Reading Novels of the Domestic Drama

Because I've been doing so much handwork in the past few months, my novel reading has suffered. Instead, when I wasn't gardening or--more lately--involved in family activities associated with our daughter's living with us for the summer, I would sit down in front of my television with the latest handwork project and access Netflix in order to watch something that wouldn't be so engrossing as to interfere with the needle work. And so I have watched all of the old Adam Dagleish mysteries from the 1990s, adaptations of the P.D. James mystery novels; most episodes of the sci-fi series Stargate Atlantis; all of the British Rosemary and Thyme mysteries; and now, abandoning myself to the nostalgia of childhood, the Mission: Impossible episodes of the 1960s and 1970s.  Occasionally, I think that I should listen to language tapes instead when I'm doing handwork, for then I would be learning something, but the boyish face of Colonel Shepherd of Stargate Atlantis or Roy Marsden's melancholy Adam Dagleish or the lovely English gardens highlighted in Rosemary and Thyme make me abandon my more intellectual aspirations. Could I stitch as well while repeating Spanish phrases?

This week, however, putting handwork aside, I indulged in a novel by one of my favorite contemporary British novelists, Joanna Trollope, who ranks up there with my other favorite British novelists, Jane Austen, Barbara Pym, and Penelope Lively. I gulped down the novel in one day, immersed in the human experience that Trollope creates so believably in her novels. Novels written by women authors that deal with domesticity and human relationships underwhelm many people. Charlotte Bronte said of Jane Austen's fiction: "There is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy, in the painting. She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound." Mark Twain had this to say: "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig [Jane Austen] up and beat her over the head with her own shin-bone."

But I love a finely written novel that delineates the human heart in all its strength and weaknesses without resorting to violence or over-dramatization. I love novelists who realize that we reveal ourselves more thoroughly in everyday experiences, when we least think we're on display to the world.

Anthony Trollope, a distant relative of Joanna Trollope's, had this to say about Jane Austen:

Heroes and heroines with wonderful adventures there are none in her novels. Of great criminals and hidden crimes she tells us nothing. But she places us in a circle of gentlemen and ladies, and charms us while she tells us with uncommon accuracy how men should act to women, and women act to men. It is not that her people are all good;.--and certainly, they are not all wise. The faults of some are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered till they are bright as steel. In the comedy of folly, I know of no novelist who has beaten her.

Anthony Trollope, if living today, would perhaps write something similar about the novels of Joanna Trollope, which are often called "domestic dramas" because they deal with the everyday drama of marriage, lovers, divorce, children, aging parents, aging lovers. Another term that has been used to describe these kinds of novels is "Aga saga." According to Wikipedia the "Aga saga is a sub-genre of the family saga of literature. The genre is named for the AGA cooker, a type of stored-heat oven that came to be popular in medium to large country houses in the UK after its introduction in 1929. It refers primarily to fictional family sagas dealing with British middle-class country or village life." Obviously, the phrase has a condescending ring to it.

Joanna Trollope describes in an interview some of the criticism of her writing:

“I am often criticised for being rather accessible. . . . And my reply to that is I think Mozart and the Parthenon are quite accessible, too, though perhaps in another league. . . . There was one review that said 'you could read this book in a day’, as if that was a bad thing. I mean these books to be easy to read, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t thought-provoking.

But, as Fay Weldon says, "She can be as subtle as Austen, as sharp as Bronte. Trollope’s brilliant."

In The Men and the Girls, the Joanna Trollope novel that I finished today, two couples that are the main characters are men and women with a wide gap between their ages; the men are in their late fifties or early sixties, their younger partners in their thirties and forties. The novel deals with the issues this discrepancy in age causes. At the beginning of the novel, an accident causes a young woman to re-examine her life, and she is convinced she must leave the much older man with whom she and her young daughter have been happily living for eight years. In a conversation before she leaves, the man, very kindly, asks," Are you afraid you'll have to look after me?"

The young woman eventually responds, "I'm afraid of you," to which the man wisely replies: "You're afraid of yourself...You see in me what you will become and you're afraid of that."

Who among us hasn't had that fear as we observed those older than us? I see that fear in my daughter's eyes, as she grapples with deciding on college courses and emphasis of studies that may affect the choices she can make later in life. At work, she has seen what bureaucracy can do to a person, how it can wear one down, destroying ambition, dampening enthusiasm, encouraging mediocrity. At home, she sees the disappointments and sorrows I and her father have dealt with, and while we have survived, we bear the scars of those battles, a cynicism or melancholy that we cannot entirely escape, despite our best intentions. This is a difference between fifty-four and twenty.

Toward the end of the novel, one of the characters in Trollope's novel The Men and the Girls, a young wife to a television star who is past his prime, lies in bed thinking:

She...had lain awake for a long time thinking...that there were few things she could think of at that moment that were as desolate as plain old disappointment . . . [N]obody ever gives disappointment the credit of being a prime force behind wayward behavior. But it is. Disappointment is what's the matter with most of us...

It's that kind of insight I so appreciate in the novels of Joanna Trollope, that, and the believable characters that come to life in her novels.

Voltaire and Torture

A few days ago I began reading Ian Davidson's history of the last twenty-five years of the life of Voltaire, Voltaire in Exile. Born in 1694, François Marie Arouet took the name of "Voltaire" when he was 24 years old. Today, he is best known as the author of Candide, the picaresque tale that satirizes religious fanaticism, the excesses of power, and blind optimism in the face of horrible human suffering. The last twenty-five years of his life, Voltaire was in exile from Paris and the French court; it was during those years that he began championing the rights of ordinary people unjustly accused and punished by a state ruled by an absolute monarch and "buttressed by the superstitions of the Catholic Church." In his prologue, Davidson writes "that Voltaire's individual campaigns, together with the development of his thinking about the general principles and practices of the French justice system, were landmarks in the history of penal reform in France and Europe."

Eighteenth-century France was quite different from twenty-first-century America, but reading of the first case that Voltaire championed, I couldn't help but think of how power breeds similar despotic behavior even in democratic societies. We might be freer to check that power, but if the voice of reason is muted by fear, nationalism, fanaticism or fundamentalism, the powerful force of that freedom is diminished.

The case that Voltaire challenged was the case of a Protestant family led by its patriarch, Jean Calas, a prosperous cloth merchant. The Calas family were Protestant, except for one son who had converted to Catholicism. In France at that time, Protestants were terribly oppressed:

Protestant services of worship were forbidden, male offenders were liable to a life sentence in the galleys, female offenders to life imprisonment and preachers to execution. The only valid marriages were those sanctified by the Catholic Church, and all newborn children were required to be baptised and brought up as Catholics. Many professions, including that of the law, were open only to those who could prove they were practicing Catholics. Protestant families were required to employ Catholic servants.

One evening, this particular family discovered one of the adult sons dead in the family shop downstairs from the family's domicile. When the authorities were called, the family first said that the young man had been found dead on the floor. Later, they changed their story, saying that they had found the young man hanging in the shop; they had hoped to keep the suicide private because in France at that time, suicides were denied honorable burials. The brutal magistrate arrested the entire family on the assumption that the family had murdered the son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism (though there was no proof that this son was contemplating such an action), ignoring the fact that one son had already converted and wasn't murdered by his loved ones. However, the populace was superstitious, easily inflamed, and religiously intolerant; public opinion turned against the Calas family, even though no proof was ever discovered to tie the death of the son to the father. And anyway, the son was young and strong at twenty-nine-years of age; the old father much feebler at sixty-four. The family's Catholic servant was also present in the house.

Although the father was tortured--stretched on the rack, forced to drink ten jugs of water twice, and had his legs and arms broken with an iron bar--he did not confess. He was then strangled, and his body was burned.

A description of the typical trial process also reveals the extent of state repression in France at that time:

The accused was allowed a lawyer, who could make representations on his behalf outside the courtroom; but the lawyer was not permitted to be present at the questioning of the accused, which took place behind closed doors. The accused was not given any advance notice of the questions, nor of the evidence or witnesses arrayed against him, and he might even not know the details of the offence he was charged with.

We read of such torture and rigged trial proceedings and may well be happy that we don't live in such brutal times. But then perhaps we will remember the "enemy combatants" we kept for years (and continue to imprison) at Guantanamo Bay, men who for a long time had no access to legal representation and who were held without being charged. And now, the torture memos of the Bush administration are being released in which the following methods (i.e., torture!) were used to get prisoners to talk: slamming prisoners against a wall, pouring cold water on them, depriving them of food, making prisoners remain in stress positions, placing prisoners in close confines for hours, keeping prisoners awake for hours--even days, slapping prisoners in the face, making prisoners remain nude, confronting prisoners with things that they were terrified of, such as insects, waterboarding prisoners.

Over two-hundred years ago, Voltaire faced an oppressive regime that tortured with impunity with the support of many of its illiterate and superstitious citizens, and he had this to say to his friends:

You may ask, my divine angels, why I am so strongly interested in this Calas. It is because I am a man, because I see that all foreigners are indignant at a country which breaks a man on the wheel without any proof.

Trying to get the facts of the trial proved extremely difficult because trials were conducted in secret. In letters to friends, Voltaire championed transparency:

What do we ask? Nothing more than that justice should not be as dumb as it is blind, that it should speak, and say why it condemned Calas. What horror is this, a secret judgement, a condemnation without explanations! Is there a more execrable tyranny than that of spilling blood on a whim, without giving the least reason? . . .You owe an accounting to men for the blood of men. As for me, I do not ask anything more than the publication of the trial procedure. . . It is important for everybody that such decisions should be publicly justified.

Later, Voltaire published a ninety-page pamphlet criticizing the roles the Catholic Church and a prejudiced Catholic population played in this miscarriage of justice; he argued for tolerance and warned of how such events effect us all:

If an innocent father of a family is delivered into the hands of error, of passion, or of fanaticism; if the accused has no defence except his own virtue; if the arbiters of his life run no other risk in killing him, than that of making a mistake; if they can kill with impunity by a simple decree; then the public outcry is raised, every man feels he is in danger, one can see that no one's life is in safety in the face of a tribunal set up for watching over the life of the citizens, and all voices in unison demand vengeance.

These words of a flawed but brilliant man, a father of the Enlightenment, a champion of reason, speak to us today.