibility and the use of autobiographical material, an exaltation of the primitive and the common man, an appreciation of external nature, an interest in the remote, a predilection for melancholy, and the use in poetry of older verse forms (from Marriam Webster).

The Romanticism of the Nineteenth Century wields enduring influence. It still shapes our approach to romantic love, our application of democracy, and our definition of art. To understand Romanticism is to better understand our own culture. Carr’s book illustrates a fairly extreme branch of Romanticism that resembled the cultural turmoil of the 1960’s. Free love, substance abuse, and political activism—it was all there in the 1800’s. However, it was lived-out in fancier clothes and with a better vocabulary.

Carr offers a personal picture of various revolutionary-minded Russian exiles who published newspapers and pamphlets while wandering through Europe (Czar Nicholas II had no tolerance for even the faintest whiff of criticism against his government). I had not previously realized that European Romanticism, unlike the nature-loving, fairly apolitical Romanticism of the English-speaking world, was intrinsically a political influence.

This is love, according
to Romanticism. 

The book centers around Alexander Herzen and his immediate circle. He and his fellow exiles attempted to conduct their romantic and sexual lives in accordance with the principles of novelist George Sand (she taught the primacy of emotion-driven love and the folly of societal strictures like loveless marriage). Boy, did that cause them a lot of grief. Imagine the following scenario: a man and woman conduct a “spiritual” and physical affair. Their spouses find out about it. The woman’s wronged husband offers to free her. She refuses to leave him, because she loves both men, and decides that it would kill her noble husband to be abandoned. The man’s wronged wife keeps urging the woman to run off with the man, because he will get tired of her more quickly that way. Everyone exchanges many long, emotional letters and the two men talk darkly of duels. The adulterous man is shocked-- horrified-- overcome by the unkindness of the wronged husband, who cruelly returns his (the man's) letter of justification unopened. Their community decries the possessiveness of a husband who would hold his wife to marriage vows against her will. The woman still refuses to leave her wronged husband but "can't" give up her correspondence with her lover. Wronged husband sends letters to their community in justification of his own position. Sides are taken. Friends of wronged husband knock man down stairs. Man indignantly denies that this undignified hallway proceeding ever happened, and claims that he instead sent his assailants running. The adulterous woman in this tale is Alexander Herzen's wife.