A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

This was published in 1929 by Hogarth Press, a publishing house that Woolf and her husband founded. It is based on a lecture Woolf gave at Cambridge University. Despite being almost one hundred years old many of the themes resonate today. Reading this book reminded me (as if I needed reminding) of how far we, as a society, have to go until women are treated as importantly as men are; until women’s ideas are regarded as valid as men’s are; until women’s work is respected as much as men’s is and rewarded accordingly. Another particularly resonant theme that struck me was the poverty of women. Woolf talks about how women are collectively so much poorer than men because they have not ‘learnt the art of making money’; or more precisely, they are practically unable to earn money because of their roles as mothers: ‘Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children—no human being could stand it’. Of course women these days in Western countries do not have thirteen children. Yet women’s low wages relative to men’s is directly connected to their roles as unpaid wives and mothers. If you take the partner out of the picture, single mothers are one of the poorest demographic groups in Australia (sorry, don’t have time to give you stats - maybe I’ll fill this in later).


Woolf’s central argument is that in order for women to write, they need a room of one’s own and an income. Because women had been deprived of these things, there were few notable women writers. Woolf’s description of the possible conditions that Jane Austen wrote under made me look at Austen’s books in a new light. I had never really thought about it, but Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice etc were probably not written in an office or ‘a room of one’s own’, at a leisurely and private pace, but in little pockets of time that Austen could steal while she sat in a drawing room with other women or family members who were chatting or sewing.

Woolf notes that female characters in novels, specifically up to Austen’s days, are depicted in relation to men. ‘I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends […] But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men’. It is true that this is no longer the case, and women characters have more depth in novels. But I still think that male characters are allowed much more autonomy than female characters. I know I’m departing somewhat from novels, but I can’t help but feel this point is particularly relevant when it comes to mainstream movies. Check the bechdel test out: Next time you go to a movie, think about a) how many female characters there are, and b) whether they are independent characters or mainly depicted in relation to the more important male characters. Here is an interesting blog entry with interesting links included about this in relation to the very popular Toy Story 3.

Anyway, back to Woolf, her parting words are those of encouragement laced with criticism. Get out there ladies: learn, and write!

Here is the link to the penguins classics page for A Room of One's Own

Week 7: Notes from Underground (1864/1918) by Fydor Dostoevsky.

Many apologies for the delay in this review! Winter colds season has finally caught up with me!


The underground man, the nameless narrator of Notes from Underground, is not a nice man to spend a lot of time with. Fortunately, Dostoevsky’s book is rather short (clocking in at around 150 pages). While he isn’t a nice man, he is definitely an interesting man, and his “notes” are well worth reading.

Dostoevsky was very deliberate to let his readers know that the underground man’s opinions were not his own. In a preface he states:

The author of the diary and the diary itself are, of course, imaginary. Nevertheless it is clear that such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in our society, when we consider the circumstances in the midst of which our society is formed. I have tried to expose to the view of the public more distinctly than is commonly done, one of the characters of the recent past. He is one of the representatives of a generation still living.

Interestingly, this preface has been taken by Bret Easton Ellis and applied to American Psycho, with a similar purpose and completely different results.


There is no plot to Notes from Underground, instead, the reader is addressed directly by the narrator as he reflects upon life from his unique point of view. His self-taught wisdom includes the pronouncement that there is “pleasure in a toothache”, while lamenting a long lost last encounter with “reality” where he attempts to interact with friends at a social function, only to find himself the butt of everyone’s joke.


The narrator leaves, humiliated and meets Liza, a street prostitute. In Liza there is hope of redemption, that this utterly unlikable and uncaring man could have some spark of humanity within him. The narrator is floored by the prospect that Liza’s relationship could see him turn into a “good” man, and seeks instead to sabotage it, driving away Liza and any shred of sympathy his readers may have for him.


The stark and bleak world of the narrator’s Russia makes me want to read more of Dostoevsky’s work. I tried to read The Brothers Karamazov when I was still in High School (only because it was referenced in an episode of The X-Files), but didn’t make it more than 10 pages in.


The tone of anger and apathy are partly explained by the knowledge that Dostoevsky was imprisoned for disagreeing with the dominant political regime in Russia at the time. Although this novel was written after his release, there is no doubt that he himself felt like an underground man, on the fringes of society, with no space for his own views except in the pages of his novels.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Plot:
Richard Papen is a teenager from a poor family in California who ends up going to a university in Vermont. He decides to study Greek, and in doing so joins a very exclusive group of 5 students and their lovable but elitist teacher, Julian. The students of classical Greek are a cut apart from the rest of the university—they are intellectually brilliant but arrogant and insular. The twins, Camilla and Charles are the most likeable and ‘ordinary’ of the group; Henry is a genius but cold; Francis, is gay and vampire-ish with his long black coat and startling white skin, and Bunny is bumbling, quirky and not as smart as he thinks he is. All of them, especially Henry, are extremely wealthy and Richard lies about his background to become part of the group. Much like Nick in The Great Gatsby, Richard is a conduit through which the story is narrated. Unlike Nick, however, there is little in Richard to like. The six students spend their days in classical Greek texts, far removed from the reality of college life, and events conspire that lead them to murder of Bunny.

This is not a whodunit, because Richard introduces the story by telling us that they murdered Bunny on the first page. Instead it is a story of how they reached the situation where they felt they had no other recourse but murder; of the repercussions of the murder on them, and a very suspenseful story of a group of young murderers desperate not be found out.

Themes:
Logic and rationalism vs passion and nature
Henry, the leader of the group, epitomises the boundary between logic and passion. He thinks so much—his head always in a book—that he cannot connect with passion or nature that humans are supposedly meant to feel. It’s almost as though his intellect is a cage of logic from which he cannot escape. This will resonate with anyone who thinks deeply. For anyone who has at least once thought, “I wish I could just stop thinking”, there is certainly truth in the phrase “ignorance is bliss”.

The inability to escape the reality of a humdrum everyday existence—an existence so inferior to what life ought to be if you’re a thinker—drives the group to experiment in bizarre ancient Greek bacchanal. After several attempts, they succeed and manage for a few hours, to lose themselves: “Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no “I” [...] You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence, seem after such an ecstasy”. The bacchanal nevertheless ends in disaster, the result of which becomes the motivation for Bunny’s murder. Yet this bacchanal and the ensuing disaster as well as the murder of Bunny are, for the group, opportunities to escape the cages of logic. As Henry tells Richard one day, months later, “[...[ my life for the most part has been very stale and colorless. Dead, I mean. The world has always been an empty place to me. I was incapable of enjoying even the simplest things. I felt dead in everything I did. But then it changed [t]hat night I killed a man”. Richard is horrified to realise that he knows exactly what Henry is talking about. Henry is the only one articulate enough to explain the complex emotions, such as this one, the others, including Richard, are afraid to admit. He claims that murder allowed him, for one brief moment, to “live without thinking”. The murder and the bacchanal allowed them to transcend reality for a moment.

Reality vs transcendence
The study of Greek classics and Julian, their teacher, embody the theme of transcendence. The students’ foray into the study of classical Greek and their neglect of other university subjects represents their pursuit of the otherworldy, which is not only supported by Julian, but actively encouraged. By immersing themselves into the world of Greek mythology and tragedy, they reinforce their exclusive community and sharply delineate the boundary separating them from the life experiences of average, ordinary university students.

The description of Julian is, by Richard’s own admission, unreliable. He is painted as someone who makes Richard feel like a much better person than he knows he is. Julian seems to have achieved the transcendent state the students yearn for—he does not mix with other academics; nor does he bother teaching or learning anything outside his specialty. He shows contempt for the reality of most people’s lives but is warm and caring to his 6 students. This relationship is an allegory for the relationships between the ivory towers of academic life and the rest of the ‘real world’. In contemporary Australia, at any rate, I think this divide is disappearing. I’m not so sure this is a good thing, considering what it’s being replaced with. But that is topic for another blog...: -)

After the murder, Patrick and his friends deal with the emotional repercussions in different ways. The consumption of alcohol and pills by some of them, however, take on monumental proportions. This is in keeping with the theme of the pursuit of an existence far removed from reality.

Why I liked this book
Don’t pick up this book unless you’re prepared to become quite obsessed for the next week or so. This is a book that called my name when I wasn’t reading it. I would be in the kitchen, chopping carrots, and my mind would wander to something Henry said, and my chopping would become frantic as I decided I needed to get back to the book immediately. It had me gripped from the beginning, and the more I read, the more I wanted to read. It also had a very dark and horrible mood that haunted me for a while....I had some bad dreams involving death while I was reading it.

The suspense in the first part of the book—up to Bunny’s murder—comes from not knowing how they come to the decision to kill him. The suspense afterwards comes from wondering if they are going to be found out. It also comes from all the secrets.... Patrick is on the outer of the group for a lot of the time, and there are a lot of things that he wonders about—we are privy only to his thoughts about what is going on—not what may actually be going on.

The link to the penguin classics page for this book  is here.

Week 5: Therese Raquin (1867) by Emile Zola

I first read Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin when I was in first-year uni (which, for anyone counting, was 9 years ago). It was a set-text in a subject where we studied what I now consider to be the “greatest hits of literature”.


(Personal sidebar: my lecturer was the first person who planted the idea of a PhD in my head, so it’s all his fault, really!).

In my mind, Therese Raquin is linked to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Although Flaubert was a realist writer and Zola a naturalist (distinctions I learned about in that same class, 9 years ago), there are definitely similarities in the plots.


In both novels, a young woman (who shares her name with the title of the novel) marries a man she doesn’t love for the financial stability he provides. Soon, she finds herself dissatisfied with her oafishly-depicted husband, a dissatisfaction which is compounded when she meets a more attractive man who promises her an escape from the her mundane life.


Like Madame Bovary, Therese Raquin was denounced upon publication as “pornographic”, “putrid” and “a quagmire of smile and blood”. Unlike Bovary, whose heroine never repents of her actions, Zola’s characters live out the consequences of their every action. Either way, these novels certainly do not deserve the reputation they received when they were initially published, even when changes in morals and norms are taken into account.


Certainly, Zola depicts with relish the thrills experienced by Therese and her lover Laurent when they are in the midst of their infidelities. Zola took great pains to accurately represent the emotional life of his characters. Therese, who before meeting Laurent, lived a quiet life of silent resentment, comes alive during their affair. Zola describes how

“Her unsated body threw itself frantically into pleasure; she was emerging from a dream, she was being born into passion”.

However, this novel is not an advertisement for adultery, as it was originally (mis)interpreted. Driven wild by their passions, Therese and Laurent commit a desperate, despicable act, which turns their lives upside-down and sets the rest of the novel on a course towards its dramatic conclusion.


What makes this novel so interesting to read is how the emotional life of each character is not just described in emotional terms and words, but their emotions are externalised through their actions, reactions and perceptions. Emotions permeate the very core of each character, as well soaking through the very nature of the text, until you feel as though you’ve been living with every moment of their happiness, sadness, guilt, grief and ultimately wrath.


For Zola, Therese Raquin was an experiment, he wanted to place his characters in situations of intense emotional anguish and see how they would react. He later went on to perform a similar, more extensive, literary experiment: writing a series of novels which traced the lineage of one (fictional) family over the course of numerous generations.


More than an example of early literary experimentation, Zola’s Therese Raquin is an amazingly evocative and deeply tragic novel, and well worth a read (or two, even if those readings are over 9 years apart!).


The Penguin Classics page for Therese Raquin is here.

Week 4: The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald

Poor Gatsby. What a sad tale this is. The story is about Jay Gatsby, but it is also about America at a particular point in history—its emergence from the gloom and despair of war into an era of indulgence and decadence. Indulgence and decadence that Fitzerald, who lived it, critiques as superficial and futile.

The story of Jay Gatsby is narrated by one of the most affable narrators I have encountered. Nick is perhaps the only character of decency in the entire story—and what utmost decency it is. So upright, polite and so honest, he is the perfect conduit through which the story of the much more charismatic Gatsby should be told. In the end, boring but likeable Nick was the only friend Gatsby had.

Nick, a young man in his late 20s, moves to West Egg in New York’s Long Island Sound to get started in the bond business in New York. He moves into a small house surrounded by large ostentatious ones. His next-door-neighbour is Jay Gatsby, 30 yrs old, who holds wild parties that draw huge crowds, most of whom know little about the host. The masses speculate on his character and source of wealth, but no-one really cares. They are simply happy for somewhere to go on Saturday nights. The parties are famous and people drive for miles to attend, usually not leaving until the sun has risen the next morning.


But Gatsby is not interested in the masses who flock to him and his party house. After a life of rough living as a young man, Gatsby became immensely wealthy, mainly through illegal means, such as bootlegging and illegal stockbroking. He built an enormous house in West Egg so he could have a view of the house where Daisy, the love of his life (and Nick’s cousin) lives with her husband Tom and children in East Egg. Gatsby’s short adult life has been building up to the day when he faces Daisy again, after their love affair was cut short upon him being called up to serve in World War I. Daisy is a beautiful and carefree woman. These characteristics along with her wealthy lifestyle attracted the then young and impoverished Gatsby. The parties he now holds, the monstrous house he lives in and the extravagant lifestyle he leads: all are attempts to secure status in Daisy’s eyes.


The love story that at first appeared so poignant and predestined is ultimately paper-thin, as is the veneer of sparkle and glitz surrounding the luxurious but shallow lifestyles of the characters. Daisy represents the moral emptiness of the era. Gatsby is victim of his own tunnel vision and the carelessness of the society which he worked so hard to become a part of. There is little beneath the surface of the roaring 20s in New York and the bonds that connect people in the glitz, glamour and all night-partying are weak and meaningless.


This is a great read! Places and people jumped out of the page at me - I wanted to give Tom a hiding, see Gatsby smile; I could picture Nick's girlfriend's tan and jaunty walk and I could hear Daisy's voice. I know nothing about 'literary devices' or 'narrative arcs', and I have no idea how or by whom certain books are judged as classics, but this is a damn good read.


The link to the Penguin page for The Great Gatsby is here.

Next Week: J.A is reading Therese Raquin by Emile Zola.

Week 3: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was the master of the epigram: short, pithy, wittily-phrased, truisms. Most of these epigrams have been absorbed into pop-culture. His recent “appearance” on The Simpsons is a clear example of this.  The ghostly form of Wilde visits Homer in a dream and spouts such timeless phrases as “Experience is simply the name we give to our mistakes”.

Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is full of similar witty epigrams. Many of these are espoused by Lord Henry Wotton. Lord Henry plays the part of the tempter, a devil-like figure, who shows Dorian Gray a path towards a “new hedonism”, where pleasure is valued above all other pursuits.

Wotton describes his ideology to Gray:

I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream – I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism […]. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification.

Gray throws himself into the pursuit of pleasure in all its forms. The effect of this wild hedonism is represented by the novel’s titular metaphor. While outwardly, Gray shows no sign of corruption, or even aging over the course of twenty years of hedonistic living, a picture of Gray, painted by frustrated admirer Basil Hallward, has supernaturally started to age and decay, representing the hidden monster that Gray has truly become.

The painting is imbued with Gray’s inner life because it was created at the same moment that Lord Henry indoctrinated Gray into the cause of new hedonism.

Wilde’s novel was considered controversial at the time. So much so, that Wilde felt compelled to add the following preface: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all”.

Interestingly, I feel that this is a supremely moral book. The corruption and decay represented in the painting of Gray functions as an indictment on his way of life. Although on the surface, it seems to uphold Lord Henry’s ideals, the novel’s conclusion delivers justice and punishment for Gray’s way of life.

A modern day incarnation of Dorian Gray is Patrick Bateman from Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. This is another novel which, on the surface, seems to uphold a particularly amoral way of life, but whose depths reveal a similarly strong indictment of its protagonist’s actions.

However, I’d recommend Wilde’s novel above Ellis’, which should only be read by those willing to stomach its lengthy passages of gruesome violence. The only lengthy passages in need of endurance in Wilde’s text are the lengthy descriptions of the decadence and wealth and conspicuous consumption of Grey’s hedonism. But the rewards are worthwhile. Where else will you read such gems as “[the picture] had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul?”.


The Penguin Australia page for The Picture of Dorian Gray is here.

Week 2: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Ignatius J. Reilly and his pyloric valve are deeply offended by the modern world. With a masters degree in medieval history (having spent almost as long at university as Jenn and I have), Ignatius is obese, obnoxious, unemployed and still lives at home with his mother in their New Orleans home. He is completely uninterested in finding a job; after all, he claims, he is too physically and emotionally fragile to work. Ignatius spends most of his time in his bedroom in a stained nightshirt drinking Dr Nut, masturbating and occasionally writing about the downfall of modern society. Sometimes he floats out to watch television and to eat his mother out of house and home. Several times a week he catches a taxi to the cinema to watch whatever is showing, hurl abuse at the screen, and consume popcorn by the colossal handful.


In the opening scenes, Ignatius’ elderly mother comes into debt and demands that Ignatius finally seek employment. Finding work is arduous for someone who has difficulty leaving the house before noon. It is particularly arduous for someone who is offended by most people’s ‘worldviews’. An example of his contempt for anyone and everyone is his parting note to Talc, one of his university history lecturers: “Talc: You have been found guilty of misleading and perverting the young. I decree that you be hung by your underdeveloped testicles until dead. ZORRO”


Forced to get a job, Ignatius leaves a trail of devastation in his wake. He burps and rants his way through New Orleans having uproariously disastrous effects on those with whom he comes into contact. As a cleric at Levy Pants, on the surface he injects some warmth and productivity into the business. But actually he is wreaking havoc with business partners and factory workers, who he believes should revolt. As a hotdog vendor, Ignatius cuts a menacing figure in his pirate costume. Even a job as simple as this leads him obliviously into a situation involving shifty figures from the local bar.


The digressions into other characters’ lives, such as those of Mr and Mrs Levy, became tiresome. I found myself wondering when we were going to return to the juicier and much more entertaining Ignatuis. There was, in fact, far too much happening in this story. It became a bit convoluted in the end with all the different stories meeting in a way that was smart, to be sure, but too complicated and busy. Ignatius and his mother were the shining stars in this novel, and the peripheral characters just weren’t engaging enough for me to care about them.


This is a story of hilarity revolving around a pathetic character in pretty depressing surroundings. The hilarity is thus is imbued with a sense of darkness—a gloom whose exact source cannot be identified, but which is made all the more poignant by the fact that the author, John Kennedy Toole, committed suicide in 1969—eleven years before this book was published. Knowing this leaves the reader with a bittersweet aftertaste; such a great read in the context of such tragedy.




Penguin Classics link