. . . and the other stuff: academic, mostly

[chelseagirl]

Yesterday started off on the down side -- for once, M.'s insomnia was catching, so I dragged myself into school in the morning. Wore entirely the wrong thing; somehow had decided that a rather frilly dress, bought in London and in style a couple of years ago, wasn't getting worn enough; ending up feeling somehow like a fashionable dork.

My students owed me papers that day, so they were unusually quiet due to the usual post-paper lack of sleep, and *my* lack of sleep had me not dynamic enough to pick up the slack; the section that meets for two hours on Tuesdays got out an hour early with the injunction to be ready to talk on Thursday.

Then I spent three hours at the NYU library, ready to come back for a teaching meeting for one of the courses I'm doing next semester -- only to get back to school and discover it's next week.

But my Trollope class was terrific. It's in a church hall uptown, lots of mature ladies, and they were *great* -- really interested and engaged. I'm excited about that.

And this morning I realized that *The Warden* fit my dissertation perfectly; there's the legal case, and law vs. conscience, and Trollope's more conservative take on reform, and his specific address to Dickens as Mr. Popular Sentiment. It would be a good countertext to what I'm writing about.

Comments

[neuralclone.livejournal.com]

As a bit of a Trollope fan I'm delighted to hear he got such an engaged and interested audience - and left asking myself why certain Victorian authors have "survived" and others haven't. Why Trollope and not Mrs Humphrey Ward, for example?

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

I suspect one of the reasons Mrs. Ward hasn't really come back into critical favor is because she took a fairly conservative and antifeminist stance on certain issues; feminist and postcolonialist critics have done lots of the bringing of people back into fashion, and they haven't particularly cared for her.

There are some Trollope fans in my class, and quite a few more people who never got around to him before *because* he wasn't in critical fashion back when they were in college or etc. Most of the negativity I've heard -- why are you teaching *Trollope* or "he's dull and boring" are from people who clearly came of age during High Modernism!

I'm just so very pleased with it all!

[neuralclone.livejournal.com]

I gathered she was not so much "anti-feminist" in the sense of being a right-wing conservative, but "anti-feminist" in the sense of believing that it distracted energy from more "important" issues. In Marcella, for example, she had a heroine who was a Fabian Socialist (!) and her "bad guy" was someone who betrayed workers during a strike.

I wonder how much of her reputation as a right-wing author comes from Rebecca West's assessment of her?

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Sadly, though I've got *Robert Elsemere* sitting in the "to read" pile, she's one of my gaps -- I'm afraid I was mostly reflecting what I've read in criticism, the VICTORIA mailing list, and generally 'round the 19th century water cooler.
;-) Of course, considering the pace at which people are being reassessed these days, she's probably been completely exonerated in the past few years when I've been too busy to be on VICTORIA! I know that people were starting to refer to her as "Mary" Ward rather than "Mrs. Humphry", which seems like a gesture of feminist reassessment, even if it doesn't take her preferences into account.

I'm a little worried about a new student who showed up for the second week of my continuing ed class -- without having read *The Warden* he pronounced Harding to be "sinister" -- since there could be nothing further from the truth of the character *sigh* I think I'm going to have to sit on this one from time to time. I can outface an undergrad when I have to, but this guy's 60. Eep.

[neuralclone.livejournal.com]

Harding is sinister? That's, um, an interesting interpretation.

(Or should I say "inversion"?)

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Yeah -- I was warned that this student could be a bit-- opinionated? But having an opinion about a character in a book you haven't even read, that's . . . different. Eep.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Forgot to say: I will put Marcella next on my list, though -- sounds very cool.

Was she opposed to women's suffrage -- is that perhaps what it's been based on? I know George Eliot was, and yet feminist critics have managed to muddle on with her.

[neuralclone.livejournal.com]

Well bear in mind I know little more than you do - I've only read the
"Virago Modern Classics" edition of Marcella and its introduction by Tammie Watters. According to that:

Somewhat the victim of her own success, she was taken up by the Establishment and lured into dreams of Empire. But what really cast a shadow over her life was her presidency of the Anti-Suffrage League. Why should she who championed free thought and created stunning Laura Fountain, who gives up her life rather than forfeit her mental freedom, so box herself in? She acted from the belief that suffragettes were wasting energies better used in women's education, social work, and local government, and that men as the managers of the Empire should also control parliament.

In other words, she sounds like a complex and interesting individual.

(Oh, and Marcella evidentally got a rave review from the Manchester Guardian!)

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

The work of hers I'm most familiar with, though once again, from the criticism -- it's been in the to-read pile for too long because it looks a bit bleak and I never think of it at the right time -- is Robert Elsmere, about a clergyman who's lost his faith. Most Victorian novelists wouldn't have touched *that* with a ten foot pole. So she's definitely not afraid to explore complex issues.

I think it's one thing to have refused to support suffrage and another thing to have lent her name to anti-suffrage. That's kind of *also* taking away from attention to women's education and etc.?

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

BTW, seeing my Scorpy under your Scorpy -- can you see how the kitten's facial markings are a negative image of the real Scorpy? :-)

[neuralclone.livejournal.com]

Does this make him the anti-Scorpius? *g*

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

If they ever were in the same place at the same time, the universe itself might cease to exist.

Note to self: Cancel Wayne Pygram's dinner invitation. *g*