Lesbian Vampires in Jam!

I have recently been reading "Carmilla" by J. Sherridan Le Fanu. This is the kind of book I really like because when someone asks, "What's that you're reading?" you can reply either, "Nineteenth century Gothic literature." or, "Lesbian vampires!" depending who's asking. Carmilla was an early and vampire story and one of the books which served as inspiration for
Bram Stoker's Dracula. The story is narrated by a beautiful nineteen-year-old who lives in a castle with her father and tells of how the mysterious Carmilla comes to stay with them. Carmilla doesn't get up until the afternoon, suffers from a strange illness and wants to touch the narrator inappropriately. Soon local peasant girls are found pale and dead and as the narrator begins to suffer from a bizarre langour, her father is eventually prevailed upon to call in the vampire hunter.

At the end of the novel, there are still a substantial number of loose ends: Carmilla originally arrived with her mother, who is presumably a vampire too and still on the loose. There was also an old woman in their carriage as well, so that's two of them. And what about all the peasants Carmilla drained? Are they coming back from the dead as lesbians? I am a little surprised that the narrator can see one vampire killed and assume that all is now well. If the book were more modern I would assume the extra vampires were being kept alive for the sequel, Carmilla Bites Back.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Persuasion was Austen's last book and was not published until after her death. It was also the only one her books I had not read, so now I have collected them all. I'm as happy as a small boy with a completed album full of football stickers.

Seven years before the start of the novel, Anne Elliot was persuaded by her friend Lady Russel (who has taken on the role of Anne's mother after that lady died) to reject the proposal of Frederick Wentworth, even though she loves him, because he has no money or rank and therefore, Lady Russel cannot conceive of the marriage resulting in anything other than misery. In the meantime, Anne's father the stupid, snobbish Sir Walter Elliot has been busy squandering the family fortune because he refses to do without any of his status symbols. Things become so bad that the Elliot family are forced to leave their ancestral seat, Kellynch hall, and rent it out to Admiral Croft. Admiral Croft's wife turns out to be Wentworth's sister and suddenly he is back on the scene, now a captain with wealth he's plundered from Britain's enemies, declaring that he is ready to marry. At first he seems understandably embittered by Anne's original refusal and starts a romance with her friend Louisa Musgroves, claiming to be charmed by her strength of character. Then Louisa goes and blows it all by throwing herself off the cobb at Lyme Regis, for Wentworth to catch her - only he misses and she gives herself a serious head injury. Louisa may not be the sort of wimp who'd pass up a perfectly good fiance just because someone told her to, but she does now seem deficient in common sense. Anyhow, Anne goes to join her impoverished folks for the season in Bath, and before long Mr William Elliot, her cousin, is chatting her up in all the fashionable locations. You can't marry your cousin! It's just wrong! The children will have 3 heads or something... But we don't have to worry about mutant children (shame, they'd give Austen's novels a bit of extra excitement...) because in the nick of time the cousin is revealled to be a bounder and a cad and Captain Wentworth professes his love. Let the bells ring out and so forth.

In her book lady of intellect and taste who is “past her bloom” is still able to bag a husband. Sadly this wasn't the case for Jane herself and she died unmarried at only 41. Seems as if the men of her time cared more for a pretty face with a bit of money attached than for a lady with any kind of mind.

Famously, we never get any scenes in Austin in which men are talking to one another without ladies present, because Jane never got to hear how they spoke each other in these circumstances. I have also noticed that the books finish at the point where the heroine is engaged; presuamably because Austen has no exerience of what happens after that, either.

I like Mrs Croft much better than I like the heroine. I think her a much better model for modern women: she and the Admiral have a marriage of equals and she has followed him all over the world. She helps him to run his affairs and they drive their carriage together.

“Persuasion” was writen at a time of increasing social mobility and has birth versus money as one of it's themes. The book has plenty of sailors who have made their fortune (maybe fighting Napoleon, I'm not sure of the history) and are now looking to marry a class of girlie who would have been well beyond reach otherwise. The idiot Sir Walter Elliot disapproves of the navy on the ground that it is “a means of bringing persons of low birth into undue distinction”, but the posh totty is nevertheless flockng to Naval officers! Austen's view seems to in favour of social mobility and “marrying up”, but in a qualified way: Our happy ending is that Anne finally gets her dashing officer, instead of being stuck with the family's mean-spirited heir presumptive, the author makes it pretty clear that she finds Mrs Clay's scheme to marry Sir Walter absolutely beyond the pale. I can't really see what the difference is between them. Is it OK for men to be social climbers, but not women? Is OK to work your way through manly exploits against the French, but not through marriage? Or is it that as a lawyer's daughter, Mrs Clay ranked a lot lower in Austen's world than it first seems to me?

Another theme of the book seems to be setting up a contrast between family and friends. Anne's friends value her and enjoy her company while her father and sister Elizabeth just ignore her and her sister Mary needs Anne to make her feel important and distract her from her imagined illnesses. Despite this, Anne is made to feel that she has a duty to her family. In some ways, Anne's family is dysfunctional enough to give the novel quite a modern feel; One parent is absent (due to death rather than divorce) and the rest are a couple of silly spendthrifts and a hyperchondriac drama queen.

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell

Well the Bookclubof1 blog has been pretty quiet recently. That's because I've been chipping away at the Cannon again. I have been reading Mary Barton and I think I now understand why until relatively recently Mrs Gaskell has been so incredibly unfashionable. My aim here is to supply both of my readers with everything they'll ever need to know about Mary Barton in order to seem cultured without having to read the bugger.

Mrs Gaskell was the wife of a Unitarian minister and lived in Liverpool. “Mary Barton” was her first book (and the worst one of her's I've read so far) and was apparently very controversial in its day – although it's pretty hard to see why now. It was written during the recession of the 1840s and details the hard lives of the mill workers in Manchester. The plot runs something like this:

Mary's Mum dies leaving her with her father who works as a weaver in a dark, satanic mill. She gets a job as an apprentice dressmaker and everything goes well for a time. Mary is lucky enough to have a choice of two admirers: sensible, hardworking Jem Wilson who has a good job as an engineer or Harry Carson, the dandy git who is the mill owner's son. Being an idiot who thinks a rich man would marry a shop-girl, Mary initially prefers the latter but eventually come to realise Jem's sterling qualities. Unfortunately, this is where things start to get difficult. The recession comes and workers are laid off at the factory or have their hours cut. Many of them can't feed their families anymore and the people are sick and starving. John Barton is part of a Trade Union delegation which attempts to negotiate better conditions with the mill owners. Not only do the negotiations fall through, but Harry Carson finds the workers' raggedy appearance (caused by his own greed in the first place) hilariously funny. The union come up with a plan to murder him: they draw lots and whoever draws the marked piece of paper has to kill him. John Barton gets the job. When Carson is murdered the blame falls of Jem Wilson who was seen having a fight with him in the street over Mary. Mary guesses her dad is the killer. She wants to prevent Jem being hanged for murder, but can't bring herself to turn her dad in so she goes chasing about the country to find someone who can give him an alibi. Finally she confesses her undying love for Jem from the witness box while being cross-examined. It's cheesy. Cheese on toast.

And it's all cheese from here on in. Mary's Dad reappears wracked with guilt, confesses the murder to Harry Carson's father and then drops dead on the spot. Why couldn't he have done this 10 chapters earlier and saved Mary and Jem a whole load of hassle? The whole story just felt really contrived and unnecessary at this point. Anyway, Daddy Carson now decides that the way to prevent things like this happening in future is to be a nicer kind of mill owner, but at the point where we leave him he still believes that it is “The Market” that is starving his workers, not him. Bloody Adam Smith has a lot to answer for. Mary and Jem get married and emigrate to Canada where they live happily ever after, even though Jem's “frabbit” old mother comes to live with them. The cheesiest bit of all is right at the end though... throughout the book, Mary has a friend called Margaret who is a fantastic singer, but blind. Right at the end she and Jem get a letter from England which reveals, “They've done something to Margaret to give her back her sight!”. How crap! Very early laser surgery, I expect...

What you can't really appreciate from this precis is how very religious the author is. (And you can tell what the author thinks about bloody everything from the long expositiory lectures, planted like booby-traps in the text. That's something that you just don't get in modern novels – and a good thing too!). In some ways this is a good thing as it is Gaskell's religion that gives her sympathy for the poor which was mostly lacking in middle class people from her era. A lot of the time it makes her annoyingly sanctimonious: for example, it's a sin for the workers to feel downcast while watching their children starve as they should have faith in God. Also, the bourgoisie should conduct themselves in a moral and upstanding way to set a good example to the ignorant workers!

However progressive Gaskell might have been in her attitudes to the proles, in this book at least, she is no supporter of women. Early on John Barton complains: ”That's the worst of factory work for girls. They earn so much when work is plenty that they can maintain themselves”. Well, Heaven forbid that we should be able to take care of ourselves and not have to whore ourselves out to men! There's also lots of author's commentary about how inappropriate it is for wives to work because when the husband gets home all tired and finds that his missus hasn't tidied up and made him dinner it drives him to that den of sin known as the pub. Why don't working husbands drive wives to the gin shop? Before any one thinks that I am judging someone from the past by modern standards, I'd like to point out the The Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written some 50 years before Mary Barton, so Mrs G could have chosen to suck a lot less than this!

There are lots of critiques on the Internet which begin with statements about how Mrs Gaskell's writing is far too sentimental for our sophisticated modern tastes. I disagree. Yeah, she's too sentimental for anyone with intellectual pretensions, but look at the huge number of misery memoirs sold and try to tell me the Great British public are too sophisticated for Gaskell. She'd be entirely right as a scriptwriter for Hollywood romantic comedies. She'd also have been at home working on 'Stenders. And she'd have LOVED Brookside. In fact, I think that's a great essay question right there: If Elizabeth Gaskell were alive today, Brookside would still be on TV. Discuss.