August 28, 2008

Main point: 

The main thing I wanted to get across in this class is that we have to learn, not only what these eighteenth-century novels say, but how they work.  Eighteenth-century novelists were not writing with us in mind; that is, they weren't writing for people who had a long experience in reading fiction, and who came to works with habits formed by reading works by the likes of Charles Dickens, Henry James, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf--the nineteenth century and modernist writers who developed the form.  At the start of class, we spoke about the kinds of things that we expect from novels, and generated a good list:  characterization, setting, plot development, closure, pleasure, to name a few.  Eighteenth-century novels have all of these things, but often in different ways and in different combination from what we expect.  Shedding our expectations and assessing these works on something like their own terms will be a big part of our task together.

As modern readers--and English majors--our inclination is to think that our task is to interpret texts, to try to dig under the surface to get at what an author is really saying.  My argument is that this strategy isn't always going to work with the novels we're reading--it certainly won't work with Haywood.  Rather, we have to think about the surface, to figure out what's going on.  My suggestion is that we think of her book as a kind of game, one to which we have to figure out the rules.  One rule we picked up quickly--most of the women in volume 1 have names that start with the letter A.  Interesting!  As we'll see, this is a way of organizing the characters and the books of the story--later, most of the female characters will have names that start with M.  Haywood's readiness to use this kind of rubric suggests that she's thinking of these characters as in some sense interchangeable; at a very basic level, they're very much like each other.

Our most extensive discussion focused on the what seem to be the rules for representing subjectivity.  We noticed that women characters frequently had their thoughts depicted directly, though quotation, whereas male characters like D'Elmont more typically have their thoughts portrayed in the third person, by the narrator, a technique known as free indirect discourse.  There are lots of implications here about characterization, gender, and the imagined audience/readership for Haywood's book.

Close Reading:

One passage we looked at appears on page 51.  D'Elmont has just been told by Anaret, Amena's maid, that Amena's father has kept her from him to force D'Elmont to come clean on his intentions:

"D'elmont was not perfectly pleased with these words; he was too quick sighed not to perceive immediately what Monsieur Sanseverin drove at, but as well as he liked Amena, found no inclination in himself to marry her, and therefore was not desirous of an explanation of what he resolved not to seem to understand."

Several things to note.  As we've already observed, it's typical of the novel that D'Elmont's thoughts are expressed, as they are here, through free indirect discourse rather than directly; the narrator mediates between us and male characters like him while more frequently offering comparatively direct access to the minds of women characters.

Note, too, that what's on display here is the intricate workings-out, at the level of how individuals make their moves, of courtship.  As we noted, courtship was a central concern in this society (as it still is!) but young people would have had very little direct access to it--it was something of a mystery to them.  Part of the pleasure of the novel for readers was surely simply informational--so this is how it works?  this is how it feels to be in the middle of trying to figure whom to marry and how to get him or her to marry you?

Finally, let's not ignore D'Elmont here!  We've already seen that he's kind of ignorant of romance, or, to use the narrator's favorite word about him "insensible"--he doesn't get it.  And why should he?  He's a warrior, and has spent his youth fighting rather than courting.  But here we see that he's decided to play dumb as well; he's "resolved" to make it seem as if he doesn't understand what is going on here.  This way, he hopes, he might be able to continue to see Amena without having to propose to her, since he's not really interested in marrying her, at least not at the moment.  

Referent:

St Omer's, on page 37.  This is the place where D'Elmont leaves his brother the Chevalier Brillian to recover from some wounds.  This was a Jesuit college for lay people in northern France, often patronised by Catholic English people.  By mentioning this institution, Haywood reminds her English people at the outset that the story is set in a Catholic country; to an English reader of 1719-20, this renders the story slightly exotic--and slightly suspicious!  That is, Protestant English people of this period looked at Catholic France as a benighted, backward place, holding on to a discredited religion, and Haywood very efficiently underscores the Catholic setting of the novel with this reference.  But because St Omer's was frequented by the small minority of English people who wanted a Catholic education, it would have been a familiar name to her English readers--it's exotic, but not so exotic that they wouldn't recognized.  it's a savvy choice.

Web link of interest:

Have you ever read an old novel or play and seen them mention an amount of money and wondered--how much is that in our money?  Well, here's a website that will help you figure out how much money from older periods and different nations is worth now.  Very handy for figuring out, for example, how much Mr. Darcy ten thousand pounds a year in Austen's Pride and Prejudice is really worth (rough answer--a whole lot).

http://www.projects.ex.ac.uk/RDavies/arian/current/howmuch.html