Bibliography
Jul. 17th, 2010 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyNight and Day – Virginia Woolf
Not quite sure why I originally wanted to read this; I think it had something to do with wanting to read more Woolf, and thus is probably tangentially related to the Mirrlees project, although be mogadored if I can remember why. The night and day of the title arises from a number of pairings in the novel, where characters together form night and day; it's quite a formal structural conceit that works with variable success, especially when the inevitable symmetry means that one character falls out of the matrix more or less completely, which is a shame as she's one of the ones that I like the best.
So. The central female protagonist is Katharine Hilbery, the grand-daughter of a famous poet who is forced into helping her mother with her grandfather's biography and assumed to be terribly literary because she's descended from Artists. Her deep and dark secret is that she actually wants to do maths, and finds mathematics far more interesting and exciting than poetry, which bores her to death. She doesn't know quite how to cope with her desires and what is expected of her (devotion to her mother, marriage to a Respectable Artistic Man), and thus lives a strangely distanced life from her own experience that Woolf manages to capture rather beautifully.
Her finance is William Rodney, an arty type who is terribly traditional and concerned with appearances, and believes himself to be deeply in love with Katharine - which fact soon reveals itself to not actually be true when she finally agrees to marry him. It turns out that he's an odd sort of jealous of her but actually doesn't see her as a woman he really wants to live the rest of his life with (not that he ever quite admits this to himself, but it's quite clear). Their conversations and interactions with each other are just... oh, horrid. Absolutely horrid and awkward, Katharine trying to do her best to do what is expected of her despite the fact she really doesn't care for William, William getting increasingly frustrated at Katharine's lack of proper feeling, the constant missing each other. She never even tells him about her interest in maths, for goodness sake. It is incredibly sad, and I am very glad that this state of affairs doesn't continue.
The other male protagonist is Ralph Denham, a man from a completely different social class, who has met Katharine once and got infatuated with her. He doesn't like her much when he's in her company, but he leaves her and goes all swoony. He does his best not to give in to the fantasy image, and does a jolly good job of recognising it for what it is - and yet. He is actually jolly good value, terribly intellectual about his emotions and so on, but genuinely respectful of who Katharine is rather than who he thinks she should be. This is helped by him not being in the same social class or indeed in the slightest bit literary, I think.
The other female protagonist is treated bloody badly by Ralph; she is Mary Datchet and is pretty much Katharine's mirror image - an independent woman living on her own income, volunteering for a suffragist organisation, hosting poetry readings and political meetings in her small apartment, no obligations - except for a massive unrequited crush on Ralph, and poor, poor Mary. She drops out of the story when Katharine's cousin Cassandra comes on the scene, which is a jolly shame - she's by far the more interesting female character and one gets the sense that she's too - emancipated? for Woolf to want to explore much further. Woolf is more interested in the issues involved in growing beyond one's expectations of How Things Should Be or How People Think One Ought To Act, and such issues of social mores consume the novel. Mary has, however, already stepped beyond most of them. Katharine, Ralph and William have a hell of a lot of growing still to do, and the book follows them as they grope their way forward. And I mean grope - no perfect protagonists here.
I did enjoy this, but it's possibly more hard work than it needs to be. Mind you, it is still an early Woolf effort, and she's clearly still getting warmed up.
for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf - ntozake shange
This is one of those books that made it onto the list as I've been reading more about women's writing in America; Shange is a black feminist who began her writing life in the 1970s. shange follows similar conventions to bell hooks in not using conventions of capitalisation and Anglo-American spelling as part of that identity, which I respect here. for colored girls is formally en-genred as a choreopoem. Individual poems were written, then twenty were threaded together into a musical performance with choreography. Apparently the staged version was very successful on Broadway; it was shange's first major work, and the one she is most well known for now.
I have to say that I do rather miss not having had the experience of seeing for colored girls in performance. Some of the poems jump off the page as beautiful, vivid, harsh and sharp representations of lived experience, drawing laughter or tears, depending on the poem's mood. But some of them don't jump, and you read them with a sense of missingness, that they have lost a part of themselves because you do not have the dance or the music they need to make them come alive. To not see the performance is... hard. I mean, play scripts are somewhat different, in that I can conjour characters. But I have no mental imagery for dancing, and certainly no idea of what the right sort of dancing for this kind of work would look like. So I read the text, and feel at once enriched for discovering some of the jewels that work and impoverished for not seeing them all in their right medium. There is a DVD of a 1982 performance on Netflix, so I should probably make up for not seeing a live performance by at least experiencing that.
Not quite sure why I originally wanted to read this; I think it had something to do with wanting to read more Woolf, and thus is probably tangentially related to the Mirrlees project, although be mogadored if I can remember why. The night and day of the title arises from a number of pairings in the novel, where characters together form night and day; it's quite a formal structural conceit that works with variable success, especially when the inevitable symmetry means that one character falls out of the matrix more or less completely, which is a shame as she's one of the ones that I like the best.
So. The central female protagonist is Katharine Hilbery, the grand-daughter of a famous poet who is forced into helping her mother with her grandfather's biography and assumed to be terribly literary because she's descended from Artists. Her deep and dark secret is that she actually wants to do maths, and finds mathematics far more interesting and exciting than poetry, which bores her to death. She doesn't know quite how to cope with her desires and what is expected of her (devotion to her mother, marriage to a Respectable Artistic Man), and thus lives a strangely distanced life from her own experience that Woolf manages to capture rather beautifully.
Her finance is William Rodney, an arty type who is terribly traditional and concerned with appearances, and believes himself to be deeply in love with Katharine - which fact soon reveals itself to not actually be true when she finally agrees to marry him. It turns out that he's an odd sort of jealous of her but actually doesn't see her as a woman he really wants to live the rest of his life with (not that he ever quite admits this to himself, but it's quite clear). Their conversations and interactions with each other are just... oh, horrid. Absolutely horrid and awkward, Katharine trying to do her best to do what is expected of her despite the fact she really doesn't care for William, William getting increasingly frustrated at Katharine's lack of proper feeling, the constant missing each other. She never even tells him about her interest in maths, for goodness sake. It is incredibly sad, and I am very glad that this state of affairs doesn't continue.
The other male protagonist is Ralph Denham, a man from a completely different social class, who has met Katharine once and got infatuated with her. He doesn't like her much when he's in her company, but he leaves her and goes all swoony. He does his best not to give in to the fantasy image, and does a jolly good job of recognising it for what it is - and yet. He is actually jolly good value, terribly intellectual about his emotions and so on, but genuinely respectful of who Katharine is rather than who he thinks she should be. This is helped by him not being in the same social class or indeed in the slightest bit literary, I think.
The other female protagonist is treated bloody badly by Ralph; she is Mary Datchet and is pretty much Katharine's mirror image - an independent woman living on her own income, volunteering for a suffragist organisation, hosting poetry readings and political meetings in her small apartment, no obligations - except for a massive unrequited crush on Ralph, and poor, poor Mary. She drops out of the story when Katharine's cousin Cassandra comes on the scene, which is a jolly shame - she's by far the more interesting female character and one gets the sense that she's too - emancipated? for Woolf to want to explore much further. Woolf is more interested in the issues involved in growing beyond one's expectations of How Things Should Be or How People Think One Ought To Act, and such issues of social mores consume the novel. Mary has, however, already stepped beyond most of them. Katharine, Ralph and William have a hell of a lot of growing still to do, and the book follows them as they grope their way forward. And I mean grope - no perfect protagonists here.
I did enjoy this, but it's possibly more hard work than it needs to be. Mind you, it is still an early Woolf effort, and she's clearly still getting warmed up.
for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf - ntozake shange
This is one of those books that made it onto the list as I've been reading more about women's writing in America; Shange is a black feminist who began her writing life in the 1970s. shange follows similar conventions to bell hooks in not using conventions of capitalisation and Anglo-American spelling as part of that identity, which I respect here. for colored girls is formally en-genred as a choreopoem. Individual poems were written, then twenty were threaded together into a musical performance with choreography. Apparently the staged version was very successful on Broadway; it was shange's first major work, and the one she is most well known for now.
I have to say that I do rather miss not having had the experience of seeing for colored girls in performance. Some of the poems jump off the page as beautiful, vivid, harsh and sharp representations of lived experience, drawing laughter or tears, depending on the poem's mood. But some of them don't jump, and you read them with a sense of missingness, that they have lost a part of themselves because you do not have the dance or the music they need to make them come alive. To not see the performance is... hard. I mean, play scripts are somewhat different, in that I can conjour characters. But I have no mental imagery for dancing, and certainly no idea of what the right sort of dancing for this kind of work would look like. So I read the text, and feel at once enriched for discovering some of the jewels that work and impoverished for not seeing them all in their right medium. There is a DVD of a 1982 performance on Netflix, so I should probably make up for not seeing a live performance by at least experiencing that.
