"I know I should like to fight my way in the world as you are doing! But a woman can do nothing to raise herself. Isn't it hard?" -- Kate Cregeen, proving the novel should be called The Manxwoman (p. 203)
There's a quote by Czeslaw Milosz that I think about all the time, that "since the late eighteenth century, literature and art had been steadily forfeiting the ability to represent what I would call the 'multi-layered object'" (from the fantastic The Land of Ulro, p. 211). I'd add that, as the tendency has progressed, the problem has increased dramatically from the 19th century to the 20th. This came to mind when I was trying to figure out why on earth Hall Caine's The Manxman (1894) was so good.
This is another once best-selling book, written by a once famous author -- even later turned into a movie by the super-famous Alfred Hitchcock! -- and both he and the novel have been almost completely forgotten. I threw it in my cart on a whim several years ago, when Valancourt Books was having some kind of sale, and I put it on my Classics Club list because it was still on my shelf. It came up on in the November Classics Club spin, and I said to myself, "Oh, why not?"
And lo! I loved it! Despite an occasional slog of dialect, it was a page-turner, with characters I was deeply invested in, deft psychological insights, a broad societal picture of life on the Isle of Man, and a whole wealth of themes underlying a fairly simple triangle of childhood best friends and the neighbor girl they both love. It's hard for me to even imagine a randomly selected contemporary best-seller, especially on the love triangle theme, that would have so many dimensions.
Cousins Philip and Pete are both grandsons of the local lord of the manner. Orphaned Philip's father was disinherited for marrying beneath him, and while he has no income, he does have a doting, genteel aunt looking out for him. Pete is the current heir's illegitimate son, an open secret unacknowledged by the family, who grows up more rough and tumble among the working classes. The two boys become best friends, dreaming of running off to sea, and as they grow up, both fall in love with their feisty schoolmate Kate.
When Kate's father shoots down Pete's proposal, he goes to South Africa to make his fortune. She (kinda sorta) agrees to wait for him, not taking it too seriously, although Pete, Philip, and her family sure do. In ironic foreshadowing, she insists that she doesn't care about Pete's lack of a "name," and says "when I want to marry I'll marry the man I like" (50). Oh, the certainty of youth! By the next page, though, realizing that everyone considers them engaged, she says "I have nothing to do with it, seemingly. Nobody asks me" (51). Whether she wants to marry Pete or not, the people in her life aren't taking her autonomy into account.
Pete's villainous half-brother, also infatuated with Kate, contextualizes her situation, reflecting their world, in which men with more fortune and social standing are ruined by treating women honorably, and rewarded for abandoning their lovers and children: "A girl like this can never marry the right man. The man who is worthy of her cannot marry her, and the man who marries her isn't worthy of her" (70).
While Pete is gone, she and Philip form a strong bond, eventually blossoming into love, but Philip is constrained by his loyalty to Pete; later he realizes that he's also been held back by the idea that their marriage would repeat his own father's disgrace, and probably wreck his prospects.
The young couple finally gives in to their feelings, just in time for Pete to return a rich man, and preparations for the wedding are underway before Kate can even be sure if she is or isn't pregnant. With no right course before her -- just a muddle -- the characters are all pretty much doomed to misery.
This novel does a masterful job of portraying the environment of its time, and how that influences the characters to do what they do. A lot of the pressure on Kate is emotional and psychological: she doesn't want to hurt the kind, doting Pete, or hamper Philip's career, or disappoint her family. Because of all this, she doesn't assert herself or take her own feelings into account, merely going along with events. But her doing so leads to much worse damage down the line, for everyone. Caine is clearly sympathetic to Kate's position; near the end, both men remember how full of life she was, before being dragged down by love, sex, and motherhood, clearly making a thematic point.
Caine also addresses the societal pressures on her, such as ideas about who can marry whom, with potentially career-destroying loss of status in a wrong choice: Pete wasn't good enough for Kate because of his finances; Kate isn't good enough for Philip because of her social class. Women are in bad positions if they have sex, and especially if they have children out of wedlock, and their enforced subservience leads to avoidable problems. Women aren't supposed to be straightforward about their feelings or desires. While all of this is shown as wrong and unfair, the narrator describes it as if it is all an inevitable part of human nature that could never change.
"The pathos of the girl's position was no accidental thing. It was a deeper, older matter; it was the same to-day as it had been yesterday and would be tomorrow; it began in the garden of Eden and would go on till the last woman died -- it was the natural inferiority of woman in relation to man" (116).
Now, going on 125 years later, almost no one thinks a woman's life should be over because she has a baby without being married, or that the child should be marked for life by society because of it. or that no man could be a successful lawyer if he married a girl whose parents were in trade. The fact that so much has changed makes the book, in retrospect, oddly hopeful.
The paragraph above is immediately followed by these sentences: "She had the same passions as Philip, and was moved by the same love. But she was not free. Philip alone was free" (ibid). I feel like the light is starting to dawn on even the narrator, as it does to the reader, that her lack of freedom is not the result of anything "natural," but to social conventions that can and will change, after they ruin enough people's lives to make those changes themselves seem natural and self-evident.
For one thing, there's the open hypocrisy of the fact that "a man may sin and still look to the future with a firm face" (202), when a woman cannot, but at the same time, the pressure to marry men they don't love, and have sex with those men, is recognized as "a grim reality of life" (226). When Kate asks herself, "Why can't I be quiet and happy?" (247), the answer is that she shouldn't! And tellingly, all the constraints put on her as a woman lead to making the lives of the two men who love her as unhappy as she is, so neither gender is served by them.
This is no sociological treatise, however, but an entertaining page-turner with a lot of local color. Since we are dealing with Victorian melodrama, the novel's major turning points all seem to be timed for maximum coincidence value, rendering the drama a little less "realistic," but I could actually see the usefulness of the convention in highlighting the emotional intensity of those scenes. Using coincidence in this way might not have always been sheer authorial laziness, but a device to create a certain effect, which would have been understood by the readers.
Sidenotes:
I wondered if this novel was the origin of the phrase "for Pete's sake" (65).
There's some unfortunate comments about the natives in South America that will make a modern reader go "Eeeee," but it's certainly realistic to the period.
There are (often amusing) subplots about Kate's father, a fire-and-brimstone preacher, and his conflicts with other villagers. When told that the rakish heir "has sold himself to the devil," he replies that "the devil gets the like for nothing," which made me LOL.
But speaking of religion, the beleaguered Pete breaks out in an angry speech near the end: "God doesn't punish the innocents for the guilty. If He does, He's not a good God but a bad one ... you are making Him out no God at all, but worse than the blackest devil that's in hell" (387). Amen, brother.
Caine, Hall, and David MacWilliams. The Manxman. Kansas City, Mo: Valancourt Books, 2009.
There's a quote by Czeslaw Milosz that I think about all the time, that "since the late eighteenth century, literature and art had been steadily forfeiting the ability to represent what I would call the 'multi-layered object'" (from the fantastic The Land of Ulro, p. 211). I'd add that, as the tendency has progressed, the problem has increased dramatically from the 19th century to the 20th. This came to mind when I was trying to figure out why on earth Hall Caine's The Manxman (1894) was so good.
This is another once best-selling book, written by a once famous author -- even later turned into a movie by the super-famous Alfred Hitchcock! -- and both he and the novel have been almost completely forgotten. I threw it in my cart on a whim several years ago, when Valancourt Books was having some kind of sale, and I put it on my Classics Club list because it was still on my shelf. It came up on in the November Classics Club spin, and I said to myself, "Oh, why not?"
And lo! I loved it! Despite an occasional slog of dialect, it was a page-turner, with characters I was deeply invested in, deft psychological insights, a broad societal picture of life on the Isle of Man, and a whole wealth of themes underlying a fairly simple triangle of childhood best friends and the neighbor girl they both love. It's hard for me to even imagine a randomly selected contemporary best-seller, especially on the love triangle theme, that would have so many dimensions.
Cousins Philip and Pete are both grandsons of the local lord of the manner. Orphaned Philip's father was disinherited for marrying beneath him, and while he has no income, he does have a doting, genteel aunt looking out for him. Pete is the current heir's illegitimate son, an open secret unacknowledged by the family, who grows up more rough and tumble among the working classes. The two boys become best friends, dreaming of running off to sea, and as they grow up, both fall in love with their feisty schoolmate Kate.
When Kate's father shoots down Pete's proposal, he goes to South Africa to make his fortune. She (kinda sorta) agrees to wait for him, not taking it too seriously, although Pete, Philip, and her family sure do. In ironic foreshadowing, she insists that she doesn't care about Pete's lack of a "name," and says "when I want to marry I'll marry the man I like" (50). Oh, the certainty of youth! By the next page, though, realizing that everyone considers them engaged, she says "I have nothing to do with it, seemingly. Nobody asks me" (51). Whether she wants to marry Pete or not, the people in her life aren't taking her autonomy into account.
Pete's villainous half-brother, also infatuated with Kate, contextualizes her situation, reflecting their world, in which men with more fortune and social standing are ruined by treating women honorably, and rewarded for abandoning their lovers and children: "A girl like this can never marry the right man. The man who is worthy of her cannot marry her, and the man who marries her isn't worthy of her" (70).
While Pete is gone, she and Philip form a strong bond, eventually blossoming into love, but Philip is constrained by his loyalty to Pete; later he realizes that he's also been held back by the idea that their marriage would repeat his own father's disgrace, and probably wreck his prospects.
The young couple finally gives in to their feelings, just in time for Pete to return a rich man, and preparations for the wedding are underway before Kate can even be sure if she is or isn't pregnant. With no right course before her -- just a muddle -- the characters are all pretty much doomed to misery.
This novel does a masterful job of portraying the environment of its time, and how that influences the characters to do what they do. A lot of the pressure on Kate is emotional and psychological: she doesn't want to hurt the kind, doting Pete, or hamper Philip's career, or disappoint her family. Because of all this, she doesn't assert herself or take her own feelings into account, merely going along with events. But her doing so leads to much worse damage down the line, for everyone. Caine is clearly sympathetic to Kate's position; near the end, both men remember how full of life she was, before being dragged down by love, sex, and motherhood, clearly making a thematic point.
Caine also addresses the societal pressures on her, such as ideas about who can marry whom, with potentially career-destroying loss of status in a wrong choice: Pete wasn't good enough for Kate because of his finances; Kate isn't good enough for Philip because of her social class. Women are in bad positions if they have sex, and especially if they have children out of wedlock, and their enforced subservience leads to avoidable problems. Women aren't supposed to be straightforward about their feelings or desires. While all of this is shown as wrong and unfair, the narrator describes it as if it is all an inevitable part of human nature that could never change.
"The pathos of the girl's position was no accidental thing. It was a deeper, older matter; it was the same to-day as it had been yesterday and would be tomorrow; it began in the garden of Eden and would go on till the last woman died -- it was the natural inferiority of woman in relation to man" (116).
Now, going on 125 years later, almost no one thinks a woman's life should be over because she has a baby without being married, or that the child should be marked for life by society because of it. or that no man could be a successful lawyer if he married a girl whose parents were in trade. The fact that so much has changed makes the book, in retrospect, oddly hopeful.
The paragraph above is immediately followed by these sentences: "She had the same passions as Philip, and was moved by the same love. But she was not free. Philip alone was free" (ibid). I feel like the light is starting to dawn on even the narrator, as it does to the reader, that her lack of freedom is not the result of anything "natural," but to social conventions that can and will change, after they ruin enough people's lives to make those changes themselves seem natural and self-evident.
For one thing, there's the open hypocrisy of the fact that "a man may sin and still look to the future with a firm face" (202), when a woman cannot, but at the same time, the pressure to marry men they don't love, and have sex with those men, is recognized as "a grim reality of life" (226). When Kate asks herself, "Why can't I be quiet and happy?" (247), the answer is that she shouldn't! And tellingly, all the constraints put on her as a woman lead to making the lives of the two men who love her as unhappy as she is, so neither gender is served by them.
This is no sociological treatise, however, but an entertaining page-turner with a lot of local color. Since we are dealing with Victorian melodrama, the novel's major turning points all seem to be timed for maximum coincidence value, rendering the drama a little less "realistic," but I could actually see the usefulness of the convention in highlighting the emotional intensity of those scenes. Using coincidence in this way might not have always been sheer authorial laziness, but a device to create a certain effect, which would have been understood by the readers.
Sidenotes:
I wondered if this novel was the origin of the phrase "for Pete's sake" (65).
There's some unfortunate comments about the natives in South America that will make a modern reader go "Eeeee," but it's certainly realistic to the period.
There are (often amusing) subplots about Kate's father, a fire-and-brimstone preacher, and his conflicts with other villagers. When told that the rakish heir "has sold himself to the devil," he replies that "the devil gets the like for nothing," which made me LOL.
But speaking of religion, the beleaguered Pete breaks out in an angry speech near the end: "God doesn't punish the innocents for the guilty. If He does, He's not a good God but a bad one ... you are making Him out no God at all, but worse than the blackest devil that's in hell" (387). Amen, brother.
Caine, Hall, and David MacWilliams. The Manxman. Kansas City, Mo: Valancourt Books, 2009.
No comments:
Post a Comment