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1/31/02 Bree - checking back in

Dear Meister,

I agree with your interpretation of the Emma'72 Mrs. Elton/Mr. Knightley scene.  I expect JA wanted it that way, since Mrs. E. was so infatuated with herself that she would find a prospective beau in any acquaintance!

I also fully agree with you regarding the romance and passion with which JA imbues her writing, but that is understated, not blatant.  That is why it is so effective  it is extremely subtle and expressed in, should I say, conservative, ways? Therefore, I found Jeremy Northam's reproachful rantings inconsistent with the tone of JA's Mr. Knightley.  Mr. K. was 37 or 38, so that does reduce the credibility of both Mark Strong and Northam.

Also, the romance between Emma and Mr. K. developed slowly, under the guise of many mundane meetings, conversations and interchanges of opinion.  The scene on Box Hill, in which Northam grabbed Emma's arm and yanked her around to face him was not in keeping with the George Knightley we know and love!  I admit John Carson did not have the youthful vigor of the other two, but he had a perfect Knightley-ish attitude, especially his adult tolerance toward Mrs. Elton.  He found her a source of entertainment rather than irritation, which is the only way to take someone like that (I wish I could!).

JA's expression of passion and romance is really exceptional in its subtlety.  Maybe too subtle for Ms. Bronte - was it she who said of JA "the passions are perfectly unknown to her"? Mansfield Park, for one, was full of passion!

I wondered if anyone who saw all three Emma film's joined me in lamenting the lack of development of Isabella (Emma's sister)? In the book, she was sort of a feminine mirror image of Mr. Woodhouse, always in agitation over weather, meals, and health.  She had much more of a personality than any of the filmed versions allow.

Another point is that in the novel, Miss Bates was actually described as a happy woman who found good in all her circumstances, and who was highly thought of in general.  It is true she jabbered on and on (sort of like I'm doing right now), but she wasn't really supposed to be an object of ridicule.  I think the films played up the ridiculous to an unnecessary degree.  Does anyone else agree?

1/31/02 Ashton - other offenses in Emma-'96

Dear Bree,

I did notice Northam's rough treatment of Emma - the grabbing of her arm - and I was offended by it. I can't imagine what the actors and director might have been thinking.

What ages would you guess for Northam and Strong? Unlike yourself, I would guess them both in the right age range. Godwin was a bit mature for the part of Emma Woodhouse, so the producer choose an actor, John Carson, that gave the right age difference. But, to me, Carson seems to have been a man in his middle to late forties at the time of production. What say you? To me, only Kate Beckensale seemed the strictly correct age for Emma.

You are right about Isabella Woodhouse, she was just like her dad. Isabella also was the only character who took her dad seriously - did not try to compensate for his hypochondria. There is that one passage in the novel where husband John goes ballistic when Isabella and her dad work each other up over the relative health implications of various resorts.

An offense occurs at the very beginning of Emma-'96; the voice of the female narrator informs us that this was a time when the ballroom was the most important thing for the English mind of the times. Rather ironic given the actual, tumultuous international events, the extravagant, bohemian behavior of public figures, and the extreme danger to which Jane Austen's sailor brothers were subject.

1/31/02 Linda - Good Lord have Mercy!

Dear Ash,

Are you sure you have the straight of it on Pudd'nhead Wilson?  I can't believe that! I am all astonishment!  Our sly teachers, 'they never said a word'!  I will most certainly check that out for myself!  My friend has gone to work or I would ask her about that story!  I am left speechless!

Except to say that I had a very nice birthday celebration and visit. Yankee, huh? Well, we'll see!  Oh, and Thank you very much for the 'Birthday Card'! My kids got a kick out of it! No matter what you say I'll still send you all
Love from Linda

1/31/02 Ashton - Be specific and I will cite passages

Dear Linda,

What is it you cannot believe? I don't believe that I interpreted anything. So, if you will be more specific, I will quote directly from the novel.

1/31/02 Cheryl - Hunh???

Dear Ashton,

First of all, let me reiterate:  I HAVE read Huckleberry Finn, Puddinhead Wilson, The Gilded Age, and everything else Twain ever wrote, so far as I know with the exception of Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn Among The Indians. I have also read Mark Twain A to Z, by R. Kent Rasmussen; Letters from the Sandwich Islands (original letters for the Sacramento Union); "The Love Letters of Mark Twain" edited by Dixon Wecter; Mark Twain and Sam Grant, General Grant by Matthew Arnold and Rejoinder by Mark Twain; Mark Twain's Frontier (textbook); ... shall I continue? In other words, I do know my Mark Twain.

Now that my snit over, you need to take another look at exactly what I wrote:

"by MODERN standards, Twain was a racist."

I stand by that statement because no matter how you try to wrap him up in epistemological malarkey, and slap your own arbitrary definitions on words, Twain didn't think a black man was as good as a white man, and I defy you to show me one piece of direct evidence to the contrary.  To say that a racist couldn't have written Huckleberry Finn is simply a circular argument.  And far more feeble than my circular argument that Twain was a product of his time and culture and that both his time and his culture were racist.

Now, was Twain able to rise above his childhood training?  To a large extent yes.  He was a man who forced himself to see others as individuals.  He's also a bit like his whaling captain character from "Roughing It" in his natural instinct to champion the underdog no matter what. Hawaiians against the missionaries, Mexico against the French; elderly muslims against the "pilgrims"; Italians against an American who called them dishonest; Chinese immigrants against San Francisco riff raff.  But it's easy to find passages in which Twain reviles just about all these groups. Was he a racist by the standards of the time?  No,  he was one of the most liberal thinkers of his age. But his age wasn't our age.   Twain bristles when he discovers that his guide in Italy (?? see note) is an expatriate former slave who dresses and comports himself as if he were a white man.  Of course Twain then laughs off his initial response with broad irony, pretending not to understand why the young man would wish to leave his home and its "opportunities" just for the questionable advantage of being treated with respect and allowed to make a living like anyone else.

"Puddinhead Wilson" can be interpreted as you have, but it must also be interpreted as part of the larger context of his work.  The specifics of the switched children are socially significant to you and I, but were they to the majority of Twain's readers or Twain himself? The ironic denouement is perfectly in line with Twain's other works and the whole fingerprint subplot wouldn't exactly work if we were talking about cats or the "Blue Water."  Furthermore, the switched baby subplot would seem totally ridiculous to anyone of Twain's era who was "in the know." Linda can perhaps back me up when I say that 35 years ago at least, there were plenty of people who could "tell" if you had any African American ancestry by looking at your fingernails, or checking to see if the cartilage in your nose "popped" when moved around, or whether your fingers were tapered or spatulate, whether or not you were tongue tied.  None of these people would believe for a second that such a switch was plausible so where does that leave Twain's lesson?  I'm not disagreeing with you about Puddinhead Wilson, but I think you must admit that what we're doing here is retrofitting assumptions.

Believe me Ashton, I will help you shout Twain's praises from here to the Himalayas, but you're not going to have anymore luck reforming him than his beloved Olivia.

(N.B.  I thought this was in Italy in A Tramp Abroad but I didn't find it there ... I'll quote the actual passage as soon as I can find it.)

A bit of Poetry for the Meister, in the spirit of his Ogden Nash inflictions.

From Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary.

To men a man is but a mind. Who cares
What face he carries or what form he wears?
But woman's body is the woman. O,
Stay thou, my sweetheart, and do never go,
But heed the warning words the sage hath said:
A woman absent is a woman dead.
          Fogo Tyree

1/31/02 Ashton - There is nothing arbitrary about my definition.

Dear Cheryl,

Since you have read so much of Twain, you should be able to bring some text to bear to support your view, you certainly have not as yet.

You find my definition of racism to be "epistemological malarkey". I thought to invite you to give us the correct and pure definition, but I found that I don't have to because you already supplied same, "... Twain didn't think a black man was as good as a white man, and I defy you to show me one piece of direct evidence to the contrary." Well, not thinking a black man as good as a white man is biological determinism is it not? (Are you surrendering to the dark forces of epistemological malarkey?) And, I don't have to supply my first bit of direct evidence because I already have - I am already way out ahead of you in that regard. I showed that an inescapable conclusion from Pudd'nhead Wilson is that if you raise a white man as a slave, you will produce a slave with all the usual blemishes of a slave; and, raise a slave as a white man, you will produce a white man with all the usual white-man's blemishes.

I don't have to ask Linda about this. My daughter's biological father was black and so my grandson's biological grandfather is of the same persuasion. Both of them fail both the fingernail and nose-cartilage tests. Both are culturally white. My daughter rankles in the white world, my grandson is comfortable and popular.

Perhaps you will supply evidence to the contrary, but I believe this attempt to hang a racist tag on Twain is perfectly wrong. I also suspect that this wrong-headed effort might arise from the fact that Twain did not portray every slave as a Frederick Douglas. Well, I am sorry, but Twain was right about that, Douglas was a three-sigma deviate (much as that white, under-class representative, Lincoln, was a three-sigma deviate) and it would have been an abuse of the truth to suppose otherwise.

Why do you quote that poem to me?

1/31/02 Linda - Pardon me, please

Dear Ash and Cheryl,

I should have been more specific, but now that I have had my nap I'll add the following.  I was refering to the concept of switching babies. Twain's story was not 'spoken of' as if it were a 'no-no' subject.  It just seems to me as if it should have been mentioned sometime in my day, with an associated exclamation as "Oh, the horror and shame of it!"  As Cheryl pointed out, MOST of the time we can tell the difference though I am not aware of the terms she used as in fingernails, etc.  We just KNOW, maybe not all the time.  That is not specific, I know, but it is hard to explain.  I was surprised when Mariah Carey (sp) said on Oprah that she was part African-American.  I didn't see her 'up close and personal' but it was hard to tell.  Maybe when you get as far out as one 32nd it would be hard for us to tell.  In the switched baby situation it might possibly fool us as well.

Judging by Cheryl's citation of works by and about Twain, I am an amateur and should keep my mouth shut until I have read some of it.  I am going to keep her remarks close at hand while reading Twain (and yours too) to see what I can see.

I don't care why Cheryl quoted that poem to you, I like it.

Oh, and one more thing to Cheryl, my friend tried very hard to remember where in LOTR someone was raped.  She spouted off all those weird sounding names and their adventures - she has read the books and seen the movie - but could not remember a rape, but was aware of the other violence, etc. Since she is a Church Secretary and a member in good standing who liked both I will raise my opinion of Tolkein and give it a go.  So Cheryl, can you give her a clue as to where it is found and who is involved - to jog her memory?

I can't wait for my friend to get home from work to read today's posts.  Oops, I just got a call from the Lady of the house to say that the Gentleman of the house is taking us out to dinner, so I gotta run.

Hope this helps to muddy the water!
Linda

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