Movin' On Up

Property and the urban/rural binary function as markers of class and class mobility in both Howards End and The Way We Live Now.  In TWWLN, the weight of one’s class position rests firmly in the country estate that comes with a title.  However, as the fate of Georgina Longestaffe demonstrates, the city becomes all-meaningful in maintaining one’s position—or, for Melmotte, in attempting to surpass one’s position.  Without the city, there are no means for making connections, both marital and financial.  Still, in TWWLN, the distinct separation between the rural and urban continues and the impossibility of certain characters to cross that boundary successfully presents in Ruby Ruggles and Felix Carbury.

Moving ahead half a century, in Howards End, the lines between the rural and urban have already begun to meld.  The countryside, after all, is now a quick jaunt by the fully-established and regular train service.  Further, though, the border between country and city now vanishes:  “‘All the same, London’s creeping.’  [Helen] pointed over the meadow—over eight or nine meadows, but at the end of them was a red rust” (289; ch. 44).  No, the city’s takeover is not accomplished quickly—the city “creeps” like the ivy slowly overtaking Howards End.  This slow emigration of cityscape into country, in fact, happens slowly enough that the threat may not even be noticeable to those less mindful of such matters than the Schlegels.  And as the narrator suggests, this creeping city changes the vibrancy of the landscape into “rust.”

As Cristy also notes, Margaret, beholden like Mrs. Wilcox to the past, hopes against this shift:  “Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever” (290; ch. 44).  But, of course, Margaret hopes from her bourgeois position.  She does not know that, as Leonard Bast has told Helen, the “shameful” attitude of the current lower class toward its past as it has moved toward its own center of hope:  urban mobility (202; ch. 27).  In Leonard’s shame concerning his grandparents’ position as “agricultural laborers and that sort,” Forster underscores the city’s promise to both the lower and middle classes the opportunity to escape an imposed status.  In the age of industry, capital, speculation, and automated motion, the city now spreads its arms wider and wider to catch any who would wish to advance.

Matt's Blog the Fifth: Who the Hell is Howard?

I have been intrigued by how the question of rights pervades this novel, particularly as it relates to land ownership and women’s rights.  It seems a bit obvious to simply say that Howards End, both the novel as a whole and the house of its namesake within the text, has a great deal to do with both who has a right to occupy the space, but there is also this psychological dimension to the whole thing that paradoxically questions to what extent one continues to care about such things after living there.  A continuum of several instances in the novel inform this line of questioning for me: Mrs. Wilcox’s obvious reverence for the space (evidenced in Helen’s letters and confirmed once we know Mrs. Wilcox better), Mrs. Wilcox’s very conservative claims at the luncheon with Margaret’s friends (“I sometimes think it is wiser to leave action and discussion to men.”-66); the debate upon Ruth’s death over Margaret’s right to Howards End (just as much fueled by ethnic concerns as gender); and finally the discovery of Helen’s pregnancy following the plot to commit her to an asylum.  After this realization, and Henry’s insistence on entering Howards End,  Forster writes of Margaret, “A new feeling came over her: she was fighting for women against men. She did not care about rights, but if men came into Howards End it should be over her body” (247).  It seems like more a question of legal legitimation catching up with social mores, but as the novel reminds us repeatedly, social mores do not have any ipso facto virtue (think of Leonard’s quest for culture) but are rather legitimized by tradition, and in this case a tradition implicitly tied to certain conceptions of property.

Additionally, these are just a couple of moments in the text that stuck out to me:

When Mrs. Wilcox and Margaret are shopping, we get a bit of free indirect discourse as Margaret and Ruth discuss what they give to their servants: “’We always give the servants money,’ ‘Yes, do you, yes, much easier,’ replied Margaret, but felt the grotesque impact of the unseen upon the seen, and saw issuing from a forgotten manger at Bethlehem this torrent of coins and toys.  Vulgarity reigned” (69).  I am curious as to how this fits with the other claims about poverty in the text.  I’m not sure how to characterize what, exactly, Forster is doing with poverty and poorness.

And did Leonard Bast really die by a bookshelf falling on top of him?  I’m not making that up, right?  That’s actually in the book I am reading on page 277? The books catalyzed a cardiac episode? (“Books fell over him in a shower.”)

Blog #5: The Changing Country Estate

In Howards End, Forster’s narrator says, “To speak against London is no longer fashionable. The earth as an artistic cult has had its day, and the literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town” (92). This passage brings to mind earlier texts like The Way We Live Now. Although Trollope’s text is satirical and shows a critical picture of England as a whole, Roger Carbury’s country estate seems idyllic in comparison to London. Hetta Carbury does not marry Roger, but the estate is still happily retained within the family, even if that family now includes Paul Montague. Forster’s narrator highlights a change in the current literature, no longer idealizing the country and instead highlighting city life. Howards End occupies a liminal place in that it continues to critique London, but it also revises the way readers see the landed estate.

The critique of London life and praise for the country estate is first seen through Mrs. Wilcox's character. Mrs. Wilcox “worshipped the past” (19), which is shown in her conservative views on a woman’s role and even more notably in her place attachment. When she hears about Margaret’s impending move, she cries, “Can what they call civilization be right, if people mayn’t die in the room where they were born?” (71). Her strongly-held opinion that people should always live in one place goes against the popular notions of progress and imperialism that her husband espouses, and at first Margaret cannot understand Mrs. Wilcox's viewpoint either. She tells Mrs. Wilcox that her life in London really has “something quiet and stable at the bottom” (67), and she doesn’t lament her move because their house was ordinary and they “shall easily find another” (71). However, things quickly change for Margaret. Even though she once put her faith in people and personal relationships, she tells Helen, “I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It’s one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place” (111). With friendships becoming so common and disposable, Margaret looks for stability in a physical place. This desire is very nostalgic, and Margaret actually begins to realize that civilization is not moving forward but actually regressing backward: “The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde” (128). Forster exposes the present way of life—which Trollope posits as the way we live “now” (and maybe the way we always lived)—and shows that there has been a distinct break from the more immediate past to turn towards an even more distant, primal past. This conception of property and home is cyclical, rather than a linear progression.

However, most people in the novel do not share Mrs. Wilcox and Margaret's opinions. When Mr. Wilcox tells Margaret that he thinks Ducie Street is “going down,” he says, “Shows things are moving. Good for trade” (156). In his mind, any sort of change is the mark of progress and business. Margaret is tired of the “continual flux” (156), but she also admits that people like the Wilcoxes “keep England going” (223). This comment implies that the way of the future is not to hold onto stability, as much as Margaret may wish for it. The country estate is an ideal, but it does not seem to be a viable option for England’s future like it is in Trollope’s novel. In The Way We Live Now, country estates are a safe, stable form of wealth. However, Howards End becomes disposable for the Wilcoxes because it is just another form of wealth that is more useful when liquidated. They hold onto the estate for some time, but they have plenty of other houses. Therefore, they ultimately relinquish Howards End to Margaret so that she won't get any of their money.

Only people like Mrs. Wilcox and Margaret, who are relics of the past, have a deeper connection to the country estate. In many ways, Forster’s novel is doing the same thing as other Victorian novels—lamenting the fall of the country estate’s importance while also idealizing it. Yet, what I found most interesting was the way in which the novel did away with hereditary transmission. Howards End is passed down from one woman to another woman, and not even of the same family: “To [the Wilcoxes] Howards End was a house: they could not know that to [Mrs. Wilcox] it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir…Has the soul offspring? A wych-elm tree, a vine, a wisp of hay with dew on it—can passion for such things be transmitted where there is no bond of blood?” (84). Forster shows that unlike physical property, passions of the soul are one thing that cannot be passed down hereditarily. Furthermore, these passions hold a much higher importance than physical wealth, which is why Howards End is destined to belong to Margaret.

The country estate in The Way We Live Now appears to be the moral stronghold of the novel, a relic of the past that is nonetheless stable. The ending of Howards End paints a very different picture of the country estate. Helen says, “Life’s going to be melted down, all the world over” (290). Her comment again hints at the newer nomadic way of life in which property is liquidated, prophesying that all of England will one day become as fleeting and unstable as London. Margaret realizes that this is true and thinks that all country estates are “survivals, and the melting-pot was being prepared for them. Logically, they had no right to be alive” (290). However, Forster does not end his novel with this bleak fatalistic loss of England’s past that was invested in stability and place attachment. Instead, Margaret defies the world’s logic and says, “All the signs are against it now, but I can’t help hoping, and very early in the morning in the garden I feel that our house is the future as well as the past” (290). Margaret suggests that the world will always be unpredictable and the future is not yet determined, but if anything has the ability to last it will be Howards End, not for its stability as a financial property like it would be in Trollope’s novel, but for the spiritual sense of home that it provides.

Final blog! Due Sunday, April 27, 9 pm. Comments optional this time -- a single post will do.

Howards End:

1. How does Forster's use of the country estate relate to Victorian attitudes a shown  in Felix Holt  or The Way We Live Now? What do the differences tell us about changing attitudes the gentry, or the uses of the past in the novel, or something else?

OR

2. Free post. Anything you want to write about Howards End, thoughts left over from earlier discussions, or overarching ideas about class, status, and/or various forms of capital.

Again, comment on other posts if you wish, but comments aren't a requirement this week.

The Possibility of a Politics of Time in The Seamstress

Chapter II of Reynolds' The Seamstress begins with the beginning of the work day, the narrator noting that "the clock of St. Paul's, Convent Garden, is now striking seven, as Virginia rises from her humble pallet (3)," placing both the time, and the time's importance to Virginia explicitly before the reader. The importance time has for Virginia is immediately tied to her working life, with the narrator informing the reader of Virginia's exhausted condition by noting that "for, after twenty-one hours and a half of continuous, unwearied toil, four hours and a half of slumber were but the veriest shade and mockery of rest (3)!" Virginia is not only working a tremendous amount of time with very little rest, but the great deal of time she is working has led all of her life, including the hours in which she rests, to be regulated by and thought of in terms of hours. Hours, opposed to days, is how she experiences her life, an experience of life directly resultant from the wage system under which she labors.
In this way, The Seamstress, by way of Virginia's experience, is able to depict a way of experiencing time which would seem vastly different from that of characters encountered in other novels, characters often drawn from classes other than the laborers. In many of the works we have read up until now, time was measured in days and months, characters shown planning in terms which did not seem to divide individual days into smaller units. The Seamstress, however, offers the reader a different view of time, by extension allowing readers to immerse themselves in and articulate a critique of the realities facing workers. By presenting a world in which time passing in hours rather than days, readers may be able to more fully understand the ways in which measuring the day, even beyond the time spent working, in hours, and see how this conception of time works itself as a form of exploitation.
This different understanding of time presented by the novel can be seen as reflected on the formal level in the very tense in which it is written. As seen in the above quotes, much of the novel is written in present tense, opposed to the past tense which we've encountered up until now. Time, measured in hours, is shown as a constant of Virginia's. The very present in which Virginia lives is already divided up and measured as part of time, rather than becoming inscribed in time retrospectively, when told in past tense, as is oft to happen when one is measuring in larger units, such as days or months. Over the course of days and months, time is allowed to fall from focus of characters, only placed within a narrative across time when recounted. In this way, the very style employed in the writing, as well as what is being written about, offers the reader a chance at analyzing the different ways in which time is divided as a reflection of one's situation in life, providing a site in which to analyze time as a political category.

Marx's Vampires Lurking in The Seamstress

The Seamstress is what I would characterize as the very best a melodrama has to offer. Good characters are really good, society is full of awful people, and our heroine honorably struggles through many trials and tribulations. As one might expect the heroine is all things good and she has an impossible description of her physical appearance to match. I was very struck by the detailed and lengthy descriptions of Virginia’s beauty in the early chapters as well. As Hannah has already pointed out, she seems existence as an unattainable example of beauty that speaks the purity of her interiority. In my experience, when the leading lady is impossibly beautiful and the world around her is dank, dark, and chilling, this leads me to consider the Gothic implications of the text.  

A writer who skillfully employs the use of the Gothic in his writings on capitalism is Karl Marx, specifically in his descriptions of capitalism as a vampire. Jason J. Morrissette, author of "Marxferatu: The Vampire Metaphor as a Tool for Teaching Marx's Critique of Capitalism," explains Marx’s vampire analogy as the “Capitalists are, in effect, draining away the value of their workers’ labor to enrich themselves—just as supernatural vampires drain their victims’ life force to grow stronger” (639). The opening scenes of the text strongly indicate a vampiric relationship between Virginia and Mrs. Jackson. Virginia works on a dress for 21 hours only to have her efforts and skill undervalued significantly. Described as an invalid, Mrs. Jackson seems to be stronger once Virginia gives her the red dress, as Virginia’s labor is literally rejuvenating her. Jane, another servant of Mrs. Jackson’s, is surprised at Virginia’s work ethic and the little regard she seems to have for the longevity of her life: “But you won’t keep it up long miss—you’ll see you won’t. It will kill you right off in a few years if you do “ (7). As Virginia is set upon an errand by Mrs. Jackson that then escalates into her following the exchange of money for the product she has created, she is able to see just how much Mrs. Jackson has taken from her and how little she receives in return. What is most striking is the description of Virginia’s labors over the dress. The description seems to be similar to one affected by the power and attack of a vampire (we’ll say Dracula for a contemporary reference):

But suddenly she starts from that waking trance: the toil is over—the work is done . . . The reaction now commences: the ebb of the tide of energies so unnaturally forced in the same channel for so many hours, begins in terrible earnest. The sensation is as if the warm blood were receding from the heart and flowing out of the veins, bearing away all the vital powers on its crimson current. A feeling of languor, painfully deepening into exhaustion, comes over the maiden. (6)

I do not really know where to go with this Marxist vampire lurking about the text, but I think I will be exploring it further in the longer paper. 

Blog #4: Suffering in The Seamstress

I'll preface my post by saying that I'm only 22 pages into the narrative (my digital version is 145 pages), up until the point that Virginia walks the street with Mr. Lavenham. Therefore, I'll have to limit my response to the beginning of the narrative.

Reynolds' text constructs the vitality of human life as diametrically opposed when it is seen through the lens of class distinction. Virginia, we learn, miraculously maintains a spritely interiority, despite immense suffering. The narrator describes the conditions of penury that afflict Virginia:

"For she thought that it was hard--oh! it was hard to have toiled so much and have rested so little, [sic]--to be compelled to sit up so many hours, and to be enabled to sleep for so short a time,--to plunge herself by sheer labour into such utter exhaustion, and to rise again with the stiffness still in every joint and the aching in every limb!" (3, chp. 2).

Clearly, Virgina struggles against enervation and exhaustion. In this sense, the reader is clearly meant to  understand Virginia's felt sense of life as unjust and unequal. The fact that she is compelled to wake up everyday with "aching in every limb" suggests that Virginia's vitality is determined by her class position. As someone living in conditions bordering complete abjection, she is never afforded the luxury of feeling her own body as secure or comforted. Rather, the trace of her labor pervades every inch of her.

The narrator's description of Virginia's physical beauty, though, suggests that she resists her destitution to an extent: Virginia's "sylphide beauty"(1, chp. 1) is conveyed partly by the vibrancy of her red lips (1, chp. 1), and her skin and ankles are healthy enough to "instantaneously" effect sexual desire within the Marquis (7, chp. 2). While Virginia's vitality is clearly complicated (we should definitely discuss the opening scene in which she pushes her body to its physical limits, which paradoxically invigorates her work and destroys her health), I think that Reynolds suggests that Virginia is "living" in a way that foreshadows continued life.

This sense of life continuing is contrasted by a scene of life ending. Mrs. Jackson, the elderly woman who exploits Virginia's labor, is described as an "invalid" (4, chp. 2) and presumably sick. I think that this image serves a very specific purpose in Reynolds' text. By associating aging and illness with someone from a class that can live relatively comfortably, he underscores the resiliency and initiative of the working class as diametrically opposed to the corruption of the "upper" classes (which are variously defined in the opening scenes). Specifically, Reynolds suggests that it is the working classes who embody "life." The "upper" classes--symbolized by Mrs. Jackson as anyone who can live in relative comfort, free from daily aching limbs--exemplify a type of life that is less than full, and moving downward, rather than upward. Virginia, on the other hand, embodies a vitality that is moving upward, despite her suffering. Therefore, Reynolds suggests that all classes live a life that is "less-than" full; the lower classes are forced to struggle, yet persevere; the upper classes languish, and slowly recede into enervation.