Lawrence: Lady Chatterly's Lover

Lawrence, D.H.: Lady Chatterly's Lover; Bantam Classics, New York, 2007

This edition is a Bantam re-issue of the "Original Unexpurgated 1928 Orioli Edition" with a 1968 preface by Lawrence Durrell and a newer introduction by Ronald Friedland.  The backstory and explanations about this book were almost as fascinating as the book itself.  Because of the language and the subject matter, Lawrence knew it would have trouble getting it published in England so it was published in Italy.  I remember reading this book in either my late teens or early 20's.  I don't remember finding the book to be anything special at the time - though I was probably equal parts titillated and made anxious by the language and sex scenes, having been an obedient and overtly conforming child.

Reading this book now, from the vantage point of well-established adulthood, I found the descriptive language enthralling and the perspective on the industrial age fascinating.  The use of dialect - and I'm more tolerant of the use of words like fuck and cunt now - not because I'm more tolerant to crude language (I still think it's lazy, limiting and monotonous) but because I'm open to the idea that Lawrence needed to use these words to communicate the point he was trying to make.  This changed viewpoint no doubt owes something to the years I've accumulated but also something to the course texts I've been reading and discussing since September.  I also think it reflects how the world has changed in the last few decades, that is, even within my lifetime.

The book starts out with Sir Clifford and Lady Chatterly [Constance] married; and though they feel during their one month's honeymoon that they are intimate, it's not a physical intimacy.

this intimacy which was beyond sex, and beyond a man's "satisfaction. ... No, the intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And the sex was merely an accident, or an adjunct: one of the curious obsolete, organic processes which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary. pg 9

 After the honeymoon in 1917 Clifford ships off to war.  He is shipped back home in 1918, "smashed", paralyzed and with no interest in any physical intimacy with Connie.  Their life is one of her supporting him in his efforts to achieve fame and fortune as a writer.  His dependence and her subservience as 'helpmeet' create a life they both initially deem intimacy.  Connie eventually looks for something more and begins a sexual love affair with Sir Clifford's gamekeeper, Mellors.  Mellors is a Tevershall man, born into a collier family but raised above his 'station' during his service during the war, in India.  He comes back, somewhat physically damaged by the war, emotionally damaged by his unhappy marriage to a local woman, and determined to live a quiet life in the woods, alone.

Lawrence expounds upon 2 main themes in his novel: the evils of industrialization and the redeeming power of sexual connection.  His descriptions of the Nottinghamshire countryside, where he grew up, are evocative of the blight that descended upon the green countryside of England.

but alas, one could see in the near distance the chimney of Tevershall pit, with its clouds of steam and smoke, and on the damp, hazy distance of the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall village, a village which began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for long and gruesome mile: houses, rows of wretched, small, begrimed, brick houses, with black slate roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful, blank dreariness.  pg 10

The people were as haggard, shapeless, and dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly. pg 11

...up a dark, damp drive, burrowing through gloomy trees, out to the slope of the park where grey damp sheep were feeding... pg 11 

Sir Clifford's friends are all a bit effete, snobs with various character gaps and hangups, prejudices and damage.  The most appealing of these for me was Tommy Dukes, his bachelor friend who, when asked whether he believes in anything, replies:

"Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say 'shit!' in front of a lady."  [pg 40]

Lawrence writes well about the class system and its inflexibility.   He describes the gulf between Wragby Hall, seat of the Chatterly's, and the village people of Tevershall, writing on page 12

Gulf impassable, breach indescribable, such as is perhaps non-existent south of the Trent.  But in the Midlands and the industrial North gulf impassable, across which no communication could take place.  You stick to your side, I'll stick to mine! A strange denial of the common pulse of humanity.

The character of Michaelis, Lady Chatterly's 'upstart' Irish lover gives Lawrence a chance to show the relentless class system in England, in Clifford's contempt for his presumption and for being, despite all his success and his polish, the "wrong sort", an arriviste and a "Dublin mongrel."  Connie feels some sympathy for him, the outsider - "and when her sympathy was awakened she was quite devoid of class feeling."  [pg 23]  Michaelis doesn't reach her as a woman though, despite the sex - he doesn't love her.  For Lawrence, achieving orgasm at the same time is a key feature of true union between a man and a woman.  While I admired his attempts to describe love, sex etc through a woman's viewpoint, the main perspective in the book seemed very much male, with this being just one example.

Clifford is an unsympathetic character.  I initially felt sorry for him, gone to war to do his duty and returned home broken and empty.  However he is very self-absorbed, and becomes increasingly selfish - with a child's selfishness - as the years passed.  He is a snob and a man who, even without the excuse of injury and paralysis, would have self-restricted himself to a shallow, cold life empty of human connection.  Though sexual intromission is not possible for him, he has no desire for any physical intimacy with his wife, no physical connection.  His sense of entitlement due to his class, heritage and position are accepted by him to be his god-given birthright.

"No wonder the men hate you," she said.

"They don't!" he replied. "And don't fall into errors: in your sense of the word, they are not men. They are animals you don't understand, and never could.  Don't thrust your illusions on other people.  The masses were always the same, and will always be the same.  Nero's slaves were extremely little different from our collier or the Ford motorcar workmen...It is the masses: they are the unchangeable.  It is one of the most momentous facts of social science.  Panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus.  What is wrong today, is that we've made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and posioned our masses with a little education."

[...] "And what we need to take up now," he said, "is whips, nor swords.  The masses have been ruled since time began, and till time ends, ruled they will have to be.  It is sheer hypocrisy and farce to say they can rule themselves." [pg 200]

Despite Sir Clifford's opinion that the masses and the class system are immutable, and not only should not be changed but cannot be changed, he is just as fully convinced that, give him a son fathered by anyone, and he can bring him up a proper Chatterly, ready and able to assume his rightful position.

"I don't care who his father might be, so long as he is a healthy man not below normal intelligence.  Give me the child of any healthy, normally intelligent man, and I will make a perfectly competent Chatterly of him.  It is not who begets us, that matters, but where fate places us.  Place any child among the ruling classes, and he will grow up, to his own extent, a ruler.  Put kings' and dukes' children among the masses, and they'll be little plebeians, mass products.  It is the overwhelming pressure of environment."

"Then the common people aren't a race, and the aristocrats aren't blood," she said. 

"No, my child! A; that is romantic illusion.  Aristocracy is a function, a part of fate.  And the masses are a functioning of another part of fate.  The individual hardly matters.  It is a question of which function you are brought up to and adapted to. It is not the individuals that make an aristocracy: it is the functioning of the aristocratic whole.  And it is the functioning of the whole mass that makes the common man what he is."

"Then there is no common humanity between us all!"

"Just as you like.  We all need to fill our bellies.  But when it comes to expressive or executive functioning, I believe there  is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes.  The two functions are opposed.  And the function determines the individual." [pg 201]

Lawrence also speaks insightfully about the emotional trauma or damage to the psyche that can persist or which can take years to manifest (he likens it to a slowly developing bruise).  This must have been something seen in returning soldiers after WW1 but it also makes me think of Freud's research and that of other psychoanalysts of the previous 50 years.  This slow persistent trauma crops up in both Sir Clifford and in Mellors, both damaged in the war.  He has a great passage about decay and time marching on:

all the brilliant words seemed like dead leaves, crumpling up and turning to powder, meaning really nothing, blown away on any gust of wind.  They were not the leafy words of an effective life, young with energy and belonging to the tree.  They were the hosts of fallen leaves of a life that is ineffectual.  [pg 52]

Lawrence wrote many passages celebrating nature and "Olde England" and decrying industrialization and the pace of change of modernity.  While this mainly manifests itself in Mellors, the gamekeeper, Clifford too longs to preserve the old ways:

Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak trees [of the wood around Wragby Hall].  He felt they were his own through generations.  He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place inviolate, shut off from the world.  [pg 43]

The air was soft and dead, as if all the world were slowly dying.  Grey and clammy and silent, even from the shuffling of the collieries, for the pits were working short time, and today they were stopped altogether. The end of all things!

In the wood all was utterly inert and motionless, only great drops fell from the bare boughs, with a hollow little crash.  For the rest, among the old trees was depth within depth of grey, hopeless, inertia, silence, nothingness.

Connie walked dimly on.  From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world.  She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees.  They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence...  [pg 69]

There is also much phallic imagery in the book, Sex, potency and especially male sexuality are used as the barometer of a healthy life, a true life, of humanity.  Some examples of Lawrence's powers of imagery [pg 92]:

Constance sat down with her back to a young pine tree, that swayed against her with curious life, elastic, and powerful, rising up.  The erect, alive thing, with its top in the sun!  

Today she could almost feel it in her own body, the huge heave of sap in the massive trees, upwards, up, up to the bud-tips, there to push into little flakey oak leaves, bronze as blood. It was like a tide running turgid upward, and spreading on the sky. [pg 132]

I found it interesting that Lawrence chose to write the book from a woman's point of view.  Some of his  passages seem awkward and like what a man would think a woman might feel.  Some seemed more discerning, such as when Michaelis the Irish lover is half-heartedly trying to convince Connie to leave Clifford and live with him.

Connie looked at him amazed: and yet she felt nothing.  These men, they were all alike, they left everything out.  They just went off from the top of their heads as if they were squibs, and expected you to be carried heavenwards along with their own thin sticks.     [pg 54-55]

Nature is used as the antithesis of the industrialization, the civilization, the modernity of the world.  Lawrence sees that movement away from the natural to be the main cause and symptom of man's decay and eventually his destruction.  Mellors is his voice in this.

When the last real man is killed, and they're all tame: white, black, yellow, all colours of tame ones: then they'll all be insane.  Because the root of sanity is in the balls. Then they'll all be insane...they'll make their own grand little act of faith. They'll offer one another up."

"You mean they'll kill one another?"

"I do...! If we go on at our present rate then in a hundred year's time there won't be ten thousand people in this island: there may not be ten.  They'll have lovingly wiped each other out. [...]  To contemplate the extermination of the human species and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else.  And if we go on in this way, with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in algebraical progression, as it is going on: then ta-tah! to the human species... "[pg 239]

"...when I feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by its own mingy beastliness, then I feel ... the moon wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the stars: made foul by men. [...] [I]t's a shame, what's been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life.  I'd wipe machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. [pg 242]

Lawrence also makes frequent mention of Mammon and the bitch-goddess of success.  Mellors the gamekeeper is a damaged man who has decided that retreat into solitude and nature are all he wants out of life.  When he connects with Lady Chatterly he is dragged back into the world of feeling, connection, relationship.

But he knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory.  The industrial noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it.  A man could no longer be private and withdrawn.  The world allows no hermits.  And now he had taken the woman, and brought on himself a new cycle of pain and doom.  For he knew by experience what it meant.

It was not the woman's fault, not even love's fault, nor the fault of sex.  The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines.  There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanised greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform...

He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor forlorn thing.... And they would do her in!  As sure as life, they would do her in, as they do in all naturally tender life.... But he would protect her with his heart for a little while.  For a little while, before the insentient iron world and the Mammon of mechanized greed did them both in, her as well as him.  [pg 129-130] 

Lawrence is equally pessimistic about society: "...conscience was chiefly fear of society, or fear of oneself. [...] He was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast."  [pg 130] and about civilization:

The young ones get mad because they've no money to spend.  Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they've got none to spend.  That's our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out...The women are the maddest of all.  But then they're the maddest for spending, nowadays. [...]  [pg 220]

 If you could only tell them that living and spending are not the same thing!

Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't. [...] I feel great grasping white hands in the air, wanting to get hold of the throat of anybody who tries to live, to live beyond money, and squeeze the life out.  [pg 331]

Some of his writing and themes reminded me of Hemingway and trying to get back to basic pleasures, lives of action and simple motivations.  It fit in well with what we've been reading of Darwin and of Freud as well as the class concerns and angst of Dostoyesvsky.  I'm finding all the books we're reading swirling around in my brain and it's hard to pick out one thread or trail that I want to explore.  I wish I had unlimited time to explore all these thoughts and questions.

Discussion: Dostoyevsky & Nietzsche

DOSTOYEVSKY
Dostoyevsky lived 1841-1881.  Russia had been Christian from about the 10th century.  The Tzars took power from the nobles but gave them increased power over their serfs.  The nobility became very oppressive.  Huge downtrodden serf population.
19th century.  In 1812 Napoleon had invaded Russia and was defeated but not through any superiority of Russia, more vanquished by the elements, deprivation.  Much tension in 19th c., paranoia, fear of uprisings.  Michael Vacunin, father of uprising, nihilism, Turgenev: questioning of the old values.

Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow, father was a doctor, an alcoholic.  He came from a religious, strict family, raised on hospital grounds and would talk to the patients.  Well-read.  Small of build, strong personality, hot-headed but pale and introverted at school.  Suffered from epilepsy.  Psychological writer.  Was a socialist and early existentialist.  Was a member of a writer's club and was arrested and ended up on the firing line.  Eventually the execution was called off (it's thought the calling off was planned from the beginning). He then was sent to Siberia for 4 years hard labour and then had to join the army. Following this, Dostoyevsky became a journalist and went to western Europe.  Became a gambler and addict.

Dostoyevsky was very affected by the people he met in prison and in Siberia as well as by his addiction to gambling and the degradations this brought him to (lying, pleading, debasing himself, importuning family and friends).  He also had numerous sexual intrigues throughout his life.

Every Dostoyevsky novel has a woman at the end as a Christ-like figure who saves (or, in the case of Letters from the Underground, tries to save) the "hero/narrator."

What is better - cheap happiness or exalted sufferings?  Why is it limited to these 2 choices, or to these qualifiers?
Dostoyevsky was a Christian writer and Christianity has a belief in redemption through suffering.  The narrator does not believe in Christianity but Liza is trying to save him by offering love.  Dostoyevsky felt that the threat to mankind was science (The Crystal Palace of science and technology at the London Exhibition of 1851) and reason, and the salvation was Christianity - if you accept the message.  Science tells you that you are going to die but offers you nothing else whereas Christianity offers you life after death. (Other religions offered other options such as reincarnation).

Normal man is "man of action" vs the acutely conscious man who is tormented by doubts, questions and emotions.  Men of action are the doers, the inventors, the scientists, the warriors etc.
The book is a critique of material progress..."cheap happiness."
Romantics believed that through nature and beauty you could find meaning/happiness.  Developed towards pantheism which believed God was in everything.

Liza's situation is much more dire than the Underground Man's yet she bears it, accepts it, she doesn't lament her lot, she still has hope.

NIETZSCHE - Dr. Samir Gandesha led this discussion.
On the Genealogy of Morals is most accessible of his texts.  Hermeneutics of Suspicion - geared towards unmasking language, culture, morals
Freud and Marx also included
French philosopher Paul Mercure

Nietzsche born 1844 - Marx wrote manifesto 1847
Radical humanist, critique of property - social and economic, trained as philologist

1889 - breakdown, dies 1900
Freud publishes Interpretations of Dreams in 1900
Sister Elizabeth cares for him after breakdown.  She was very right-wing and portrayed him as a German nationalist, a proto-Nazi, which he was not.

His relationship to Plato - wants to understand philosophy.  Criticizes socratism on 3 fronts -

1. in the Republic, devises an ideal state, banishes poets and tragedians.
2. ideal state based on theory of forms - world around us is illusory, comprised of copies of an ideal world located elsewhere
3. in the notion of a justice hierarchy, reason sits at top and governs with assistance of the passions - argument of the philosopher-king

Feels socratism is working its way, via christianity (St Aquinas, Emmanuel Kant) into the Western Civilization (phenomenal world and ideal world), critical of Kantian morality

110.14-25 - locates his issue in Plato/Christian ideal that god is truth, that truth is divine

"the truthful one, in that audacious and ultimate sense presupposed by the belief in science, thus affirms another world than that of life, nature, and history; and insofar as he affirms this "other world", what? must he not, precisely in so doing, negate its counterpart, this world, our world? ... It is still a metaphysical belief on which our belief in science rests -- we knowers today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, we too still take our fire from that great fire that was ignited by a thousand-year old belief, that belief of Christians, which was Plato's belief, that God is truth, that truth is divine ... But what if precisely this is becoming ever more implausible, if nothing proves to be divine any longer, unless perhaps error, blindness, lie -- if God himself proves to be our longest lie? -- --- At this point it is necessary to pause and to reflect for a long time.  Science itself now is in need of  a justification...

Nietzsche's conclusion was that a noble class/caste identified good qualities and bad qualities was derived from his philological studies.
Transvaluation and priestly class (slave-revolt) takes the reverse of this valuation
It is the slaves' feeling of weakness that leads them to this shift - their lack of power

Dark side of civilization (hermeneutics) - based on system of cruelty

Science includes cultural sciences as well as technological - systematic investigation

What does he mean by mastery, by will to power?
Are the masters those who control money, the state?

Nihilism - a process where the highest values are in the process of devaluing themselves
The sovereign individual -
Man is left with "will" and a question of where we derive our values from.
It's a will to power - this is how you counter will to nothingness (nihilism) - denial of the body, denial of the senses.

Nietzsche wants life-affirming ideals not life-denying as the ascetic ideals are.
What is the basic force?
Will to live but not in a metaphysical sense, not in a 'hereafter' sense.
Truth but not a propositional truth based on the state of the world but a Truth.
Will to power (based on his later writings but heralded in GM) - the ability to impose the aspect of being on becoming - if life is this constant process of becoming.
Role of Art, of style, fixes and establishes certain interpretations of the world
Justice is the right of the stronger, Nietzsche was influenced by the Renaissance and Machiavelli.

Heraclitus - Reality is this river, this constant state of becoming, you never step in the same water twice in a river.

52.19-25
"...life itself is defined as an ever more purposive inner adaptation to external circumstances (Herbert Spencer).  In so doing however, one mistakes the essence of life, its will to power; in so doing one overlooks the essential pre-eminence of the spontaneous, attacking, infringing, reinterpreting, reordering and formative forces, upon whose effect the "adaptation" first follows; in so doing one denies the lordly role of the highest functionaries in the organism itself, in which the will of life appears active and form-giving."

Will to power through naming and renaming, those who master language, the artists, now it's the media.  The creative people, enable us to see the world differently.
Italians futurists, over-powered by Roman empire, urged active forgetting.

Some people try to expand their minds by chemicals (Timothy Leary), or physically (other cultures use physical deprivation to achieve this as a rite of passage).  Any new ventures are often very quickly co-opted by greater society, mass culture.

Live your life knowing that everything you do will live on for ever and be repeated. Every moment must be lived to its fullest - the artist is always creating new value.
Nietzschean ideals taken up by European modernists at the turn of century (19th c. to 20th c.)
Innovation, avant-garde,

Sarah Kofman, a French philosopher - tried to appropriate Nietzsche from a feminist perspective.

Dostoyevsky: Notes from the Underground

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Notes from the Underground, Dover Thrift Edition,

I found this book depressing but it seemed SO familiar.  The main character, the underground man himself with his self-pity and his determination for self-sabotage was someone I felt I had read about before.  Maybe it's just a Russian archetype.  He was quite frustrating but Dosteyevsky wrote it all so beautifully: what he thought and felt, how he appeared to others, his opportunities for redemption and how he would throw it away.  I actually thought he might allow things to work out with Liza and get out of his funk but he was determined to keep himself down.  I loved the character of Appollon, so passive-aggressive, he must have driven the neurotic underground man crazy.

On pg 31, he is thinking back on his younger days and how he has come to be where he is now.  he scoffs at Romanticism "We Russians, speaking generally, have never had those foolish transcendental "romantics" -- German, and still more French -- on whom nothing produces any effect; if there were an earthquake, if all France perished at the barricades, they would still be the same, they would not even have the decency to affect a change, but would still go on singing their transcendental songs to the hour of their death, because they are fools."  He goes on to describe what the Russian 'romantic' is and it's quite a humorous description as he describes quite pragmatic romantics, always with an eye out for advantage.

"That is why there are so many 'broad natures' among us who never lose their ideal even in the depths of degradation; and though they never stir a finger for their ideal,..., yet they tearfully cherish their first ideal and are extraordinarily honest at heart." pg 32

He really is a sad character and though he is pitiful, there is something of his insecurity in many of us.  He says pg 31 "Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike everyone else.  'I am alone and they are everyone'.

He describes himself as pitiful, loathsome, hysterical etc. He is very untrustworthy as a narrator and he tells us so frequently (pg 33, pg 26, pg 27, pg 22, pg 25)
After he tries to pick a fight and get thrown out of a window [he is unsuccessful in his defenestration attempt], he says "I never have been a coward at heart, though I have always been a coward in action." pg 34
He starts to stalk an officer he has become obsessed with.  He refers to himself several times as a fly (pg 34 "I had been treated like a fly"; pg 36 "that I was a mere fly in the eyes of all this world, a nasty, disgusting fly -- more intelligent, more highly developed, more refined in feeling than any of them, of course -- but a fly that was continually making way for everyone, insulted and injured by everyone."; "All of them took scarcely any notice of my entrance, which was strange, for I had not met them for years.  Evidently they looked upon me as something on the level of a common fly." pg 42)

The underground man indulges in fantasies about how life could be where he was admired and loved.  "Everyone would kiss me and weep (what idiots they would be if they did not), while I should go barefoot and hungry preaching new ideas and fighting a victorious Austerlitz against the obscurantists. pg 40

He runs into old school friends and they are planning a party for Zverkov, a rich friend (who came in for an estate of 200 serfs while still a school).  The underground man hates him because of his advantages, what he calls being "favoured by the gifts of nature."

He didn't do well at school.  He was intelligent and knew the material but couldn't get along.  "Once indeed I did have a friend.  But I was already a tyrant at heart; I wanted to exercise unbounded sway over him..." pg 47  He is so insecure about everything combined with false bravado about his superiority.  He invites himself along to a get-together.  He wants everything to go perfectly, to be able to redeem himself in their eyes.  He sneaks away from work 2 hours early to be able to get ready  "The great thing, I thought, is not to be the first to arrive, or they will think I am overjoyed at coming.  But there were 1000 of such great points to consider , and they all agitated and overwhelmed me." pg 47.
He overthinks and obsesses about everything.

Of course it all goes terribly wrong, and where he can make it worse he does.  It's horrifying to observe him sabotage himself with absolutely everyone he encounters.

It was interesting to think about what Dostoyevsky would have been thinking and feeling as he was about the same age as his protagonist when he wrote this.  It's very dark but then I find so many Russian stories have this same dark fatalism.

Discussion: Jane Eyre

We had a guest professor for this session, Jane Sturrock from the English department - her specialty is 19th century literature.  It was a good session with lots of discussion.

She spoke about various elements in the novel:

• English chauvinism
• Racism
• Treatment of aristocracy (Blanche Ingram) is flawed, shallow
• Coincidences (wanders moor and meets cousins)
• England's imperial role

She mentioned the Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys - which highlighted the sexual woman -
The Mad Woman in the Attic - suppressed anger, suppressed sexuality - women's writing.
I read this years ago and don't remember being impressed by it but I'll put it on my ever-expanding list of books to read "when I have time."

Jane Eyre was published in 1847, near the end of the "Hungry 40s" - famines of 1840s
Written in the 1st person, by a woman - adventurous - a woman who insists on her own voice; also childhood was important in this novel which was different for the times.
Liberating and threatening for the period when 1st published
2 years later Dickens started to publish novel in form of autobiography, child (David Copperfield)
Jane Eyre contained a character whose adult role was built on childhood experiences, the suffering child - this device was also seen later in Great Expectations.

We also spoke a bit about the themes of power (adult figures, Mrs Reed, Brocklehurst, Rochester, monied classes), love, money, voice (female, child, poor etc), biblical references.

The Discourse of the novel - we spent a few minutes on Sturrock's opinion on how she reads a novel.  I've never taken any english courses beyond 1st year english so I have no experience of how to "read" a novel.

Martha Nussbaum's name was brought up [again] - and her writings on philosophy, law, literature
"novels direct us to pay attention to the concrete ... moral choice"
Ethical decisions made from actual human situations, relationships

Robert Moyes (UVIC) - novel imagines social realities, Kant's ethical suppositions, Jane Eyre
Doesn't imagine more hypothetical situations than Kant but difference is in quality of imagining

The dreamwork that a novel does: something you recognize from your own hidden life "forlorn child, homeless wanderer on moors, impossible love, later fulfilled"

Some background on the Brontes:
6 children, mother has died then 2 eldest die so Charlotte left as eldest - didn't want that position - they are poor for their middle class
Live in isolation, brilliant children
Reading and writing passionately - reading romantic writers: Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Wordsworth (the child is the father of the man)
Use non-realist, non-rational (dreams, hallucinations, altered states) human experiences
2 imaginary kingdoms (Angria (Charlotte and Branwell), Gondole (Emily & Anne)
Byronic hero - NB for Charlotte
Gothic elements -
2 modes of narrative (realism - burnt porridge, servants) and (gothic - moors, halls, Bertha, Rochester's secrets)
Gothic novels written in 1790s and later - trope: young pure virginal heroine goes to huge dark mansion and threatened by older powerful male (how often has this been repeated ??!?)
Much of power of Jane Eyre comes from combination of realistic elements and gothic
Importance of dreams - sometimes wakes from dream to find an even more dream-like reality.
She dreams of children and trouble.

Fairy Tales - Cinderella?  Bluebeard?
Supernatural world  - 1st meeting - on the road, Rochester riding, Eyre on stile - she hears approach of horse, man and dog and thinks of a supernatural dog
"Mustard seed" Midsummer Nights dream and also parable in bible (mustard seed grows to large plant = kingdom of heaven) - this isn't familiar to me.  Something I'll have to check into.
Also mystical aspect of Eyre and Rochester hearing each other voices when they were far apart.

Many elements of the natural world - speaks to action and character as well - twilight, the moon at various key times (Moon mother figure) - She goddess figure

These worlds intensify the sense that Jane's inner world is NB
Power imbalance - Jane says no to Rochester initially as not the relationship she wants and somewhat going against mores of the time

Sadomasochistic relationships - Rochester and his stunt as the gypsy, how he leads Blanche Ingram along.

Power and gender roles - confrontations Jane has with aggressively male characters
Masculine power, even St John has role of absolute power (or assumption of absolute power)
Charlotte had a relationship and correspondence with a man she called "My Master" - at boarding school
Also Branwell suffered from an adulterous affair with wife of his employer and was tossed out

Love in Jane's life - unloved child, drives her out to seek another life - love of Helen and Miss Temple at school - then Rochester

Power/Priviledge
Jane sees herself as revolting slave when living with Reids but also uses same language later with Rochester.  Rochester wants relationship of equals but as soon as he is sure of her and engaged he starts to treat her as an inferior - starts to direct her and ignore her wishes - put "diamond chain around your neck myself" - shopping trip.
Also image of the harem, seraglio (Chap 24)
Use of language of fetters, charters, harems, depots, colonial language

Rochester is manipulative and playing games (gypsy, pretending to woo Blanche Ingram) - thinks of jealousy as a tool to get what he wants
In Chap 24 Rochester analyzes the power equations of their relationship

Women in 1840s - no rights, little education, little means of earning money
Married Woman's Property Act didn't come into force until 1872

Chap 27 - power imbalance - Rochester furious at being defied by Jane
Women as "frail and indomitable" - striking especially at the time (1840s)

Adrienne Rich wrote on Jane Eyre.

When they finally marry they are more equal - physically Rochester reduced (loss of sight and hand - biblical punishment for adultery) and Jane also now is financially independent and has family (Diana & Mary, St John)

R: Who will care for you?
J: I will, I will care for myself.

Voice -
Truth NB to Jane and for Charlotte Bronte
To Mrs Reid "I dare because it is the truth" - also declares the need for love
To Rochester - similar claims - do you think I can stay to become nothing to you (when thinks will marry Blanche Ingram) etc etc

I'm poor, plain, a woman but I matter
Addresses reader in Chap 12 about women (can 1/2 of humanity survive without a role)

Bible - used throughout - used to give a personal depth to narrative - also refers to Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress; scene in orchard is Adam & Eve; storm and lightening blast
Allusions deepen the text
When finds out about Rochester
Psalm 69 "the waters have closed over me"

By Grand Central Station also uses Psalms; Oscar Wilde's Dei Profundis "out of the depths I speak to you oh god" relationshp with Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading gaol

The ending - moves away from J & R and finishes with St John dying as missionary in India
Ends with words from end of bible
"Imperialist evangelism'

Novels often end by moving themselves out

BYRON's question - power relationships  - Jane only ended up marrying Rochester after she was in the ascendancy (and in sections regarding St. John she does speak about being in the ascendancy so this is a consideration for her).

Kirstin - hero's journey

Discussion about why Rochester had to suffer such deprivations before he and Jane could be happy together - was this symbolic (loss of eyes and hands as biblical punishment for his prior sins) - or was this what was necessary for Jane's equality to Rochester - he was brought down physically as well as through wealth

I felt that Rochester's misfortunes happened as a way to make them equal - Jane could never rise to Rochester's heights because of the class structure and his wealth so by bringing him down physically and through loss of his estate they can approach some equality.

Nature vs Nurture
Can Bertha help her madness?

Rochester at one point tells Jane if she doesn't listen to him he will use violence.
At one point Rochester tells Jane to put her hand in his because as long as he can touch and see her, he will be content - of course later he loses his sight and his right hand.

Both Jane and Rochester speak the language of reason - they connect through their language and thoughts.

Chris asked why Jane Eyre is considered a feminist novel and what does it say about the role of Women in Victorian society?

Abilio asked about the main elements that determined Jane's final independence: Family and Money.

Jane being locked up in red room as child and Bertha being locked up by Rochester in attic rooms - which she later sets fire to. Parallels.

Jane is a very passionate person and at school she learns to temper this with reason, education.

1st person format was very important as this is a journey of growth and self-discovery.  Makes us empathize with Jane who could be a very drab, minor secondary character (poor dependent, student at foundling school, governess, plain person, poor).

Laura asked about whether Jane's education and learnedness gave her any advantages?

Bronte's Jane Eyre

Bronte, Charlotte: Jane Eyre; Broadview Editions, Peterborough, 2004

I enjoyed re-reading this book.  I had read it a few times as a child/teenager and I mainly remembered the scenes in the orphanage and the mad wife in the attic.  I also have very vivid memories of the 1st scene when she is hiding in the library in the window, reading, and her unjust treatment at the hands of her relatives.  Reading it from a perspective decades later and with much experience under my belt, in my profession as well as the culture around me, it was amazing how much commentary on society was packed into this book.  I still very much liked the character of Jane Eyre.  Bronte had a knack of describing Jane such that we could see why those around her were bothered by her but we were totally on her side.  Her integrity was what sold it for me, her strength of character especially when so very young and disadvantaged.

There were some great lines again that I want to remember:

pg 82 "I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste."

"If you are a Christian, you ought not consider poverty a crime." (to Hannah)

"Laws and principles are not for times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this.” - when rejecting running away to France

There was so much social commentary in this novel:

pg 178

"Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth.  Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts just as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.  It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex."

pg 207; Chap XIV

The Nurture vs Nature Debate:

During one of their 1st conversations, Rochester admires Jane Eyre's frank manner, freedom from affectation and her strong statement on the rights of the free-born individual.  He tells her: 

"Not three in three thousand raw school-girl-governesses would have answered me as you have just done.  But I don't mean to flatter you: if you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it."

Jane Eyre contains characters that range from very bad (John Reed, Mrs. Reed, Mr. Brocklehurst) to the very good (Helen, Mrs. Temple, Diana and Mary Rivers), with many characters of mixed qualities in between.  If human nature is in fact Nature (meaning what we are born with), then how much blame or admiration should we give to people for qualities innate to them whether this be musical ability, athletic ability, intelligence?  Qualities such as compassion, honesty, industriousness, integrity are often considered to be much affected by the 3 Es: environment, education and experience but how much of these are innate? Jane Eyre was raised under very adverse conditions and grew up to be a woman with many admirable qualities.  Is she to be praised for this or is this just the nature she was born with?  Rochester considers that he is basically a good man, and he blamed the sinful life he had led on adverse events that happened to him.  Are we justified in condemning John Reed, Mr. Brocklehurst or Blanche Ingram for their faults or were they constrained by their natures?

pg 236
It is interesting to read how much Bronte inserts about reason in her story.

"Arraigned at my own bar, Memory having given her evidence of the hopes, wishes, sentiments I had been cherishing since last night - of the general state of mind in which I had indulged for nearly a fortnight past; Reason having come forward and told in her own quiet way, a plain, unvarnished tale, showing how I had rejected the real and rabidly devoured the ideal; "

pg 282
Jane Eyre seems to sit firmly on the reason over passion debate.  Passion isn't bad but if it's a battle between reason and passion then reason should be the decider.

"Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her [Jane Eyre] to wild chasms.  The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are ; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision.  Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I [Jane Eyre] shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience."

St John is a very rigid, self-righteous character.  He seems the epitome of what you do not want in a missionary.

"Reason, and not feeling is my guide: my ambition is unlimited; my desire to rise higher, to do more than others, insatiable.  I honour endurance, perseverance, industry, talent; because these are the means by which men achieve great ends, and mount to lofty eminence."

When he describes himself to Jane, he has many conflicting statements.  He says he is a follower of Jesus and has adopted his "pure, his merciful, his benignant doctrines." Yet he goes on to describe his "due sense of Divine justice" and he is nothing if not ambitious.  He was an interesting character for Bronte to insert into her novel and he made me wonder who might have been in Bronte's life that influenced this character.

I thought the characters were interesting, they were not necessarily realistic but they all contained components of interest, qualities or failings that we see in the people around us but sometimes magnified to great effect.

Discussion: Barthes & Smart

Yesterday we discussed two very different books about love.  One was the Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart's prose-poetry book, By Grand Central Station I sat down and Wept.  The second was French intellectual Roland Barthes' treatise on love, A Lover's Discourse.

For Smart's book, the discussion ranged through many areas:

• Is your reading or enjoyment of a text affected by the character/morals of the author ?  Some people felt that Smart's affair with a married man did tarnish the brightness of her prose.  Stephen proposed that Smart wanted to be a poet and realized that to write stirring poetry she needed life experiences much removed from her conventional upbringing and remote location in pre-War Ottawa.  He felt this could have been an impetus for her actions in bringing George Barker to North America and in carrying on the affair.

• Someone asked whether we would think differently had Elizabeth Smart been a man.  Laura mentioned than she read this book right after reading Werther and initially thought that the author WAS a man until quite far along in the book, when Smart returns to Ottawa.

There were so many unknown quantities in this book - from Smart's deliberate style which is not based on a chronology of facts to the 1st person style which tells us nothing about George Barker nor about his wife.  We see it all from Smart's perspective.  We had much the same situation in Werther where everyone was seen through his lens.

Most of the class liked Smart's poetic style.

We discussed the fact that, though Smart's book took place during WWII, she barely mentions the war and is only concerned with her love affair.  Apparently she was criticized for this when the book came out.  I didn't agree with this criticism.  I thought she referred to the war in a way that showed she had strong feelings about the reality and the horrors of war.  Much of the book takes place in North America and especially in California.  I would imagine at the time (early 40s) that the war did not resonate to the same degree as it would have in Great Britain or Europe.  I would guess from her comments that Smart was anti-war and as such, could not be expected to be all rah-rah-rah about it.  She was also young and in love.

Stephen mentioned some elements I hadn't picked up on: her use of water or fluid imagery.  Her references to nature and her social commentary were some of my favourite parts.  Her comments on youth and aging were also very pithy - though being middle-aged, somewhat hard to receive.

The 2nd book was Barthes' discourse on love.  Most of the class enjoyed the book.  Joni put together a couple of pages of quotations from the text and posed some questions arising from these, which we discussed.  The majority of the class enjoyed the structure.

We spoke about whether Barthes or Smart were gendered.  I felt that both novels were somewhat gendered - Smart's possibly less than Barthes to me.  I did find Barthes very gendered.  Some of his observations were applicable to both make and female but several of them were from a perspective I could not relate to.

It has been a good experience to read Werther, Smart and Barthes within 1-2 weeks of each other.  Now on to the terror of the French Revolution and Anatole France.

Smart: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Smart, Elizabeth: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept; Flamingo/HarperCollins, Hammersmith, 1992

I read this book as a rite of passage in my teens - a Canadian rite of passage.  I'd forgotten what Smart's prose was like.  Some time in the last 5 years I read Rosemary Sullivan's biography of Elizabeth Smart which I found fascinating: partly because of the details of her life in the earlier part of the last century but also because she has a nature so dissimilar to mine.  Her decisions, her actions and the way she lived her life were so different from my life and my choices that it seems far more than 1/2 a century and several wars distant from my lifetime.

I just finished Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and it is interesting to compare the 2 books: Goethe from the male perspective in 18th century Germany and Smart's from the female perspective in North America.  One somewhat fictional (though Goethe incorporated events from his own life as well as an acquaintance who committed suicide because of unrequited passion) and the other poetically autobiographical.  Both writers passionate and literary people.

I enjoyed Smart's writing and imagery though my ever-rational side kept parsing the sentences for truth to anchor the poetry in fact and chronology.  Of course she reminds me of Sylvia Plath, similar time period and both women in love with philandering poets and tolerating their comings and goings, waiting and suffering for their lover to return to spend some time with them.  I also can't help thinking about Pat Lowther.

Like poetry, Smart's prose captures moments and vignettes with brief bursts of strong imagery.  In one of my favourite sentences she captures whole [passionless] lifetimes in one sentence.  

When I hurry down the street it is not any game I hold in my mind and play with the passers by, but the shyness which keeps seamstresses nervously peering out of their badly-lit rooms, half hidden behind the drab lace, preferring to dream over their gas-jets and mild tea than submit to the rude investigations of the world.

This is every Anita Brookner novel, distilled down to one sentence.  Smart then goes on to write:

There are such, you know, and they treat their possessions gently, as if they were children or animals. But don't think they are overlooked. Thousands of angels yearn over them, are even now embroidering them skirts, and getting ready to teach them the rhumba.   [Part 6]

Where Brookner seems to have some fellow feeling for her gentle, quiet, oh-so-correct women, Smart sees their lives with a twist of humour but humour arising from the contempt of the young and passionate for the aged and resigned.  Later in Part 8 she is more explicit about her contempt for the degenerations of passionless old age, saying of the old:

Or does nature walk beside them, holding their flabby forearms and whispering medicinal lies? For memory deserts them and their eyes get dimmer as the past achieves perspective. 

Who can say there is anything won at such a price?

[..] But her eyes were like medieval wild men in her head, clutching at her diminishing days that brought them no rest. [Part 6]

Smart, like Goethe/Werther, also has a strong relationship with nature.  She writes "But what can the wood sorrel and the mourning dove, who deal only in eternals, know of the thorny sociabilities of human living?"

On passion/love:

The stream of our kiss put a waterway around the world, where love like a refugee sailed in the last ship.  My hair made a shroud, and kept the coyotes at bay while we wrote our cyphers with anatomy.

[..] I am possessed by love and have no options.

[Part 10]  He kisses the circles on top of the water beneath which I lie drowned.  Soft as a fish, the kiss glides down to me, it swims through me, trailing its bubbles of love.

Smart writes about "the hatred of the mediocre for all miracles."

[...] Not one of all those martyrs nailed to every tree in the western hemisphere will find favour in the editor's measuring eye.  On the amusement page, to fill up space, one inch and a half, perhaps, of those who were forced to die.

Butter is up 10 cents.  The human being is down.

When she and Barker are arrested at the California/Arizona state border, and charged with intending to cross state lines for the purposes of sexual communion, Smart writes at the end of their 2-day interrogation, 

Who is for us if these are so fiercely against?  All our wishes were private, we desired no more scope than ourselves. Could we corrupt the young by gazing into each other's eyes? Would they leave their offices?  Would big business suffer?

Though the majority of the book takes place in America with references to England, I enjoyed the odd Canadian reference

But faint as hope, and definite as death, my possible phoenix of love is as bright as a totem-pole, in the morning, on the sky, breathing like a workman setting out on a job.

Asking no one's forgiveness for sins I refuse to recognize, why do I cry then to be returning homeward through a land I love like a lover?

[...] how sympathetic the frozen Chaudiere Falls seem under the December sky, compared with these inflexible faces.

The passion burning through Smart's book, though it only covered a short period during her early 20s, is incandescent.  And the fact that she spent her life in England raising 4 children she had with Barker, though they never married and he only visited intermittently, suggests the centrality of passion in her life persisted.

Shakespeare's KING LEAR

Assigned text: Shakespeare, King Lear  Oxford Paperbacks, 2008
Text I read: The complete Works of William Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, 1982, London.

As our texts get within 1000 years of the current time, I find them more appealing.  I've enjoyed the ancient texts and the more of them I read, the more I get out of them but now being able to read  Shakespeare felt a bit like coming home.  I have only read a couple of his plays (aside from high scool assigned readings that sadly did nothing to make me appreciate Shakespeare - I hope English teaching is more inspiring today in this regard).  Every time I see a good production of Shakespeare (and thank god for Bard on the Beach and other Shakespeare festivals) or read one of his plays I'm astounded and thrilled by his language.  I hadn't read King Lear before and had never seen it performed so my only knowledge is hazy and pieced together from occasional references.  I enjoyed the play and it worked very well to read it the same week as Machiavelli's The Prince.  Even before actually knowing what Machiavellian might denote, I would have called Edmund Machiavellian in his plotting and his amoral decisions and actions.  I don't think I'd ever heard of Kent before and he was a Scarlet Pimpernel-type character for me.

This play was full of lots of passion and a bit of reason.  King Lear seemed to make his decisions solely based on passion.  He may have been a more reasonable leader in his prime but in his dotage he seems a creature of impulse and passion.  He throws years of love away with Cordelia based on her very reasonable and thoughtful (and NOT passionate answer to his question about how much his daughters love him).  Yet he is more than taken in by Goneril and Regan's fawning and hypocritical replies - he obviously didn't study Machiavelli's chapter 23 on "How Flatterer's Must be Shunned".

Goneril and Regan, the two eldest daughter's (why are the eldest always the evil siblings?), seem to just be evil.  It's hard to say whether they are governed by passion or reason.  They seem motivated by greed and though they can plan and act amorally, I'm not sure it qualifies as reason.  I think it is just evil passions and animal cunning.

Edmund is motivated by anger, jealousy, greed, feelings of vengeance, bitterness.  He can reason much more effectively and in a very Machiavellian way.  He probably balances passion and reason but in all their negative connotations - which for me puts him more in passions camp and less in reasons camp.  We haven't really been considering qualifying passion and reason into good passion and bad passion; good reason and bad reason but Edmund would end up solidly in the BAD camp for both qualities/emotions.

Kent has both passion and reason in a good way.  He is passionate in his devotion to King Lear and in his bravery and integrity bu he is also very reasonable in his ability not to have his judgement clouded by passion.  He seems more to act based on HONOUR and we haven't discussed where this falls in the passion or reason camp.  That would be an interesting discussion.

I have to include some favourite lines to remember:
Act 1, Scene 1
40-41  ...while we unburdened crawl towards death...
56 ...dearer than eyesight, space and liberty
60  ...:A love that makes breath poor and speech unable
90  Nothing will come of nothing  (A "shout out" to Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius, Epicureans and Stoics)
148  ...when majesty stoops to folly
164  kill thy physician, and the fee bestow on the foul disease
181  Freedom lives hence and banishment is here
199  ...but now her price is fall'n
205  Dowered with our curse and strangered with our oath
249-251  ...that art most rich, being poor; most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised
279-280  Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides, who covert faults at last with shame derides

Act 1, Scene 2
14-15  th' creating a whole tribe of fops got tween a sleep and a wake
21  Now, gods, stand up for bastards
51  the oppression of aged tyranny
30  by an auricular assurance  (I have to admit I like this turn of phrase solely for its medical interest); also Act 1, Scene 4 child of spleen
134-135  An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!
136  My father compounded with my mother under the dragon's tail, my nativity was under Ursa Major.
151  How long have you been a sectary astronomical?

Act 1, Scene 4
185  and be athwart disnatured torment
289  sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child
Scene 5
as a crab's like a apple

In Act 2, Scene 2, Kent has a wonderful speech where he recitesa long list of epithets about Oswald.
70  anger hath a privilege
81  epileptic visage  (I'm not sure what this means, contorted?)
51  Fortune that arrant whore
116  I'll beat the drum till it cry sleep to death
130  sepulchring an adultress (you have to admire Shakespeare's economy of language - he says so much so succintly and pithily)
165  you fen-sucked fops

Act 2, Scene 4
221  Thou art a boil, a plaque-like sore or embossed carbuncle
232   for those that mingle reason with your passion (Regan speaking about her father's old age)
275  women's weapons (tears)

Act 3, Scene 2
I am a man more sinned against than sinning
70  The art of our necessities is strange and can make vile things precious
79  a brave night to cool a courtesan  (about a cold night)

Scene 3
21  o, that way madness lies
75  pelican daughters

Act 5, Scene 3
137  A most toad-spotted traitor
173  The wheel is come full circle

Sappho's "POEMS and FRAGMENTS"

(Sappho’s poems and fragments, Transl. Stanley Lombardo, Hackett, 2002)

These poems and fragments were completely new to me.  I had heard the name Sappho before and knew the adjective 'sapphic' but knew nothing of the person or her work.  This was a fascinating story and body of work to be made aware of.  It was amazing to see how powerful and evocative these fragments are – and the effect they have had on many people over the centuries, especially women in the 20^th century.  I was fascinated to read about how many of the fragments were discovered between 1897-1937, almost 3000 years after she wrote them, preserved because they had been written on potsherds and on scraps of papyrus or parchment that were discovered in ancient middens in Egypt.  It was also intriguing how several pieces have come down to us only through being quoted by later writers.

These poems and fragments are full of passion.  Amazing to see that this endures over the centuries and with only scraps of words surviving, still so powerful and moving in a culture and time so far removed from when they were written:

“Come to me again now, release me

from my agony, fulfill all

that my heart desires, and fight for me,

fight at my side, Goddess”

“Look at him, just like a god,

that man sitting across from you,

whoever he is,

listening to your

close, sweet voice,

your irresistible laughter

And Oh yes,

It sets my heart racing –

one glance at you

and I can’t get any words out,

my voice cracks,

a thin flame runs under my skin,

my eyes go blind,

my ears ring,

a cold sweat pours down my body,

I tremble all over,

turn paler than grass.

Look at me

Just a shade from the dead”

“do not crush my spirit with anguish”

There are so few words in these poems yet they exude passion.

Where the words aren’t passionate, they are so evocative, often bittersweet, and with compelling descriptions of the world around her, the island of Lesbos.

“Sweet mother, I can no longer work the loom.

Slender Aphrodite has made me fall in love with a boy.”

“You have forgotten me,

or you love someone else more.”

“…

but I love delicacy, and love has won for me

the light of the sun, the sunlight’s beauty”

“…

drove your chariot pulled by sparrows

swift and beautiful

over the black earth, their wings a blur

as they streaked down from heaven

…”

“I do not expect my fingers

to graze the sky”

 "...

as at sunset, the rose-fingered moon

outshines all stars, spreading her light

over the salt sea, the flowering fields,

and the glimmering dew falls, roses

bloom amid delicate starflowers

chervil and sweet clover

.."

Though this poetry does not contain much of Reason, there are some references about moral concerns and how to live life.

“He who is beautiful is beautiful only when seen,

But he who is good will be beautiful at once.”

“But if you are my friend,

Go to a younger woman’s bed;

For I will not endure an affair

In which I am older than the man.”

I enjoyed the introduction to this edition, by Pamela Gordon and when I have time, I’d love to read more about the time as well as about the women who have been drawn to Sappho and her poems.  They remind me of the women in the 19^th and early 20^th century who weren’t content to live a conventional life but found ways to travel and live a life they preferred, away from society.  

Amazingly brave.

Passion wins through in these poems, leaving Reason the realm of Athenian intellectuals.

GENESIS

GENESIS
(online text)

It was interesting to read Genesis after reading the Bhagavad Gita.  Both texts begin with a listing of family members: in the Gita both Dhritarashtra and Arjuna, his nephew, list family members as the cousins prepare for battle, a battle between the sons of Dhritarashtra and the sons of his brother Pandu.  Genesis contains a recounting of mankind’s lineage beginning with Adam (and Eve) and extending down to Joseph, younger son of Israel (Jacob) and Rachel.

Lineage and family seem to be important in both cultures and times (India before 150 BCE and the Middle East prior to 1250 BCE.  In the Gita the family relationships are in the background but in the Old Testament the lineages described comprise the main framework of the text.  It describes mankind's original descendants and in particular their interactions and covenants with the Lord.  Genesis ends with mention that from the 12 sons of Jacob (Israel) came the 12 tribes of Israel.

Genesis seems to be an attempt to explain how mankind came to be, and why life in the world is so hard: 

• the fall from grace when Eve and Adam ate the apple and were banished from the Garden of Eden, when Adam was condemned to a hard life of labour and Eve was condemned to the pains of childbirth;
• the great flood which was punishment for the wickedness in the world, wiping out all living things except Noah, his family and the pairs of animals he had selected to save in the Ark;
• the Tower of Babel where man’s one language was forever confused by God because mankind had dared to aspire to reach for heaven;
• the covenant with Abraham and his descendants, a covenant renewed with Isaac, one of Abraham’s descendants.

Both texts (the Gita and Genesis) deal to some extent with living a good life (as opposed to living "the good life"), though the Gita’s message or advice is more structured and consistent.  Genesis seems to be more descriptive of ‘historical’ events that led to the known world (or as it was known prior to 1250 BCE) rather than a  carefully thought out set of advice on how to live one’s life.  Aside from fear and devotion to one god, there is no consistent message in Genesis on how to reach Paradise.

I was struck while I was reading Genesis on how much of it still is present in our everyday conversation or literature.  The text itself has a very archaic style and structure but the words and concepts are very much present and in use today:

In the beginning, God created…

And God saw that it was good

Let us make man in our image

Be fruitful and multiply

Garden of Eden

And on the 7^th day…he rested

You are dust and to dust you shall return

Cain & Abel

Am I my brother’s keeper?

A mark on Cain

Dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden [where Cain dwelt]

40 days and 40 nights

Two and two, male and female, went into the ark

The dove came back to the ark after the flood with an olive leaf in her beak (so Noah knew the flood waters had subsided from the earth)

For God made man in his own image

Sold his birthright for a mess of pottage

Tower of Babel

Sodom & Gomorrah

Sold into Egypt

The great Flood

The 12 tribes of Israel

There were many sections that I did not know or remember from growing up in the Catholic school system in Quebec, such as God saying that he would set his bow in the clouds as a sign of his everlasting covenant with the earth that he will never again wipe out all living things with a great flood.   I can see how the terms “old testament” came to mean a severe God and harsh punishment.  There were definite, harsh consequences for actions or sins.  I have more remembrance of New Testament readings from going to mass as a child.  These were very different with their themes of “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” and of forgiveness and redemption: the forgiving of the prodigal son, of Judas, of Mary Magdalene, the concept of repentance.

As a guide on how to live a good life, the Bhagavad Gita seems more useful and relevant than Genesis.