The Wonder by Emma Donoghue

A Fast didn’t go fast; it was the slowest thing there was. Fast meant a door shut fast, firmly. A fastness, a fortress. To fast was to hold fast to emptiness, to say no and no and no again.

Inspired by Victorian fasting girls and the story of Welsh wren – Sarah Jacobs, the necessities of whether needing food to survive was a fascinating subject of its time, a dive-hard pseudoscience and some kind of phenomenon that was taken advantage of to achieve means in different kinds of professions: journalists either praised the girls – deeming them as practising a prodigious fast, debunked the myth, or unmasked fraud; doctors spent time on whims or unseen theories that could make their reputation; locals and priests tried to make their counties famous and beautified the acts; photographers composed images which entailed innocence or foreshadowed deaths.

Cheat me, hoodwink me, as long as you eat.

Eleven years after the end of Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852) sets as a backdrop of the story. The Irish fasting girl, Anna, whose family claimed her living without food for four months after her eleventh birthday, was kept under surveillance day and night at home by a Charity nun and a Nightingale nurse working on shifts. Hired, received order and to follow it meticulously was easy in the beginning – was there some calculated covert device the nurse was bent on exposing it. Vocation and vows, resignation and rectitude worked abreast simply for observation sake. She fumbled around the drawers, treasure chest, nooks and crannies searching for evidence that could prove the committee and others her abilities and be of something big in her future paths.

It was when the affection took hold that crumbled the nurse’s judgment of how she should be perceiving Anna. Calm, innocuous, loving, inquisitive, and intelligent, Anna had a mature feminine qualities which embedded the notion of Angel of the House. The devout faith in her religion and a sense of redemption were accomplices of the girl’s waning health as a result of the fasting; and two weeks of watch escalated and loosened her remaining time on the tarnished earth. The nurse induced herself to finally see the truth – the blindness, blighted side of the locals. Her strident and destructive acts in rage against the townsfolk in order to save the girl that we read in the latter half of the story was blasphemous towards the Holy pact between the priest and his people, defiant and disruptive to the considerable delicacy of the domestic sanctum of the Home – following her heart to perform the opposite of nursing in a “rapid, efficient work of chaos” was her proud sacrilege which somehow reminded her of Guy Fawkes’s gunpowder plot.

I like this novel and appreciate its culmination – I think Emma Donoghue did justice – especially as a modern writer of our century. It is as if she has found the mission of means to salvage the fasting girls from the eyes of seeing them as commodities of their day, and help them born again in a new world.

Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley

“[W]hen I discovered that he, the author at once of my existence and of its unspeakable torments, dared to hope for happiness, that while he accumulated wretchedness and despair upon me he sought his own enjoyment in feelings and passions from the indulgence of which I was for ever barred, then impotent envy and bitter indignation filled me with an insatiable thirst for vengeance. I recollected my threat and resolved that it should be accomplished. I knew that I was preparing for myself a deadly torture, but I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse which I detested yet could not disobey.”

Mary Shelley understands so much about human nature and relationships. Oftentimes individuals toil on their overwrought and arduous tasks night and day – this is all in their intentions that “Passion” and “Mission” are assimilated into one ultimate being. Accomplishment and adulation are the other names with which hard work is rewarded. It is with this spiritual essence, an amalgamation, which sometimes, if unnoticed, leads restless beings astray, malnourished and athirst, and drives them into delirium and detachment from reality. Think of religious fervour and the craze for artistry pursuits of her days – when in extremity, how precarious these little longings of acquisition become a source of destruction in both body and mind.

In this novel, Frankenstein has an inquisitiveness of acquiring scientific knowledge. His assiduity is able to hypothesise, theorise, and actualise something so peerless and mighty that defies all beliefs in his field. With this, he creates an identity that becomes a real-world catastrophe – something which is too monstrous and hideous to be a plausible being. This “demon” only has one course to live – to haunt and destroy his creator by avenging and killing his loved ones – an unstoppable action only when death claims one of the two lives. Repeatedly, alike his unceasing trials and errors, Frankenstein goes through despair, poignancy, and estrangement from his society as he witnesses the lifeless forms befallen in front of his eyes one by one.

In terms of human desire, I might think of a relationship of one fulfilling and one consenting. In nuptial lives, whether a femme covert would one day stand up disagreeing being a silent partner of the ideals and fight for her own rights, to be that femme fatale. This idea could be incorporated as an analogy into Shelley’s novel.

To be honest, Frankenstein, as a novel, is not one of my favourites in terms of its storylines. It is too poignant to behold that becomes at times an irritation. But I really admire the depth that comes along with it; and I certainly agree with others that I would find some new ideas if re-reading it.

Basil (1852) by Wilkie Collins

Although many readers would praise the Big Four fervently as Wilkie Collins’s masterpiece, Basil has occupied a special place in my heart. First coming across this book about ten years …

The Maid by Nita Prose

“The tight lips. The smile that wasn’t a smile. I’m beginning to understand the nuances of smiles, their cornucopia of meanings. I save each smile in a dictionary that I keep alphabetized on a shelf in my mind.” (p.137)

This is one novel which I read in November, a book I pick up this year – a year that I have not been reading a lot. I work all year round assiduously from January to December, I toil laboriously without a blink of an eye. I somehow pride myself with this rectitude and patience; but I am not sure if this is the life I am contented with. When I peek at the synopsis of this book, the plotline which intrigues me is that this protangonist is quite a peculiar person, a very singular one indeed. In this gist on the back cover, although Gran is described as a social compass of Molly – a woman who is in want of comprehending social cues and expressions of the others – in my opinion, Gran is only centered as an old lady of serenity and comforts. Molly is the heroine who needs to prove herself and grow by experience in the book. Another thing which wins me over to grab this novel is that Molly is an overtly complusive and self-regimented twenty-five-year-old woman. She is not simply a stickler but she is very conscientious in her demeanor – one who could not survive without a set of rules – one who only judges the others based on conventional proprieties and levels of cleanliness. But the reality is a subjective world, it is convoluting in nature alongside many faces and stances. Of course, Molly needs to realise amongst her misfortune that so many things could be also seen beneath the surface – objects seem crystallized but layers upon layers of dust, the vileness accumulates in time which would be hard to inspect and eradicate single-handedly.

I admire and am amused by how Nita Prose got inspired by her trip in London to write this debut. She opened the door, saw a maid in the London hotel which she took abode in retreated into a shadowy corner just because the maid felt embarrassed in this situation – she was holding the Nita’s pants and intending to fold them neatly and tidy up the mess. This awkward encounter stayed with Nita’s mind for a long time. During her flight back, she unleashed the thoughts and wrote down some passages on a napkin which culminates in a prologue of this novel. How I wish I could have such urge to write something great!

I want to be immersed into Molly’s world – not only the inner world but also her working environs as a hotel maid wearing an invisible cloak and humble habiliment. “I am your maid. I know so much about you. But when it comes down to it: what is it that you know about me?” However, just as the time when she thinks she has been going through her day-in and day-out job discreetly, it is painful to see that it is not exactly the case – she has been a subject of ridicule and taunts all along. She has been misunderstood from a very young age in isolation and mistreatment; but this memory does not sink in but transitions to her workplace. A brimful at one’s content unveils more danger ahead.

Yes, when I read along, I expect it might be a whodunnit story; I forget that it was Molly herself who I wanted to get familar in the first place. It would not be considered as a brilliant whodunnit story – it is not as complex as it should be (and I wish the twist in the end could be thrashed!); but you could say that it is a heartwarming one, and it is a light and breezy read.

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami (translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd)

My thoughts after reading this book:

As a proofreader of manuscripts, the heroine has to be engaged with and get immersed in the storylines; but at the same time – practice makes perfect – she works out the way to detach herself from the plots, to be devoid of feelings only to spot the inconsistencies and inaccuracies.

Away from workhours, she seems to subconsciously apply this profession to her reality – it is a humdrum day-to-day living set out by rules. People see her as an outsider: a loner who is never passionate about life and lives of others. Yes, there’s no harm in her; but where’s the fun? She is incarcerated and confined by her own being, never reaching out to anyone. She is phlegmatic and reclusive. She is a nonnette. We could not find anything to define her. She is only a very reliable and conscientious proofreader – this is what we would engrave on her headstone when that time comes.

But what if her aloneness is finally defeated by a sense of loneliness? What if her solitariness is somehow felt out of sync with that humanely inbred nature? One still in that little piece of heart hopes for love and affections, and she craves to lift the weight of her life and shift it into a breeziness of light. Light whispers a secret language; it exudes warmth and colours; being enshrouded with darkness, you find rays of light amidst the chaos – in darkness, I seek light, there it is.

In her storyline, she in the daylight encounters a man in his fifties – a patient, personable man who has a gentle smile which brightens her world, a man who absorbs layers of lights and reflects them in his own being, a man whom she does not know very much about. At night, she dreams for a connection with him. Being Lovers in the Night – she dreams amidst darkness – the hours which transform you in the lightest of beings. In dreams, she could finally gazes into his eyes – that unblemished love and coexistence which I await countlessly in reality, there they are.

This book makes me ponder. A human could conjure lots of ways to make a heart lighter amidst the darkest times. The Maker’s greatest gift to his beings is the gift of the ability to hope. Every thinker finds solace in his own means, day and light, everywhere, only if I seek it.

(Spoilers) Lily: A Tale of Revenge by Rose Tremain

“Lily prefers not to remember her first days and nights at the Foundling Hospital. She has always tried to consign them to oblivion, but they have always resisted. They are like a world that will not heal, like a snatch of melancholy music that will not fade, like a mathematical sum which never alters but is never solved.”

I read this book right away after finishing Lucky Button by Michael Morpurgo and was so overwhelmed and enshrouded by the deep well of darkness of Lily, a Tale of Revenge by Rose Tremain. This historical fiction is a far cry from the former cheerful and hopeful aura of the other book. I remembered watching about a half-an-hour interview of Michael Rosen on YouTube hosted by the London Foundling Museum. He says the picture he likes the most among the illustrations of the Book is the portrayal of Thomas Coram at the Gin Street (?) witnessing the anguish and destitution of homeless and neglected children. At a shocking and decisive moment Coram decided to do something about it that he raised the funds and founded the Hospital in 1741. On the other hand, regarding Lily, there goes a paragraph to describe the poignancy of children after they were admitted to the charitable institution:

…”Siren cry of wickedness and rage […] Coram also knew that many of those he took in at six years old had formed attachments to their foster-parents and that these partings caused them a virus of sorrow from which they might never recover. All he could do was suggest to those who had the day-to-day care of the children that severity be demonstrated towards this “illness”…” (p.59)

So as you see, Lily seems to be an antithesis of Lucky Button. Moreover, I have been to the Foundling Museum thrice; it is always one of my favourite museums in London. Being always reminded over and over again in the book that orphans and abandoned babies who were being ensconced at the Hospital have been living sins since their births takes out some of the positivity I have regarding this book. While I started perusing the chapter named “No Entry to Children” (halfway of the book), I doubted whether I could keep on reading it because everything about this story is too brutal and unsympathetic. This book honestly really got on my nerves after a full-day’s work.

“…How fine a thing it was that the world kept changing and that nothing lasts beyond some finite and allotted season.” (p. 184)

However, excuse my subjectivity about the history and mission of the Foundling Hospital, there are many sides which I like about this book. The scariest thing at the Foundling Hospital for the children in this story was not the fear of catching deaths from smallpox and diseases but their diminishing will to live for an unknowing future, the inoculation from the carers at the Institution reprimanding that the children that they were shameful entities to be rescued from God; that they were the ungrateful wretches who are inescapable to be blamed for being born and destined to enter the gate of hell. This confinement maimed their mental strength adding on their weak constitution.

Lily is a gripping melodramatic story with plots intertwined between the heroine’s younger times and womanhood. While Lily’s younger and rebellious self is being silenced and rotten away bit by bit with loss and departure from the loved ones as well as abuses at the Hospital, the seventeen-year-old self is too agitated to find a recourse to heal the past trauma and unable to quieten a part of mind full of chaos and shame. With this, she undertakes an action which could be seen as an vile act of wickedness and incorrigibility, but it is the only means to cure and extricate herself as an urgent need of survival without any hateful associations with the past.

Although the sub-heading of this book underlines itself as a revenge tale, there is also a side about rescuing, redeeming herself from darkness, and seeking the unadulterated lights through various means – church windows, places, people, dreams, a haven she imagines, a belief of goodness, and an unfaltering love. For Lily, she loves at the same time just when she is experiencing the traumatic childhood. She could not find these without pain. She denies being a nameless entity and not seeking to be forgiven. She is not a thistledown blown away by the wind but flowing and hurling to find her ground of abode. Pain and warmth rays of sunshine seem to coexist and symbiotic. And this is how a life could be for Lily – and she realises what it means much earlier on than us.

All in all, although this book is not a favourite fiction of mine, I quite enjoy the story because there is a desolation in the atnosphere with a really interesting backdrop and vivid imagery.

Dissolution of graven images in Jane Eyre: The pillars of Mr. Rochester and St. John Rivers

The First Meeting of Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, Thomas Davidson (1842–1919)
Bronte Parsonage Museum; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/the-first-meeting-of-jane-eyre-and-mr-rochester-20999

For me, I felt at home in this sort of discourse. I could never rest in communication with strong, discreet, and refined minds, whether male or female, till I had passed the outworks of conventional reserve, and crossed the threshold of confidence, and won a place by their heart’s very hearthstone.

Jane Eyre, Chapter XXXII

Jane Eyre likes investigating the human’s heart, the strengths and weaknesses of her acquaintances. When trying to dissect Jane Eyre with aspects of how she copes with patriarchal sphere, she is a strong heroine who seems to be so undisciplined by challenging the societal thoughts and considering the mental facades of others, dispensing any conventional ties and medium of customs constrained with the external world while having “with no malevolent scorn of their indiscretion, but with a kind of innate sympathy”. At critical points, her spirit bursts through expansively, revolts against the feminine husk that hedges its preternatural sheen. For instances, when she is confronted with John Reed’s cruelty in childhood, she recognises in her being that there is no hierarchy and subordination between the two. Stripped off his esteemed rearing of athleticism, effusion of being enshrouded in motherly love and all inbred qualities she lacks physically as a orphan girl, John Reed’s “violent tyrannies, all his sisters’ proud indifference, all his mother’s aversion, all the servants’ partiality, turned up in my disturbed mind like a dark deposit in a turbid well” (Chapter II). “Drive out the mocker, and out goes strife; quarrels and insults are ended” (Proverbs 22:10), she does not know what she does with her hand, her spirit predominates, summons the resource to respond the pungent suffering, which she also later on mutinies against her maternal aunt before departing for Lowood. Compared with Eliza Reed, a sister of John Reed and a product of patriarchal preferences, who answers her call of novitiate duties and cuts all familial ties upon her mother’s death, Jane’s resolution of rebellion is deemed a much more aggressive action.

On the other hand, just as Jane ponders her peers’ motives and true countenances without decors and societal indoctrination, the peers must also have observed her with same equal measures, especially the male characters, who might have examined her indiscriminately, juxtaposing and assimilating her characteristics with their own to fulfill their hearts’ desire, like the qualities they acknowledge of in the case of a feme covert. Their self-righteousness mutates into an act of compliance and manipulation respective of both parties which they think is conducive in the first place but ends up detrimental to a relationship which they intended to proceed. It results from the fact that they could not strike a balance between Feeling and Reason considering Jane’s standpoints.

Mr. Rochester

“The flame flickers in the eye; the eye shines like dew; it looks soft and full of feeling; it smiles at my jargon: it is susceptible; impression follows impression through its clear sphere; where it ceases to smile, it is sad; an unconscious lassitude weighs on the lid: that signifies melancholy resulting from loneliness. It turns from me; it will not suffer further scrutiny; it seems to deny, by a mocking glance, the truth of the discoveries I have already made,—to disown the charge both of sensibility and chagrin: its pride and reserve only confirm me in my opinion. The eye is favourable.”

Jane Eyre, Chapter XIX

Regarding Mr. Rochester, when I first read it, his dissection of Jane Eyre is so accurate as well as poignant, because as readers who have witnessed Jane’s sufferings from childhood of isolation and misunderstandings, there is finally a character (or a male protagonist) who shares her sympathies and analyses her character unprecedentedly in details and richness like a seasoned novelist, essayist, physiognomist, and an irascible old sage of human nature. The gypsy scene with his observance of Jane’s face at close reading dumbfounds me dramatically. To Jane, she must have felt a spirit connected to her own, a mentality which is disrobed and cognizant by another and vice versa. Her tearful confession of the romantic love towards him is seen as a volcanic eruption of Feeling with a sardonic way of aiding and abetting from another, surrounded by a seemingly consecrated ground at the orchard garden which is devoid of human activity and gossips. The spasms also denote an intelligence of Rochester’s correctness in “mind-reading”. Moreover, through his confiding the secrets and previous loss of love from tête-à-tête with Jane, we are as sure as the heroine that she is the only one who is eligible for salvaging Rochester and paves his path towards reformation and regeneration, as a domestic fairy to tame a restless Samson, an angel of the house.

Yet after all my task was not an easy one; often I would rather have pleased than teased him. My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.

Jane Eyre, Chapter XXIV

Just as we are convinced of how the plot goes, reality keeps us in check and, like Jane, the graven image vanishes and disperses in front of her visage. “Thou shall not commit adultery”; Rochester might have a clever flair of gauging Jane’s passion and Feeling, but he underestimates and overlooks Jane’s Reason and Consciousness. She could be gentle, submissive, pliant; but her wanderer qualities are instinctive, and judgement is strong-willed if needed be. Jane’s resilience and self-worth to be independent of mistreatment and temptation against a wrongful union testify Rochester’s miscalculation.

Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth – so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane – quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.”

Jane Eyre, Chapter XXVII

From the introduction of Victorian Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology edited by Kate Flint (OUP, 1997), one of the short stories Margaret (1869) by Christiana Fraser-Tyler tells of a young governess, Margaret, being seduced by the eldest son of the family. When she receives a love letter from the man, after much deliberation and a battle of emotional ambivalence, she defies the temptation and decides to leave her work permanently. It imparts a didactic message that an indigent employee, however defenceless and dependent might be, must take heed to consult the most appropriate action for herself based on class position and propriety. Reciprocated and unrequited romances between masters of households and young governesses were much popularized since the publication of Jane Eyre. “Young girl should be able to act with pragmatic common sense” (p. ix). Furthermore, Margaret serves a warning to underline the anxiety surrounding the three-decker romances of the time.

Although Jane and Rochester reconcile in the end, the affection she has for Rochester at the time of temptation gives her time to make a moral distinction; moreover, invoking the help of Mother Nature after leaving Rochester indicates that there is a more therapeutic and soporific Force as well as a powerful Being which oversees her rightful path and guides Rochester’s fitful desolation back on the right track. Her husk invisibly and silently treads on moorlands, hollows and glens, and her solitary spirit always seeks to be embraced amidst a vast manifestation.

Picture from Look and Learn History Picture Archive:
https://www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/M576635/Illustration-for-Jane-Eyre

St. John Rivers

Compared with Rochester who tries to conquer Jane’s Reason, St. John Rivers is the one who intends to conquer her Feeling and colonises her with Reason.

“To live here buried in morass, pent in with mountains – my nature, that God gave me, contravened; my faculties, heaven-bestowed, paralysed – made useless.

Jane Eyre, Chapter XXX

St. John Rivers, the Clergyman at the Morton village in North-Midland, and Rochester, the inheritor of Thornfield Hall are exact antipodes. St. John River has a stature tall and slim, fair hair, blue eyes, an appearance of a Grecian profile. Rochester, jet-black hair and thickset, is a figure of Samson and Vulcan. The similarities shared between them would be that though envincing different charisma, they both have a fitful and brooding nature which verges on shadows of melancholy. Rochester overbears wounded memories, his is a spirit who searches for love, a kindred soul, and a peace of mind; St John’s craves for a lifelong mission, a raging and tempestuous voyage, pitches and plunges – all trials which comprise the essentials of testing his resolve to spread his Master’s Word and glory. He dreads monotony, he embarrasses those who offer desultory and affectionate remarks which he finds them anything but salubrious. His considers himself the pack leader, inoculating and enlightening those who live in the void with his sole happiness resting on “my king, my lawgiver, my captain, the All-perfect”. He is the ultimate disciplinarian and dogmatist in the story.

Like many others, I also think St. John Rivers is a fascinating character. What I find him most interesting is that he keeps scrutinising every move of Jane and monitors every action, which is kind of comical in my opinion. He keeps a mental checklist of her fortitude and servitude to prove himself she is of a worthy pack, a good disciple complementing his lifelong mission and work. From assigning the task to Jane of “toiling” as a village schoolmistress to her generous distribution of inheritance, he is experimenting her will at his quiet recess and carefully drafting what goes on in his head and executing his plans.

I happened to look his way: there I found myself under the influence of the ever-watchful blue eye. How long it had been searching me through and through, and over and over, I cannot tell: so keen was it, and yet so cold, I felt for the moment superstitious—as if I were sitting in the room with something uncanny.

.Jane Eyre, Chapter XXXIV

The disposition of St. John Rivers reminds me at times of Villette and the surveillance of Madame Beck, of the religious doctrines and debates between Catholicism and Protestantism being expostulated throughout the novel. He is no Mr. Brocklehurst, who is an abominable flatterer, a hypocrite who somehow gets trampled by Miss Temple; he is not Helen Burns because he does not “appear to enjoy that mental serenity, that inward content, which should be the reward of every sincere Christian and practical philanthropist”; he is not Eliza Reed because he repels mundune life. St John is a really complex character indeed that demands quite a lot of time to wrestle with before we get to know him in entirety.

“God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife. It is not personal, but mental endowments they have given you: you are formed for labour, not for love. A missionary’s wife you must—shall be. You shall be mine: I claim you – not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign’s service.”

Jane Eyre, Chapter XXXIV

While Rochester teases Jane “having the air of a little nonnette; quaint, quiet, grave, and simple”, St. John trusts his instincts that she is destined to be a missionary wife whose work consists of duty and not for love. They should be married and spread the word of God in a foreign remote land rather than he goes alone as a bachelor. It is over this matter that although he has talent, a righteousness, he is too self-centered to put himself first over Jane’s Feeling, which he thinks is merely transient, superficial and futile.

“He is not my husband, nor ever will be. He does not love me: I do not love him. He loves (as he can love, and that is not as you love) a beautiful young lady called Rosamond. He wanted to marry me only because he thought I should make a suitable missionary’s wife, which she would not have done. He is good and great, but severe; and, for me, cold as an iceberg. He is not like you, sir: I am not happy at his side, nor near him, nor with him. He has no indulgence for me – no fondness. He sees nothing attractive in me; not even youth – only a few useful mental points.”

Jane Eyre, Chapter XXXVII

In Jane’s self-enlightening journey, we witness her rebellion against justice, against hypocrisy, against temptation, against Reason, against misconceptions of God’s faith, against all who try to instill perceptions of her, and comes back to what she think is most truthful path according to her heart.

Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë

Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought! I could not answer the ceaseless inward question – why I thus suffered, now, at the distance of – I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.

The novel starts with Jane Eyre as a ten-year-old orphan girl living with her maternal side of a family. “Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings”. It is with that pang of pain and isolation that it becomes her will to figure out means to attest her substantiality and congeniality with the world. Throughout the novel, it reflects the elements of “Presentiments”, which Jane possesses within her mental self; “Sympathies”, which she has summoned to relate with other beings, and “Signs”, which Mother Nature whispers in her ear while ego thinks itself remain the sole arbitrator of its own actions. In the beginning, she recognises “Presentiments” and “Signs”, which is instinctive in nature. Conversely, the lack of “Sympathies” is still awaiting to flouish; and the yearning of Jane to connect with others is so deep and fiery within.

As a bildungsroman novel, we go through various phases that Jane forbears, overcomes, and reaches to a self-enlightenment. In Gateshead Hall, she is seen as a cumbrous discord in temperament and looks, an intimidating imp with ireful eyes that scrutinise every movement and head that plots malicious thoughts against the family. In Lowood Institution, she “tries to do her best: it is a pity that doing one’s best does not always answer”. Labelled as a liar and picked upon by Mr. Brocklehurst, Jane nevertheless keeps the resolution with an inquisitive mind to learn and an eagerness to please the others whom she adores: Miss Temper the superintendent, and Helen Burns, her frail good friend. In Morton village in North-Midlands, Jane is described by St John Rivers the clergyman as “docile, diligent, disinterested, faithful, constant, and courageous; very gentle, and very heroic”, a woman born with a missionary mission and a form of labour, not of love. Driven by people’s perception of herself, She questions her position and place constantly, and always adjusts merely not to become a discomfiture as well as satisfy the expectations of others. Some consider her quiet and pliant, though in fact she is, it is merely her difficulty to distinguish the medium “between absolute submission and determined revolt” against unfair judgement and despotism.

It is not until later that when Jane gets to see clearly her inner thoughts as well as self-consciousness and reason that she finally exerts her autonomy: it is an innate quality not to be effaced and subdued. It is in her soul and spirit that is awakened to call forth the husk and fulminate. With Jane Eyre, we feel the same spasms of joy, a hunger that is at last sated, and a mind elated when we become limpid to realise our true self. As humans, we are scarred and scorched at some points; all are infallible beings with respective traumas and subjectivity. In the same case, Jane is able to summon the mutiny and voice her mind, because she knows the persons who address flaws against her are also imperfect and she stands among her equals. In the universal truth, there is no persona superior and inferior to another, only caste and class confine the hedge and boundaries.

The epithets that are said about her are not without societal views of patriarchal conventionality and self-righteousness. It is in their immutable nature and nurture that others try to conquer her and are unsympathetic towards her. In Gateshead, it is not because children are supposedly handsome, romping, happy and contented that she is repugnant in the visage of Mrs Reed. Of Lowood, as a charitable orphaned institution, it is fatally congruous with Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in Brontës’ time, of an epitome of fearful biblical consequences of punishment and sins, wants, malnutrition, torpidity, and illness. Confronting with the actions of St John, his nature delineates a “steadfast bulwark” that aspires to a greater cause, that prostrates towards an afterlife where he believes himself predestined to be in a convoy of the most courageous hearts of “lawgivers, statesmen, and conquerors” but not one belonging to a domestic life and cosy parlour. It only takes time and patience to unveil the true facades behind the decors.

“Know, that in the course of your future life you will often find yourself elected the involuntary confidant of your acquaintances’ secrets: people will instinctively find out, as I have done, that it is not your forte to tell of yourself, but to listen while others talk of themselves; they will feel, too, that you listen with no malevolent scorn of their indiscretion, but with a kind of innate sympathy; not the less comforting and encouraging because it is very unobtrusive in its manifestations.”

In this novel, we observes Jane’s understanding of the world and human relations. These revelations of another being’s struggles and hardship denote a goodwill of her own to excel for the present and future as well as to heal her past wounds. While reading her narrative, we never find a rant dressed in disguise and a blame catapulted towards others. She sees everyone’s pains in nooks and crannies including her own, their perturbed nature, and their ambitions in virtue and vice. Their weakness in minds is endeavoured not to be discovered, her eyes flash truth which shoot like arrows straight through another’s heart. Hers is a nature which summons and demands sincerity of another.

“I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you – especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.”

With an impassioned and fiery heart not devoid of love and feelings, a mind that never thwarts, Jane reconciles to another being whose soul yearns for her spirit. It demands for another existence which is symbiotic in nature and tightly knitted by Moirai. Mr Rochester’s disposition and temper is of a changeable kind, irascible at times, unmanageable and easily agitated; his heart is restless and hard to be consoled. On the other hand, he is willing to defy constraints to confess his love for Jane and believes she could make him regenerate into a better person, a reformed living, to compensate for his past mistakes. His love even seeks to transcend and verge on a pagan note – of sacrificing himself and kneeling before his goddess with will and energy, a soul of virtue and purity. Rochester’s religious faith is unlike St John; it is not the loss of striving for a social position that makes one pensive to confide in God, but it is the desertion of love consequential to defilement and temptation against consecrated laws of marriage that he finally comes to term and understands God’s wisdom, omnipotence and infinitude. In this novel, Providence always works in tandem with protangonists’ Feelings when they supplicates Reason and Conscience from a Higher Being to make the right judgement.

Jane Eyre is a beautiful novel with so much passion, depth and enrichment which hits you hard on a personal note. It divulges a message to your spirit that with a heart and faith that never falter, love and forgiveness can heal oneself properly. The energy within enables one to unmask and connect with another kindred soul whom you can trust in solace and tranquility.

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami (Part 2: Eggs)

“There’s no need to get wrapped up in a man’s desire,” Rika declared. “There’s no need to involve women’s desire, either. There’s no need to get physical. All you need is the will, the will of a woman.”

Ten years later, Natsu (38) is a critically acclaimed women writer. But overlooking inner circles of life, she’s not happy. Ex-colleagues are all married with children. Being single, she shares nothing in common to empathize with family rants; and she’s sick of being told by people having no ambitions concerning her career and love life. Amidst languor of a writer’s block, she’s long been obsessed with the idea of meeting her child: having a baby on her own.

Natsu researches through various blogs, interviews, and conferences on infertility treatment and artificial insemination. In Japan, at the time of this writing, identities of donors/birth fathers are kept confidential by hospitals which carry out the operations, and only married women are allowed to do so. Repelling physical touch, syringing sperms to get pregnant is her only option. It reflects societal and critical views about women using these methods, and traumatic consequences relating to the donor-conceived children who’re kept in the dark about their identities.

If part 1 talks about Poverty, part 2 focuses on the “inbred” and “logical” values of Harmony in traditional society. The Universe starts off at its idealistic moment; eggs are calculated within days of ovulation; an embryo is formed when egg and sperm are merged in a body at optimal temperature. While earthly matters are supposedly maintained in equilibrium, the core is lopsided, unbalanced, anything but fair and harmonious, of “the collision of incompatible ideals”.

I find part 2 is more engaging. The concept of pregnancy and motherhood could bring so much weight and debates. While doubting an unfamiliar idea on one side, the traditionally accepted norm is naturally raised along with its hidden drawbacks. One who conforms to its rules means opposition against another who is being compromised for its sake. And if one questions the morality of a newly-formed idea, technology or an ideology, one must be asked to step back to square one of doubting the inherent/traditional value of that aspect.

All in all, Breasts and Eggs is a fantastic and interesting novel. There’s so much to reflect and ponder upon.

By the way, there’s an upcoming novel by Kawakami translated into English entitled Heaven that’s coming out this June. I cannot wait to read it!

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami (Part 1: Breasts)

“My monolithic expectation of what a woman’s body was supposed to look like had no bearing on what actually happened to my body. The two things were wholly unrelated. I never become the woman I imagined.”

A 30-year-old woman/first narrative, Natsuko, meets up with her elder sister Maki (39) and Maki’s daughter Midori (12) at Tokyo station one summer. Them two from Osaka are going to stay at her flat for two nights as Maki decides to consult with a surgery doctor for breasts enhancement. Meanwhile, Maki’s daughter hasn’t been talking to her mother for six months (she reminds me of Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine).

Breasts enhancement is ostensibly the talking point, but not as pivotal as we learn of the hardship the two sisters had gone through from childhood up till now in womanhood. Under the awning of hustle-bustle in Japan, a restless soul is trapped inside a body, the cells of poverty keep on fertilising and multiplying by themselves; the blood cells that churn along the veins suck up most nutrients to keep this poverty alive. Though the body might be wilting and frail, the restive soul is still reluctant to give in.

Maki says she wants her breasts restore to the time before breastfeeding. But working as a bar hostess, either deliberative thoughts or fleeting impulses, we empathise her intentions with more than one possibilities other than the pleasing desire for beauty. Competitive environment, sex objectification, escapism and solace of happiness. We’re just as sensitive as Maki’s daughter, Midori. We, who’ve been mothers or daughters, and even humans, who’re capable to love are subject to care. Some truths are just too cruel to brace and name, especially in a woman’s world.

On the other hand, three months behind rent, Natsuko’s repelled to be nibbled up by reality. Aspired to be a novelist, retaining her individuality is the one mission in life. Though convincing herself poverty is a process of shaping her entity, she gets inescapably obscured by its darkness. The meaning of night turns inspirations into an enmity that try to wrestle, strangle, and extinguish her soul with dreams and passions for accomplishing something great.

Night come, settled with the heat, and cast some things in stark relief and others in shadow. The world was saturated with regret and consolation, people and things that went before. As we walked along, something was asking me if I planned to keep on going, or if I’d finally had enough. Not like the world actually cared. This was nothing more than self-absorption. Narcissism. It was my dream to make a living as a writer, but was this tendency of mine to come up with sentimental narratives everywhere I went helping me or getting in my way? I honestly had no idea… (p.48)

In this part, all earthly matters, just like jumbled memories and bodies, are strewn by confusion and inconsistency. Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about. However, when so much complexities surrounding a life that one could not even figure out who and what thing is real, in this life of these two women and a twelve-year-old girl, they are certain of one thing: Poverty appears ubiquitous and unchangeable. Although Poverty incarcerates them like a mind trapped in a body, it all the more sharpens their senses and feelings rather than to be made numb in its prison. “Mixed with smells and images and feeling lined up perfectly”, Poverty is a backbone which not only dominates the meanings of “light of the day” and “light of the night” but also constructs a frame of thoughts and strings of memories. The universe is its epitome. But its sharp edges should not threaten a bleeding and sensitive soul to retreat into oblivion like a carcase.

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Quote:

“Hey, did you know ferris wheels are one of the safest places you can be?”

Midoriko looked at me for a second before shaking her head.

“Somebody told me that when I was a kid, i forget who. Anyway, when you look at one from the side, it’s almost flat, the way a firework looks two dimensional when it explodes, like you could poke it with a stick and tip it over. Freaky, right? I always thought if something awful happened, a ferris wheel would be the first thing to come down. But its not true. They can take all kinds of abuse. Rain, wind, even massive earthquakes. They won’t budge. These things are built to withstand anything. So, when I first heard this, it gave me an idea. It just came to me, maybe we should all live on ferris wheels. I was really serious about it, too. We’d all have houses up there, and wave at each other from our windows. We could use paper-cup telephoners to talk to the next cabin over, and we could set up laundry lines for hanging up our clothes. I remember drawing things like this a lot, a whole world full of ferris wheels. You know, a world where everyone was safe from earthquakes and typhoons and everything. A safer world.”

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) by Elizabeth Taylor

Mrs Palfrey, lately bereaved of her husband, comes to stay at a residential hotel in Cromwell Road so as to live the rest of her days. There are also four elderly “guests” at the Hotel. Claremont Hotel is the last place where they could have the last freedom: thank God, in spite of the aching backs and loose jointed limbs, they could still eke out the remaining expenses on meals, wine and taxis, scuff around the neighbouring squares to prove their mortal existence, and burst out words and actions that still validate as well as characterise what they are. Claremont Hotel is also the last place where they could assert a little pride of independence which stately-supported homes do not suffice. But underneath all that joviality, desultory witticism and gossips, the guests know that Claremont Hotel is not the resting place where they get tended with their mess; and they aren’t allowed to die there.

As this novel revolves around the life of Mrs Palfrey and the residents at Claremont, there are interesting but depressing perspectives which are encapsulated in this story. First of all, the guest still preserves this silver lining that London is a place where they could overbear the reality of aging with graciousness. It embeds metropolitan vitality, the capitalistic hustle-bustle and cultural lineament that make them being forgetful of bodily pains, lassitude and bleakness. London gives them hope that various and sundry activities could turn quiescence to action. Being gregarious is what their pompous relatives and friends in suburban London could offer them. So significant are the people who could give the guests a brush on public and private face. However, a person who is teeming with hopes for the future when moving to Claremont would also turn himself/herself down with gradual frustration and numbness. Enactment of going out is deterred by excuses, deferment and fancies. Sadness and loneliness start to enshroud an aging body to a state of oblivion, that the one who is formerly needed has sunk to an entity that is being unheeded and unloved. What remains before being disposed at the nursery home is only a humiliated soul which strives to defend itself from the public face, a heart which is made of indignation from comparison and jealousy and an accumulating detachment from the outside world.

In the pages of introduction, Paul Bailey states that the works of Elizabeth Taylor is reminiscent of the writings of Jane Austen. “The residents of the Claremont are drawn by Elizabeth Taylor with a sympathy that is strengthened, not diminished, by her beady eyed detachment from them. Her peculiar gift is for noticing the casual cruelty that people use to protect themselves form the not always casual cruelty of others. Her ear for insult is, every so often, on a par with Jane Austen’s.” Indeed, the subtly acrimonious retort between the guests at Claremont with their middle-class manners are indispensable elements of this novel which somehow provide a sense of comic relief.

On the other hand, I note the shrewd observance that Taylor has contributed in relation to the elderly, with endeavours of ridding their old smell and dampness, as well as instilling the little life and love that is still left in them. The atmosphere of reading those passages and dialogue is so poignant and intense. Meanwhile, it is also sad to read the gulf of barrier that separates the immobile old and the impassive young among the middle class.

Overall, I like her writing and the sense of humour, but considering its tone and themes about aging persons, I think this book might not be the best Elizabeth Taylor to start with. I guess I’d keep looking for more of her works.

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Quotes:

She tried to see that it was graceful. The outlook – especially on this darkening afternoon – was daunting; but the backs of hotels, which are kept for indigent ladies, can’t be expected to provide a view, she knew. The best is kept for honeymooners, though God alone knew why they should require it. (p.3)

The silence was strange – a Sunday-afternoon silence and strangeness; and for the moment her heart lurched, staggered in appalled despair, as it had done once before when she had suddenly realised, or suddenly could no longer not realise that her husband at death’s door was surely going through it. Against all hope, in the face of all her prayers. (p.4)

In London, the rain was pouring down: in Scotland, it was coming down more steadily, as snow. (p.21)

Arthritis did not kill. One might go on and on, hopelessly being a nuisance to other people; in the end, lowering standards because of rising prices. (p.42)

The launderette (coin-operated) had overhead fluorescent lighting, which enabled him to read easily his George Gissing. (p.47)

Walking along the Fulham Road he thought about love – the appalling inequalities of it. There is always the one who offers the cheek and the one who kisses it. There was Mrs Palfrey doting on him, to his embarrassed boredom: and Rosie being doted on by him, to his exasperated sense of loss. But the French saying was not for always true: for instance, his mother had been the one to tilt her cheek, and now was left unkissed. (p.157)

It was hard work being old. It was like being a baby, in reverse, Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost. Names slip away, dates mean nothing, sequences become muddled, and faces blurred. Both infancy and age are tiring times. (p.172)

Oh, well, he thought, we’re all saddled with our hearts. It was a strange old pumping outfit God had thought up on that last day – so Victorian, it seemed. (p.184)

The Leavenworth Case (1878) by Anna Katharine Green

“Now it is a principle which every detective recognises, that if of a hundred leading circumstances connected with a crime, ninety-nine of these are acts pointing to the suspected party with unerring certainty, but the hundredth equally important act is one which that person could not have performed, the whole fabric of suspicion is destroyed.” – Ebenezer Gryce, The Leavenworth Case

Upon graduating from college, Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935) embarked on a literary journey of writing poetry, but later on, without telling her father, who was a lawyer, she secretly began to write her very first detective novel, The Leavenworth Case. It received enormous critical acclaim with its publication in America in 1878 as well as the United Kingdom the following year. Following its success, Green wrote many more and with that she was earned the wonderful sobriquet – “the mother of detective novel”. I’ve just lately discovered this lady and her works, and I was thrilled after finishing the novel in finding that Wilkie Collins also adored The Leavenworth Case. He claimed to have read this book dozens of times without ignoring the fact that he always paused to “admire the fertility of invention, the delicate treatment of incident – and the fine perception of event on the personages of the story”.

Blue curtains, blue carpets, blue walls. It was like a glimpse of heavenly azure in a spot where only darkness and gloom were to be expected. 

Accidents all happen in the fairest scenes, and profound secrets are to be divulged under the veneer of hospitable roofs – that we of course commonly acknowledge. But while devouring this novel, I was still amused by how Anna K. Green crocheted this aura of mystery brilliantly. The matter of duality is explored not only in terms of household surroundings between levity of ornaments and grimness of the case, but also of its characters as well. There are multi-facets of personalities one gets to witness and exhume in another person gradually in time, or thoughts and actions which are considered perceptibly incongruous. These portrayals of characters debunk experiences and meddle in the heads of contemporary readers. Means of living do not fit one’s looks and appearance seamlessly: the duties of an amanuensis make one apparently behave like an automaton, but deep down, he might own a fiery heart and be capable to love; a girl who is stripped off the favours and attentions by elders might be seen to constitute a mind full of envy and hatred, conversely she could be an effigy symbolising self-respect and the willingness to sacrifice. In this novel, everything does not look what it seems to be and shrouded in clouds of mystery.

Ambition, love, jealousy, hatred, revenge – transitory emotions with some, are terrific passions with me.

The vagueness and uncertainty are also illustrated in the aspect of how one possessing feelings and affections towards another.

“It was enough that I was allowed to stand in her presence and look unrebuked upon her loveliness. To be sure, it was like gazing into the flower-wreathed crater of an awakening volcano. Fear and fascination were in each moment I lingered there; but fear and fascination made the moment what it was, and I could not have withdrawn if I would.”

A lady in the story, although being haughty in her position, to a man, she seems to illuminate him in rays of sunshine. Several characters are also besotted by her grace and beauty, but it is the loneliness which underlines a human’s fragility, contributes to his downfall, crushes his sense and reason, incriminates and hurls himself into the deep irretrievable gulf of darkness. The derailment, emotional complexity and psychological development keep us weighing every circumstance of the criminal case and its suspects. At one point, Detective Gryce states that a murderous crime must be uprooted mainly by a motive of none other than avarice. Because of that, while we are guessing the real culprit, we are also led blindly into a cul-de-sac, but in the end, the summation of the story actually points to the avarice of love and the endeavour to dispel one’s loneliness.

Mr. Gryce was a portly, comfortable personage with an eye that never pierced, that did not even rest on you. If it rested anywhere, it was always on some insignificant object in the vicinity, some vase, inkstand, book, or button. These things he would seem to take into his confidence, make the repositories of his conclusions; but as for you – you might as well be the steeple on Trinity Church, for all connection you ever appeared to have with him or his thoughts. At present, then, Mr. Gryce was, as I have already suggested, on intimate terms with the door-knob.

I love everything about this novel. The locked-room murder case is gripping, the romance is alluring and flowery descriptive, the confessions and denouement are superb with no stones being left unturned. The idea of incorporating the superstition element with the crime is interesting. I also like the symbiotic relationship from enmity to amity between the two cousins, Mary and Eleanore.

Reading along the plotlines with twists and convolution, I am amused and fascinated by Ebenezer Gryce. He has not the typical look of a detective. There are no gimlet eyes and glaring eyes staring about at the stakeholders of the affairs, but he has that brooding disposition of “conversing” and “caressing” the objects around him. And then there is his personal assistant Q (short of “query”), a sprightly, ubiquitous young lad who is good at disguising anything but a gentleman. They not only propel the people in motion, but also provide more or less a comic relief regarding the investigation of a painstaking criminal case. When the “knight errand”, or the protagonist is still fastidious over moral scruples, them two have already worked on some discreet and cheeky espionage on their own.

I am glad when finding out they are actually recurring characters of the “Gryce series”, which I hope to spend more time reading in future. What’s more, I would also like to read Anna K. Green’s Amelia Butterworth crime cases. This amateurish spinster detective is said to be the prototype of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Patricia Wentworh’s Miss Silver.

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Quotes:

He remained a moment silent. “Mr. Raymond,” he cried at last, “have you any idea of the disadvantages under which a detective labors? For instance, now, you imagine I can insinuate myself into all sorts of society, perhaps; but you are mistaken. Strange as it may appear, I have never by any possibility of means succeeded with one class of persons at all. I cannot pass myself off for a gentleman. Tailors and barbers are no good; I am always found out.” – Ebenezer Gryce

Turning my attention, therefore, in the direction of Mr. Gryce, I found that person busily engaged in counting his own fingers with a troubled expression upon his countenance, which may or may not have been the result of that arduous employment. But, at my approach, satisfied perhaps that he possessed no more than the requisite number, he dropped his hands and greeted me with a faint smile which was, considering all things, too suggestive to be pleasant.

“Women are a mystery; and though I flatter myself that ordinarily I am a match for the keenest bit of female flesh that ever walked, I must say that in this case I feel myself thoroughly and shamefully worsted.” – Q