An Unknown Beauty

Question Marked

Google Images

Not just beautiful, she's feudable!

And so as to avoid a feud, I'll not post her image here . . .

Marius as Heathcliff?

Bad to the Bone
Google Books

I'm glad I'm not the only reader to see that Howard Jacobson was channeling Emily Brontë in his novel The Act of Love through his depiction of Marius as Heathcliff, though not in each and every respect, of course, but the resemblance is definitely there in Marius's dark good looks, rough roguish manners, and corruscating intellectual brilliance:

Marius is Much Wenlock's answer to Heathcliff, brooding and muscular. (Tim Adams, "Take my wife . . . and I wish somebody would," The Guardian, October 5, 2008)

Not that we had no assistance from Jacobson himself, for he 'hints' as much on page 41: "the Heathcliff-if-all-else-perishes rocky-eternity beneath you."

The book is morbidly fascinating and forces its readers into assuming the perversely voyeuristic perspective of the first-person narrator, Felix Quinn, manipulator par excellence who somehow brings his wife and Marius into an affair that appears headed toward disaster for all.

I say appears because I've finished all but ten percent of the novel and have yet to see how things end . . .

Pride and Prejudice: Darcy's Ardent Love

Colin Firth as Darcy

Ardently in Love with Elizabeth

(Image from Wikipedia)

I've been using my time alone to work on an article about love and resentment in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and I've been trying to understand why Fitzwilliam Darcy falls in love with Elizabeth Bennet even though he considers her his social inferior:

As we know from the novel, although Darcy initially has no interest in Elizabeth and even deplores her inferior social status, he soon begins to notice her attractive features, especially the way in which her face is "rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes," the "light and pleasing" aspect of her figure, and the "easy playfulness" of her manners (26). From this series of closely spaced moments of recognition, Darcy discovers to his surprise that he is attracted. He begins "to wish to know more of her" and therefore starts to attend "to her conversation with others" (26). He will certainly come to note that she enjoys reading, for in his presence, she turns down a card game in favor of a book (40), and in a conversation that soon follows, Darcy maintains that for a woman to be truly accomplished, she must demonstrate "improvement of her mind by extensive reading" (43). He also enjoys conversation (27-28), attends to hers, as already noted (26), and obviously delights in her conversational art, as evidenced by his smiles at her verbal adroitness (49, 63, 102, 197, et passim). Elizabeth's attractiveness for him is thus both physical and intellectual, and already at an early meeting, due to the "mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner," he finds himself never "so bewitched by any woman as he was by her" and realizes that he could "be in some danger" if he were not careful, yet he continues to admire the "colour and shape, and the eyelashes, so remarkably fine," of her eyes (56-7) and also later pardons her friendship with the despised Wickham due to his own "tolerably powerful feeling towards her" (105). He regularly attempts, however, to maintain emotional distance from her because of her social inferiority, as when he scarcely speaks "ten words to her through the whole of" a day (66) or when he adopts "a colder voice" in her presence (201), but despite his best efforts to resist her charms, he falls ever more deeply in love with her through each subsequent meeting, as he confesses to her in his initial proposal of marriage:

"In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you." (211)

His was a genuine struggle between an elevated pride and an overwhelming love, for when he finally approached her to propose, "he came towards her in an agitated manner" (211) but expressed himself eloquently in "representing to her the strength of that attachment which, in spite of all his endeavors, he had found impossible to conquer" (212).

I'll need to rework and strengthen this passage, but I think that it hits on the principle reasons that Darcy falls for Elizabeth despite his elevated pride even as it prepares for the subsequent struggle between Darcy's continued love for and roused resentment at Elizabeth.

By the way, all citations are from the Cambridge Edition of Pride and Prejudice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), an annotated, scholarly text edited by Pat Rogers, and I appreciate Google Books for making this sort of research possible for me.

Jeffery Hodges: "How I met her" . . . thanks to Robert Musil

Robert Musil

(Image from Great Books Guide)

Matt Lamers, journalist and editor for the Korea Herald, is currently having a series of articles and columns examining international marriages in Korea published in the Herald's Expat Living section, and yesterday (July 1, 2009) was my turn to tell my story of how I met Sun-Ae . . . which was a bit different than the usual boy-meets-girl story. I've told this tale before here on Gypsy Scholar, but some readers might not have read it:

How I met her

By Jeffery Hodges

About four years ago, when my family and I were still living in Osan, a woman in our apartment complex encountered my wife and recognized her as "the person married to that foreigner."

What the woman particularly wanted to know was, "Why did he marry you? You're not beautiful."

I suppose that there's always a story to tell. I met my wife in Germany, on a train. I hadn't noticed her standing on the platform before boarding, but she had already observed me, perceived the danger, and kept her distance. Despite her effort to avoid me, I happened to sit down beside her. Pure chance - it was the only empty seat. (My wife says fate.)

"Hello," I said, noticing her for the first time, and liking what I saw.

"Hello," she responded, in a low, wary, but husky and thereby enticing voice.

"I'm Jeff Hodges," I told her.

"I'm Sun-ae," she told me.

"What does your name mean?" I asked.

"Good Love," she revealed.

I took it as a sign and decided to marry her. But I had to win her heart. I therefore asked her what she was studying.

"Robert Musil," she said, still wary.

Now, I don't know that "Musil" derives from "muse," and it may be just a variant of "mueseli," but I took him as my inspiration.

"Oh," I noted, "The Man Without Qualities."

By chance (or was it fate?), I had recently begun reading that novel. In German. Indeed, the entire conversation with this unexpected love of my life was taking place in German.

I am terrible at foreign languages, not particularly eloquent in even my own, and was having to woo in a tongue suited less to expressing passionate love than to explaining the mechanical workings of an internal combustion engine. Even the German title of Musil's book sounds mechanical: "Der Man ohne Eigenschaften."

Rather like a piston, isn't it: Ei-gen-shaft-en. Ei-gen-shaft-en. Ei-gen-shaft-en. Ei-gen-shaft-en. Ei-gen-shaft-en ...

She, however, was impressed that I knew the book. Especially when I related the opening story, which introduces the main character, Ulrich, who meets a beautiful, mysterious woman through a series of unfortunate events and accidentally wins her heart.

This introductory part of the novel ends with the dry observation that, "One week later, she was already seven days his beloved." Which I quoted aloud.

I may not have won her heart with that, but I caught her attention. And over poetry the following evening, I did capture her heart.

When I took her to my Ozark home to meet my family, everyone was impressed with her but also baffled. My youngest brother put it succinctly, "How did Jeff ever get such a beautiful girlfriend?"

How indeed? I owe it all to a man without qualities.

That man would be Ulrich, I suppose . . . though I in fact owe my marital bliss to the author Mr. Robert Musil, who merely intended to write about the Austro-Hungarian Empire and would be astonished to learn that his magnum opus led to something far greater than that.

July 13th will make 17 years since Sun-Ae and I met on that German train, and our love is still an adventure going places.

Life Can Be a Dream . . .

Jane Austen

"Jaunty Sihouette"

(Image from Pemberley)

Late in Pride and Prejudice, when the ending has turned happy for the characters with whom we identify, Jane Austen puts into Elizabeth Bennet's mouth the following words, which strike me as true:

"We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing." (Miss Elizabeth Bennet, Chapter 54, Pride and Prejudice)

I am, as you know, an instructor. Sometimes, even, a professor. Consider the difference in those titles, but even as one who sometimes professes, I am -- at the fundament of my existence -- one who instructs. I can therefore teach only what is not worth knowing . . . and thus not worth teaching. What is truly worth knowing, I cannot impart.

But I didn't learn this from Austen or Bennet. I learned it from experience, and so will my students . . . eventually. For instance, my international-relations students asked my advice last week on how to pursue their university studies. They are mere first-year students, and I am old enough to be their father.

"I can tell you what I did wrong. Be sure to make and keep connections. You'll need them someday when you look for a job. Aim to have a career that looks linear on your CV. Otherwise, you'll look like someone who lacks direction. This is especially important after your undergraduate degree. Try to make good grades . . . but don't let grades get in the way of your education. Adopt a personal standard of excellence that goes beyond the next test. Learn as if for eternity."

I think that I said a bit more than that, but I was talking to myself. Not that my students didn't listen. They did. But to understand what I meant? Maybe the practical stuff, but the truly worthwhile? That takes a lifetime, and comes from experience, not instruction. Actually, I did follow some of my own advice in my years pursuing an education -- I always sought excellence beyond the exams . . . well, almost always. But I neglected connections and followed a winding, eccentric path, which isn't necessarily bad if you don't mind going off track.

I spent years in Europe, even a year in Switzerland, working on my Coptic and preparing for a career in Gnostic studies . . . but where did that get me? Several months in Basel chasing a lost girlfriend in the summer of 1988 while living with anarchists and getting tear-gassed by the police. I thought of this yesterday when I stumbled across Steven Erlanger's New York Times article, "For Art Lovers, Basel Doesn't End at the Fair" (June 6-7, 2009). That brought back memories, some good -- like Marc Chagall's 1912 image of The Rabbi enjoying his pinch of snuff, housed in the Basel Kunsthalle . . . the original of a print that I'd kept tacked to the wall of my boarding room while a young student in the late 1970s at Baylor, where I'd pined for passionate love and dreamed of unattainable greatness. But some memories bad -- such as cutting short a friend's defense of my ex-girlfriend with these words describing her behavior that Basel summer of 1988:

"She was selfish. She was cold. She was sometimes brutal. And she was a coward."

I suppose that two of those adjectives could apply to me as well. Take your pick, for it hardly matters anymore, it was so long ago.

After that, my career at least seemed on track, the Fulbright and Naumann doctoral fellowships that I'd won seeming to presage a future so bright that I ought to wear shades. It didn't turn out quite like that. After one postdoc in Australia and another in Jerusalem, I reached a deadend. An Australian friend at the University of New England, Armidale, who had promised support in my job applications, informed me at the critical moment when I needed support and had requested from her a recommendation for a position in religious studies that included courses on women in religion:

"I am on principle opposed to males teaching courses about women in religion."

What could I say to her words concerning this 'principle'? That I'd suddenly discovered the vast difference between the prepositions "on" and "in"? What could I say to myself? That I was lost on an eccentric intellectual path without proper connections in the academic world? That I'd found myself putting trust in the wrong person? That I'd finally learned: It's not your enemies who betray you, but your friends? But all that hardly matters anymore, it now seems so long ago.

Besides, in the course of these detours and deadends, a miracle occurred, and I was granted a future despite all else that didn't go quite as planned.

And life can be a dream . . .

Paradise Lost: "Danger in Good Sex"

Jan Brueghel the Younger

Paradise (c. 1620)

"Behold that great, astonished prude,

the lion proud with little pride..."

(Image from Wikipedia)

Despite being a 'Puritan', Milton was hardly what one might call 'puritanical' -- although he did praise above "all Temples th' upright heart and pure" (PL 1.18) -- and I promised yesterday some evidence today on how explicit and titillating Milton can get.

I had broken off yesterday's entry almost immediately after noting James Grantham Turner's remark about Milton despising the "open flaunting of illicit sexuality" (Turner 153), so one might imagine Milton as one of those puritanical prigs who patch over every explicit thing with fig leaves. Milton does not describe everything in explicit detail, of course, for he's better than that. What he does is cover just enough to let the sensuous rhythms of his words and the amorous workings of our own imaginations do the rest:

Milton is no prude, and he expresses Adam and Eve's sexual intercourse and climax in a veiled manner that intimately yet unexpectedly involves the reader in their private erotic play, which implies Eve's:

Subjection, but requir'd with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best receivd,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet reluctant amorous delay. (PL 4.308-11)

That "sweet reluctant amorous delay" takes us to the very brink of their climax, which is then again delayed for us as Milton conceals from us those "mysterious parts" (4.312) that were only for Adam and Eve unconcealed.

Yet, paradise does pose its challenges to the happy couple in their "mutable perfection" (PL 5.524), for:

Hidden from that first pair was the fact that Eve's game of amorous delay, both prior to and during lovemaking, left Adam vulnerable to an unfortunate consequence:

Because sweet reluctant amorous delay will provide a daily reaffirmation of "the conscience of her worth," Adam will inevitably be vulnerable to the opposite of object-debasement. The game that preserves Eve's value from the fate of debasement works all too well, and the consequence is a tendency in the first husband to abase himself before the idol of his mate. It is no surprise when he falls "Fondly overcome with female charm" (9.999). The sexual fantasy Milton embedded at the origins of human love simply has to, by its very meaning, buck against the ordained hierarchy that sets the man over the woman. It makes the Fall explicable. (Kerrigan and Braden 45)

As Kerrigan and Braden go on to note, "Courtly love was charged early on with idolatry, and Adam's Fall is in this sense a medieval one," in the sense that Milton places himself, if ironically, within the Medieval Romance tradition (William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden. "Milton's Coy Eve: Paradise Lost and Renaissance Love Poetry," English Literary History. Volume 53, Number 1 (Spring, 1986), page 48).

On the other hand, my faithful commentor who goes by the pen name "Eshuneutics" has pointed out Milton's more positive debt to the tradition of courtly love, so I will need to work a bit more nuance into this paper.

And some say that blogging is a distraction from serious scholarly work! Not that my own work is very serious...

Milton: Eve's Female Charm

Courtly Lovers

Under the Tree of Knowledge

Albrecht Dürer, "Adam and Eve" (1507)

(Image from Wikipedia)

As readers will already know, I've been floundering around like a fish out of water, flipping from one place to another in my search for a topic that I can turn into an article on Milton before the semester begins, and I think that I've finally found a topic that I can do quickly.

I've been discussing some variations on the interpretation of the Fall as Adam's heroic act of noble self-sacrifice, and I've noted that I read Milton as critiquing this view. I had intended to look either for Milton's sources or at his influence, but given my limited time, I'm going to focus almost solely upon the argument internal to Paradise Lost, albeit with some discussion of the courtly love tradition.

My basic idea is that Milton presents Adam's fall in terms of a courtly lover's experience, which begins by lovingly overpraising the lady's beauty but ends in basely lusting for the lady's body, a transition from the spiritual to the carnal that the Romance tradition knew so well (and sometimes even celebrated).

I've only just begun, so here's what I've written thus far:

In his discourse with Raphael, Adam admits to a weakness that he has felt since discovering Eve:

. . . here passion first I felt,
Commotion strange, in all enjoyments else
Superiour and unmov'd, here onely weake
Against the charm of Beauties powerful glance. (PL 8.530-3)

From the context, PL 8.508-33, Adam reveals that precisely his reason, his mind itself, is subjected to beauty's charming capacity to engender passion.

Adam quickly emphasizes that he 'understands' that he himself, made directly in God's image, is superior in the mind (8.541ff):

. . . yet when I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems
And in her self compleat, so well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say,
Seems wisest, vertuousest, discreetest, best;
All higher knowledge in her presence falls
Degraded, Wisdom in discourse with her
Looses discount'nanc't, and like folly shewes;
Authority and Reason on her waite,
As one intended first, not after made
Occasionally; and to consummate all,
Greatness of mind and nobleness thir seat
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
About her, as a guard Angelic plac't. (PL 8.546-59)

Adam praises Eve in language that recalls that of courtly love, for he places Eve above himself in subjecting his "Authority and Reason" (8.554) to her. Moreover, he confesses that Eve's own "Greatness of mind and nobleness" (8.557) serve to "create an awe / About her" (8.558-9) that inverts male hierarchy and confirms him as her overawed servant, and he openly wonders if "Nature faild" to leave him strong enough to resist the lovely charm of the woman.

Adam is in love. And he both idealizes and idolizes his beloved. Raphael is less than pleased, and "with contracted brow" (8.560), he begins to warn Adam:

Accuse not Nature, she hath don her part;
Do thou but thine, and be not diffident
Of Wisdom, she deserts thee not, if thou
Dismiss not her, when most thou needst her nigh,
By attributing overmuch to things
Less excellent, as thou thy self perceav'st.
For what admir'st thou, what transports thee so,
An outside? fair no doubt, and worthy well
Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love,
Not thy subjection: (PL 8.561-70)

Raphael's words constitute a critique of the courtly love tradition, which has often elsewhere been criticized for its tendency to idolize the beloved lady.

I then segue into a riff from Don Quixote that some readers would instantly recognize but that I'd prefer to leave out for now. This is enough for today.

Now, I'm off to prepare breakfast for my own dear lady, the toast of Seoul...

"I'm 'a get medieval on your eyes"

Our Lady of Cardigan

Cardigan, Wales

"Go west, young man Gawain, go west..."

(Image from Mair O Aberteifi)

We left Gawain in trouble yesterday just as he had turned from devotion offered to the true heavenly queen to devotion offered to a more earthly aristocratic lady. Part of Gawain's trouble stems not from this pagan turn but from the nature of the courtly love that he accepts as part of his aristocratic culture.

I'm working on this topic (and hence boring my regular readers to tears) because the International Center for Korean Studies (ICKS) has asked me to present a paper at the ICKS International Conference on "Celibacy and Enlightenment/Salvation" (August 2-3, 2007), which will take place at Korea University. Since I've long wanted to write something about my favorite Medieval romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I'm taking this opportunity to do so ... and thereby inflicting my interests on my wary but longsuffering readers.

The connection between the theme of this conference and my Gawain paper lies in the Christian conception of humankind's fallen nature and the need for a salvation external to one's own efforts. Early in the poem, Gawain is described -- though perhaps ironically -- as an almost perfect human being, one who perfectly embodies courtly and Christian virtues. He initially manages this by paying court to the Queen of Heaven, for he can thereby fulfull the demands of both systems. Gawain, however, must fail in his efforts at perfection if this poem is intended to convey a profoundly Christian soteriological point. The nature of Gawain's failure is what links my paper to the conference theme of celibacy and salvation, for when Gawain turns from the Virgin to Lady Bertilak, the love expressed turns from spiritual to carnal, for that's the nature of courtly love.

The following is part of what I've been working on to establish the problem posed by courtly love for Gawain's attempt to remain chaste. I'm not saying anything new, of course; I'm merely trying to fill some details for scholars outside of Medieval English studies.

In the Medieval context, courtly love would ordinarily entail some problematic elements. In the ideal case, a knight devoted himself to service not only to his liege lord but also to his lord's wife, whom he was bound to protect, honor, and love. But what sort of love? Although perhaps modeled on the paradigm of the Christian's devotion to the Virgin Mary, in which case the ideal courtly love would be a highly sublimated sort of love similar to Christian caritas (cf. Edmund Reiss, "Fin'amors: Its History and Meaning in Medieval Literature," in Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8 (1979), 74-99), the reality is that courtly love was an unstable complex of sexual desire and spiritual aims. Francis Newman noted that courtly love was "a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and self-disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent" (Francis X. Newman, ed., The Meaning of Courtly Love (1968) vii). Similarly, C.S. Lewis described it as "love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love" (C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), page 2). From a rigorously Christian perspective, courtly love is inherently adulterous, for its practice entails that mature men express their love for an already married lady in language that powerfully emphasizes her physical beauty. From the explicit teaching of Christ as given in Matthew 5:27-28:

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

The operative word here in this King James Bible, obviously, is "lust," but we should dig a bit deeper into the past and look at the Wycliffe English translation, for John Wycliffe was a contemporary of the Pearl Poet:

Ye han herd that it was seid to elde men, Thou schalt do no letcherie. But Y seie to you, that euery man that seeth a womman for to coueite hir, hath now do letcherie bi hir in his herte. (Matheu 5:27-28: Wycliffe Bible)

But we should also check the Latin Vulgate, which the Pearl Poet would surely have known:

Audistis quia dictum est antiques: non moechaberis. Ego autem dico vobis: quoniam omnis qui viderit mulierem ad concupiscendum eam iam moechatus est eam in corde suo. (Matthaeus 5:27-28: Vulgate)

The two words are thus coueite (covet) and concupiscendum (ardent desire), and they are related etymologically. The former derives from the Latin word cupere, meaning "to desire, covet," and in the 14th century, the time of both Wycliffe and the Pearl Poet, the word coueite meant "To desire with concupiscence or with fleshly appetite" (OED I, 1106, 2), hence demonstrating why Wycliffe (or one of the Wycliffe 'team') rendered the Latin Vulgate's concupiscendum by the Middle English coueite. As for the latter term, concupiscendum, it derives from the Latin concupere (the intensive prefix con- plus cupere, thus "to long for, desire"). The related Latin term concupiscentia was taken over into English as "concupiscence" as early as the 14th century, appearing in Chaucer, The Parson's Tale (c. 1386), with the meaning of "Libidinous desire, sexual appetite, lust" (OED I, 777, 2). Given the Pearl Poet's theological interests and scriptural knowledge, he would surely be aware of Christ's teaching on adultery as a matter of lusting in one's heart.

I still need to fill out this part of my paper more completely, for I need to put my own stamp on the material, maybe liven it up a bit so that it won't be quite so boring as this blog entry.

Perhaps if I were to quote from Lady Bertilak's attempts to seduce Gawain...