An Imperfect Novel Worth Reading

 

Thomas Nast

 

     What better time to have a look at The Gilded Age than when the American president seeks to gild everything about him while exhibiting unprecedented greed, fraud, and corruption?

 

     The collaborative authorship of The Gilded Age (1873), written by Mark Twain and his Hartford neighbor Charles Dudley Warner [1], is doubtless responsible for the narrative’s uneven plot line and style.  The shift between Twain’s colorful characters and vigorous dialect and Warner’s smooth and bland sentiments makes the reader feel the work is two different novels, braided together in a way that is never quite integrated. 

     The cast of characters is largely familiar from the melodramas of the day: a distressed woman, a cad, the virtuous and the avaricious.  Critics judge that the authors were satirizing popular plot-lines, but it seems more accurate to say that they were reproducing popular stories in part to ensure themselves a market while reserving the right to make a bit of fun now and then.  For the first two-thirds of the novel the emphasis is on comedy and a devastating attack on the government and the economic system with the love interests kept in the background, though romance does eventually emerge, a concession to the taste of the masses like Kitty Carlisle and Alan Jones in Night at the Opera.  Laura’s murder of Col. Selby (which to many readers comes as a surprise) alters the tone, adding notes of pathos and tragedy while the satiric onslaught continues unabated.

     Though he had published travel sketches and short stories, The Gilded Age is Twain’s first attempt at a full-length novel which may in part explain his willingness to work with a co-author.  The combination of his and Warner’s inexperience in the form (Warner was a distinguished editor but he had written only books on travel and gardening) makes it unsurprising that they produced a formally imperfect volume.  This factor and their shared authorship were not lost on the book’s earliest reviewers, one of whom wrote that “Neither of them has yet given evidence that he could command an interesting plot, the conduct of which would develop interesting characters.”  Another found the narration “jerky and jolty” exhibiting an “abruptness and unexpectedness” in the development as a result of the fact that “two hands did fashion the work,” while a third concluded more severely, “The Gilded Age is a failure.  It is rather a simply incoherent series of sketches.” [2]

     Further, though each wrote an initial section, they later came to do alternate chapters and to rewrite each other’s contributions.  Their wives, who had originally challenged them to attempt the work, may have offered opinions on its progress as well, and the result is inevitably uneven.

     Whatever its faults, The Gilded Age presents an uncompromising, even devastating critique of America.  The government is portrayed not as simply harboring corruption but as being altogether rotten.  When one senator exposes the bribe another has offered him, there are calls to investigate not the miscreant but the whistle-blower.  A politician who refuses to buy votes is considered the unethical one.  The public good cannot survive in an environment where everyone is looking out for the main chance.  And the legislators’ rapacity is only a special case of the general greed that reigns under capitalism.  While Philip’s Ilium coal mine does finally deliver on its early promise, virtually every other investment scheme mentioned is wholly fraudulent. 

     For a contemporary American reader, this picture of crooked profiteering in public life will seem only slightly exaggerated.  The current president is openly selling pardons and appointments, making subservience (and its material form of donations) far more important than expertise for influence in his administration.  And we have seen speculative bubbles in technology stocks as well as the birth of explicitly fraudulent investments like cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens, encouraged by politicians more interested in advancing their own wealth than the good of the country.  The present day has at least matched the single-minded pursuit of money in the nineteenth century, when American presidents would at least never have considered hawking trashy merchandise while in office. 

     Apart from this general critique of the political and economic system, The Gilded Age makes significant comment on the role of women.  Laura and Ruth are arguably the most important characters, as most of the others are either caricatures or very thinly portrayed.  Furthermore, the book is clear about the unfairness of the limited life choices available to women and goes so far as to suggest that women’s suffrage might bring reform to the legislative halls. 

     Yet a feminist today would surely complain that both of these women, who possess unusual ambition and initiative, not only fail, they fail because of the very female characteristics typically cited by male chauvinists.  Laura is clever and effective in her machinations, but comes to grief after being deceitfully betrayed by a lover.  She becomes very close at least to legally insane before killing Selby, highlighting the double sexual standard and women’s dependance on men, but also suggesting that she is overemotional, the victim, perhaps of hormones.  Though Twain referred to her as the “heroine” [3] of the book, she is as well a villain, a femme fatale, in her lobbying in which her trading on her good looks is yet another gender stereotype.  Ruth, while guilty only of the laudable desire to practiced medicine, proves not quite up the demands the profession placed on her, nearly dying from overwork, thus implying that those who wished to bar women from the professions for their own good did so for good reason. 

     The novel contains numerous loose ends.  The appended note with its ironic apology for raising curiosity about Laura’s father without satisfying it, is itself sufficient evidence that the story had not been thoroughly planned.  The epigraphs, selected not just from European languages, but also from Hawaiian, Quiché, Sanskrit, Yoruba, and the like, may be a good enough gag the first time, but rapidly becomes annoying before the reader simply ignores them.  The fact that the first edition left them untranslated proves that readers were not expected to understand them.

     Yet, for all its shortcomings, the book hits its mark squarely with its depiction of most politicians and businessmen as self-interested and capable of any deceit.  At the same time it shows the hopeful optimism of Americans in general, never sufficiently disillusioned to turn away the next sure thing when pitched by a glib salesman.  One finds in The Gilded Age only sparks of Mark Twain’s brilliance and a few sonorous if platitudinous lines of Charles Dudley Warner, but, considered as a whole, it is an important American political novel and a well-observed portrait of the United States revealing the national faults: an obsession with money-making, the dialectic of hucksterism and naivete, the oppression of women, but also allowing room for a saving remnant of ambitious individuals whose dreams, unavailable in some other nations, may in the United States, at least in part, come true.   

 

  

 

1.  Twain later said that both authors’ wives also contributed to the book.  It was not Twain’s only attempt at collaboration.  He wrote Ah Sin with Bret Harte, a play that ran for five weeks and the unperformed Colonel Sellers as a Scientist with William Dean Howells but withdrawn before its first performance.  He later contemplated two collaborations with the Austrian playwright Siegmund Schlesinger.

2. Quotations are, in order, from “American Satire,” New York Herald, Dec. 22, 1873; “The New Book by ‘Twain” and Warner,” Hartford Times, December 23, 1873; and “Literary Notes,” The New York Graphic, December 23, 1873.

3.  April 16, 1873 letter to Mary Fairbanks.

Meredith's Ridiculous Egoist

 

     Reader may wish to have a look at my piece on “Meredith’s Poetic Novel: Diana of the Crossways” at https://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2025/09/merediths-poetic-novel-diana-of.html.  Page references in parentheses refer to the Penguin English Library edition edited by George Woodcock.

 

     The fiction of George Meredith is distinguished from that of other Victorian novelists by a number of factors.  He stands practically alone in his feminism and he can be compared only to late Henry James and perhaps the George Eliot of Middlemarch in his portrayal of the gossamer threads of motive that precipitate our acts (and velleities as well).  He was a great practitioner and theoretician of comedy.  Yet surely Meredith’s most striking characteristic is his mannered style which can occasionally oblige even a seasoned reader to scan a page a second time.  He is capable of passages which are often delightfully witty, syntactically complex, and sometimes of staggering beauty in which style is clearly the governing principle guiding the content which must be content simply to tag along. 

     Oscar Wilde skewered the downside of Meredith’s remarkable prose in “The Decay of Lying.”

 

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything, except articulate. Somebody in Shakespeare−−Touchstone, I think−− talks about a man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's method. But whatever he is, he is not a realist.

 

     In his influential theoretical essay in “An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit,” Meredith argues that comedy, as opposed to humor and satire, encourages moral behavior and aims at reforming human folly.  No carnival license for him, instead “comedy is the fountain of sound sense.”  In his view “it is the first condition of sanity to believe” that “our civilization is founded in common-sense” (a term more problematic than Meredith allowed) and it is the violations of these norms in his view that gives rise to “the contrasts the Comic Spirit perceives,” which provides the comic writer the work of correcting these deviations.  (In a writer so modern in many ways, it is a bit startling to find moralism stern enough to find Restoration comedy “beyond blushing” and full of “cynical licentiousness.”) 

     But his heart seldom seems seldom centered on the censorious correction of human error.  What sustains a novel by Meredith is his talent for striking figures of speech, his playful wit, and his elegant if somewhat elaborate style.  Even on the theme of the nature of comedy, in the novel the topic is organized about Meredith’s fanciful imps that crouch about their figure of fun mocking, hardly a notion compatible with common sense.

     The witticisms of the formidable Mrs. Montstuart Jenkinson such as her characterization of Vernon as “a Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar” or of Laetitia “here she comes with a romantic tale on her eyelashes” (like those of Meredith’s Diana) are surely to be appreciated for their cleverness alone (42).  A longer passage from the “Prelude” which generally sketches the narrative’s progress raises the author’s rhetorical standard high over everyday usage such that the exuberance of his language becomes the point far more than any strictures on proper behavior.

 

     Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos; and we are not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately know what, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process, on board our modern vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and the general water supply has other uses; and ships well charged with it seem to sail the stiffest:—there is a touch of pathos. The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire to clothe himself at everybody's expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the actual person. Only he is not allowed to rush at you, roll you over and squeeze your body for the briny drops. There is the innovation.

 

     Here Meredith opens with a ship as a metaphor for his story and water as ballast identified with pathos.  It is surely inaccurate to claim that every narrative must have pathos.  While a Chaplin movie may well include a good deal there will be none at all in with the Three Stooges.  Yet few would notice to dubious claim as the ingenious figures of speech carry the reader along like a tide.  “It can hardly be the cargo,” i. e. The Egoist is fundamentally comic rather than sentimental or melodramatic.  The image shifts then to clothing; the egoist derives his self-worth from the opinions of others, “clothing himself” at others’ expense, yet finding himself so embarrassed (“naked”) that he will serve as a personification  of pity.  Yet, as the comedy is sustained, he does not demand your tears (after the manner of Little Nell), and “there is the innovation.”

     This is all very well, if slightly elaborately stated, but the following paragraph which introduces the figure of the Egoist is even more distinctly characteristic of Meredith.  Here the reader encounters the imps of comedy, central to the book’s themes however far distant from commonsensical concepts.

 

     You may as well know him out of hand, as a gentleman of our time and country, of wealth and station; a not flexile figure, do what we may with him; the humour of whom scarcely dimples the surface and is distinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality, have first made the mild literary angels aware of something comic in him, when they were one and all about to describe the gentleman on the heading of the records baldly (where brevity is most complimentary) as a gentleman of family and property, an idol of a decorous island that admires the concrete. Imps have their freakish wickedness in them to kindle detective vision: malignly do they love to uncover ridiculousness in imposing figures. Wherever they catch sight of Egoism they pitch their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim their lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come. So confident that their grip of an English gentleman, in whom they have spied their game, never relaxes until he begins insensibly to frolic and antic, unknown to himself, and comes out in the native steam which is their scent of the chase. Instantly off they scour, Egoist and imps. They will, it is known of them, dog a great House for centuries, and be at the birth of all the new heirs in succession, diligently taking confirmatory notes, to join hands and chime their chorus in one of their merry rings round the tottering pillar of the House, when his turn arrives; as if they had (possibly they had) smelt of old date a doomed colossus of Egoism in that unborn, unconceived inheritor of the stuff of the family. They dare not be chuckling while Egoism is valiant, while sober, while socially valuable, nationally serviceable. They wait. (36-37)

 

     The imps practice a kind of “freakish wickedness,” but they also may bide their time, conceding their object’s prestigious social role and importance under feudalism.  Yet it is the very artificiality of his aristocratic standing that guarantees he will prove by the late nineteenth century ridiculous.  There is after all, something inherently absurd in the fact that he has always been highly regarded, purely because of the accident of his birth.  He is certain eventually therefore to fall prey to fatuous “frolic and antic,” emitting steam which attracts the imps with their “detective vision.”  Like pagan orgiasts they dance in “merry rings” about the great man, the “colossus,” who has, like Britain’s aristocracy in Victorian times, outlived his social usefulness and thus become preposterous and laughable. 

     Here the reader finds a rich stew of figures of speech.  The egoist is an “idol,” a “colossus,” while less perceptive readers who take his pose for his true nature are “angels.”  The imps, meanwhile, are like a besieging army with their camp pitched all about the egoist as he transforms into a sort of absurd engine puffing steam as the imps (and the readers) look on amused.  

     Meredith is as earnest a Victorian as Matthew Arnold, but he is far more of an aesthete.  While he maintained high-minded principles of moral behavior, social justice, and political idealism, he was fond as well of playing with words and of building ingenious verbal structures that are more obviously entertaining than they are improving.  Surely considered only as a reformer or an ethicist he would have little name by this time; it is as an imaginative and inventive storyteller who can hold the reader’s interest with his language alone that we read him today.  The reader knew Willoughby for an ass when he first appeared.  The novel would have been excruciatingly prolonged had that demonstration been the point of the story.  Instead Meredith fills more than half a thousand pages with wit, fascinating figures of speech, and rhetoric by turns stately and effervescent.  One concludes with a wistful regret in part arising from seeing Laetitia accepting a loveless marriage and in part for one’s own departure from Patterne Hall after a pleasant stay.  Though Meredith may have conceived of comedy ultimately serving the cause of the betterment of humanity, he, and we as well, will consider that we have gained something merely by having our fancy tickled. 

Meredith’s Poetic Novel: Diana of the Crossways

 

 

     My 1917 Modern Library edition  of Diana of the Crossways includes an introduction by Arthur Symons, the critic who shaped readers’ understanding of Symbolist and Decadent poetry.  He maintains that Meredith “breaks every rule” of novel-writing, that he is in fact “essentially a poet, not a novelist.”  To Symons Meredith has written “the most intellectual” English novels as he aims at “something which is the poetry of pure idea.”  He thus writes prose “as if it were poetry, with an endeavour to pack every phrase with imaginative meaning, every sentence, you realise, will be an epigram.”  For him “life recorded becomes, not a new life, but literature about life.” 

     This tendency is particularly pronounced in Diana of the Crossways as the title character is well-known for her epigrams and witty conversational sallies, many reported in the first chapter “Of Diaries and Diarists.”  In describing her, Meredith comments self-reflexively on his own use of such material. 

 

    Drolleries, humours, reputed witticisms, are like odours of roast meats, past with the picking of the joint. Idea is the only vital breath.  They have it rarely, or it eludes the chronicler. To say of the great erratic and forsaken Lady A****, after she had accepted the consolations of Bacchus, that her name was properly signified in asterisks “as she was now nightly an Ariadne in heaven through her God,” sounds to us a roundabout, with wit somewhere and fun nowhere.  Sitting at the roast we might have thought differently.  Perry Wilkinson is not happier in citing her reply to his compliment on the reviewers’ unanimous eulogy of her humour and pathos:—the “merry clown and poor pantaloon demanded of us in every work of fiction,” she says, lamenting the writer's compulsion to go on producing them for applause until it is extremest age that knocks their knees.  We are informed by Lady Pennon of 'the most amusing description of the first impressions of a pretty English simpleton in Paris'; and here is an opportunity for ludicrous contrast of the French and English styles of pushing flatteries—'piping to the charmed animal,' as Mrs. Warwick terms it in another place: but Lady Pennon was acquainted with the silly woman of the piece, and found her amusement in the 'wonderful truth' of that representation.

 

     The initial figure of speech compares wit to the scent of dinner on the fire specifically drawing attention to the ephemeral quality of both phenomena.  Meredith then begins with a variation of the modesty topos by declaring that, since such remarks can only be appreciated in lived experience, his project of recording them must fail.  To test this hypothesis, he proceeds to a particular bon mot concerning “the great erratic and forsaken Lady A****.”  The comment, as it turns out, depends for its effect, not on being present in person, but rather on the anecdote’s written form using asterisks.  Yet this, too, though it is worth recording apparently, he denigrates as possessing “wit somewhere and fun nowhere.”  He realizes his effect as he at the same time denies it.  The first three sentences have required the reader first to compare an impression of cleverness with a smell of dinner cooking, then with a breath.  Wine is allusively called “Bacchus,” asterisks are equated with stars, and drunkenness with theophany, surely a hefty burden of figures of speech for a few lines of prose. 

     He promises no more likely survival for the spirit of Diana’s next quoted witticism, that she must act the “merry clown and poor pantaloon demanded of us in every work of fiction.”  Here she highlights the art of her repartee with allusions to circus and commedia dell’arte performance.  She is said to find it “lamentable” that she must produce such “drolleries” until advanced old age, itself figured concretely as the time that “extremest age” makes the knees knock.  Thus, just as she is shown to be extra clever by her belittling her own conversational abilities, Meredith’s persona strengthens his case for her by denying that his repeating of such lines can have the effect they had when originally spoken.  Still, the author seems to be satisfied at the extent to which he has achieved his desired effect of convincing the reader of Diana’s verbal skills when he mentions another of her satirical comments, one recalled by Lady Pennon, and attests to its “wonderful” effect without even recording what she said.  Here the reader is expected to be impressed by precisely nothing. 

     Though the work scarcely shrinks from themes – it contains perhaps the most explicit feminist thinking of any fiction of its era – Meredith’s primary appeal is in poetry: synaesthesia, figures of speech, and fresh language.  Memories are said to be like cooking odors and asterisks like stars while old age is signified by knock knees and Diana resembles a circus clown.  Apart from the book-long associations of Diana Warwick with the divine huntress, this brief passage contains allusions to Dionysos, Ariadne, and Orpheus, and the theatrical figure of Pantalone.  (In the following paragraph Tacitus is quoted in Latin.)  This dense texture, replete with tropes, foregrounds the verbal medium with less emphasis on the semantic content.  

     After all, what the passage says is that is has no possibility of success, that writing cannot possibly reproduce the moment of lived experience, that in fact lived experience is ineffable and the writer can never hope to convey the feeling of narrated incidents.  Given that denial of language’s ability to mirror life, the writer entertains just as Diana did, by linguistic fireworks and puzzles.  Rhetorical devices such as allusions are showy artifices and every metaphor is a little riddle.  Diana of the Crossways is, as Symons says, “a poetic novel,” and its readers will enjoy the pleasures often associated with poetry.

     In fact Meredith was surely not indifferent to tendentious elements in his tale.  He is quite explicit about his analysis of women’s causes and these were very much in the air as women had, in the generation before the novel’s publication, gained rights to divorce, property ownership, and education, including the medical profession.   Furthermore, the book is in part a roman à clef based on a scandal involving the Honorable Mrs. Norton, Lord Melbourne, Sidney Herbert, John Delane, and others.  Yet these elements are, on every page of the novel, secondary to Meredith’s word-play and verbal ingenuity.  If it is impossible for us to understand Diana’s cleverness through retold anecdotes, we have before us Meredith’s wit, and that, of course, is all we need.

Wilde's Salome as Femme Fatale

  

Wilde wrote Salomé in French, then worked with Lord Alfred Douglas to produce an English translation.  Strauss's opera uses a German version by Hedwig Lachmann.  My comments apply equally to each of these dramas.

    Salomé has little in common with Wilde’s other plays, those drawing room comedies with witticisms and ironic inversions falling thick and fast.  Salomé is less a play than it is a sustained tone poem on the theme of erotic desire, ratcheted up to such an intensity that the sudden murder at the end seems the only way out.  Herod, of course, obsesses over Salomé’s charms, while the young Syrian captain is driven by her to suicide, and the incestuous Herodias grouses with sexual jealousy in the background.  Salomé herself exhibits perhaps the most perverse and ardent compulsion of all, with her  insistence on kissing Iokanaan against his will, whether he be alive or dead. 

     Even without the masterful illustrations by Beardsley and such fevered later re-imaginings as Ken Russell’s 1988 film, the focus of the play is unquestionably desire.  Salomé’s transgressive character was recognized by the censors, and the play was initially banned by the Lord Chamberlain and later performed in a modified version.  When Mahler sought to stage Strauss’s opera in Vienna at the Staatsoper, he was blocked by the censors.   Widely admired by musicians and composers though with a dubious reputation among others, the opera was chosen as the benefit show at the Metropolitan Opera in 1907, but the reaction of prudes on the opera’s Board of Directors led to the show’s cancellation. [1]

     But what is the meaning of all this pent-up desire?  Perhaps the core motive, underlying the harmonics and variations, is the archaic masculine fear of female sexuality expressed in the African practice of female genital mutilation, in the orthodox Jewish idea of a niddah, and in legendary figures such as Lamia, the sirens, Lilith, and Melusina.  In the neolithic period, fertility goddesses seem to have been at the center of religious activities, but later, under monarchies with pantheon headed by a male ruler, the sexual Other was revalued.  Men’s marvel at childbirth combined with helplessness in controlling lust, the predictable anxieties of courtship, and, in many cases, guilt for oppressing women to generate a fear of female supernatural power.  The gift of Eden’s fruit, which doubtless originally signified the good things of the earth, became the cause of a calamitous Fall.  The course of the Odyssey is basically a route around one dangerous female after another in search of the positive example of Penelope as the loyal wife.  Morgan le Fay, succubi, and the real-life persecutions of accused witches

     This archetype descends through myth and then legend into fiction over the centuries without losing popularity.  At the time of Wilde’s play, the mere choice of Salomé as theme was provocative.  By the late nineteenth century her story had become a favorite theme of Symbolist and Decadent authors, notably in Moreau’s paintings and Huysmans’ fiction, but also in works by Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Massenet.  Salomé provided a theme lurid enough to satisfy transgressive tastes, yet remaining largely within Biblical tradition. 

     This notoriety is, in fact, however, only half of the dialectic.  The story in the gospels of Mark and Matthew, though they do not name her, tell the tale of Herodias’ daughter asking for the head of John the Baptist in a narration clearly meant as a sort of lesser crucifixion, a contest of good against evil in which the saints’ martyrdom serves a Providential purpose.  Josephus mentions her as the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas [2], but does not relate the story about John.  Though the princess of Herod’s court is not named until centuries after her time, a certain Salomé, identified in the late Book of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, by Bartholomew the Apostle, and called “Salomé the temptress” is named among those visiting Christ’s empty tomb.

     Unsurprisingly, she is made a heroine even a sort of feminist by a good many recent critics.  The lead perhaps is taken by Kate Millet in her ground-breaking Sexual Politics (1970) when she notes Wiilde’s own identification with the temptress and characterizes the play as a whole as a drama of “homosexual guilt and rejection.”  Before long one critic declared "The Jewish Princess Was a New Woman" and another argued that the play was "a devastating fin-de-siecle attack on the conventions of patriarchal culture."  This attitude influenced views of the politics of the piece, and it became possible to redeem even the ethnocentric stereotypes by claiming that Wilde had written “an Orientalist play that questions the very premises of Oriental discourse.” [3]

     In fact, however, Salomé’’s actions are irredeemably reprehensible.  She is selfish and her passion perverse.  The aesthetic glow that lingers about her derives from sexual energy heightened by the late nineteenth century Romantic notion of the wicked that descended from the popular taste for the Gothic some decades earlier. [4]  Evident in Baudelaire’s title Fleurs du Mal, Verlaine’s poètes maudits, and the slightly later career of Aleister Crowley, the aesthetics are in fact not far distant from the fondness for Nazi imagery among outlaw bikers or for Satanist pentangles among heavy metal fans.  Thus, Salomé’’s behavior is first of all titillating with little or no moral implication. 

     The contemporary readings of Wilde’s protagonist derive from two new complementary innovations he had introduced into the old story.  On the one hand, Wilde emphasizes Salomé’’s agency by stressing her independence from her mother who in the gospels is responsible for asking for John the Baptist’s death.  In the play Salomé acts like a willful teen-ager and ignores her mother (who does ultimately endorse her plan).  This strengthening of her character allows some to see her as an admirable heroine, yet it is decisively undercut by her sudden and violent death at the end ordered by Herod who had earlier seemed quite under her control.  Thus the prerogatives of the patriarchy are reasserted, and the possibility emerges of treating the princess as a tragic hero.

     Such a treatment, though, is unlikely to occur to the viewer whose appreciation of the play more likely resembles that of the listener to a formal concert piece setting forth a theme followed by variations, all charged with emotional electricity.  The image clusters occur and revur like leitmotifs; mentions of the moon, doves, flowers, and the gaze that fixes the other come and go like the corridors and the verbal phrases in Last Year at Marienbad.  The play as a whole may arise, as some have said, from Wilde’s own “forbidden” loves, seen as vicious by the homophobic, but in the end it is a sustained meditation on the dynamo of erotic power itself, whatever the origin or object, here so dramatically explosive as to ruin the protagonist.  Plato himself, to whose loves Wilde appealed so ingenuously in court, would have recognized the “madness” in which the characters are caught. [5]  In the end Wilde’s Salomé is a sensual and emotional experience far more than an intellectual one.  It is less a cautionary parable of a femme fatale than it is a dramatic simulation of sexual excitement, no less powerful for the fact that it is all but universal.

 

 

 

1.  Among those shocked at Strauss’s opera was J. P. Morgan’s daughter Louisa.  The work finally came to the Wiener Staatsoper in 1918 but the Metropolitan did not stage it again until 1934.  Apart from wealthy board members, reaction in New York included the reviewer from the Musical News to whom the “conception of the story is repugnant to Anglo-Saxon minds (“Comments on Events: Salome in New York,” 32 [March 9, 1907]).  This article also quotes several other opinions, among them a writer in the New York Musical Courier who supported the play and feared that its cancellation would make New York a “laughing-stock” in Europe.

2.  Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews (Book XVIII, Chapter 5, 4).

3.  See Jane Marcus’ essay in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library 78 (1974).  The next quotation is from Elliot I. Gilbert, “’Tumult of Image’: Wilde, Beardsley, and Salome,” Victorian Studies 26 (1983) and the last from Yeeyon Im “Oscar Wilde's "Salomé": Disorienting Orientalism,” Comparative Drama, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Winter 2011).   For a more subtle reading see Helen Tookey, “’The Fiend that Smites with a Look’: the Monstrous/Menstruous Woman and the Danger of the Gaze in Oscar Wilde’s Salome,” Literature and Theology Vol. 18, No. 1 (March 2004).

4.  Wilde was far from alone in finding the theme attractive.  There was in fact a bit of a vogue for Salomé during the period, expressed in poetry by Heinrich Heine, Stephane Mallarmé and William Butler Yeats, fiction from Joris-Karl Huysmans, Gustave Flaubert, and Jules Laforgue, and visual art by Gustave Moreau, Lovis Corinth, and Henry Ossawa Tanner.

5.  In the Phaedrus Plato explicitly says that love is madness, yet he adds that it may nonetheless bring the greatest of blessings (sec. 244).

Archives of the First Majority Gallery

America’s susceptibility to celebrity extends even to the arts. We laud the famous to the skies while neglecting those who have never gained the spotlight. We gladly pay premium prices for concert seats to hear a performer we know by reputation and ignore first-rate regional talents. We turn in a literary journal to the names we recognize and never get around to the rest. In order to succeed in the arts one must be as clever about publicity as about one’s art. In this way most artists work in darkness and leave no trace. The merit of an aesthetic work does not entail its longevity.

All the more do those who embrace counter-cultural ideals and eschew conventional markers of achievement prepare their own obscurity. Ted Joans was always just too hip for the mantle of fame while Allen Ginsberg found it fit him well. Patti Smith doggedly pursued every opportunity for advancement, so we can say her name today, while dozens of other punk poets are forgotten.

During the 1970s my wife Patricia Seaton, sometimes called “Ia,” was an exhibiting member of the First Majority Gallery in Berkeley, a pioneering all-female gallery in Berkeley. In a few decades the First Majority, has all but vanished from memory. Virtually nothing of its history is recorded online beyond its place in a few artists’ résumés and scans of old journals listing shows. Surely such grass-roots artistic formations have their own story to tell of the cultural history of our time. I record below some haphazardly surviving records concerning the group which were kept in increasingly battered cardboard boxes through all the artist’s travels and subsequent ventures. Having witnessed so very much of lesser importance preserved apparently forever in digital form, I list these documents here to record available details of one small and twisting tendril winding through the history of the age.

Reading the guest book comments for Patricia’s show, I am struck by the number of visitors who thought the work pointed important new directions. They felt the presence of something meaningful, beautiful, and novel in the arts. Decades later their enthusiasm cannot be recaptured, but it is possible to preserve a few fragmented traces of what once excited it.



Multiple copies exist of some documents.

call for submissions for two group shows during the summer of 1975 signed Ginger, Janet, Judith, Rosalie, and Sheila.

call for submissions for a group show inviting work “whether or not you consider yourself to be an artist,” on the theme of the Great Mother scheduled for April 24, signed “Rosalie, Sheila, Ia, Ginger, and Evelyn.”

call for submissions for a show on the theme “Illumination: words, pictures, & light” opening June 24, 1975.

letter dated June 18, 1975 signed Patricia Seaton indicating a wish to join the collective.

note accepting Seaton’s work for group show July 12, 1975.

“An Interior Landscape” Nov. 3-Dec. 7 (1975) poster with drawing by Ia and, following the title, the words “women’s environment . . .mental contours . . .collective art work.

“Spirits Clothed in Flesh” Jan. 27-Feb. 8 (1976) with drawing by Ia from a painted plate and, following the title, the words “paintings, drawings, ceramics, phantoms demonic & delicious."

“A Women’s Art Show” Oct. 1-Oct.31 (1975) with drawing perhaps by Janet Cannon-Unione including Virginia Atkin-Murray, Janet Cannon-Unione, Evelyn Hinde, Patricia Seaton, Sheila Seguin, Judith Sutliff, and Judy Todd.

Catalogue for “Spirits Clothed in Flesh” including three drawings by Ia.

press release for a slide lecture on “Patriarchal Mutilation of the Great Mother” by Lili Artel on September 18 and 25, 1975.

press release for “Spirits Clothed in Flesh” Jan. 27-Feb. 28 with remarks attributed to Euterpe of Chicago.

Women’s Art Center Newsletter, Winter 1976, with notice of Ia Seaton show, labeled gallery copy.

“The First Majority: Conversation with Sheila Seguin and Ginger Atkin,” four-page document citing a founding statement from February 1974 and list of the current collective members: Ginger Atkin, Rosalie Cassell, Evelyn Hinde, Patricia Seaton, Sheila Seguin, and Judy Todd. The document discusses the gallery and its vision, past shows, the current “Internal Landscape.”

announcement of an April 1 showing of tapes from “Just Us” and from International Women’s Video letters and of a program “Meet the First Majority” on April 25. Both are noted as “women only” events.

poster for the April 25 “Meet the First Majority” program, including “women only.”

poster for first show opening Feb. 15 with a group show including Virginia Atkin-Murray, Janet Cannon-Unione, Rosalie Cassell, Ellyn Rabinowitz, Diane Rusnak, Sheila Seguin, and Judith Sutliff.

poster for “Hindsight,” sculpture and environment by Evelyn Hinde with a drawing (by Hinde?) September 14-October 18 (1975?).

poster for “Bay Area Women: part 2” August 10-September 4, 1975 with unsigned drawing.

poster for “Ghost Images,” paintings, prints, and photos by Judith Sutliff with photo by Sutliff June 15-July 10.

poster for show featuring “The Drawings, Paintings, and Poems of Janet Cannon-Unione and Virginia Atkin-Murray with unsigned drawing.

poster for “Camilla Hall: her paintings, drawings, poetry” March 16-April 15 with drawing by Hall.
poster for Paintings and Sculpture by Sheila Seguin May 17-June 12.

poster for “Witch’s Retort” art by Rosalie Cassell and Judy Todd March 6-April 3, 1976 with unsigned drawing.

poster for the “Great Mother” show including Lina Allertons, Diane Rusnak, Pat Henshaw, Karen Berkan, Lougran O’Connor, Benita Mirabelli, Elizabeth Ennis, Maxene Galkin, January Nice, Leslie Markham, Nan Parry, Sara Sunstein, and Rossi Stewart, April 24-March 29, 1976.

poster for “Bay Area Women” July 12-August 7 with unsigned drawing.

poster for “Womanrise” Amazon art by Virginia Atkin, Dec. 23-Jan. 27 with drawing by Atkin.

poster for video evenings Feb. 9, March 11, and March 25 featuring the Just US Video Collective, the Iris Video Collective and CCAC Women’s Video, the latter two to admit women only.

poster for open poetry readings (women only) in the gallery starting April 9.

poster for lectures Sep. 2 by Evelyn Hinde on Käthe Kollowitz [sic], Sep. 18 Lili Artel in the Great Mother, and Sep. 25 Lili Artel on “Fragmentation of the Great Mother in Patriarchy.”

text of proposal to Berkeley City Government for grant, dated December 1975.

report to Berkeley Civic Arts Commission detailing programs in the First majority Gallery space, undated.

photocopy of new story “First Majority: more than just a gallery” September 1975.

press release following the gallery’s first show opening February 15, 1975, discussing the history of the project, two pages.

“The First Majority: Evolution of a Women’s Gallery in the East Bay” discussing the first show, February 15, 1975, copied from an unknown journal.

copy of article by Brenda Kahn from The Daily Californian February 25, 1975 “New Gall;eryto Shpwcase Women Artists Only.”

Calendar of First majority events for January through March showing numerous programs undocumented elsewhere.

unspecified: letter from Chico State professor asking for slides of “Octopus Woman” for a course on Women and the Arts, newspaper announcements of shows, visitor book with comments for “Spirits Clothed in Flesh,” six pages from what seems to be a gallery sitter’s book, list of Bay Area media outlets, poster for “Persona, a women’s art show" in the Berkeley Library.

Notes on Recent Reading 4 (Sarah Scott, Madam de La Fayette, Wharton]

Sarah Scott’s Millenium (sic) Hall

     Scott’s 1762 novel attracts attention primarily due to its subject matter. In recent decades its depiction of an all-female utopia has justifiably enjoyed considerable attention from feminist critics, but Scott’s themes are more revealing and complex than some reductive summaries might suggest.
     The women of the Millenium Hall commune (critics generally use the original edition’s spelling) live a life in many ways entirely rational. They spend their time in fully human activities, pursuing the arts in an Edenic setting. Each is a refugee from the persecutions of men and each has found, in female affection and support, satisfaction otherwise unavailable. In fact the place has the air of blithe eighteenth century Enlightenment absoluteness: the women, the reader is told, are altogether harmonious. With the conflicts occasioned by gender removed, they can enjoy daily happiness. Passion appears invariably accompanied by error at the least and very often wickedness. The few satisfactory marriages one glimpses are wholly cerebral. Though love between men and women seems virtually always harmful, among the women one hears no hint of lesbianism. The author herself had a very brief disastrous marriage and a longterm relationshop with Lady Barbara Montagu (sometimes considered co-author) during which they put into practice many of the ideas suggested in the novel.
     Nonetheless, Scott is socially conservative enough to present the ladies as endorsing marriage as a general rule and assisting others in finding proper matches even while rejecting life with a man for themselves. Chastity and sexual reputation have such importance in their minds that one woman actually accepts a mismatched marriage rather than allowing a wholly untrue rumor to circulate.
     Indeed, the bliss of Millenium Hall is such that the place might seem as though it must have the ennui of Eden as well as its charms. The critic seeking a route to social reform might note that each woman has come with an independent fortune -- it is markedly easier to construct a utopia if one need not bother about anyone’s earning a living. Still, even the ladies’ sometimes absurd gentility may be read as a response to the very real economic domination of men.
     Radical as it may be in some of the claims on behalf of women, the book is scrupulously conservative in essentials: for instance, claiming that while “every station has its duties, those of the great are more various than those of their inferiors.” Scott’s conservatism is even stronger in matters of religion. Far from ideas like eighteenth century deism, Scott advances a wholly confident orthodoxy, often invoked to place the seal of undeniable truth on the ladies’ contentions. Their spirituality is shallow with one exception: they are philanthropic, helping their poorer neighbors (while not questioning the class system). This benevolence is the most certain evidence of their Christian virtue. In contrast, the sympathetic male narrator has just returned from the slave plantations of the Indies where he made his fortune never, apparently, thinking of the well-being of the workers.
     The narratives of the lives of the groups’ members, while programmatically determined, are often similar to the incidents in novels like Richardson’s. Seductive aggressive males, fainting females, marriage, money, and class generate the incidents. In this way the book conforms to the “conduct novel” which, by setting forth exemplary behavior, both to be emulated and avoided, anticipates the self-help genre which occupies so many best-seller notches today.


de La Fayette’s Princess de Clèves

     More a soap opera than a roman d’analyse, Princess de Clèves depicts a world in which the courtiers spend their time in elaborate intrigues, pursuing power and sex, because they have nothing else to do. However deceitful and selfish their methods, they have exquisitely developed sensibilities. It’s like a despiritualized Genji where every act is a theatrical gesture and refinement is cultivated by all. Vanity here presents in one of its purest forms. Surely the idlers who filled the courts of many absolute monarchs in all parts of the world must have similarly passed their time seeking pleasure while pursuing the more serious occupation of jockeying for influence by backstabbing and lying.
     In this context the heroine is the exception. She excels in every quality admired by the nobles around her. In fact, an annoying habit of the author is to use empty superlatives. Not Madame de Clèves alone, but many characters are the noblest, the most handsome, charming, witty, yet the reader is given virtually no specific detail to make these grand abstractions imaginable. These are less descriptions of individual than they are rhapsodies for beauty that is too beautiful to be quite real.
     Unfortunately for Madame de Clèves, she is also too good to survive. In an amoral court, she is incongruous. Having entered a loveless marriage with little hesitation, she then insists on being faithful, eventually dying for virtue (as her long-suffering husband had done before her). The one who inspired her passionate unfulfilled love, the Duc de Nemours, one learns in a one-sentence paragraph, found that time ameliorated his loss and his love faded.
     The narrative, far from being a psychological masterpiece as some have said, strikes me as melodramatic and sentimental. The court’s aesthetes appreciate their own reaction more than the object of their contemplation. Nonetheless, the reader must admire the novel’s brevity, structure, and the lofty pitch of its abstract ideals.


Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed

     Oddly, toward the end of her career, Edith Wharton produced a work that looks very much like someone else’s first novel, a Bildingsroman (more specifically a Künstlerroman) about an sensitive but awkward Midwesterner experiencing a love-tragedy amid the pretentious New Yorkers. Unlike most critics, Wharton thought this one of her best works. For me the satiric material on the Middle West, reminiscent of Floyd Dell or Sinclair Lewis, is awkwardly done and fits poorly into the plot. For a college graduate in the twenties, with or without literary interests, to take the temple at Delphi for a Christian Science Church, as Weston does, is not quite believable. Similarly, Wharton’s treatment of “modern” styles in fiction has aged poorly. One hears of “pure manly stories of young fellows prospecting in the Yukon” [London] and “descriptions of corrupt society people” [Wharton]. Rauch and his Voodoo poems sound like e. e. cummings with their tradition under a show of modernism, and I suppose Weston himself is based on Wolfe. But where is the strong mainline of modernism, Eliot, Pound, Stein, Joyce? The writers here seem like a shallow bunch. Vernon Lee criticized the book for its “cult chat,” but it is hard to associate these paper dolls with real writers.
     Significantly, the descriptions of Vance’s blockages are okay, while his transports are weak. In fact all the rhapsodies of nature and of psychology sound flat to my ears, and the view of writer as unique seer badly puffed up. The vague concept of “Mothers” is perhaps meant to demonstrate the young writer’s intuitive brilliance, but it sounds rather silly instead. Wharton’s images too often seem like Weston’s, such as the self-dramatizing of feeling “handcuffed and chained” to one’s life.
     The sentimental plot, generated by the virtuous self-control of Halo Spear and Vance Weston, is about to conclude in a conventional happy ending, when, in the space between the beginning and the end of the very last sentence Wharton’s tone switches. At first it seems the two, now each freed of their marriages, can find their destiny with each other: “And when at last he drew her arm through his and walked beside her in the darkness.” Without warning, Vance’s alienation returns: “the creator of imaginary beings must always feel alone.”
     Though myself a “raw product of a Middle-Western town,” I found her literati to be reductive even as caricatures and the love story emotionally simple, which is to say sentimental. I imagine the sequel, The Gods Arrive, is more of the same, but I rather doubt I shall ever find out.