Behind a Mask or A Woman’s Power December 13, 2011

Behind a Mask, Or, a Woman’s Power by Louisa May Alcott

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I decided to read Louisa May Alcott’s Behind a Mask for Transcendentalist Month, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The brief blurb claimed it was so unlike the usual Alcott-fare most people are familiar with — the likes of Little Women, Eight Cousins and An Old-Fashioned Girl. Apparently it was to be dark and mysterious…the kind of material that no one, not knowing Alcott except through her well-known works, would ever have suspected. The story is this. A young woman comes to the Coventrys as a governess, highly recommended by a family friend of theirs. However, she brings with her a mystery, a love affair everyone suspects she had with the elder son of this friend. Being a meek and lovely woman, though, more than half the family grows to love her. But the elder Mr Coventry is not convinced that Jean Muir is an innocent. He is quite sure she has ambitious designs, and we are very speedily assured that Coventry is right. The rest of the novella charters the course of Jean Muir’s plan to captivate the Coventry boys and the rest of the household.

When I began reading this story I was fascinated, because almost from the start we are given to understand that Jean Muir is not all that she seems to be. The hint is subtle but there:

Poverty seemed to have set its bond stamp upon her, and life to have had for her more frost than sunshine. But something in the lines of the mouth betrayed strength, and the clear, low voice had a curious mixture of command and entreaty in its varying tones. Not an attractive woman, yet not an ordinary one; and, as she sat there with her delicate hands lying in her lap, her head bent, and a bitter look on her thin face, she was more interesting than many a blithe and blooming girl.

A few paragraphs later we are made privy to the woman behind the mask. Not as young as she appears before the family, dark-haired as opposed to her fair wig, a face puckered with hatred and bitterness in sharp contrast with her mild, meek and gentle appearance — the effect is stunning. Really, I could not help but admire how such a woman could be the pretty governess she makes everyone believe she is. This side of her struck some sense of fear as to how diabolical her plans really were. I can’t say that I was for her throughout the story…neither can I say that I was particularly against her. But, at the end of it all, when I thought about it, I figured Alcott was really trying to say something. That the Victorian woman, for the most part, was only putting on a face to satisfy her patriarchal society. Jean Muir appears to us in the guise of what is expected of a woman…and in her case, not just as a woman, but as one from her lowly station. It is interesting to note how Muir rises in the esteem of her employers when they believe her to be an impoverished woman of genteel birth. I think it also significant that Muir wears a blond wig to cover up her dark hair. This did not convey anything to me besides the fact that fair hair was considered, not only beautiful, but angelic in that society. While this is an important point, it was only after reading Jillian’s post of Alcott that I understood this had a deeper significance. Allow me to quote from Jill’s post:

Can you imagine being an adolescent girl, trying to explore your feelings, yourself (yes, self!!), and having your Dad critique your introspection? Not only critique it, but pretty much forbid it? (PS – He thought that Louisa was evil because she was dark-eyed and dark-haired. Blonds were naturally good, he claimed.) — my emphasis

I was reminded of dark-haired and passionate Jo March, and now here was Jean Muir, a perhaps darker side of Alcott, representing, not just her natural looks, but also the fire within her. I believe Alcott was echoeing something that Wollstonecraft says in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman — that if one does not allow a woman to be educated, she is bound to resort to wiles in order to get her own way, for she is not allowed to do it honestly and openly. Jean Muir is an ambitious young woman, and perhaps it is most natural for her to want to better her situation in life. While courses are open for men to do so, the only way open to the likes of Muir is to capture the interest and attention of a rich son in the household she works for. One cannot, then, blame Muir for the tactics she resorts to. She must live. She fears continual poverty. Society will allow her no other means to grow. So, she chooses to take the course of deceit over dying in poverty. I take the following quote from an essay by Christine Butterworth-McDermont:

Doyle insists that despite “affirmations of women’s need for employment and warnings of consequences of its absences, Victorian culture on both sides of the Atlantic made it difficult for women to support themselves and to maintain respectability at the same time” (144). British society considered working so “fundamentally immoral” that governesses were often considered “morally suspect” (145).

Jean Muir’s case seems rather hopeless from society’s point of view. But she proves to be an independent, resourceful woman. At this point, though, I would like to point out that whenever it seemed Muir’s plan would not work there was a sense of sheer desperation in her…the kind that is hinted at in the factual tones of the above quote. She was always aware that this was her last chance — succeed or die starving.

In the course of my planning out this post, I came across Butterworth-McDermont’s essay titled “Behind a mask of beauty: Alcott’s beast in disguise”. This essay draws parallels between the fairy tale, “Beauty and the Beast” and Alcott’s writings. I learnt that Alcott had the tendency to rewrite this story in many ways through out all her story telling. The original story of “Beauty and the Beast” exalts beauty to the point where it can be the only thing that tames a beast. I believe Alcott tries to debunk this notion in creating a heroine that represents both beauty and the beast. Interestingly, the ‘beast’ is Muir’s true nature, while beauty, though not her true identity, is what she actually uses to ‘tame’ the men of the house. I really admire how Alcott brings about this duality, emphasising the wrong society has done to make women deceitful. At the end of the story Jean Muir tell Lucia, the jilted betrothed of the elder Coventry, that she should have resorted to wiles too…it would have been a sure way for her to have kept her man.

I love how Alcott brings out the contrast in this beauty and the beast theme where a few young people, including the Coventrys and Jean Muir, get together to act out various tableaux.

She was looking over her shoulder toward the entrance of the tent, with a steady yet stealthy look, so effective that for a moment the spectators held their breath, as if they also heard a passing footstep.

“Who is it?” whispered Lucia, for the face was new to her.

“Jean Muir,” answered Coventry, with an absorbed look.

“Impossible! She is small and fair,” began Lucia, but a hasty “Hush, let me look!” from her cousin silenced her.

Impossible as it seemed, he was right nevertheless; for Jean Muir it was. She had darkened her skin, painted her eyebrows, disposed some wild black locks over her fair hair, and thrown such an intensity of expression into her eyes that they darkened and dilated till they were as fierce as any southern eyes that ever flashed. Hatred, the deepest and bitterest, was written on her sternly beautiful face, courage glowed in her glance, power spoke in the nervous grip of the slender hand that held the weapon, and the indomitable will of the woman was expressed–even the firm pressure of the little foot half hidden in the tiger skin.

“Oh, isn’t she splendid?” cried Bella under her breath.

“She looks as if she’d use her sword well when the time comes,” said someone admiringly.

“Good night to Holofernes; his fate is certain,” added another.

“He is the image of Sydney, with that beard on.”

“Doesn’t she look as if she really hated him?”

“Perhaps she does.”

In this first tableau, Jean Muir actually reveals her true self. But none are aware of this, believing her to be an excellent actress (which she is, of course, but they have it all topsy turvy). She seems to put all her heart into this scene. And then comes the tableau where she plays a young lover, and in which many believe they see the true Jean Muir:

the picture was of two lovers, the young cavalier kneeling, with his arm around the waist of the girl, who tries to hide him with her little mantle, and presses his head to her bosom in an ecstasy of fear, as she glances back at the approaching pursuers. Jean hesitated an instant and shrank a little as his hand touched her; she blushed deeply, and her eyes fell before his. Then, as the bell rang, she threw herself into her part with sudden spirit. One arm half covered him with her cloak, the other pillowed his head on the muslin kerchief folded over her bosom, and she looked backward with such terror in her eyes that more than one chivalrous young spectator longed to hurry to the rescue. It lasted but a moment; yet in that moment Coventry experienced another new sensation.
Many women had smiled on him, but he had remained heart-whole, cool, and careless, quite unconscious of the power which a woman possesses and knows how to use, for the weal or woe of man. Now, as he knelt there with a soft arm about him, a slender waist yielding to his touch, and a maiden heart throbbing against his cheek, for the first time in his life he felt the indescribable spell of womanhood, and looked the ardent lover to perfection. Just as his face assumed this new and most becoming aspect, the curtain dropped, and clamorous encores recalled him to the fact that Miss Muir was trying to escape from his hold, which had grown painful in its unconscious pressure. He sprang up, half bewildered, and looking as he had never looked before.

Jean Muir is in her element in this tableau! Excellent theatrics. But who is aware of it besides the reader?

I think “A Woman’s Power” as the alternate title for “Behind a Mask” is just as strong and fitting a title as the latter. I’m in awe of this side of Alcott, and I hope to read some more of her other dark stories. Apparently had Alcott been allowed to continue in this vein she would have preferred to stick to such women characters. This story has been an eye-opener of sorts.

If you are curious and would like to give this novella a go, here are a couple of links to online sources — source one; source two.

Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” October 31, 2011

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been reading quite a few American writers this year, and it has been a novel experience. There was a time when English Literature to me meant works by British authors. I never could appreciate, or rather, allow myself to appreciate works by anyone else. I’m really glad I don’t have such a mindset any more, because I’ve been enjoying exploring writers from other backgrounds besides that of Britain.

So, it goes without saying that The Scarlet Letter is my first experience of Hawthorne. I must admit to having some trouble starting with this mini-novel. Hawthorne’s introduction was way too dry for me and I was rather impatient to start on the story itself. At the end I skipped the “Custom House” introductory chapter and dove straight into the story of the scarlet woman. From thence it was smooth sailing and a very effective one.

The novel begins with a young woman by the name of Hester Prynne, standing on the scaffold of shame, an illegitimate babe in her arms. She has been accused of adultery but she refuses to reveal the name of the man whom she was involved with. As a result she is ostracized from society, doomed to where the letter ‘A’ embroidered in scarlet on her bosom – a symbol that would let the world know of her crime. In that same little town dwells the father of Hester’s baby and Hester’s recently-arrived husband. Forced to keep both her lover’s and husband’s identities secret, she dwells alone in her misery, the only light in her otherwise dark life being her daughter, Pearl.

Pearl becomes a strange, unnerving symbol of this secret tryst between her parents. However, she is not only a symbol to the outer world of this liaison, with her brightly coloured clothes and her vibrant personality (both of which are slightly looked down upon by this puritan town, especially from a child begotten out of wed-lock), but she seems to serve as a ‘judge’…mocking of her mother’s plight. Even Hester sometimes feels that her daughter is possessed by a demon that laughs at her. Pearl also possesses an uncanny knowledge of who her father is, and who Hester’s husband is…although her knowledge is more from intuition than actual reasoning thereby making it impossible for her to understand the relationship she has with these two men.

One then wonders if Hawthorne is being judgmental of Hester’s adultery. But as one moves on one sees that all three principal characters (excluding Pearl) are being severely punished for their sins – Hester and her lover for the same reason, and Hester’s husband for his seeking revenge, and in such a devious manner at that! And yet, one sees redemption for both Hester and her lover as they both try to make up for their ‘crime’ – she in her penance, love, and charity for the poor, and her for the final step he takes in confessing to the whole town his part in the affair and his acknowledgement of Hester and his daughter.

This story was dark and powerful, eerie and nail-bitingly intense. There was something so very gothic in its atmosphere, especially with the strong presence of Pearl. Even Hester’s lifestyle becomes a self-inflicted darkness in her attempt to not be happy for she firmly believes that happiness must not be her lot with what she has done. Does this say something of the woman’s psyche? I was going to add “in those days”, but I suspect it is something that is ever present in women even today – the tendency to blame self to the extent of punishing oneself. And yet, it’s amazing to see how much Hester grows in her isolation. She becomes a spectator and she is better able to views things in a light otherwise not seen when withing the narrowed confines of convention. Therefore, she is able to deal with her pain so much better, while still empathising with the agony her lover goes through.

I don’t think Hawthorne is for adultery. He obviously condemns it. But as is said in the Bible one is to hate the sin but love the sinner, and that’s what Hawthorne seems to be doing. He loves Hester. He is all for her. He stands by her, sometimes gently mocking the puritan townsfolk for their blinders. For their own hypocrisies that they cover through condemning others. For their tendency to point at the ‘speck’ in their brother’s eye than to deal with ‘plank’ in their own. Hester realises all this from her outsider’s position, and she learns to love the townsfolk even more for these faults of theirs. She understand that they are all of them alike in their many sins, and pities for their inability to see what she can see.

Wow! This was a gorgeous and I know I’d love to re-read this some time soon!

Have any of you read The Scarlet Letter? What did you think of the themes Hawthorne deals with? What’s your favourite thing about this book? Did you read the “Custom House” introduction? What did you think of it? Do you think it is really relevant to the story?

A Brief Note on “The First Dragoneer”. August 29, 2011

So, I was looking for something really light to read on my husband’s iphone, and spent some time browsing through the fantasy section. (It’s been ages since I’ve read something on elves and dragons and I’m missing it.) I came across a free novella by M R Mathias called The First Dragoneer (click on link to Goodreads’ blurb and free ebook). It sounded promising and the reviews were good. I ‘pick it up’ and read through it quickly.

It’s a well-written story about a couple of youth on the threshold of manhood, who go hunting. They come across a huge cave outside the safety of their kingdom’s borders and an adventure they sure couldn’t forget for the rest of their lives.

However, after this adventure, things moved to quickly, without pause. The story seemed to go out of control, rushed, as though the writer decided that he had given his readers enough of a prequel and it was time to get to the real thing. I found it disappointing in away, especially after the detailed description of these boys on a final hunt and the exploration of the cave. Also, at the end, I was reminded so suddenly and strongly of Christopher Paolini’s Eragorn. A dragon, dragon rider, and the connection between the minds of two completely different beings.

This novella is the prequel to the actual Dragoneers Saga, and consists of the first two chapters of The Royal Dragoneers. I did not read those two chapters as I wasn’t sure I would be able to read this series, and I preferred not to be tempted too much. I would recommend this, though. M R Mathias has a great deal of writing potential, and premise of the story sounds interesting.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s May 6, 2011

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote

It wasn’t until quite recently that I learnt that the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s was actually based on a novella; one written by Truman Capote and published in 1958.

I recall my reaction to the movie when I first watched it. It was slow for a little girl, true, but I was fascinated by the character Audrey Hepburn played. She flitted across the screen all petite and glamorous, fragile and full of life. I was drawn to her. And of course, the haunting tune of Moon River captured my heart so completely that for years it was the only part of the movie (besides Hepburn) that I truly remembered. I watched it again, a few years ago, and I found that Moon River was a musical expression of the sad ache I felt for Holly Golightly. Hers was such a tragic figure - living in a dream and yet, perhaps, more aware of reality than her neighbour ‘Fred’. I was glad, though, that in the end she hooked up with the writer. However, I have just found out, that, as usual, the movie is way more optimistic and fairytale-like than the original story.

As I geared up to read Capote’s version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s I decided to read through a few reviews first. Of the few I read most were rather disparaging of Holly Golightly’s character (in the novella i.e.) and I found myself feeling a little uneasy about going ahead and giving this version a try. Nevertheless, I began it. And I have to admit that I loved it – perhaps better than the movie simply because Holly Golightly was true to character right up to the very end of the story; a free bird who wanted to yet didn’t want to belong.

I don’t know how well I am going to be able to express my feelings of this piece here. I do know that I experienced much on reading this (e)book. What struck me first was the narrator’s attitude towards Holly at the very beginning of the story. He doesn’t care at all about what might be happening to his former neighbour, but a call from an old common acquaintance has him reminiscing about this strange child-woman.

Holly Golightly is a few months shy of nineteen years when the narrator first sees her. (We never learn the narrator’s name. We only know him as Fred – the name Holly calls him by in remembrance of the brother she loved.) She is a social butterfly who attract men to her like a magnet. She lives off these men and yet she is as free as a bird. There’s something so whimsical about her, so effervescent and fleeting about her character and lifestyle. She has a quirky way at looking at life. But it very soon dawns on the reader that this is a young woman with a past that has influenced greatly her current lifestyle. We get glimpses of her past by very little off-hand things that she says unwittingly, and then of course from the bit of her past that catches up with her for a brief spell.

It wasn’t until more than three-quarters into the book that I understood the narrator to be in love with her. However, he describes the love he felt for her as the same love he had for his gardener or postman, his neighbour, and a certain family of his acquaintance. In other words, this probably explains his indifference to the news he receives at the beginning of the story regarding the whereabouts of Holly. And yet, as he tells his story, one feels, that at the time, he was as serious as he could get about his whimsical neighbour.

The Holly described in the book is the exact opposite in colouring of Audrey Hepburn’s Holly. But in every other aspect they were alike. For my part, I simply could not replace Hepburn’s Holly with a light blond, light-eyed Holly. It was the former’s image that always floated into my mind’s eye. That aside, the impression I was left with was the same as with the movie. Holly seems to live a dream of her making and yet she is so aware of her loneliness. In her own words, she is a ‘wild thing’ longing to stretch he wings and fly into freedom:

“Never love a wild thing, Mr Bell…you can’t ever give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. … If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky.”

But even ‘freedom’ is not complete happiness, for while Holly never wants to belong to anyone or anything, ultimately she realises that she really does want to belong.

“…it’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.”

She is a ‘phony’, a pretender, and she knows it. She is aware of the kind of person she is even though she does not know what she wants and what she feels. But she is brave. She says with that quaint streak of practicality in her:

Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn’t being pious. Just practical.

It was towards the end of the novella that something struck me. Could it be that the facade Holly Golightly shows can only be a cover for a lost and frightened soul? When she receives a letter from the man she was to marry, saying that he had to cut off any connection with her, she is in hospital. She first puts on her make-up, her dark glasses and then she is ready to face anything the letter might have to say. Could it be that her whole lifestyle in New York is a way to disguise the past she has come from?

Holly Golightly intrigued me as she did the narrator. She is an enigma. But she cannot change. At the end we go back to the beginning – the place she was last spotted at.

You know…I think I loved this book as much as I did the movie.

To Sir, With Love July 10, 2010

To Sir, With Love by E.R. Braithwaite

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I must have been around eleven or twelve years old when I watched To Sir With Love (1967). It was a movie that moved me a great deal, not to mention Sidney Poitier’s excellent acting! I never got to see it again after that first time, and was quite excited to come across only last week at a local book store. There was just one copy of the book with a very dignified Poitier gazing out from its cover.

I grabbed it.

Read it.

It is a story about the experience Braithwaite had as a teacher – an authobiography that documents one stage on his life. Very well educated, Braithwaite works as an engineer until the Second World War calls him to a sense of his patriotic duty. He joins the R.A.F. and leads the life of a hero…until the war is over. Back in civilian clothes and confident about getting a good job with his excellent qualifications, Braithwaite suffers a terrible disillussionment when he finds that the colour of his skin brings out the prejudice in his fellow white Britons. For me personally, it is easy to relate to what he says in the following passage:

The majority of Britons at home have very little appreciation of what that intangible yet amazingly real and invaluable export – The British Way of Life – means to colonial people; and they seem to give little thought to the fantastic phenomenon of races so very different from themselves in pigmentation, and widely scattered geographically, assiduously indentifying themselves with British loyalties, beliefs and traditions. This attitude can easily be observed in the way in which the coloured Colonial will quote the British systems of Law, Education and Government, and will adopt fashions in dress and social codes, even though his knowledge of these things has depended largely on secondhand information. All this is especially true of the West Indian Colonials, who are predominantly the descendants of slaves who were forever removed from the cultural influenc of their forefathers, and who lived, worked, and reared their children through the rigours of slavery and the growing pains of gradual enfrachisement, according to the only example they knew – the British Way.

The ties which bind them to Britain are strong, and this is very apparent on each occasion of a Royal visit, when all of them, young and old, rich and poor, join happily together in unrestrained and joyful demonstrations of welcome. Yes, it is wonderful to be British – until one comes to Britain. By dint of careful saving or through hard-won scholarships many of them arrive in Britain to be educate in the Arts and Sciences and in the varied processes of legislative and administrative government. They come, bolstered by a firm, conditioned belief that Britain and the British stand for all that is best in both Christian and Democratic terms; in their naivete they ascribe these high principles to all Britons, without exception.

I had grown up British in every way. Myself, my parents and my parents’ parents, none of us knew or could know any other way of living, of thinking, of being; we knew no other cultural pattern, and I had never heard any of my forebears complain about being British. As a boy I was taught to appreciate English literature, poetry and prose, classical and contemporary, and it was absolutely natural for me to identify myself with the British heroes of the adventure stories against the villains of the piece who were invariably non-British, and so to my boy-ish mind, more easily capable of villainous conduct. The more selective reading of my college and university life was marked by the same predilectio as for English literature, and I did not hesitate to defend my preferences to my American colleagues.

For two years Braithwaite struggles to find a job midst the prejudice that festers in the civilian world. At long last he gets a position as a teacher in a rather poor neighbourhood. It wasn’t something he had been looking to do, and to top it of, his students would be white save for one child.

My own experiences during the past two years invaded my thoughts, reminding me that these children were white; hungry or filled, naked or clothed, they were white, and as far as I was concerned, that fact alone made the difference between the haves and the have-nots. I wanted this job badly and I was quite prepared to do it to the best of my ability, but it would be a job, not a labour of love.

But as teacher and students struggle to maintain a balance this story becomes a narrative not on black and white, but on a relationship slowly yet surely forged between a misfit bunch of children and their teacher, friend and guide. In fact, at one point as he is calling out attendance he mentions how it wasn’t really necessary as he already knew who was absent:

I could quickly spot an absence, so much a part of me the class had become.

Of course, the struggle of the blacks does not take a back seat. We find how quick people are to assume the worst of a black man; how he is treated like filth even in a fancy restaurant where he is obviously more cultured and educated than the waiter; and even where doubts creep in with the reaction of others to his romantic relationship with Miss Blanchard, his white fellow-teacher. It is a struggle against a prejudice cloaked in British poise and etiquette. Braithwaite says it was easier for the black man in America to fight for his rights since the prejudice was so open and obvious. But in Britain it was hard to fight for rights, that on the surface, looked absolutely clear and proper. The story ends with the passing out of his very first class, but his story continues in other books on various stages of his life.

The novel is written in the first person, and is very crisp and to the point. Each chapter is episodic in style, and though a short novel, it covers quite a bit of ground. I cannot say that the book moved me. In fact, I think the movie did that to me. Nevertheless, it keeps you interested and wondering – especially with regard to the relationship between Braithwaite and his students. This is a novel that teachers would relate to quite easily. I would say that this is a must read only for the themes that recur throughout the novel. However, it’s yet another easy read.