Neo-Victorian Voices: The Wonder, Emma Donoghue (2016)

Many will know Irish-Canadian novelist Emma Donoghue from her much-lauded Room (2010)—the contemporary tale of a woman trapped by a predator and bringing up her son in captivity. But Donoghue’s works when viewed as an oeuvre otherwise have a decidedly historical bent. There’s Slammerkin (2000), inspired by an eighteenth-century murder, The Sealed Letter (2008), the story of an 1864 divorce case and Frog Music (2014), the tale of a nineteenth-century cross-dressing frog catcher. And then there’s her 2016 The Wonder, which I’m writing about today—a novel set in the 1850s that pits the English rationality of a nurse trained under Florence Nightingale against a village of superstitious Irish peasants, convinced they have a miracle in their midst.

The Wonder (2016)

Eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell hasn’t eaten in months, or so her parents claim. Is God sustaining the child with manna? Or is this a hoax, a medical oddity, something more sinister? Lib Wright, our protagonist, is determined to be vigilant and to get to the bottom of the mystery, but she doesn’t expect to grow fond of her devout and unworldly patient, or that she will have to confront her past—the secrets she is hiding of her own.

Donoghue’s cast of characters is small and her setting a tiny village, with one store-cum-drinking place, surrounded by bog. I was unsure how the simple premise would play out over the length of a novel but she’s masterful at building tension and at suggesting the monotony and repetitions of a nurse’s ‘watch’ or ‘vigil’, while keeping readers turning the pages.

Emma Donoghue (1969-)

The Ireland of the mid-nineteenth century leaps off the page, but, most unsettling, it’s not unthinkable to imagine a similar story unfolding in the country’s rural communities today. There’s much that’s recognisable—the pervasiveness of religion, which mingles with folklore and myth, the hostility towards outsiders, the culture of secrecy, suffering and martyrdom.

Much as I enjoyed the novel, there were two slight disappointments. First, the love interest character—a journalist—is under-developed, convenient for plotting purposes but lacking the nuance of Lib, Anna and others. Second, nothing really forces Lib to reassess her prejudices about the zealots she’s surrounded by. It wasn’t that I was hoping for a supernatural explanation but I would have liked a moment of self-revelation, where Lib rethought some of her assumptions.

Overall The Wonder is a quiet sort of historical novel, with drama and action saved for the final pages. It’s a novel about caregivers and patients, cynics and believers, and, more than anything, our complex relationship with food, our bodies, appetite. Donoghue has a gift for uncovering tales from the past, which have resonance today.

Which twenty-first century novel, set in the nineteenth, would you like the Secret Victorianist to review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton (2013)

The Luminaries is the kind of novel that makes people uncomfortable (and not just due to its sheer size!). It pushes readers, rather than spoon-feeding them. It breaks many of the rules adhered to by aspiring writers (there are by some counts 19 protagonists—try selling that one to your creative writing professors). And, above all else, it plays with our love of logic—the reasoning and deduction that appeals to fans of mystery and detective fiction—while threatening this with a structure based on the astrological and a conclusion leaning towards the mystical.

Many of the negative reviews of the novel which you can find on Goodreads and Amazon (which aren’t nearly as numerous as those glowing with praise for this Man Booker winner) sound closer to break up letters. Reviewers tell the book they’re not sure if “it’s you or me”. They’re worried that they’ve failed a test, that they’re not the readers they thought they were, that they’ve missed the point.

Eleanor Catton (1985-)

But, as with most novels, The Luminaries, while a monumental achievement, has strengths and weaknesses. Whether you’ll enjoy the novel as much as I did depends on the value you ascribe to each area:

Setting

Many of us read historical fiction to be transported to a different place and time and Catton has a wonderful setting in 1860s Hokitika in New Zealand. There are many tropes of the nineteenth-century doorstopper here, in a novel more complex than Dickens’s Bleak House and with multiple narrators as in Collins’s The Woman in White, but the unique setting opens up new possibilities for a cast of gold-diggers, prospectors, politicians, prostitutes, all trying to make it in a new world, greater diversity, with Maori and Chinese characters as well as British transplants, and a spectacular natural backdrop to a very human drama.

Plot

Catton is a master of plotting. I’d give anything to see her outline document! If you love to puzzle out novels, obsess over the course of events in the podcast Serial, even draw out your own timelines to keep events straight, this novel might be for you. If not, it won’t be. This novel doesn’t go easy on the casual reader. Skim one sentence and you might miss something. Revelations aren’t repeated or greeted with fanfare.

Pacing and Structure

The structure of The Luminaries is one of its most distinctive features, with parts decreasing in length as the novel progresses to mirror the waning of the moon. The characters act and interact in accordance with the star signs and other astrological bodies they represent, with the star charts preceding each section bringing another dimension to the reading experience. This is all very interesting but the victim of this grand design is the novel’s pacing. The first section is overly long and it takes too much time for any pieces to fall together. The language and the promise of the magic to come was what kept me reading but I can understand why some might have lost their patience. Once the pace picks up so did my reading. It probably took me half the time to read the final 600 pages, than the first 300.

Character

This was one of the most puzzling aspects of the novel for me. The astrological framework provides a distinct basis for each of Catton’s characters and yet they often didn’t feel differentiated enough. Bizarrely, I got more of a sense of personality when we weren’t in that character’s point of view, making me wonder if the omniscient narrative intrusions were keeping us at a distance from those whose heads we were meant to be in. In Victorian style, characters’ traits are described but I rarely saw them acted out in a memorable way. If your favourite thing about fiction is rooting for a hero or heroine you won’t find that here, but it wasn’t the lack of sympathetic protagonist that bothered me—rather the characters felt more like pieces on a chessboard than fully realised human beings.

Language

The Luminaries is beautifully written. Long as the novel was I found myself rereading stellar sentences and pausing to marvel at Catton’s turns of phrase. The voice is simultaneously an homage to nineteenth-century fiction and fresh, bringing something new to our bookshelves. We often hear the maxim that literary fiction is character-driven, but The Luminaries proves the power of plot-driven literary writing.

What would you like to see the Secret Victorianist read next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

First Impression: Alias Grace, Netflix, Episode 1

On the heels of Hulu’s incredibly successful The Handmaid’s Tale, comes another Margaret Atwood adaptation — this time of her 1996 historical novel, Alias Grace. It’s Netflix’s foray into nineteenth-century costume drama but with more vomit, violence and child abuse than we’ve come to expect in the genre and that’s just in Episode 1.

Netflix's Alias Grace (2017)

Grace Marks (Sarah Gadon) has been in prison for 15 years for a murder she may or may not have committed when alienist Dr Simon Jordan is sent to interview her by a group lobbying for her release. Grace, who is more used to doctors measuring her head than asking what goes on inside it, is suspicious, unsure what to make of the psychoanalysis we’ve come to expect in our modern crime dramas. But she begins her story nonetheless, and, through frequent flashbacks, we learn about her immigration from Ireland to Canada, mother’s death and father’s drunkenness.

Gadon is compelling, her Irish lilt believable and poetic, her stare intense. But Edward Holcroft, as Dr Simon, is a little two dimensional in this first instalment — a plot device to get Grace to talk. I hope that in later episodes the frame story is developed further to stop the interruptions from getting old.

Mary and Grace in Alias Grace

The art direction is dark and gritty. I preferred the close ups, for instance in the prison or below deck on the ship, to the scenes where we could see the unconvincing backdrops. There’s a particularly arresting montage where we see a succession of beds being covered by quilts, the camera dwelling on the detail. It’s in moments like this that the idiosyncrasies of nineteenth-century life feel more vivid — just as in The Beguiled, which I reviewed recently.

Overall the episode does a good job of drawing viewers in, letting Atwood’s first person prose work its magic. The subject of a murderess is a fascinating one for us, as it was for Victorians, and the fact that the show is based on a true story (a double murder in 1843) seems designed to appeal to those devouring crime documentaries on Netflix, as much as those with an interest in the period. I’ll be watching, if not bingeing, the rest.

Sarah Gadon as Grace in Alias Grace (2017)

Did you watch the first episode of Alias Grace? What did you think? Let me know — here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Traces of Nineteenth-Century North America: The Secret Victorianist in Ontario and Hawaii

An accusation I hear a lot back home as a European transplant, living in the US, is that America has no history.

“How can you bear to live somewhere there’s no culture?” I’ve been asked, more than once. “Aren’t you the one who likes reading about the past?”

Yet, everywhere I’ve travelled since moving to this continent, I’ve found that history, and in particular nineteenth-century history, is very much alive and well in the popular imagination. Canada and the United States’ comparative youth makes this century (my century) loom even larger, and the sites and monuments that comprise their visible history, while fewer in number, seem to have a greater influence on the shaping of the countries’ current national identities.

Today I want to talk about two very different places I’ve visited in the last month — Fort George in Ontario, Canada and Iolani Palace, once home to Hawaiian royalty in Honolulu.

Fort George

Located in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Fort George was a British military structure that housed soldiers and saw combat during the War of 1812.

Today’s reconstruction allows visitors not only to explore buildings designed to mirror those of the early 1800s (living quarters, workshops and the original powder magazine), but also to watch and interact with costumed ‘soldiers’. These re-enactors march, play the fife and drum and shoot rounds from their muskets, with such serious commitment to the tasks at hand that it’s easy to imagine adversarial American troops ranged on the other side of the narrow river.

These volunteers bring the place to life (indeed it almost felt at times like we’d accidentally wandered into 1812!) but I couldn’t help but consider their motivations. What was so attractive to these men, women, and, in many cases, children, about reconnecting with the past, and indeed with Canada’s close ties to the British?

In one way it was surreal to hear ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’ played so far from England, but then, that’s how it was sung by the Redcoats the world over — no matter how far the march, how deep the ditch or how exhausting the labour, there was always something connecting you to home.

Iolani Palace

At Iolani Palace in Honolulu I certainly wasn’t expecting to see this same reach and influence of empire. But this spectacular royal home (built 1879-1882) out-European-ed many of the stately houses I’ve seen in Britain and beyond.

Portraits at Iolani Palace

It had electric lights before Buckingham Palace, a fact that dazzled visiting dignitaries and notables (I didn’t realise that Robert Louis Stevenson was once received there). Its reception rooms were decked out with portraits of European, as well as Hawaiian, royals. And, while the palace’s exterior seems designed for the temperate climate and in keeping with Hawaiian styles and traditions, once inside the dining room, ballroom, or music room you could have guessed you were anywhere.

The Music Room at Iolani Palace

The palace also served as a gaol for nine months in 1895 for the then independent kingdom’s final queen, Liliʻuokalani, who was forced out of power by the mainland-backed provisional government. In one of the upper bedrooms you can see the quilt she and one of her ladies in waiting stitched during this period, sections of brightly coloured fabric telling the stories of Hawaii’s unification, royalty and republic.

Visiting an American state with a royal past was as strange as hearing stirrings of British spirit in Canada.

The veranda at Iolani Palace

And Iolani Palace also shared something else with Fort George — the site’s reliance on reconstruction and detective work. Many pieces of the royal family’s furniture and other possessions were sold and scattered, but the team here has worked, and is working tirelessly, to recreate a version of the Palace Hawaii’s kings would have recognised.

Where else in North America would you like to see the Secret Victorianist visit? Let me know — here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

University Greek Plays, in America

A couple of weeks ago the Secret Victorianist attended a production of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, staged by the students of Barnard College here in New York City. It was my second ‘Greek Play’, as I was also at Oxford’s most recent Greek Play in 2014—a production of Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers. And, during my Masters, I had also spent time investigating the homosocial and publishing culture around the 1900 Cambridge Greek Play—Aeschylus’s Agamemnon—(a subject I’ve blogged about before).

The Harvard Greek Play in 1906

My night at Barnard however made me wonder about the history of the Greek Play in America. Were American universities slower to join in the nineteenth-century renaissance of performances in Ancient Greek than their British counterparts? The programme told me Barnard’s Greek Play was an annual event, but only one dating back to 1977. I wanted to do some more digging to find out.

What I found was a fascinating journal article from the Classical Journal, published October 1910. D.D. Hains’s ‘Greek Plays in America’ is a topline summary of American institutions’ performances of classical plays in ancient languages, and translation, and shows the speed with which these universities took to the tradition being established in Britain.

Oxford’s first Greek Play was an Agamemnon given in 1880, which was later repeated in Eton, Harrow and London. Cambridge’s inaugural Greek Play, Ajax, came two years later in 1882.

But Harvard University in fact nearly pipped Oxbridge to the post. A production of Antigone was originally planned to celebrate the opening of the Sanders’ Theatre in 1876, but was ultimately abandoned. And so Harvard’s first Greek play, Oedipus Tyrannus, was actually performed in May 1881. The venture was an immediate success. The five performances drew audiences totaling 6,000 and a professional company took the production, in translation, to New York and Boston for an additional two weeks.

The University of Toronto's Antigone (1882)

I was also surprised to find that the second university Greek Play on the American continent was Canadian. Toronto University staged Antigone in 1882 and, again, in 1894.

The University of Pennsylvania can lay claim to the first Greek comedy, the Acharnians, in 1886, while Smith College was the first with a female cast, producing Sophocles’ Electra in 1889.

Haines estimates 101 performances based on Ancient Greek drama at 47 American institutions between 1881 and 1910, with around half as many in Latin from a slightly reduced pool of universities. His conclusion that ‘the increasing number of such performances augurs happily for the future of the classics in our schools and colleges’ might have been slightly optimistic, but the tradition does live on at schools like Barnard, even as the popularity of a classical education has waned.

What would you like to see the Secret Victorianist blog about next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Review: What’s Bred in the Bone, Grant Allen (1891)

Last week one of my Facebook fans recommended I read perhaps the craziest nineteenth-century novel I’ve ever come across –Grant Allen’s 1891 What’s Bred in the Bone. If you’re after a novel with identical twin heroes who get toothache simultaneously, a heroine who struggles to overcome an overwhelming desire to dance with snakes (or feather boas), murder, illegitimacy and a rather morally dubious spell of diamond-hunting in South Africa, (after all who isn’t?!) then this one’s definitely for you. Thanks for the recommendation, Brian! 

The Snake-Charmer, John Evan Hodgson

For general readers: Allen wrote this novel as a competition entry and it’s not difficult to see why he beat 20,000 other entries to pocket the sizeable £1,000 prize money. What’s Bred in the Bone is ridiculous but also ridiculously fun, and well-written enough to be incredibly readable. The novel isn’t one which leaves readers guessing – it’s apparent to us immediately who the father of the Waring twins must be and, later in the novel, that neither of them is responsible for murder – but it is difficult to guess exactly how everything will work out, especially as the odds mount against the ‘good’ characters. The plot is well thought through (if coincidence-laden), although the central moral – that the pedigree of your breeding will shine through in your actions – may seem a little unsavoury. The ending ties everything together nicely, although I was left with a few important questions. How is Elma an abbreviation of Esmeralda? Did Gilbert Gildersleeve QC ever see his wife do the crazy snake dance? And did Cyril get rid of his snake?! 

For students: I think this is definitely one to throw into an essay to impress and amuse your lecturers. What’s Bred in the Bone is interesting in its treatment of criminal justice, Africa and the diamond trade, foreign blood (described as Romanian, gypsy and Oriental), and railway accidents (of which there is a particularly dramatic example in the opening pages). The importance of marital records, level of detail as regards transportation times and written correspondence and trial scene also link the novel to many of the tropes of sensation fiction.

Canadian born Grant Allen is largely under-studied today, apart from his 1895 novel The Woman Who Did (an example of New Woman literature), and What’s Bred in the Bone would be a lively example of some of his lesser-known work. Allen’s prominence as a scientific writer and proponent of evolution is also a notable context for the rather more dubious scientific claims made at times in the novel, which could merit from further study.

Have you read any Grant Allen? Do you know of an even stranger nineteenth-century novel you’d love the Secret Victorianist to review? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!