Theatre Review: Being Mr. Wickham, 59E59 Theaters, New York City

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Austenites never tire of new takes on Pride and Prejudice (1813), so last month I joined JASNA NY’s outing to 59E59 Theaters to watch a one-man play about one of the novel’s most infamous characters. 

Being Mr. Wickham brings us George Wickham on his sixtieth birthday, still married to Lydia (nee Bennet) and reminiscing about the dramas of his youth. The play was co-written and performed by Adrian Lukis, who was the young Wickham in the beloved 1995 BBC adaptation of Austen’s novel, so it really did feel like we were all watching a familiar character age before our eyes. 

Revisitations of Pride and Prejudice range from the canonical (see, for example, my review of Janice Hadlow’s 2020 The Other Bennet Sister) to the more daring (check out my review of Katherine J. Chen’s 2018 Mary B), and this one-act play was firmly in the former camp. Audience knowledge of the source material was assumed as Lukis regaled us with updates on what has become of the other characters from the book, but there were no shocking revelations about the original story gained from entering the villain’s perspective. 

The set and sound design were smart, keeping the play visually interesting and giving us musical interludes between parts of the play respectively, and this helped keep the crowd engaged throughout—no small feat in what’s essentially a lengthy monologue. Lydia’s off-stage voice and a side plot about a drama Wickham is watching through the window gave the impression of a world beyond the stage, and I appreciated parts of the script that spoke to the wider historical context around Austen’s novel (e.g., war and politics). 

This is linked to what I found most interesting about the play, which was otherwise merely an entertaining trip down memory lane. Lukis and his co-writer Catherine Curzon turn Wickham into the poster child for the Regency period itself—a lover of romance and Romance, who models himself on Byron, and approaches life with a total dedication to having fun. The character’s frustration at the prudishness of the Victorian age he now finds himself living in was well-done and Lukis’s comments during the after-show conversation suggested he found parallels between Wickham’s reaction to a period of increased sincerity and his own responses to society and the direction the arts is taking today.

Have you watched Being Mr. Wickham, whether in New York or elsewhere? I’d love to know what you thought of it! Let me know what plays with a nineteenth-century connection you’d like to read me review next—in the comments, via Instagram, on Facebook, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want monthly updates about my blog and other writing straight to your email inbox? Sign up for my newsletter here.

How Victorian Gothic is still inspiring writers today: a conversation with C.G. Twiles, author of The Best Man on the Planet

I can hardly believe it. The launch of my debut novel, Bronte’s Mistress, is now only a month away! The book, as the title might suggest, is a work of historical fiction, inspired by the lives and works of the Bronte family. It’s based on a true episode in the great literary family’s history, and three of the four siblings who reached adulthood are major characters in my novel.

 

But there’s another important way in which the novels of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne continue to impact writers and bookshelves today. They are pivotal to our understanding of the Gothic genre.

 

I recently chatted to C.G. Twiles, author of The Best Man on the Planet, which the writer describes as a ‘modern Gothic romantic thriller’. I wanted to know what Gothic means today, and how the Brontes can help us understand our more modern ideas of romance and suspense.

Austin:

Thanks for chatting with me today about Gothic fiction and The Best Man on the Planet! What inspired you to write the book?

 

Twiles:

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I read it when I was 21, and, ever since then, I’ve wanted to write something similar.

 

The Best Man on the Planet isn’t a retelling, but more of an inspired update. After all, it was hard to think of a really dark secret that my ‘Mr Rochester’ (in my novel, Mr Foster) could have that would shock people these days. We’ve heard it all at this point. My title is ironic, much like The Great Gatsby. I was also tired of thrillers with the word ‘Girl’ in the title, so I came up with one that had ‘Man’.

 

I have a lot of other interests, like true crime and psychology, which I wrote about for years, and so these themes also ended up weaving their way in. And I’ve always wanted to write a big soul-mance romance. So I put all that into one book. A modern Gothic romantic thriller was the result.

 

Austin:

How would you define Gothic fiction in particular?

 

Twiles:

For me, a house that has a sinister vibe is key to a Gothic novel. It can be a mansion, a castle, an urban apartment, or a double wide, but the dwelling is a witness to all the drama, virtually another character.

 

And then there’s often a Byronic hero, which of course comes from the poet Lord Byron. A dark, brooding, usually male, character, with some kind of torturous past that punishes his present.

 

But I would argue that while Gothic fiction often centres on the tortured psyche of the male, it is really about the psyche of the female, and how she deals with it. I look at it as the male being the dark part of her psyche.

 

There are exceptions of course—in Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the woman is the Byronic hero. And I haven’t read your book, Bronte’s Mistress, yet, but I’m imagining that in your novel, both Branwell and Lydia are Byronic: Branwell tortured by drink and a sense of failure, Lydia by her boring marriage and constraints of her class and era. Am I right?!

 

Austin:

No spoilers here but you may well be onto something…

 

I find a lot of your answer really interesting, especially what you said about the central role of the Gothic house. One of the things that stood out to me when reading The Best Man on the Planet was the Gothic mansion in Brooklyn that your main character, Casey, finds herself working at. How did you go about characterizing the house? Is it a real mansion?

 

Twiles:

It is real! It’s a members-only club, called The Montauk Club, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I basically described it to a T. While I was writing the book, a member allowed me inside (and bought me dinner—thank you!). You can read more about The Montauk Club on my website, www.cgtwiles.com. I hope it will survive the pandemic given that it has currently stopped all events.

 

I suppose mansions are so central to Gothic novels because of the genre’s origins. These books were often focused on the secrets and depravity of the upper classes, and those people lived in castles, estates and mansions.

 

Austin:

Speaking of the genre’s origins, do you have any favourite Gothic reads, whether classic or modern, you’d recommend?

 

Twiles:

I love anything by the Brontes. I also like middle-of-the road Gothic authors, like Dorothy Eden, and Ira Levin, who wrote Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives. In Levin’s stories, there are often sinister homes and strong heroines under duress. I was really into V.C. Andrews as a kid and read all the Dollanganger series, but I tried to reread it recently and couldn’t get into it.

 

Austin:

And any favourite, or least favourite, Gothic tropes? Which can readers expect to find in your novel?

 

Twiles:

In The Best Man on the Planet, there’s crime, there’s love and sex (though not explicit), there’s a house that basically comes alive.

 

A couple of things I also did that aren’t common now in thrillers but were in Gothic fiction back in the day: I have a heroine with a strong moral centre; she is not an unreliable narrator. There’s a sense of humour threaded throughout. The Brontes were great, dry wits, and you don’t see much of that these days in thrillers; they’re all so serious from the first paragraph. But I’m not capable of writing without some humour.

 

I’m not a huge fan of the dark and stormy night trope. Charlotte Bronte made beautiful use of a storm sweeping in and splitting the huge oak tree after Rochester’s proposal to Jane, but I don’t think that can be topped, so I tend to stay away from storms. It just seems a cheap, easy way to try to get a thrill. How much more challenging is it to create a sense of dread under a clear, sunny sky?

 

Austin:

Did you also find it challenging to deal with some of the digital realities of our lives today, when writing a Gothic with a contemporary setting?

 

Twiles:

Yes. It’s hard to give characters modern technology (cell phones, texts, emails and social media), and still manage to have the staples of suspense – like characters who can’t reach each other. If you think of that great scene in Jane Eyre where she and Rochester communicate telepathically, now they’d just text each other. Not as exciting! I kept making things happen and then realising it probably wouldn’t happen that way if there was a cell phone, so I went to elaborate lengths to get rid of modern technology.

 

Austin:

What about our modern views on psychology? We’ve come along way in our understanding of the psyche since the 1840s!

 

Twiles:

I took the more up-to-date approach that our biology and brain wiring plays a huge role in our development, more than what our mother might have done to us at age five!

 

In the world I created in my novel, the brain scan has much more importance than the subconscious. I wanted to ask the question about the role our brains play in who we are—you hear about people who have a stroke and they are suddenly a completely different person! There are people who came out of strokes speaking with foreign accents, or whose sexual orientation changed, or who suddenly became math or musical geniuses.

 

So I wanted to explore that rather than the deep buried memory thing that so many thrillers are exploring. Who are we really? In the book, Mr. Foster has had a brain aneurysm that burst. He wakes up completely changed. Is he now responsible for the actions of the man he was before?

 

Austin:

People will have to read your book to find out! Thank you so much for chatting for my blog and best of luck with The Best Man on the Planet.

 

Twiles:

It was my pleasure.

 

 

The Best Man on the Planet is available for purchase on Amazon now. Find C.G. Twiles online, on Facebook, on Instagram, or on Twitter.

 

Bronte’s Mistress is available for pre-order, in hardcover, e-book and audiobook, now, and will be published August 4. Click here to attend my virtual launch event with Strand Book Store NYC on August 3, wherever you are in the world. Want to stay in touch? Sign up to my email newsletter below, or connect with me via Facebook or Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

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Art Review: It’s Alive! Frankenstein at 200, Morgan Library & Museum, New York City

In the summer of 1818, twenty-year-old Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin, although living as ‘Mrs Shelley’ with Percy Bysshe Shelley in Geneva) wrote one of the most culturally influential stories in the English language. Her Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus has spawned countless adaptations across multiple media and has come to be a definitive part of the Gothic and Romantic movements.

The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli (1781)

To mark the bicentenary of the novel’s creation, the Morgan Library & Museum has unveiled a major exhibition dedicated to the work and its influence.

Three Witches, Henry Fuseli (1783)

I began my visit by exploring the Gothic art that inspired Shelley and her contemporaries. Many of these paintings draw upon or suggest narratives, such as Henry Fuseli’s 1781 The Nightmare, in which a demon crouches atop a prostrate woman’s chest, and his 1783 Three Witches, which has influenced subsequent depictions of Shakespeare’s weird sisters. There are also skeletal depictions of Death, such as John Hamilton Mortimer’s drawing of Death on a Pale Horse (c.1775) and multiple instances of men and women attempting resurrections by an open grave.

Death on a Pale Horse, John Hamilton Mortimer (c.1775)

In the next section of the exhibition it’s easy to see synergies between the Gothic imagination and contemporary scientific advancements. Doctors and anatomists are depicted as grave robbers, while artists show their instruments destroying and restoring life, as well as extending it.

The Anatomist Overtaken by the Watch, William Austin (1773)

Parts of the Frankenstein manuscript are on display, as well as letters between the Godwins, Shelleys and others. The romance of the Frankenstein’s creation, and the characters of Shelley, Shelley, Byron and Keats, seem to add to its mystique and appeal, as much as the story itself.

The manuscript

In a second room we move out of the nineteenth century and into Frankenstein’s afterlife in film and graphic novels. We trace the monster’s evolution from reanimated corpse to superhuman villain to participant in superhero-style showdowns. The movies become weather vanes for the sensibilities of their time. For instance, the creature’s accidental child killing appalled audiences in 1931 and so the moment was cut from the film. The bride of Frankenstein (a creature Viktor chooses not to animate in Shelley’s original tale) becomes part of our cultural inheritance—here you can observe her wig, listen to her blood curdling screams.

A poster for the 1931 adaptation

At the centre of the exhibition is Richard Rothwell’s 1840 portrait of Mary Shelley. She watches over proceedings serenely as movie buffs, bibliophiles, and lovers of the macabre file through. I couldn’t help but wonder what she’d think of how Frankenstein and his monster have outlived her and evolved and how amazed she’d be that a tale born out of her time has come to represent so much about generations since.

Mary Shelley, Richard Rothwell (1840)

Which NYC exhibitions should the Secret Victorianist visit next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Byron’s The Corsair and the American Ballet Theatre’s Le Corsaire, Metropolitan Opera House, New York City

Unlike the heroes of each ancient race,

Demons in act, but Gods at least in face,

In Conrad's form seems little to admire,

Though his dark eye-brow shades a glance of fire:

Robust but not Herculean—to the sight

No giant frame sets forth his common height;

Yet in the whole—who paused to look again,

Saw more than marks the crowd of vulgar men—

They gaze and marvel how—and still confess

That thus it is, but why they cannot guess.

The Corsair, Byron, Canto 1

Byron’s narrative poem The Corsair sold 10,000 copies on the day of its publication in 1814, while the tale of love, pirating, and a pasha (plus his harem) continued to fascinate throughout the nineteenth century. Central to the poem’s appeal was its unmistakably Byronic hero—Conrad—a man lacking the beauty and even the masculine and martial victory granted to his Classical forbears.

Yet in Le Corsaire, the ballet based on a libretto by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges, set to the music of Adolphe Adam and first performed in 1856, Conrad is not the focus. The components of Byron’s plot are there—the same characters with the same names—but the story has been sanitised, the hero moulded into one much more acceptable to conventional tastes and the female characters given roles which play out more traditionally. The slave Gulnare (Stella Abrera) no longer kills for Conrad (Mathias Heymann)’s sake, and Medora (Gillian Murphy), the damsel in distress, lives along with the titular character.

The ABT's Le Corsaire

ABT’s beautifully designed and exquisitely danced production, staged by Anna-Marie Holmes, is notable for not trying to make anything more out of this flimsy storyline. This is a piece of erotically tinged escapism where men are brave and women beautiful, where the villain (Victor Barre) is laughable but we share in the fantasy of his dream sequence as ever multiplying hoards of women and children dance for him. The greatest threat comes from the sea—a vehicle for heroism in the Prologue, a turquoise backdrop to our couple’s romance in the second act and a powerful force for destruction (but don’t worry—not of true love) in the dramatic epilogue.

The ballet might not be Byron, but it captures the spirit of the nineteenth-century fantasy and fetishisation of the East and proves that, even for the audiences of twenty-first century New York, it remains a seductive fairy tale.

Do you know of any NYC productions the Secret Victorianist should check out next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Neo-Victorian Voices: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke (2004)

Next up in my very modern series is a book that isn’t Neo-Victorian at all, but rather neo-nineteenth-century. Susanna Clarke’s magical odyssey spans the years 1806-1817, as her unlikely pair of magicians help defeat Napoleon, squabble via rival periodicals, and accidentally inflict perpetual night on swathes on Austrian-ruled Venice.

Despite its early setting, I wanted to include the novel in my Neo-Victorian round-up not only due to its high quality and current popularity (given the 2015 BBC adaptation), but because, in tone, plot and structure, it stands apart from many other historical novels (and novels more generally), making it an interesting counterpoint to some of the novels I’ve previously blogged about.

Rather than trading on plot devices familiar to lovers of nineteenth-century novels (as we saw in Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night, or even more directly, due to its intertextual interests, in John Harding’s Florence and Giles), Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell continually defies readerly expectations. Clarke’s English magicians are capable of transporting whole cities to different continents and disappearing through mirrors, and at times it feels as if she herself is achieving something similar, as the novel lurches madly but masterfully between locations, subplots and consciences.

Susanna Clarke (1959-)

If some of the Neo-Victorian writers I’ve looked at so far can seem to go a bit heavy on proving the historical verisimilitude of their texts, their literary antecedents, and their academic leanings, Clarke’s novel reads as something of a witty rebuke. Here too there are footnotes, and a deep consciousness of the novel as text, but their content is an extended joke. Clarke has created an entire academic discipline of Theoretical Magic, complete with a cast of nineteenth-century, and earlier, scholars, canonical texts with which the reader becomes increasingly familiar, and vicious intellectual debates. What’s most clever is how this ‘history’ intersects with a history of England (and particularly the North of England) made more magical. The longer you read (there are more than 1000 pages in all) the harder it becomes to distinguish between history and fantasy, as if you were trying to traverse one of Norrell’s labyrinths.

‘Footnote: In this speech Mr Lascelles has managed to combine all Lord Portishead’s books into one. By the time Lord Portishead gave up the study of magic in early 1808 he had published three books: The Life of Jacques Belais, pub. Longman, London, 1801, The Life of Nicholas Goubert, pub. Longman, London, 1805, and A Child’s History of the Raven King, pub. Longman, London, 1807, engravings by Thomas Bewick.’

One of Portia Rosenberg's illustrations

If in some ways Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a very different kind of novel, in others, however, it bears all the hallmarks of its literary antecedents. In style, Clarke attempts a blend of Dickensian characterisation and caricature with a rye social humour most comparable with Jane Austen. The execution is a little uneven (and works better in passages exempt from references to magic), but means that there are points at which the novel fills less like a fantasy tome and more like a social comedy.

‘Lovers are rarely the most rational beings in creation and so it will come as no surprize to my readers to discover that Strange’s musings concerning Miss Woodhope had produced a most inexact portrait of her.’

Overall, the novel is a light, but long, entertainment, designed to delight academics and the well-read, complete with cameos from the likes of Byron and Lord Wellington, and using the past as a foreign country where even the magical becomes strangely plausible. Don’t expect emotional depths, a literary response to the literary canon, or a Victorian preoccupation with the human condition and morality. Neo-nineteenth-centuryism is, for Clarke, a device for creating her very own breed of magic realism.

What novel should the Secret Victorianist read next in her Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

A Victorian Alphabet: R is for Rome

The Secret Victorianist was in Rome last week to visit the same sites admired by Byron and Shelley, but it was the reaction of a fictional character to the eternal city which was playing most on my mind. Dorothea Brooke, a central character in George Eliot’s 1871-2 Middlemarch, is less than impressed by Rome and its history when on her honeymoon tour.

Rome, Eliot argues, can only be appreciated when its viewers possess knowledge as well as ardour:

'To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world.’

This historical and specifically classical knowledge is precisely what Dorothea lacks. I have already posted about women’s lack of access to classical education in the nineteenth century and, as a result of this, even Rome – the centre of the classical world – becomes meaningless here in the light of Dorothea’s ignorance.

The Secret Victorianist in Rome

‘But let them [those with knowledge] conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot.’

This passage contains a lot. The ‘gigantic broken revelations’ of Rome suggest the fragmentary nature of Dorothea’s intellectual awareness as well as the physical realities of the ruined city, made more obvious to one who can’t ‘trace out’ the past from the surrounding ruins. Meanwhile, Rome’s subsequent role as centre of the Catholic faith has profound implications for how a puritanical Protestant will respond even to its classical past, with Eliot highlighting the more lowly nature of Protestant histories and passing negative judgement on their corresponding aesthetics.

Dorothea judges everything in terms of morality – her ‘ardent nature’ is inseparable from her moral code, leaving her uncertain as to how to respond to Rome. And added to this her personal circumstances, as a bride, navigating a new life role, compounds her confusion.

Rome for Dorothea is an unreadable cipher, emphasising her comparative ignorance, and a city which is morally, as well as mentally, unsettling, given its Catholicism and the separation between morality and aestheticism found in the classical art she encounters (and in front of which Will Ladislaw first sees her). And along with both these things, this confusing city becomes a manifestation of Dorothea’s inner turmoil as she reassesses her life role, following on from her marriage.

Rome confuses Dorothea then not because she thinks too little, but because she thinks too much, making her painfully aware of the cacophony of emotions explored above:

‘The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions.’

Rome then for Dorothea is a ‘vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation’ – hardly a line the tourist board should be adopting any time soon.

What should be ‘S’ in my Victorian Alphabet? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.