Neo-Victorian Voices: The Movement of Stars, Amy Brill (2013)

I’ve reviewed 32 books so far as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series, dedicated to novels set in the nineteenth, but written in the twenty-first, century. But Amy Brill’s The Movement of Stars (2013) was a breath of fresh air as it dealt with a setting and community I hadn’t read about before.

The Movement of Stars, Amy Brill (2013)

Brill’s novel is the tale of Hannah Gardner Price, a fictional Quaker ‘lady astronomer’ in mid-1800s Nantucket. When we meet her, Hannah is as dedicated to sweeping the stars in search of a new comet as she is to the Discipline demanded by her religion. She works in the town library, misses her twin brother, who has joined the scores of local men on offshore whaling expeditions, struggles to keep up with the domestic chores in the home she shares with her father and judges the young women in her community who don’t have a scientific or intellectual calling as she does.

There are powerful, gravitational, and even fatalistic forces at work though when Hannah crosses paths with Isaac Martin, the second mate on a docked whaling ship. Originally from the Azores, Isaac is looking to elevate his station by learning navigation. But he’s black and so Hannah faces censure from her community when she takes him on as a pupil and the two grow closer.

Hannah is a well-realised protagonist, Brill’s prose is beautiful and her subject matter fascinating. Nantucket came alive in the pages of her novel, being at once idiosyncratic for its natural features, Quaker heritage and role in the whale oil industry and a microcosm of the huge social, scientific and technological advances occurring nationally and internationally in the mid-nineteenth century. While the astronomical explanations eluded me at times, I found myself racing to the end, partly to find out what would happen to the characters, and partly to read the Author’s Note and discover what plotlines had a basis in reality.

Amy Brill

No serious spoilers here, but, while Brill’s romance plot is fictitious, Hannah is modelled on a real Nantucketian astronomer, Maria Mitchell. It delighted me to find that a life like Hannah’s for a woman scientist in the period wasn’t implausible, even if it was improbable.

Overall, The Movement of Stars was human, compelling and well written. It’s not flawless—Hannah, Isaac and Mary Coffey are certainly the most believable characters, with the wider cast not getting the same level of development, and it will be hard to please everyone with the ending. But it achieves one of the main goals of historical fiction, transporting readers through time and space.

Which novel 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.

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.

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry (2016)

Sarah Perry’s 2016 The Essex Serpent is a fantasy, but not in the way you might expect from its cover. 

Yes, it deals with the apparent reappearance of a mythical river monster in coastal Essex in 1893. Villagers are drowning, missing and hysterical by turns. There’s definitely something lurking beneath the water.

The Essex Serpent (2016)

But the true fantasy of the novel in its depiction of the nineteenth century. Instead of the oppressive and gloomy setting we’ve come to expect in women-focused historical fiction, Perry’s world is one of glorious possibility, where science and religion harmonise, widowhood brings freedom to roam around the beautifully-described countryside unharassed, and true friendships survive even the messiest of sexual encounters.

The blurb led me to expect a thrilling search for a living fossil, but instead what impressed me most was the novel’s strong impact on my visual imagination. Whether she’s describing rustics skinning moles, a consumptive surrounding herself with beautiful shades of blue, a delectable meal or a sheep stuck in the mud, Perry entrances with her language, pulling you into the pages.

Sarah Perry (1979- )

The Essex Serpent is also a master class in point of view, with Perry moving deftly between her characters’ heads, exposing the nuances and misunderstandings that come with many of our social interactions. Her omniscient voice is the most Victorian aspect of a book, which felt to me, despite critical comparisons of the novel to Dickens, Collins and more, largely modern.

Less successful was the central character, Cora Seaborne, who suffers from two issues often seen in protagonists—an underexplored tragic backstory and an inexplicable ability to make most of the supporting characters fall in love with her. Yet the eccentricity of Cora’s interests (in geology and evolution) and her well-rendered relationship with her (presumably autistic) son keep her interesting. I cared about her story despite these minor quibbles.

One thing I loved about the novel was Perry’s refusal to simplify—to make the characters who believed in religion foolish and those who pursue science bastions of rational progress. Every character in the novel believes in something—in the serpent, counting feathers, housing reform, open heart surgery. And that meant that, while the novel does play at the limits of credulity for a ‘realistic’ work of historical fiction, I kept believing to the end.

Which novel would you like the Secret Victorianist to read next as part of the Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

The Fortune of the Rougons: The Origins of Les Rougon-Macquarts

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms.

This extract is taken from the final paragraph of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1851). It is perhaps the most famous nineteenth-century description of the implications of evolutionary theory — the interconnectedness of all living things and the inescapable importance of our genetic inheritance, yet still the potential for variation from what has come before and the relationship between death and extinction and survival.

Emile Zola suggested that an alternative title to The Fortune of the Rougons (1871), the first in a 20-novel cycle involving the Rougon-Macquart family, might be Origins. The novel deals with the emergence of this multi-branched family in the fictional town of Plassans (based on Aix-en-Provence) at the nascence of the Second Empire, Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’etat in 1851. In keeping with his Naturalist preoccupations, Zola traces the origins of the Rougon-Macquarts’ hereditary weaknesses — their cowardice, greed and susceptibility to nervous attacks or mental illness — that will form the basis of the nineteen later novels. In The Fortune of the Rougons, the Rougon portion of the family rises to pre-eminence in the chaos of social unrest, but only through spilling the blood of others — rivals, random strangers and, of course, relatives.

The family tree of the Rougon-Macquarts

The foil to the scheming of the novel’s long list of characters is an innocent pair of teenage sweethearts — Silvere and Miette — caught up by the idealism of the Republican insurgents. The novel opens with the lovers meeting at the Aire Saint-Mittre, a piece of land that bears a resemblance to Darwin’s ‘entangled bank’, a former graveyard now teeming with life:

The thick vegetation and the eerie stillness of the old cemetery can still be seen and felt in this lane, where the walls are covered in moss and the ground seems like a woollen carpet. On the hottest days you can feel the warm, voluptuous breath of the dead rising from the old graves. Around Plassans there is no spot so exciting, more alive with emotion, so heavy with warmth, solitude and love. It is a wonderful place for lovers. When the cemetery was being cleared the bones must have been piled up in this corner, for even today people feeling in the grass with their feet often kick up fragments of skull.

No spot is more promising for the fecundity of love than the resting place of former generations but Silvere and Miette are doomed to die before the consummation of their match. Why? Silvere simply lacks the requisite survival instincts of his crueller, more decisive, more fertile Rougon-Macquart relatives. Here’s how Miette’s death is described:

In the hour of her agony, in the terrible struggle between death and her sanguine nature, she regretted her virginity. Silvere, as he bent over her, understood the bitter tears of this passionate girl. He heard the distant cry of the old cemetery bones; he recalled their caresses and their burning kisses in the night, by the side of the road; he remembered how she had thrown her arms around him, yearning for his love, but he had not understood, and now he was letting her go forever, a virgin, grieving at the thought of never having tasted the deep pleasures of life.

Emile Zola (1840-1902)

It is back in the graveyard that Silvere meets his end, passive until just before the crucial moment, unlike his peasant companion who fights ‘like a pig being slaughtered’. Only the appearance of Miette’s cruel cousin Justin causes Silvere to long for survival:

[He] felt a surge of anger, a sudden desire to go on living. It was the last revolt of his blood, just for a second.

It is too little, too late. Silvere is not enough like his uncles to survive and second later he is shot, his ‘skull burst open like a ripe pomegranate’.

In the Rougons’ drawing room, the survivors feast, all marked out by the blood of those they have crushed in their desire for advancement. This is how the novel concludes:

But the strip of pink fastened to Pierre’s buttonhole was not the only splash of red that marked the triumph of the Rougons. A shoe with a bloodstained heel lay forgotten under the bed in the next room. The candle burning at Monsieur Peirotte’s bedside, on the opposite side of the street, shone in the darkness with the lurid redness of an open wound. And far away, in the depths of the Aire Saint-Mittre, a pool of blood was congealing on a tombstone.

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

Review: Dr Mütter’s Marvels, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz (2014)

When you think of plastic surgery an image may spring to mind—of heavily botoxed celebrities, or subway commercials for breast enlargements, or Rachel Green pre and post nose job. But Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s engrossing biography of nineteenth-century surgeon, and a plastic surgery pioneer, Thomas Dent Mütter may make you think of the practice entirely differently.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz (1978-)

Mütter (1811-1859) lived in a time when those with ‘deformities’ were outcasts, when birth defects that are fixable today (e.g. cleft palates) determined the course of your entire life, when burns victims were ‘monsters’, kept hidden away from the world by their ashamed families, when terrible conditions in match factories led to ‘phossy jaw’—working class women suffering from painful abscesses, potential brain damage and, ultimately, if left untreated, death.

And he brought them comfort. Mütter’s skill and surgical innovations transformed and saved the lives of many. He removed horns and unsightly tumours. He let burns victims turn their heads (and face society) again. He developed so-called Mütter flap surgery, a technique that survives until today, where flaps of skin remain partially attached to one area, while being grafted onto another, ensuring the body does not reject them.

How Mütter transformed the lives of burns victims

Aptowicz gives us Mütter the ambidextrous maverick, Mütter the innovator, who had the foresight to believe in the importance of hygiene in the surgery room and the crucial nature of patient pre- and post-operative care, and Mütter the teacher—he was the Chair of Surgery at Philadelphia’s Jefferson Medical College (now Thomas Jefferson University) from 1841 until 1856, when poor health expiated his retirement.

But she also gives us Mütter the orphan, who made his way to Paris with very little money to learn from the century’s best physicians, Mütter the dandy, who always had a weakness for extravagant dress, and Mütter the collector, whose lifetime’s store of specimens and oddities went on to form the basis of the museum that now bears his name.

A woman suffering from 'phossy jaw'

Mütter’s story, and the history of medicine more generally, is revealing of many aspects of nineteenth-century American culture. There is, of course, the backdrop of racial tensions and impending civil war (his students would go on to be physicians on the battlefield on both sides of the conflict). There are the attitudes towards women—excluded from the medical establishment, while obstetrics is one of its most important branches, due to the high levels of maternal, and even higher levels of infant, mortality at the time. There’s a particularly gruelling section dealing with the realities of nineteenth-century abortion, and the case of Eliza Sowers, which would go on to have huge ramifications for the legal debate around termination and the ‘personhood’ of the foetus.

To contrast with Mütter, Aptowicz spends a lot of time delving into the life and opinions of his fellow lecturer Charles D. Meigs, Chair of Obstetrics at Jefferson College, who was staunchly conservative in his views. Unlike Mütter, Meigs refused to recognise the role doctors might play in contagion, even as his patients were dying from outbreaks of puerperal fever and his industry peers started to posit theories that would be proven by the advent of microbiology. Meigs also opposed the use of ether, the first anaesthetic (while Mütter was the first to use it for an operation in Philadelphia). He preferred to operate on his patients without any form of pain relief and delivered babies without it, even as women begged for relieving gas, as he saw labouring pains as a God-given trial for his female patients.

Thomas Dent Mütter

Aptowicz’s biography could have come off as macabre and voyeuristic, the literary equivalent of a nineteenth-century freak show, but throughout she remains true to the humanity of her subjects, using the same care with which Mütter treated his samples, which he often ‘saved’ from being seen as horrors to form part of his educational collection. But it’s a shame she hasn’t more information to delve into about Mütter’s personal life. While his views on medicine, and his personality as a teacher, come alive throughout, his relationships, especially with his wife Mary, are still shrouded in obscurity.

Mütter died when he was forty-seven but his life had a profound effect on the medical establishment, his patients, his students and Philadelphia. ‘Ambition…is like the sun,’ he wrote. ‘It gives life and heat to all around.’ Aptowicz’s work shows us just how far ambition (if you were an educated white man) could take you in nineteenth-century America, in spite of poverty, ill health and bad luck, and how much we owe to pioneering doctors like Mütter in medical practice today.

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