Showing posts tagged Victorian era
“
Mr. Garth: Most uncommon … She said a thing I often used to think when I was a lad: ‘Mr. Garth, I should like to feel, if I lived to be old, that I had improved a great piece of land and built a great many cottages, because the work is of a healthy kind while it is being done, and after it is done, men are the better for it’ …
Mrs. Garth: But womanly, I hope.
George Eliot, Middlemarch  Book V, Chapter LVI
“
Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying.
George Eliot, Middlemarch Book II, Chapter XXIX
“
Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian: We are but mortals, and must sing of men.
George Eliot’s translation of Theocritusfrom Idylls and the “motto for Book II, Ch. XXVI of Middlemarch.

Sorry Not Sorry for the Middlemarch Spam

I have posted a lot of Middlemarch quotes already.  I would say that I’m sorry, but it’s only going to get worse.  I’m reading it for my senior thesis and so far almost every new chapter is quotable.  This is how I’m making over 700 pages of Victorian Literature even more exciting!!!

Slang in George Eliot's Middlemarch (Book I, Ch. VI)

  • Fred Vincy: All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.
  • Rosamund Vincy: There is correct English: that is not slang.
  • Fred: I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poetry.
  • Rosamund: You will say anything, Fred, to gain your point.
  • Fred: Well, tell me whether it is slang or poetry to call an ox a leg-plaiter.
  • Rosamund: Of course you can call it poetry if you like.
  • Fred: Aha, Miss Rosy, you don't know Homer from slang.
“
One can begin so many things with a new person! —even begin to be a better man.
George Eliot, Middlemarch Book II, Chapter XIII

Henry James: The Victorian Era from Both Sides of the Atlantic

I feel weird not writing about literature.  At this point last term I would have already written at least one paper.  The fact that I barely have to read 200 pages for class … I feel almost lazy.  I don’t mean to dish on Rice though; I know things will get a lot worse when all my classes begin assigning papers and presentations.  But for now, I’m going to spend some of that analytical/creative energy here.

For my American Literature class we are reading Henry James.  Truthfully, this author is the reason I’m taking the class.  So many people have told me that I should read “The Turn of the Screw.”  We aren’t reading that novella but still, I am reading finally reading this important author.  He seems especially fitted to my life right now: American citizen, but traveled so much in Europe until he finally got fed up with American politics and switched his citizenship to Great Britain.  I haven’t gone that far, but I do understand why he ended up writing so much about American ex-patriots in Europe and why this marked him as a particularly important author on both sides of the ocean.  He was listed at the end of my Victorian Literature recommended reading list at Hertford, and now he’s at the top of my reading list for American Literature 1860-1910.  I love it.

(Henry James, image from the Wikipedia.org page)

For our first piece of literature we read “Daisy Miller,” his most popular short story and then this week have moved on to one of his earlier novels, Washington Square.  I’ve heard that these aren’t as crazy and convoluted as his later novels.  I’m glad we’re starting out easy, but everyone telling me about the later ones is beginning to make me think of it as a challenge …

Anyways, I love how the narrator remains somewhat omniscient in these pieces of fiction, but still does not give the reader a full picture of what is happening.  No one character has access to the full truth; many think they do, but as the narrator hints, they are all misled at least a little bit.  James could easily sweep in a clue in the reader, but where’s the fun in that?  I love this because I feel like it is true to life.  You can’t just stop, ask the narrator what is going on, and then continue, knowing that whatever he/she/it told you is the truth.  I love that even though James’ novels were written centuries ago when people generally lived in a different manner, they still apply to my life today.

I’ve also been reading some crazy modern drama for my capstone course and I’m sure our discussion of David Wiesner’s picture book, The Three Pigs, in Origins of the Postmodern will be worthy of further discussion, but I’ll have to save that for another post.  Even though readjusting to Rice has been weird in some ways, getting back into the classroom with these sorts of texts is always comfortable and enjoyable for me.