Review: To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

To The Lighthouse takes place by the sea, and Virgina Woolf’s prose is itself ocean-like, washing over you in waves, immersing you and buffeting you about. Her stream of consciousness perspectives allow you to explore the thought processes that make up our understanding of ourselves and of others.

One theme Woolf explores is our ability to relate to others. Sometimes we feel an aching loneliness that we can never be truly known by another person (“for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge.”). Other times, our loved ones show us they know exactly what we are thinking, what we need (“And again he would have passed her without a word had she not, at that very moment, given him of her own free will what she knew he would never ask, and called to him and taken the green shawl off the picture frame, and gone to him.”). And at other times still, we think we are alone in feeling a certain way, when many share our same thoughts (“for each thought, ‘the others are feeling this. They are outraged and indignant with the government about the fisherman. Whereas, I feel nothing at all.’”). Woolf presents her characters so intimately and details their relationships with others so meticulously that small gestures between them are imbued with as much meaning to us as they hold for the characters (“And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him.”).

Another theme Woolf explores is the linear passing of time, at odds with our much more circular examination of ourselves and our inner thoughts. The characters contemplate how they’ve spent their lives: Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay each consider how the demands of raising eight children impacted their abilities to pursue other sorts of fulfillment. Lily reflects on the happiness of married couples, and her decision to remain unmarried. In their introspections, each character bounces between the past, the present, and their dreams of the future. Time itself presses onwards unrelentingly (“as she … left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.”).

How well can one know another person? Much of the novel occurs while Lily paints a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay, and the novel itself is itself a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay. We see Mrs. Ramsay through the eyes of each character (“Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with”), and she is someone different to each of these people. And yet, all these facets of Mrs. Ramsay are who she is. When James finally visits the titular lighthouse, he remarks that the Lighthouse seen from a distance, the “silvery, misty-looking tower,” and the Lighthouse seen up close, inhabited with “washing spread on the rocks to dry,” are both the Lighthouse: “For nothing was simply one thing. The other was the Lighthouse too.” Mrs. Ramsay is likewise the mother, the wife, the cheerleader, the beautiful woman, the warm woman who knows how to bring people together, the cold woman who cannot say “I love you.”

Lily perhaps knows Mrs. Ramsay best of all the others — maybe because she is also a woman, and therefore sees her as an equal and understands the many social pressures placed on women. Her grief at the loss of Mrs. Ramsay is beautifully written, exploring our changing relationships with those who are no longer with us (“It had seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart thus. Suddenly, the empty drawing-room steps, the frill of the chair inside, the puppy tumbling on the terrace, the whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques flourishing round a centre of complete emptiness.”). Fittingly, when Lily’s portrait of Mrs. Ramsay is finished, the novel ends too.

Review: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

How should you read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations? One option is to peer into it for hints of how it has shaped thinking in the 1900 years since its writing — this collection of disconnected aphorisms is one of the most famous texts of the Roman Empire. In this reading, you might reflect on the author’s views on cosmic order and nature and on the cyclical flow of time, and how philosophers as diverse as Isaac Newton and Friedrich Nietzsche might have approached his writing on these themes. Or perhaps you might do more of a feminist critique: how has Marcus Aurelius’s stoicism shaped what it means to be a man? To be unbothered by other people’s opinions of you, to prize rationality, to be principled and purposeful and not caught up in frivolities — these commandments continue to shape social expectations of masculinity. I like this reading, and if you’re interested in the development of human thought it’s a worthwhile reason to read this book.

Another reading would take Marcus Aurelius’s writing as normative life advice. This is a reading I don’t care for. Marcus Aurelius’s philosophy teeters on nihilistic individuality, and therefore reinforces the status quo: time is cyclic and your life is short so you shouldn’t strive to change society; forget about what other people think, follow your own nature. It is also only a partial picture of morality: he has relatively little to say about community, about our social obligation to each other, or about resolving conflicting perspectives (we could call these feminine virtues). That said, it is a philosophy more compassionate about accepting the shortcomings of others than some individualistic worldviews (“If a man is mistaken, instruct him kindly and show him his error. But if thou art not able, blame thyself, or blame not even thyself.” (Book X)). But to approach this work as a source of guidance is to invite cherry-picking of poignant quotes: it is not a systematic, rigorously developed worldview, but a scattering of sometimes contradictory thoughts.

A third reading — and this is where my mind kept going as I read the work — is to read it metatextually: why did Marcus Aurelius write these particular thoughts down? The work was never meant to be published: he wrote it for himself. What personal struggles was he grappling with as he penned these meditations? Death, surely, was one: he emphasizes over and over the fleetingness of life. Other anxieties appear to trouble him too; when he writes lines like

What is such a person doing, and why, and what is he saying, and what is he thinking of, and what is he contriving, and whatever else of the kind makes us wander away from the observation of our own ruling power. (Book III)

does he speak from a self-chastising position, as someone still trying to care less about what some other person is thinking of? Is he thinking of a particular example, but cloaking it as a general conclusion? (If so, Marcus, you would have loved the invention of the subtweet.)

I like this metatextual reading best for a few reasons. First, it explains his contradictory and repetitive writing: he is trying an idea on for size to see how it fits, or working through a difficult idea. While many of his aphorisms are expressed as confident exhortations, others are tentative explorations of a thought:

If our intellectual part is common, the reason also, in respect of which we are rational beings, is common: if this is so, common also is the reason which commands us what to do, and what not to do; if this is so, there is a common law also; if this is so, we are fellow-citizens; if this is so, we are members of some political community; if this is so, the world is in a manner a state. (Book IV)

I think we should read these statements — the confident and the tentative — as more in continuity than a superficial reading might suggest (“To read carefully, and not to be satisfied with a superficial understanding of a book.” (Book I)). These meditations are not battle-tested wisdoms the author hopes to disseminate broadly, but pep talks he gives to himself (“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil." (Book II)), or records of his deliberations for himself.

Second, this reading explains the incompleteness of the morality presented here. Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher-king, his views on man-as-citizen or man-as-shaper-of-society he would have debated extensively and applied as part of his imperial duties. The views scribbled here, just for him, naturally cover what remains: how to handle day-to-day emotional challenges in the right way.

Finally, there is a comfort in recognizing that even the literal Emperor of Rome struggled with navigating the complex waters of his internal life.
 

A few favourite lines not woven into the above:

• “We ought to observe also that even the things which follow after the things which are produced according to nature contain something pleasing and attractive. For instance, when bread is baked some parts are split at the surface, and these parts which thus open, and have a certain fashion contrary to the purpose of the baker’s art, are beautiful in a manner, and in a peculiar way excite a desire for eating. And again, figs, when they are quite ripe, gape open; and in the ripe olives the very circumstance of their being near to rottenness adds a peculiar beauty to the fruit.” (Book III)
• “Men quarrel with that with which they are most constantly in communion.” (Book IV)
• “First, do nothing inconsiderately, nor without a purpose. Second, make thy acts refer to nothing else than to a social end.” (Book XII)
• “How close is the kinship between a man and the whole human race, for it is a community, not of a little blood or seed, but of intelligence.” (Book XII)
• “If our intellectual part is common, the reason also, in respect of which we are rational beings, is common: if this is so, common also is the reason which commands us what to do, and what not to do; if this is so, there is a common law also; if this is so, we are fellow-citizens; if this is so, we are members of some political community; if this is so, the world is in a manner a state.” (Book IV)
• “By remembering, then, that I am a part of such a whole, I shall be content with everything that happens. And inasmuch as I am in a manner intimately related to the parts which are of the same kind with myself, I shall do nothing unsocial, but I shall rather direct myself to the things which are of the same kind with myself, and I shall turn an my efforts to the common interest, and divert them from the contrary. Now, if these things are done so, life must flow on happily, just as thou mayest observe that the life of a citizen is happy, who continues a course of action which is advantageous to his fellow-citizens, and is content with whatever the state may assign to him.” (Book X)
• “Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be. But thou art thinking only of seeds which are cast into the earth or into a womb: but this is a very vulgar notion.” (Book IV)

Review: Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

“It is hideous, is it not, to speak in a breath of money and affection.”
— Delphine to Eugène, Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

Love and capital are the questions this novel pre-occupies itself with, like so many other novels of the nineteenth century. Let’s start with the topic of capital, leaving love to the end.

 

As in Villette (1853) and Persuasion (1817), Père Goriot (1835) reflects the tumult as the bourgeoisie overtakes the aristocracy in fits and bursts. The novel takes place during the first few years of the Bourbon restoration: aristocracy is back, baby. Goriot, a doting father and wealthy vermicelli merchant, thought himself lucky to have married his daughters to a Baron and a Comte during the Napoleonic era, when the bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders with the landed gentry. With a Louis back on a throne, Goriot is considered too gauche to grace the parlours of his now-genteel daughters. Showing remarkable composure, Goriot bids farewell to the dreams he had of spending his final years lounging in the well-appointed homes of his daughters — he gifted them nearly all his wealth as dowries — and retires to a humble boarding house, where we meet him. The first third of the novel is driven by the mystery of who this solitary old man is, who are the fancy women who visit him, and what caused his successive moves from the well-appointed room at 1200 francs a year to the drafty and threadbare room at 45 francs per month? (Like in David Copperfield, prices are detailed at every opportunity; the reader can never forget how very expensive it is to go on living.) We find out it is his daughters bleeding him dry — but I get ahead of myself. We are still discussing themes of capital, not love.

 

One of the other boarders is Eugène De Rastignac, a well-born but not well-off aristocratic lad. His family scrapes together just enough money to keep him in respectable quarters while he studies at the university in Paris. Granted a taste of life among the cream of society, he starts looking for get-rich-quick schemes. A fellow boarder, Veltran, teaches him the hard truths of the world: he can toil his way through school and the ranks of the bureaucracy, never earning more than a mediocre salary, or he can scheme his way into marriage with an heiress, and live a life of luxury. Veltran offers him a Faustian bargain: the hand of the wealthy heiress requires assassinating a man. Eugène quickly finds that high society has low morals — when everyone cheats, exploits, and lies, are his own minor transgressions really so bad? Besides, the moral road of the bourgeoisie is just as ruthless; Goriot is implied to have founded his fortune “selling flour for ten times its cost” during the Revolution of 1789. To gain entry to the class born to leisure, Eugène needs to raise funds for fashionable finery, so he begs his mother and sisters, bleeding them dry. Here, Eugène parallels both Goriot in his entrepreneurial mind as well as Goriot’s daughters in their exploitation of familial affection for personal gain. Perhaps it is not possible to discuss capital without also dealing with love?

 

Père Goriot is a tragic love story about not romantic but paternal love. Goriot’s affection for his daughters is obsessive, idolizing. It is an obscure form of love — infatuation without romance or eroticism. Every day, he walks to the Champs d'Elysees to watch their coaches go by, hoping to catch a glimpse of their visages as they pass him by. He spends his days in his damp and cramped quarters daydreaming about how they spend their evenings.

I love the very horses that draw them; I envy the little lap-dog on their knees. Their happiness is my life. Every one loves after his own fashion, and mine does no one any harm; why should people trouble their heads about me?

Goriot is delighted to discover Eugène and his (married) daughter Delphine have fallen in love. He lives vicariously through Eugène, and schemes to create a secret apartment for the couple to use to carry out their affair — including nearby quarters for himself. He basks in her reacquired company: “He lay at his daughter’s feet, kissed them, gazed into her eyes, rubbed his head against her dress; in short, no young lover could have been more extravagant or more tender.” Goriot’s sheer happiness is plain to see, but also uncomfortable to read: we see how little the daughters’ affections are returned, how self-centered they are, how blindly consuming Goriot's love for them is, and how poorly he understands the women his little girls have grown into.

 

Goriot’s daughters find themselves in dire financial straits and so he sells every last asset and trinket to address their pleas. Their tribulations cause him such distress that he falls ill, but with not a franc left for medicine or firewood. Goriot’s daughters do not visit his sickbed, too caught up in the dramas of their own lives. Instead, Eugène and another student boarder nurse Goriot as they listen to his dying ravings about the wonders and treacheries of the two women. Had he not given them his fortunes, they would have still showered him with affection, he deplores. He daydreams about how he will rebuild his wealth and buy back his daughters’ love by importing processed wheat goods — he remains to his deathbed a capitalist. It is heartbreaking to read Goriot discover his daughters are not coming to visit him, when just seeing their faces and hearing their voices would mean so much to him, and equally wrenching to see him finally come to terms with their natures. 

 

The daughters are just as uninvolved with his funeral, turning away requests for help with the dismissal that they are “in deep grief over their loss.” His gravestone thus bears the words “Here lies M. Goriot, father of the Comtesse de Restaud and the Baronne de Nucingen, interred at the expense of two students.” Like living, the reader is reminded that dying is frightfully expensive. 

 

The three young people around Goriot lie at different points along the axis of moral corruption. Daughter Anastasie is cold, calculating and most aware of how much she exploits her father’s deluded love. It is ironic that she is just as deluded about her affair partner as her father is about her: she pours hundreds of thousands of francs into funding his gambling addiction. Passionate and romantic Delphine deceives herself into not seeing her abuse of her father’s love or finds ways to rationalize it (“Why did he allow us to marry when we did? Was it not his duty to think for us and foresee for us? Today I know he suffers as much as we do, but how can it be helped?”). Her outbursts are so spirited that it is tempting to dismiss her flaws and fall in love with her like Eugène does.

At this moment I have but one fear left, but one misery to dread—to lose the love that has made me feel glad to live. Everything is as nothing to me compared with our love; I care for nothing else, for you are all the world to me.

While Eugène cares tenderly for Goriot, he is easily distracted by the luxury of a ball, and derelict towards his own family. Like Delphine, he also finds ways to rationalize or ignore the immorality of his actions (“Eugène did not wish to see too clearly; he was ready to sacrifice his conscience to his mistress.”).

 

Balzac’s characters are flawed, but understandable. He shows us how each character’s decisions are shaped by social forces. It is Parisian culture that is skewered: its dazzling splendor is an artifice concealing a cut-throat, turbulent, and unhappy core. Characters like Delphine understand this but see no escape — “Half the women in Paris lead such lives as mine; they live in apparent luxury, and in their souls are tormented by anxiety” — despite the high price of playing the game. Lives are wasted on ingenuine relationships. It’s a beautifully written book, and though the Bourbon era is long gone its themes remain poignant: financial pressures, social pressures, and a culture of individuality still trouble the development of genuine love.

Review: Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

It’s been a year of re-reads, and this book I have re-read many times. Journeying through its pages is always part self-discovery: how did these characters and their surreal banter shape my view of the world?

I can try to remove myself from the reading experience, and assess its themes and messaging from a cool distance. I played around with the idea of Through The Looking Glass as a metaphor for the rise of the bourgeoisie. Alice is a commoner — a privileged one, with servants and a nanny, but a commoner — and she starts her journey in the looking glass world serving the aristocracy, lifting the red and white royalty (chess pieces, but a possible nod to the Tudors?) out of the ashes and tidying them up. Alice expresses her desire to be a queen, and the red queen promises her that she, too, can be a queen if she gets to the eighth square (after all, the aristocracy promised/permitted some wealth and power to the bourgeoisie in their ascent). Alice makes her way through a series of odd holdovers from the feudal days: a king, napping against a tree, uselessly, while his kingdom is a flurry of activity; a duel between two brothers, to settle a silly dispute, but fought with blunt swords and a gentleman’s agreement to end by dinner-time; a knight, who can neither stay seated on his horse nor invent useful products. The world is strange: it is filled with old, familiar nursery rhymes but none of the logic makes sense any more (perhaps a revolution is in order?). Alice reaches the eighth square and finds a golden crown on her head, but she is still subordinated to the red and white queen. She starts to assert herself over a battle of wits and of table manners, and eventually leads a revolution:

“I can’t stand this any longer!” she cried as she jumped up and seized the table-cloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests, and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.

The white queen is shrunk down into a doll, while Alice shakes the red queen into a kitten. The power is all Alice's.

While I think this is a fun lens through which to enjoy the book, I can’t argue that this is the reading Carroll intended. The scenes are not crafted with the through-lines such a grand theme would need to pull it together. The sole commonality between each of her adventures that Alice remarks upon is the unexpected frequency of fish in the poetry of the looking glass world. Instead, the chapters are episodic — like an absurd version of The Odyssey — with each encounter playing on different expectations Alice has of the workings of the world, language and customs. But even if Carroll did not intend to tell the story of the bourgeoisie superseding the feudal system, that was the zeitgeist of the time (see, for example, Jane Austen, or Charles Dickens). It’s unsurprising that the strangeness of the new world order would find its way subconsciously into delightful children’s books.

Review: True Grit by Charles Portis

I'll remember this book for its lively and distinctive narrator voice, and the way it (unintentionally?) captures so much of the American psyche.

Mattie Ross is headstrong, principled, and speaks in folksy idioms. She narrates her story as if called to the witness stand. She regularly caveats information she knows only secondhand or scenes she cannot recall with great certainty. Those moments she recalls with great precision she states her willingness to swear on. Her narrative voice reflects her worldview: except for her close ties with her family, her relationships with people are largely transactional and her assessment of morality emphasizes its consistence with the law.

Lawful society versus the state of nature is a major theme of the work. Mattie's worldview comes into conflict with her life experience when she underestimates a bandit's willingness to defy her arrest and overpower her physically, thrusting her into a state of nature. In an effort to escape her captors she finds herself in a pit filled with snakes and bats. Forced by necessity, she rips the arm off a corpse (an act she views as unlawful desecration) and fights her way out.

The story itself is quintessentially American, both in the positive and negative sense. Mattie's quest symbolizes the importance of fighting for justice, although it is a retributive justice. Mattie values grit, and because of grit even a trigger-happy and vindictive bad cop may be the key to achieving justice. It's important to live by your principles, and everyone is unscrupulous and out to get you. Perhaps there is a work out there that venerates these positive qualities without also promoting these negative qualities; America is unlikely to fix its problems while instilling True Grit morality.

Review: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The various currents of American identity jump out of this novel’s pages, and then sing you to sleep with flowery, melodramatic Victorian prose.

The first of these currents is puritanism, sharply criticized by the narrative for its hypocrisy and unneighbourliness. That this streak remains within American culture despite the novel’s consistent place in school reading lists suggests the critique doesn’t quite land. Do readers laugh at the townsfolk who snub the lovechild of an adultress until she becomes a rich heiress (I certainly did), but not see themselves in these small-minded, selfish folk (I certainly didn’t)? 

Another current is the pride and tenacity in standing up for one’s beliefs, no matter the social opposition — even if it demands braving the Atlantic to reinvent oneself. This theme, too, the author weaves into his work with intention. Adulteress Hester Prynne’s quiet rebellion in transforming the scarlet letter she is forced to wear into something beautiful, her refusal to cover the letter in shame… these passages are touchingly written, heroic.

Combining these two currents together, there is a deep mistrust in the state — which is, after all, composed of people, who tend towards being cruel puritans. Highlighted secular institutions are the prison and the cemetery. Elections are pompous, revered, capricious rituals. Social interventions callously and sanctimoniously try to part mother and child. Through personification in Hester, the virtues elevated by the narrative are individual charity and truthfulness to oneself.

Some currents perhaps less intentionally flow from the author’s pen. The noble savagery of the indigenous neighbours is an artifact of the author's era. There is a heavy christian morality that coats every character’s emotions — particularly that of guilt. It weighs so leadenly on the characters that I find the novel almost not worth reading for its lack of insight into human psychology, the focus of the novel.

Review: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

This is a book for those who enjoy overtly political fiction. Those who treasure world-building and the mechanics of magic systems will be profoundly disappointed. The main character, Hank, is bonked on the head and inexplicably sent back to the sixth century. Having just as inexplicably memorized the date of every total eclipse going back over a millennia, Hank uses the knowledge of a conveniently-timed rare astronomical event to make himself King Arthur’s official court wizard, deposing Merlin.

And thus Mark Twain quickly gets all sorts of inconvenient plot necessities out of the way (the kind of power-struggle or magic system exploration that might have kept a Robert Jordan-type occupied for some 4000 pages), allowing us to focus on the real topic at hand: education is absolutely crucial for a mass social revolution.

Armed with the knowledge of the nineteenth century, Hank embarks on a modernization of the kingdom, from a patent office to telephone lines to newspapers. It quickly becomes clear that the barrier to creating a “civilized” society is not (solely) technological, but social. The feudal society is nearly alien to him in their understanding of truth and justice.

Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine. I had mine, the king and his people had theirs. In both cases they flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit, and the man who should have proposed to divert them by reason and argument would have had a long contract on his hands.

Hank finds himself repeatedly frustrated trying to reason with people about how they should go about making the world better for themselves only to be met with self-sabotaging superstition.

The painful thing observable about all this business was the alacrity with which this oppressed community had turned their cruel hands against their own class in the interest of the common oppressor.

The principal target of Twain’s polemic is the feudal system and the religious institutions that accompanied it. In 2024, it seems like a dead horse that doesn’t need further beating, but I suppose the horrors of nineteenth century capitalism had Twain’s contemporaries romancing the chivalry and bucolic villages of an imagined dark ages, just as 135 years later we romanticize some good, kind capitalism that never was.

Twain’s story shows its age in other facets too; Hank initially repeatedly refers to the sixth century denizens as animals, and once as “white indians”, in need of civilizing. These aspects felt rather uncomfortably colonial (and of course, Twain was writing at a time of American colonialism). On the other hand, Hank wasn’t using economic and military means to force a people to submit: the victims of his authority and his superior ballistics were all aristocrats, the beneficiaries their oppressed and imprisoned serfs. If anything, in his role of transforming society through enlightenment, Hank was more of a missionary. Slowly, Hank learns to relate to the people around him, and his language ceases being quite so derogatory. His friendship with his apprentice, Clarence, was quite cute.

Though the premise and some of the humour is really very silly, the novel bursts with incisive and empathetic observations about oppression, violence, leadership and political education that will linger in my mind for a while.

Review: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

David Copperfield is incredibly 19th century: it is preoccupied with the need for the emancipation of women, the commodification of relationships under capitalism, the ever present threat of destitution and debt in a callous and selfish society, the salvation promised by emigration to the Colonies. These themes are explored from multiple angles, with similar beats striking the lives of two or three characters. Though each man charts his own path and can only rarely count on the goodwill of others, Dickens seems to suggest, the tragedies and heartbreaks of the modern era happen in every other household. Though his characters and readers might feel alone, they aren’t.

This novel’s ability to weave together so many plots and stories is perhaps all the more remarkable because it is told from a first person perspective from a single point of view. That one of the most compellingly explored themes is the plight of women in marriage is similarly surprising given our point of view character is male. David’s mother marries while legally an adult but emotionally still a child. She is widowed early and left nearly friendless, and struggles to adapt to her new life. Her second husband emotionally abuses her until she becomes an anxious shell of herself, and she dies of childbirth and depression. David’s step-father goes on to repeat this process with a second victim. 

As a young adult, David falls head-over-heels for Dora, ignoring every red flag about her lack of emotional maturity. David tries to encourage his wife to learn accounting and other practical household management tasks and become an intellectual partner to him, but Dora finds herself inept and ill-prepared for all such tasks and retreats into a child-like state void of responsibility. She asks David to call her his “child-wife”; “you should think of me that way,” she begs him. Their marriage is unhappy for both of them, and she dies of a miscarriage and depression.

One of the few independent women we see is David’s aunt, Betsey Trotwood. She uses her comfortable fortune to support David’s education, and rescues Mr Dick, a neurodivergent man who would otherwise be sent to some institution and who she treats with the dignity and respect not typical of the era. But like David and his mother (and other unfortunate characters, like Emily, a lower class woman who ran off with upper-class Steerforth without a marriage), we eventually learn that Miss Betsey was also swept up in a “first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart.” She, however, wisely separated from her husband, a spendthrift.

These unhappy impulsive loves are contrasted with three positive marriages: David and Agnes, Miss Peggotty and Mr Barkis, Traddles and Sophy. In each case, the marriage is happy because the husband and wife contribute to the relationship as partners; the wife supports the husband’s professional endeavors and manages the household, the husband makes wise financial decisions and cares for the wife. It is the paragon of bourgeois notions of love.

Though this is a narrow prescription for romantic love, Dickens is far more flexible in familial configurations. The most warm and loving family is that of the Peggotties, an ensemble of orphaned children and the adults that care for them. David’s step-father and step-aunt are charged with his care, but are unloving and abandon him to factory work. He instead finds support and guidance in the home of his aunt and Mr Dick, and in his old nurse, Miss Peggotty. The family you make is more important than the one defined by the law.

Interestingly, while cross-class relationships David forms in his childhood stand the test of time, David ceases to form close relationships with the lower class as an adult. Perhaps this is unintentional (the book introduces nearly every character within the first quarter or so—David’s England seems to have a population of just thirty people), or perhaps it is a commentary on how the financial relationship between two adults precludes real friendship.

Throughout the story is an ever-present fear of being financially taken advantage of. Around every corner lurk scammers. As a child, a penniless David is scammed and swindled. As an adult, his servants steal from him and storekeepers overcharge him. The climax of the story comes with the revelation that Agnes’s father’s clerk, Uriah Heep, has defrauded him. Our characters also struggle to protect their finances from the cruel claws of the bank. Debt haunts David’s father figure Mr Micawber and Miss Betsey’s estranged husband. 

The optimization of profit over the well-being of others, the cruel and impersonal nature of law over individual charity are emphasized at each devastating tragedy. A suddenly penniless David begs his boss, Mr Spenlow, for part of his deposit to be returned to him, against the terms of their contract. Mr Spenlow sighs and says that of course he would love to be merciful but his partner Mr Jorkins “is not a man to respond to a proposition of this peculiar nature.” Mr Jorkins in turn blames Mr Spenlow's objections for his inability to return David’s money.

Although the world is lonely and selfish and dangerous, the book strikes an optimistic tone: the underhanded and insincere are punished (Heep, and Steerforth if forces of nature count as justice) and the hard-working and moral are rewarded (Traddles, Agnes, David, Pegotty). In true nineteenth century fashion, much of the hope for a better life exists in the Colonies: Emily and her family emigrate to Australia to escape the social shame of her elopement; Mr Micawber and his family emigrate to Australia in search of the stable financial existence they have failed to find in England; Steerforth’s butler Littimer had hoped to escape to America with his master’s valuables but instead is transported to Australia. (Similarly characteristic of the nineteenth century, the ills of settler colonialism and imperialism are not explored.)

The book was beautifully written; I loved the intricacy of the plotlines and the way they rhymed, the mix of humour and emotional sincerity, and the charming child’s perspective of adult concepts in the first act. But the hopes and fears explored in the book, its political pleas, all felt more of a time capsule than some other books I’ve read of the era. Elizabeth Bennett, Anna Karenina and Jane Eyre feel like kindred spirits in their struggles for independence and recognition and love despite our separation of centuries, David Copperfield and the David Copperfield cast read like empathetically-portrayed historical curiosities.

Review: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

This novel surprised me! The opening scene features the protagonist, Robert Jordan, laying out his plans to blow up a bridge to enable to Spanish Republicans to take a city over from the fascists, and I assumed this would be the inciting event to kick off the wave of action that the rest of the book would ride. Instead, the novel spans the two days leading up to the attack, every moment of the day catalogued in detail, from the typical thrilling events of an action movie (like scoping out enemy watch shifts) to the very mundane (sitting around campfires over dinner and talking). The slow unfolding of events gives space for an intensely realistic portrayal of life behind enemy lines (based on Hemingway's experiences in the Spanish Civil War, the book was a favourite among Cuban revolutionaries for its realism), and philosophical meditations on leadership.

Of the aspects of leadership explored, my favourite was the argument for strategic decision-making guided by science and engineering over impulsive action guided by blood-lust and vengeance. Repeatedly, Robert Jordan reins in his allies, who, in their desire to kill some fascists, might jeopardize the bridge objective. Repeatedly, he is proven correct, ultimately tragically correct. This kind of theme feels rare in war stories, which often feature story arcs in which the best laid plans of mice and men give way to heroic actions driven by gut feelings. It seems rare outside of action movies too: evidence-based long-term planning does not scream "gripping plot" and even the stories we tell about real world events are usually re-framed to emphasize in-the-moment decision-making and big personalities over careful team coordination and discipline in sticking to long-term goals despite temptations.

The philosophy was, however, a mixed bag: Robert Jordan's school of ethics was proudly eclectic. For him, philosophy is a matter of faith: you pick what you choose to believe and discard the rest. I would have preferred a protagonist who is as systematic in his philosophical thinking as he is in his assessment of how to place explosives or identification of men not up to the task of leading a rebel party.

The portrayal of women was abysmal. Although matriarch Pilar was quite fun, I gritted my teeth through the scenes with Maria (of which there were many). Maria, we are repeatedly told, would have been ever so beautiful if it weren't for the fact that her hair was short. Despite the disfiguring length of her hair, she has every man in the camp slobbering over how sexy she is, although she falls in love at first sight with Robert Jordan. She quickly dives into bed with him because she is told that sex with this complete stranger will cure her of her trauma from being violently sexually assaulted. She is very young, and naive to the ways of the world, and wants nothing more than to sexually please Robert Jordan and wash his socks. They agree to marry, and mother figure Pilar gives her helpful advice like "don't eat potatoes so you can maintain your figure", and Robert Jordan agrees with her on the importance of not getting fat and not eating potatoes. Insoportable.

The language of the story deserves commentary. I've seen elsewhere it has been criticized for its unnatural phrasing, but I loved it. The story is set in Spain but although it was originally written in English, it reads like an awkward translation from Spanish. The characters use "thou" and "you" for the informal and formal "tu" and "usted" as befitting their social relationships, and their speech is peppered with false-friend translations ("I could not support it" instead of "I couldn't stand it", taken from "no puedo soportarlo"). The main character, a Spanish teacher, muses at times on the fidelity of translation and the way etymology shifts across the european continent. Lots of fun easter eggs for fans of languages and people learning Spanish (i.e., me).

Review: Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Well-mannered and bright woman from an impoverished aristocratic family undergoes character development and is rewarded for it by a prosperous marriage. Sound familiar? It’s the plot for novels ranging from Jane Austen to Jane Eyre, and it is, in my reading at least, completely, amusingly, subverted in Charlotte Brontë's 1853 novel Villette. Maybe other girls have marriage as their reward; Villette is about the aristocracy learning to become bourgeois, about a young woman learning how to run a business.

Our impoverished aristocratic heroine is one Lucy Snowe, a highborn girl who we first meet spending a few months with her rich godmother, Mrs Bretton. In her early adulthood, Lucy loses her family and her fortune. The circumstances of this sudden loss of wealth are never clearly explained. Lucy is an unreliable narrator; she keeps the identity of a character secret for several chapters, until it is most dramatic to reveal she had known all along (information asymmetry is after all highly exploitable for profit) and she often mocks the reader for making assumptions or wanting to know particular details or her innermost longings. All we know of Lucy’s impoverishment is that it somehow involves a shipwreck. Perhaps she could turn to her wealthy godmother for support? No: it is the early 1800s, the aristocracy faces financial precarity in a world upset by capitalism, subject to the whims of unpredictable market bubbles. Mrs Bretton's property, “which had been chiefly invested in some joint-stock undertaking, had melted, it was said, to a fraction of its original amount.”

With no family relations to support her, Lucy becomes a caregiver for a wealthy elderly woman. The woman soon dies, and Lucy falls into despair as she tries to identify how she will be able to support herself. Like many propertyless individuals of the nineteenth century who struggled to find employment, Lucy sets out to a foreign land: a fictional continental European country called Labassecour. Though in the same dire straits as the working class, Lucy retains the tastes and obliviousness as to the financial values of things of the aristocracy. A wiser Lucy, later in the novel, will remark upon awareness of the material worth of objects as a bourgeois characteristic: “Ginevra ever stuck to the substantial; I always thought there was a good trading element in her composition, much as she scorned the ‘bourgeoise.’” But for now, our hapless heroine spends far too much money — “three times that afternoon I had given crowns where I should have given shillings” — and loses every one of her paltry possessions on the journey, finding herself purely by Providence in the drawing room of a Madame Beck, a well-off mistress of a private school for girls.

In this tense scene, Lucy is faced with the “perils of darkness and the street” if she is not able to secure employment with Madame Beck. In desperation, she pleads, successfully:

Be assured, madame, that by instantly securing my services, your interests will be served and not injured: you will find me one who will wish to give, in her labour, a full equivalent for her wages.

Thrust into this new life, Lucy is very aware of class differences, nationality differences, and wealth differences. Madame Beck, dressed in impeccable French tailoring, “looked well, though a little bourgeoise; as bourgeoise, indeed, she was." The educational institution features girls from both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and Lucy finds that it is the lower class that possesses more admirable virtues:

At the desks of Madame Beck’s establishment the young countess and the young bourgeoise sat side by side. Nor could you always by outward indications decide which was noble and which plebeian; except that, indeed, the latter had often franker and more courteous manners, while the former bore away the bell for a delicately-balanced combination of insolence and deceit. In the former there was often quick French blood mixed with the marsh-phlegm: I regret to say that the effect of this vivacious fluid chiefly appeared in the oilier glibness with which flattery and fiction ran from the tongue, and in a manner lighter and livelier, but quite heartless and insincere.

Lucy adjusts to her new life as a waged worker and as an immigrant — but not easily. She struggles with loneliness and depression. Eventually, she becomes so distraught that she swoons in a church yard, and is nursed to health by her godmother and her son, Dr. John Graham Brretton, after a surprise reunion. Lucy falls in love with Dr. John, however her affections are not returned. Dr. John is instead besotted with Lucy’s companion and student, Ginevra.

Let’s pause for a moment here and examine the trope of marriage as a reward for well-behaved young women. There are three single, aristocratic women in this novel (all British, incidentally): Ginevra, Paulina, and our heroine, Lucy. Ginevra, poor but gently born, is beautiful, unstudious, unreligious, materialistic and toys with men's affections. Paulina, a countess, is highly accomplished, sweet, chaste, witty, and thoughtful towards her loving if overly controlling father. Lucy falls somewhere in between the two: pious, gracious, restrained, poor at mathematics and lowbrow in her artistic tastes.

Following the conventional marriage tropes of the era, we would expect some embarrassing scandal of an elopement resulting in abject poverty or misery for Ginevra. Instead — having burned bridges with Dr. John for taking too much advantage of his heart and purse — we get an embarrassing scandal of an elopement resulting in Ginevra becoming a countess, living relatively comfortably, and (through a little of her own cunning) “suffering as little as any human being I have ever known.” For Paulina we would expect a happy, fruitful, and prosperous marriage. And it certainly is happy and fruitful — but her prize husband is Dr. John, who has little wealth and works for his living, and who is scorned repeatedly as “bourgeois”. Moreover, although Lucy expresses happiness that her friend marries the man they both love, there is also a sense of loss. Paulina drops suddenly out of the narrative, rarely to be seen again, and in her happy marriage, she seems to become fully subsumed within her husband:

Graham Bretton and Paulina de Bassompierre were married, and such an agent did Dr. Bretton prove. He did not with time degenerate; his faults decayed, his virtues ripened; he rose in intellectual refinement, he won in moral profit: all dregs filtered away, the clear wine settled bright and tranquil. Bright, too, was the destiny of his sweet wife. She kept her husband’s love, she aided in his progress—of his happiness she was the corner stone. 

And what of Lucy? Bottling up her emotions, she manages to get over Dr. John, and grows fond of Monsieur Paul, a teacher at Madame Beck’s school. M. Paul encourages Lucy in reading, arithmetic and various other self-improvement projects (going so far as to lock her in an attic so she would study her lines — is it a Charlotte Brontë novel without a woman locked in an attic?). When Lucy expresses an interest in running her own school — she wishes to be independent, not working for wages — M. Paul uses his wealth to make this dream come true. 

And here we discover the true reward: emancipation from poverty and familial control comes not through a fortunate marriage (which leaves one subsumed within one’s husband) but through financial independence via capital investment. M. Paul is immediately whisked away on business travel for three years. Lucy reacts thusly:

Reader, they were the three happiest years of my life. Do you scout the paradox? Listen. I commenced my school; I worked—I worked hard. I deemed myself the steward of his property, and determined, God willing, to render a good account. Pupils came—burghers at first—a higher class ere long.

Lucy finds happiness not through marriage, but from growing her business. After some time, yet another windfall of capital comes her way. A distant relative dies, and on his deathbed, bequeaths her a large sum, out of guilt for not having supported her more earlier:

How far his conscience had been sinned against, I never inquired. I asked no questions, but took the cash and made it useful.

Our heroine, who once spent crowns where she should have spent shillings on useless consumption like carriage rides, has learned the bourgeois art of making money with money.

The ending of the novel is ambiguous, but, mirrors the mysterious circumstances surrounding the loss of Lucy’s hereditary wealth: it is implied M. Paul dies in a shipwreck. While Lucy is presumably emotionally devastated by this loss, there is the suggestion that she otherwise continues to be successful in her enterprise. Although Lucy refuses to inform the reader as to her own welfare, the final line in the novel notes that the other independent school proprietress, Madame Beck, “prospered all the days of her life.”

Review: The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni

I used to read a lot of historical fiction — the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, the Sharpe series by Bernard Cornwell, The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, the list goes on. Historical fiction can serve to highlight the progress we’ve made — and it does sometimes: my favourite parts of Outlander involve time-travelling nurse Claire Beauchamp trying to recreate 20th century medical technology within the limits of 1740s Scotland. In practice, however, positive progress is often limited to highlighting how much more violent past societies were in their oppression of women – usually for titillation (Outlander is an example of this tendency too). Much of the historical commentary instead has a nostalgic, reactionary element to it: “we used to build gorgeous buildings”, “warfare used to be more noble”, “we were all happier when we were farmers living under the guidance of a kind Laird”, “we used to be faithful”. The choice of writing a novel set in the past implicitly makes a few political claims. This period has some particular value to understand at our current moment in time, or this period did something right (or maybe wrong?) that makes it a good setting for exploring love, loss, or some other aspect of human nature.

The Betrothed is a historical fiction novel set in the 1620s and written in the 1820s. Reading it in the 2020s makes the implicit political claims in Alessandro Manzoni’s choice of setting murkier to understand: the pressing political concerns of the mid-nineteenth century and how contemporary readers would have viewed the seventeenth century are not so front of mind. The 1820s were post-Enlightenment, post-French Revolution, with the capitalist class encroaching upon the power of the aristocratic class. The 1620s were feudal, dominated by power struggles between a powerful church and the aristocratic class and their thuggish bravi. Italian territories of the 1820s were governed by the Hapsburg empire, while Italian territories of the 1620s were governed by the Spaniards.

Manzoni, an aristocrat, grapples with the concepts of power and laws, the role of the (aristocratic) individual versus the State in charity, and the decline of Catholic morals, and the 1620s backdrop helps him explore how these facets of society had changed over time.

Our opening scene features village priest Don Abbondio accosted by the local baron Don Rodrigo’s hired hit men, who threaten him into not marrying the betrothed lovers Lucia and Renzo. By the law of the land, it was of course illegal to coerce people into performing or not performing marriages. Renzo is informed so by a barrister (Chapter 3), but when the barrister realizes his client would be facing the militarily mighty Don Rodrigo in court, he cowers in fear and joins the side of the law-flouting Don Rodrigo instead. Given the weakness of the law to the power of violence wielded by the nobility, how should Don Abbondio have reacted? The answer is the church: the novel devotes some fifteen pages (Chapter 25-26) to the chastisement of Don Abbondio by saintly Cardinal Federico Borromeo, who explains that Don Abbondio should have escalated the matter to the church, and watched out for his flock of parishioners rather than for his own skin.

A fourth faction complicating the Law/Nobility/Church power struggle is that of the masses, and we see their potential for power in the bread riots of Chapters 12-13. After two years of famine, aristocratic politician Grand Chancellor Antonio Ferrer attempts to soothe the masses who are furious at the rising bread prices by setting a price cap on bread, like “an aging woman who thinks she can be young again simply by altering her birth certificate.” While “orders less inane and unfair had [previously] not been executed (...) since they were so unrealistic”, the masses, in their dumb hunger for bread, ensured that this particular rule was enforced, attributing the lack of bread not to the famine but to the tyranny of the landowners, the bourgeois, and “anyone, in short, who had either a little or a lot or was reputed to have some”. The narrative is very sympathetic to the plight of the bakers, who must sell bread as if it's priced at 33 liras a bushel while the going rate is 80 liras a bushel, and face penalties for not selling their wares. While we do not see any starving peasants, we are shown several scenes of violent looters, participants running from the riots carelessly letting bread rolls fall from their overflowing baskets and arms. I took this chapter to be in part a reaction to the French Revolution of 1789, one that is suddenly aware of the power of crowds (“All that was missing was an occasion, a spark, an instigation of some sort to transform words into action”) but also one firmly believing that mob rule will lead to a degenerate state.

We see these same forces at work as the plague breaks out in Chapters 31-33: those in charge of writing laws and their learnèd consultants are stupid, ineffectual, corrupt, and break apart the ties of community, while the masses continue to fixate on conspiratorial explanations for their misery (a clandestine organization of noxious unguent spreaders) rather than material evidence (an airborne disease).

Amidst the senseless frenzy of the masses and the shortsighted overstepping of liberty of the legal system, there are nonetheless several examples given of good being done in the world. However, these are united by one principle: they are examples of highborn people following the ways of God and helping the less fortunate through charity. The turning point of the novel is the “miraculous” conversion of the Nameless One, from his days of marauding debauchery to becoming a model aristocrat. Upon his conversion, he uses his resources to rescue Lucia from the clutches of Don Rodrigo, and gives ample charitable gifts to her family to restore the balance upset by Don Rodrigo’s threats at the start of the novel. Contrasted with the bread riots, Cardinal Frederico, who “could be living in the lap of luxury”, is praised for feeding the hungry for bread from his own plate. These charitable gestures inspire a tailor to give food to a poor widow—this, presumably, is seen as a more just solution to a famine. The virtuous Fra Cristoforo, wealthy by birth and proud by nature who similarly miraculously converts to the ways of the Lord, helps the sufferers of the plague through self-sacrificing devotion in contrast to the heartless, cruel public health measures implemented by the Tribunal of Health. This emphasis on individual actions runs throughout the novel. “Do good to as many people as you can (...) and you will be rewarded many times over with faces that lift your spirits.”

In the 19th century, moral obligation had given way to legal formality. Where once one’s word of honour would suffice, now legal contracts were required. Where once noblesse oblige and the charity and protection of the church ensured the welfare of the commoners, now state intervention into the price of bread or into disease management prevailed. Manzoni appears to be commenting that, sure, the olden times had their issues with individuals (and their bravi) acting badly, but the Church and the charity of the good were there to counteract them. Now, we have just the State and the masses, and look how senseless that can be. Is there still a role remaining for the pious aristocrat?

Poor politics aside, I want to highlight two stand-out parts of the novel. The first is the portrait of Gertrude (Chapters 9-10). Her aristocratic father wishes to not divide his estate amongst his children, and so grooms Gertrude from an early age to become a nun. Despite these social pressures, Gertrude discovers the joy of love, which would be denied her were she to become a nun. However, the path to becoming a nun has been carved out for her, and to deviate from it requires upsetting every social and familial relationship she has. While Gertrude ultimately lacks the courage to leave the life others have created for her, her inner monologue is written with such empathy and compassion that it still feels like a very fresh investigation into social conditioning and the meaning of enthusiastic consent versus coercion. I think this same empathy allows Manzoni to portray plague survivors in a way that likely strikes readers of the 2020s as more accurate and true than it would have to readers of the 2010s even. There is a scene in which the star-crossed fiancé unites with a friend after the plague, and both feel out of practice socially but hunger for community and recount the trauma of the pandemic and how they’ve survived it. I, at least, have had a few of those conversations.

Finally, the translation by Michael Moore is vivid and lyrical.

And one last note: I had originally thought to write on the role of providence in the novel, however I really enjoyed Robert S. Dombrosk's treatment of the subject and direct the reader there instead.

Anna Karenina and The Woman Question

Why does Tolstoy kill Anna Karenina?

The easy answer is that Anna’s suicide is the just punishment for her adultery and lack of maternal virtues. The clearest evidence of this hypothesis is the comparison with Kitty Shtcherbatskaya, the female half of the other major romantic relationship of the book. 

We meet Kitty in the midst of a girlish infatuation with Vronsky, expressing all the excitement with dancing one would expect of Kitty Bennet. Heartbroken that Vronsky chooses Anna over her, she falls into a depression, but eventually develops a strong love for Levin. Throughout the rest of the book, her love for Levin is never shaken, not when he confesses he isn't a virgin, nor when he confesses his lack of belief in God, nor when he tries to send her away as his brother is dying, nor when he develops an interest in Anna. Instead, Kitty is described as a considerate nurse, an adoring wife, a doting mother. She enjoys her pregnancy and the tasks of housekeeping. Our last scenes with her are ones of familial bliss: her delighting with her husband over their baby recognizing familiar faces. Kitty embodies the Victorian ideal of a woman, and ends the book in happiness and financial security.

Anna is contrasted with Kitty in nearly every sense. She is uninterested in housekeeping, repulsed by her husband, and unable to bond with the daughter she births. She carries out a scandalously public affair with Vronsky, then chooses to be with him rather than mother her son, then refuses to bear Vronsky more than one child. In our last scenes with Anna, we see her unable to find security in her love for Vronsky nor joy in her life, shunned by society, turning to suicide. She transgresses against social expectations of women and because she cannot deserve a happy ending, Tolstoy sentences her to death by train, a symbol of technology’s destabilizing effect on social hierarchies and gender roles.

I find this answer unsatisfying. For starters, Stepan Arkadyevitch carries out multiple hedonistic affairs with far less remorse than his sister Anna (“one does so little harm to anyone, and gives oneself so much pleasure”) with narrative impunity. Second, Anna is written to evoke empathy. After her “fall,” we discover extenuating circumstances – she was practically forced into a marriage with a much older man as a young girl by a manipulative aunt, her marriage was cold and loveless – it really feels like the reader is being asked “you were quick to judge her, but can you blame her?” Indeed within the narrative, Dolly, a woman who works hard to maintain her marriage and who loves and cares for her children, expresses understanding of Anna’s choice: “How is she to blame? She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should have done the same.” But moreover, Anna Karenina explores the oppression of women to an extent that still feels a little radical today, suggesting a different answer to the question.
 

Does Anna die because the oppression of women in her society left her no alternative for happiness and fulfillment?

Having left a loveless marriage, Anna – uniquely Anna, and not her male lover – is shunned from society and snubbed by her former friends. Her life is genteel, lonely, and interminably boring. Attempting to fill her days with anything other than changing her gown, she turns to reading voraciously, tutoring children, and writing children’s stories. Her efforts are largely trivialized as “unnatural” “affectations”, or curious pastimes rather than truly impressive philanthropy like running entire schools. Anna’s dissatisfaction in employment is suggested to be generalizable to all women. At a dinner party, the education and employment of women is discussed:

“Woman desires to have rights, to be independent, educated. She is oppressed, humiliated by the consciousness of her disabilities.”

Anna feels precarious, relying on her lover Vronsky for support. She believes he will only love her if she remains beautiful, but confides to her sister-in-law Dolly her certainty that Vronsky will not love her while she is pregnant, despite his repeatedly stated desire for more children. Anna’s fears are justified: during her pregnancy, Vronsky remarks that “she was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. She had broadened out all over.” Dolly is shocked to learn (after seven pregnancies) that she may have a choice over whether to become pregnant – control over her own childbearing was “the very thing she had been dreaming of” – and acknowledges Anna’s wisdom in refusing to bear more children, but that even remaining beautiful is no guarantee of Vronsky’s continued support:

“I,” she thought, “did not keep my attraction for Stiva; he left me for others, and the first woman for whom he betrayed me did not keep him by being always pretty and lively. He deserted her and took another.”

Pregnancy is repeatedly associated with “hideousness” and described as “intolerable,” while motherhood is described as unrewarding, futile, imprisonment. Dolly remarks:

Why, even if we suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don’t die, and I bring them up somehow. At the very best they’ll simply be decent people. That’s all I can hope for. And to gain simply that—what agonies, what toil!... One’s whole life ruined!

Dolly asks a “handsome” young peasant woman if she has any children. The woman responds,
 

“I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent.”
“Well, did you grieve very much for her?” asked Darya Alexandrovna.
“Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It was only a trouble.”

Anna decries her lack of legal and economic independence, her social standing and her reproductive choices: “what wife, what slave can be so utterly a slave as I, in my position?"

The flaw in this interpretation – that Anna’s options in life are so miserable, so akin to slavery that her suicide is seen in some way as understandable – however, is again the veneration of Kitty’s patient maternalism that I remarked on earlier. Further, Anna’s suicidal impulses are foiled against those of Levin, the other primary protagonist of the novel. Rather than Kitty expressing anything but delight in her new motherhood, it is Levin who has an identity crisis upon the birth of their child. In his search to understand the meaning of life, he tries to rationalize his purpose, poring over philosophy texts. He finally discovers that life cannot be understood through reason, but that meaning can only be derived through faith in God. He finds peace and happiness in his life.

So is this then the answer? That Anna dies because she has no faith in God? This theory also feels lackluster: Anna doesn’t dwell on faith, and never rejects God.

Is there perhaps no answer to the question? Tolstoy (rather smugly) writes in a letter to Nikolai Strakhov:

If I were to try say in words everything that I intended to express in [Anna Karenina], I would have to write the same novel I wrote from the beginning.

Clearly, Tolstoy intended to convey some meaning. Perhaps the answer is a muddled combination of all the above: Anna, as a woman in a decaying socioeconomic class, suffers from oppression but makes choices that are understandable – not alienly evil. If a woman can simply find happiness in her husband, in motherhood, in faith, she could have an enjoyable, rewarding life, Tolstoy seems to suggest.

Indeed this status quo-affirming tangle of an answer to the Woman Question is mirrored in Tolstoy’s examination of class. A landowner, Levin is displeased that he must exploit his workers to maximize his own profit, and tries to invent a sort of profit-sharing scheme in which he may incentivize peasants to work hard while he maintains his nobility: “living in good style – that’s the proper thing for noblemen.” His communist brother points out the flaws in Levin’s scheme, that rather than truly trying to address capital’s oppression of the labourer, he is attempting something out of an egotistical desire to be original. Even Levin’s philandering brother-in-law calls Levin’s attempt to define some ethical sort of capitalism “sophistry”, and suggests that Levin give away his estate if he considers his earning a hundred times that of his peasants "unfair." After a dozen chapters devoted to the ethics of capitalism and the oppression of the peasants, Levin’s ultimate solution to the challenges at hand is to be an ethical capitalist so that he may pass on his estate to his son.

He knew he must hire laborers as cheaply as possible; but to hire men under bond, paying them in advance at less than the current rate of wages, was what he must not do, even though it was very profitable. (...) Felling timber must be punished as severely as possible, but he could not exact forfeits for cattle being driven onto his fields; and though it annoyed the keeper and made the peasants not afraid to graze their cattle on his land, he could not keep their cattle as a punishment. To Pyotr, who was paying a money-lender ten per cent. a month, he must lend a sum of money to set him free. But he could not let off peasants who did not pay their rent, nor let them fall into arrears.

Tolstoy has, I think, a sharp sense for the many problems in his society, which was rapidly undergoing change as the serf system was abolished and Russia began to industrialize. But he seems unable to look beyond his patriarchal, aristocratic perspective. The conclusion of all these fantastically written dialogues and beautiful inner workings of the characters' minds thus feels rather empty, the questions raised going unanswered.

Review: F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

I read this novel for the first time shortly after reading Nghi Vo's The Chosen and The Beautiful, a retelling of The Great Gatsby told through the eyes of Jordan Baker but in a magical realism world. I find it impossible to disentangle the two books in my mind -- they share several scenes, and often even exact lines. Where Vo's interpretation examines the choices and societal pressures faced by the female and racialized characters, the original tale looks at Jay Gatsby's obsessive idolization of Daisy and Tom's self-centered possessiveness of Daisy.

The role of women as decorative, sexual objects — to be possessed, obsessed over — was highlighted in several passages that stood out to me. Here, at the death of Tom Buchanan's mistress, her corpse is described in an offputting, vulgar way:
 

when they had torn open her shirtwaist, still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped a little at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.

Here, two musings from Gatsby, conflating Daisy and treasure:

“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.

That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it… High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…

And:

He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go—but now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail. He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be. She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby—nothing. He felt married to her, that was all.

When they met again, two days later, it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was, somehow, betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold, and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever, and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.

The tone of the story made me think a little of a more modern, more cynical Jane Austen; a critique of the unique problems and snobbery of the Very Rich, woven together with romance, portrayed mainly through conversations in carriages and living rooms. A stand-out scene for me along this theme was the absurd banter as Jordan, Daisy, Tom, Nick and Gatsby discuss who knew who at Tom and Daisy's high society wedding as Tom simmers furiously at Daisy flirting with Gatsby.

The narrator's imaginative, at times romantic, and humorously humorless prose was captivating. I thought a little of Frankenstein — a similar sort of dreamy broodiness.

Review: Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's The Odyssey

I do a little technical writing translation here and there for a website, after naively answering "yes" to "Hey, you speak French and know this one specific scientific domain, don't you?" I've since learned it's one sort of thing to carry a conversation or write a technical report in a language, and quite another sort of thing to faithfully translate both the tone and the content of words written by someone else within the limits of a restrictive character count.

Humbled by this experience, I was fascinated by Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's The Odyssey, a retelling in contemporary language arranged in iambic pentameter matching the line count of the original poem. These stylistic choices no doubt created quite the linguistic puzzle, but I loved the thought she put behind it, laid out in her translator's note:

The use of noncolloquial or archaizing linguistic register can blind readers to the real, inevitable and vast gap between the Greek original and any modern translation. My use of contemporary language—rather than the English of a generation or two ago—is meant to remind readers that this text can engage us in a direct way, and also that it is genuinely ancient.

She also took a thoughtful approach to how to portray moral values in this very ancient text in a modern, understandable way.

Translation always, necessarily, involves interpretation; there is no such thing as a translation that provides anything like a transparent window through which a reader can see the original. (...)

Because The Odyssey has become such a foundational text in our educational system and in our imagination of Western history, I believe it is particularly important for the translator to think through and tease out its values, and to see the reader to see the cracks and fissures in its constructed fantasy.

This reconsideration of beliefs and mores made it fun to compare other translations, particularly when the poem dealt with feminist topics or relationships between the elite aristocrats and the slaves or the peasants. Here's an example of one of my favourite passages by Wilson, foiled against one by Alexander Pope (1725). The gods have staged an intervention, insisting Calypso allow Odysseus to leave her island, where he has been her captive for seven years.

Wilson's:

You cruel, jealous gods! You bear a grudge 

whenever any goddess takes a man 

to sleep with as a lover in her bed. 

Just so the gods who live at ease were angry 

when rosy-fingered Dawn took up Orion, 

and from her golden throne, chaste Artemis

attacked and killed him with her gentle arrows.

Demeter with the cornrows in her hair

indulged her own desire, and she made love 

with Iasion in triple-furrowed fields

till Zeus found out, hurled flashing flame and killed him.

So now, you male gods are upset with me 

for living with a man. A man I saved! 

Zeus pinned his ship and with his flash of lightning

smashed it to pieces. All his friends were killed 

out on the wine-dark sea. This man alone,

clutching the keel, was swept by wind and wave, 

and came here, to my home. I cared for him

and loved him, and I vowed to set him free

from time and death forever.

Pope:

“Ungracious gods! with spite and envy cursed!
Still to your own ethereal race the worst!
Ye envy mortal and immortal joy,
And love, the only sweet of life destroy,
Did ever goddess by her charms engage
A favour’d mortal, and not feel your rage?
So when Aurora sought Orion’s love,
Her joys disturbed your blissful hours above,
Till, in Ortygia Dian’s winged dart
Had pierced the hapless hunter to the heart,
So when the covert of the thrice-eared field
Saw stately Ceres to her passion yield,
Scarce could Iasion taste her heavenly charms,
But Jove’s swift lightning scorched him in her arms.
And is it now my turn, ye mighty powers!
Am I the envy of your blissful bowers?
A man, an outcast to the storm and wave,
It was my crime to pity, and to save;
When he who thunders rent his bark in twain,
And sunk his brave companions in the main,
Alone, abandon’d, in mid-ocean tossed,
The sport of winds, and driven from every coast,
Hither this man of miseries I led,
Received the friendless, and the hungry fed;
Nay promised (vainly promised) to bestow
Immortal life, exempt from age and woe.

Wilson's translation highlights the agency of the goddesses (compare "indulged her own desire" with "to her passion yield"), emphasizing the double standards the famously promiscuous gods hold towards the goddesses. Calypso's interest in Odysseus is portrayed more as born of love versus an interest born of charity and pity, tinging her enraged censure of the gods with a little more heartbreak.

Another comparison of translations, this time spoken from the perspective of Odysseus' (eye-rollingly) loyal slave upon their reunion, on the subject of the suitors:

Wilson: 

We suffer / in bitter toil for these white-tusked pigs, / while others eat the food we labor for, / and give us nothing.

Samuel Butler (1900):

We have had trouble enough this long time feeding pigs, while others reap the fruit of our labour.

Pope:

For great and many are the griefs we bear, / While those who from our labours heap their board / Blaspheme their feeder and forget their lord.

The focus of Wilson's translation here is on the hardships of the slaves. Butler's is a substantially milder version of Wilson's. In Pope's, these lines serve as a sort of background chorus to emphasize how much the suitors shame Odysseus in his absence.

Reading the text, I felt very conscious that it was a translation. Although the story and the language were both familiar, it had an alien feel to it. There was a lot of unusual imagery ("Dawn's rosy fingers", "wine-dark sea"). There was an inordinate amount of time precisely detailing exactly how each sacrifice to the gods was made. It also felt very apparent that The Odyssey was first and foremost an orally performed epic. Key plot points were repeated several times over—presumably in case the poem wasn't performed in its entirety or someone missed something on a trip to the washroom. Unimportant characters were given a lot of inconsequential backstory—perhaps tying in the events and characters of the story to popular contemporary tales?

And what of the story itself? Classics are funny; you think you've absorbed a reasonably faithful understanding of the text based on triangulation of pop culture references. Sometimes it works out; the various works inspired by Pride & Prejudice provide a pretty good picture for what you'll find following the famous phrase "It is a truth universally acknowledged". On the other hand, pop culture is a terrible coordinate system for Frankenstein and it is similarly a poor mirror for The Odyssey.

I was surprised by how little of The Odyssey was sea monsters and sirens. Indeed of the 24 "books" that divide the poem, only books 5-13 relate to Odysseus' wanderings. This part of the poem starts in medias res, and follows Odysseus for an adventure or two in the third person, until he finds an eager audience to listen to his tale, allowing him to catch us up to his exploits since the Battle of Troy in the first person. This part of the poem felt a little like a musical; characters are given extensive monologue time to impress upon the audience just how impressive (or not impressive) they find Odysseus, while the plot moves from event to event with tenuous or circumstantial links between problems and resolutions. I was surprised at how much the Coen Brother's O Brother Where Art Thou really nailed the tone of this part of the book.

The remaining nearly two thirds of the book have a more forward momentum sort of plot, but it wasn't at all what I expected from The Odyssey. It was your basic vengeance story. The suitors courting Odysseus's wife Penelope are cartoonishly selfish and irredeemable. Odysseus' slaves and dog are obsequiously, irrationally, loyal to him. There are dozens of long scenes dedicated to everyone from Odysseus' son Telemachus to the slave swine-herders to the gods themselves wailing about how much the suitors disrespect Odysseus. There's an odd scene in which a disguised Odysseus is humiliated by the suitors, seemingly just to sweeten his revenge and his displays of superior bowman-ship. This all culminates in a bloody, gruesome, merciless slaughter of the suitors and the slave women who slept with them. The story was reined in from veering into vengeance porn only by virtue of Penelope being a fascinating character and her eventual reunion with Odysseus being really quite sweet. (For the nuanced portrayal of Penelope, I assume I have much to thank Wilson for.)

The main theme linking Odysseus' wanderings and his vengeance was the idea of how you treat guests. Penelope's suitors overstay their welcome and eat their way through Odysseus' wealth. Calypso violates hospitality expectations in the other direction, hosting Odysseus and lavishing him with gifts but refusing to let him leave. Odysseus himself violates the sanctity of one's home; invading Polyphemus' peaceful abode, blinding him and stealing his sheep. Odysseus is a gracious, entertaining guest at Alcinous' palace, and Alcinous inexplicably rewards him with mountains of treasure.

Odysseus is not particularly sympathetic; Wilson translates the opening lines of the epic to describe his as "a complicated man", and "complicated" really captures her portrayal of him.

I'll end my review here with one more quote from Wilson's Translator's Note that I think summarizes what makes this such an interesting read.

The gendered metaphor of the "faithful" translation, whose worth is always secondary to that of a male-authored original, acquires a particular edge in the context of a translation by a woman of The Odyssey, a poem that is deeply invested in female fidelity and male dominance.

Review: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

It's been on my to-read list for a while, and I'm glad I picked it up finally. It wasn't what I expected. I was expecting a sort of Woman Versus The Dystopian State tale, something along the lines of 1984 or Brave New World but with more women. And instead, it was a much more internal look at the how one responds to changing systems and to oppression - the lies we tell ourselves to survive and the lies we tell ourselves to forgive ourselves for perpetuating oppression.

The prose was beautiful; vivid. I think if there were more women in the metal scene, there would probably be a Handmaid's Tale concept album. A lot of very metal motifs: like contrasting flowers/life with rot, Offred's thoughtful reflections about her surroundings giving way to unbridled hatred about her situation, the ghost of the former Handmaid in Offred's room, mistrust, surveillance.....

The dynamic between the Commander and the Handmaid was well woven and reminiscent of much of the #MeToo kind of stories (despite Atwood's somewhat poor take on the movement). The commander trying to lead Offred into saying everything is better now than it was before; the way he exerted power over her to make her attend him and visit the brothel with him; the way he deludes himself into thinking she was there because she wanted to be....

I wasn't such a fan of the epilogue. The details of the world were not particularly interesting to me, and the issues Atwood takes aim at (AIDS, nuclear power plants) did not age all that well. The epilogue critiques how little we are able to empathize with the pain/humanity of people from centuries ago - but the tonal shift wasn't quite what I wanted to read at that point.

I read this during the Summer of 2020, Shelter In Place orders intact, the week after George Floyd's was murdered by the police, with curfews lasting days in cities across the country. I saw somewhere a criticism that the world reflected in The Handmaid's Tale is too unrealistic; society doesn't change so quickly. That criticism rings so hollow right now - it is very easy to see how society could change so significantly over the course of a few years. I hope it does - but in a very different direction.

Review: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Frankenstein has been re-imagined and referenced so extensively in pop culture that I thought I knew all about it. Castle, bolts of lightning, a mad scientist yelling "it's alive!", protesting peasants armed with pitchforks and torches. Probably out of boredom with the tropes, I put off reading this book that otherwise thematically aligns very well with my interests - bioengineering, ethics, Regency Era literature by female authors. 

I was pleasantly surprised to instead find a very introspective and emotional story about two men, linked by a unique relationship. Rather than a climactic event marked by lightning occurring at some late part of the book, Frankenstein's wretch comes to being at the start of Chapter 5 during mundane meteorological conditions:

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

Frankenstein waxes poetic to himself for a paragraph or two about the sacrifices he made during his two years of study and his feeling of disgust and emptiness having finally achieved his goal (not unrelatable to a graduate student), then immediately goes to bed with nary a thought for the well-being of his creation. After one brief innocuous encounter during the night, Frankenstein tries his hardest to pretend he never created a man at all, and falls into a months-long illness so deep he can't even write a letter to his family in response to their imploring.

(Frankenstein suffers lengthy illnesses on two occasions, and I wondered at the author's reasoning. Was the dramatic and interminable depression supposed to signal how emotionally wrangled Frankenstein felt? Were such languid wallows in despair so commonplace among the aristocracy that the contemporary reader would not have remarked upon them at all as unusual? Was it merely a convenient device for explaining why Frankenstein did nothing at all for a long stretch of time while she needed the Wretch elsewhere?)

Frankenstein eventually recovers enough to read a very long letter from his adopted-sister-raised-to-be-his-wife, Elizabeth, which serves mostly to extol the kind nature and excellent nursing credentials of one Justine. Justine, nanny to Frankenstein's brother, is so perfect and virtuous that reader knows she will soon die. Surprisingly, it is the brother that shuffles off this mortal coil first.

In the long-awaited dramatic flash of lightning, Frankenstein encounters the Wretch on his way home and deduces it was he who murdered his brother. Regardless, Frankenstein continues his behavior of outwardly pretending he never created the Wretch—keeping quiet even as Justine is accused of and eventually executed for his brother's murder. Inwardly, of course, Frankenstein monologues extensively about the guilt, and how no one could possibly believe him and he had no way to save Justine.

A thousand times rather would I have confessed myself guilty of the crime ascribed to Justine, but I was absent when it was committed, and such a declaration would have been considered as the ravings of a madman and would not have exculpated her who suffered through me.

Frankenstein seems to think that deeply experiencing these feelings of guilt absolves him to some extent of the crime. I thought of Silicon Valley wringing their hands about about privacy, misinformation, addiction while continuing to change absolutely none of that. There is a lengthy scene where sister-slash-fiancée Elizabeth comforts Justine on the eve before her death, exhibiting her purity and virtuousness so extensively that the reader is sure that she too will soon die. 

To help process his feelings, Frankenstein goes on a solitary hike in the Alps, the lush descriptions of the beauty of nature serving as a foil against the horror of his creation. He encounters the Wretch, and reacts with an unreciprocated hate and fear:

“Devil,” I exclaimed, “do you dare approach me? And do not you fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone, vile insect! Or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust! And, oh! That I could, with the extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims whom you have so diabolically murdered!”

“I expected this reception,” said the dæmon. “All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.”

The Wretch tells his tale of how he spent the intervening months. He is introspective, and sensitive. Teaching himself first how to survive in the forest alone, scared of the reactions of villagers to his ungainly form, he next forms a sort of parasocial relationship with a family of cottagers. By watching them from afar, he learns of companionship and society, and recognizes that the sadness in himself is loneliness. His attempt to form a real relationship with them fails, and he is driven out. He by chance encounters a drowning woman and saves her life, only to be shot by her partner. Despairing of ever finding a home in society, the Wretch resolves to ask his creator for a mate—in a monologue that is uncomfortably reminiscent of incels.

I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create. (...)

I am content to reason with you. I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? (...) I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. (...)

What I ask of you is reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself; the gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it shall content me. It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless and free from the misery I now feel. Oh! My creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my request!

Frankenstein begins to make a female companion for the Wretch, but worries about the possible consequences of enabling procreation of a new race of Wretches.

[Y]et one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?

He decides to destroy all progress he has made on the female companion, and making good on his threat, the Wretch responds by murdering Frankenstein's best friend (also noted to have excellent nursing credentials), and Frankenstein's sister-slash-wife—on their honeymoon, no less.

Frankenstein realizes the only way to end the horror is to kill his creation, and he chases the Wretch across the Arctic. The two form a sort of odd adversarial intimacy in their chase, the Wretch leaving messages and food behind for his creator to consider and consume. At the brink of death from exhaustion, Frankenstein is picked up by the self-absorbed, self-important Captain Walton, whose letters to his sister form an epistolary framing device for the novel. Frankenstein dies onboard the ship, but not before first chiding the sailors in wanting to give up and go home rather than pursue their scientific dreams, and not before making it quite clear that he felt he had done no wrong in any way since the creation of the Wretch:

In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty, but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did right in refusing, to create a companion for the first creature. He showed unparalleled malignity and selfishness in evil; he destroyed my friends; he devoted to destruction beings who possessed exquisite sensations, happiness, and wisdom; nor do I know where this thirst for vengeance may end.

The Wretch sneaks on board the ship to gaze upon Frankenstein's corpse, then with this closure achieved, disappears into the night.

“I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.” 

He sprang from the cabin-window as he said this, upon the ice raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.

What I loved most about the book was its comfort in straying from realism. No explanation of the science behind Frankenstein's creation was offered. The Wretch's experience learning about humanity and society was completely implausible from a practical standpoint. And this rejection of the need to explain minutiae allowed for much more interesting introspection and exploration of themes.

However—I feel the themes were a little murky, or perhaps they just didn't ring true for me. Frankenstein is an ambitious, confident, solitary genius who views himself as the sole person who can make ethical decisions about his product despite its societal ramifications, and who views others as being incapable of understanding his advances. This archetype feels familiar in 21st century Silicon Valley. But Shelley presents Frankenstein's fatal flaw as having played with creating life in a quest for knowledge, as opposed to refusing to seek help or advice from others. This is evident in Frankenstein's insistence on his deathbed that he "did right" in his decisions. It is a darker view of scientific progress than one I espouse; I think all areas of Science can be developed, provided we carefully assess and publicly debate the social ramifications. 

Which brings us to Frankenstein's second hamartia: his inability to recognize his Wretch as a human with emotional and social needs. Relative to the Promethean theme, this one hasn't seeped as much into the popular conception of Frankenstein. This theme, too, feels very relevant today; current debates on social ramifications of technology include the dehumanization of Amazon fulfillment center workers, the insistence that gig economy companies will finally become profitable as soon as we can automate away those pesky human gig workers, and the omission of human impacts (or indeed, playful delight in adverse impacts) when optimizing social media Key Performance Indicators. However, I felt that the way this theme was explored itself ironically neglected the humanity of the Wretch. The Wretch was abused and traumatized and socially isolated, and so he had no hope but to become a murderer and then kill himself? A depressing attitude towards survivors of difficult childhoods.

I could envision a satisfying script doctoring in which Frankenstein confides in Elizabeth, and although Frankenstein dies, refusing to ever acknowledge the Wretch's humanity and potential for redemption, Elizabeth reaches out to the Wretch and together with Frankenstein Sr. supports him in his introduction to society. This ending would also provide a very welcome opportunity for a female character to do anything other than display purity and virtuousness and then die.

I enjoyed the dramatic, elaborate prose. Although at times I felt that the author believed the word count used must be proportional to the emotional turmoil described, overall I had a lot of fun with the unironic melodrama. I would love to see a Frankenstein-themed black metal album.