Dear Serial Readers,
This story, and the series of "Scenes," ends with hope and loss--quite a fitting closure for Eliot's budding realism. Janet rallies forward into grey-haired age, and although she has no picture-perfect ending, she does have financial security, due to her inheritance as a widow, and a reasonably gratifying life. This story about an Evangelical curate who is subject to harassment and ridicule yet proves to be a deeply compassionate person--the best of the lot of the clergymen in the series (although the other two weren't *bad*)--for me, this story redeems the sequence. I say this because I'm wondering how many people started reading "Amos Barton" and then bailed, from boredom or something else? I'd love to hear about that. I still am inclined to think these early stories are trying out the "realism is boring" possibility, but this last story realizes the power of suspense, and dramatic incident, and the psychological realism of the title character--not a minister but an abused and despairing and alcoholic wife. That deathbed kiss between Tryan and Janet suggests the hint of a deeper, even sexual love, a potential marriage that does not happen: something we see often in Eliot's novels. The very last sentence of the story mentions Tryan's "lips" again. A lost opportunity that Tryan seems to comprehend.
There were bits in this last installment that also reminded me of those later novels: the deathbed scene of Dempster who seems about to make some kind of revelation made me think of Mrs Archer at the end of "The Lifted Veil." And the fast-forward of the last paragraphs reminded me of the ending of THE MILL ON THE FLOSS and the sense of survival in the wake of loss.
Finally I wanted to say that, unlike Kari, I don't think Eliot is "anti-religion." I just think she's critical of doctrinal rigidity, and so sometimes seems to castigate religious figures and religion in her fiction. But clearly she believes in the power of human compassion to bring about some kind of spiritual (and practical, daily) redemption. As I've said before, Tryan's talent to understand--to read rightly--Janet's struggles through his own experience forecasts other characters with this capacity in later novels, some of them clergymen (like Farebrother).
After this experiment with the serialization of a series of stories or "scenes," Eliot turns to novels, and although she writes two more stories ("The Lifted Veil" and "Brother Jacob"), only the second was serialized across a few months and is a self-contained story rather than these loosely linked three. I'm curious what these stories can tell us about the serial form.
Onward, Serial Readers, to Dickens' MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT! Dickens wrote this novel just after his trip to the US, and after he published AMERICAN NOTES, about those travels; so we might think of the novel as the fictional counterpart to the NOTES. Published in 19 monthly installments (the last a double-header), the first appeared in Jan. 1843, and consists of chaps. 1-3 (but not the Preface, which Dickens wrote after completing the novel).
For next week: MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT, chaps. 1-3! Spread the word!
Serially yours,
Susan
2 comments:
I just wanted to mention how excited I am to be reading Martin Chuzzlewit! My apologies for falling off the wagon with Scenes these past few weeks...
I have to start by saying, I used this book as inspiration for life this week, much like Gabriel Betteredge used Robinson Crusoe in The Moonstone. Not that I opened it at random. I am leaving Pomona this week and was thinking about all the goodbyes I’ll be saying, and I had just read about Janet tending to Tryan in his last months, focusing more on her gratitude than on her sorrow. That is my inspiration for how to treat these partings.
I was thinking about what it is that Janet repents, and it seems that in addition to her alcohol addiction she repents her earlier mockery of Tryan. Our narrator likes a mocking style, though of course he mocks types rather than specific living people. I thoroughly enjoyed the mockery of the opening two paragraphs of this section, where the narrator comes down on the side of the particular—in this case, the particular sinner—rather than on the side of the statistical and general. This emphasis returns with a new tone in the last paragraph of the story. Here, Tryan’s life is shown to be meaningfully remembered in Janet’s happy and caring life after his death.
Oh! And her husband died! It seemed to me to be the useful narrative choice to keep him alive long enough for Janet to forgive him and have her own emotional needs met, but not long enough for her to have to choose to tend to him or Tryan when Tryan is dying, or for us to see his inevitable fall back into cruelty. It seems there was a little hint that if Janet loved him enough and was strong enough he could change, but fortunately that was merely a hint, and for the most part she does not think she can change him.
I did find this story provocative and well-structured, and I find Janet quite likable: both flawed and wonderful. But I don’t think I would want to spend the sustained time on it to write an article! Have fun with it, Serial Susan!
I didn't find the stories boring, exactly, I just didn't like the tone or narrator much. Certainly lots happens in each story, a melodramatic lot, it seemed to me. This last story is actually the least eventful, in terms of plot, with the most melodrama embedded in Tryan's story of his harm of his earlier lover. At least, I find this story the least eventful, the most satisfyingly close to those ideas I formed about realism a an undergrad. Ideas formed so long ago; and no doubt so bumper-sticker-ish! I started to read The Lifted Veil by mistake when it was Janet's Repentance, and I had to give up in dismay over what seemed a surfeit of melodrama to me.
So, I feel that I liked this story best of the three because to me it seemed the most realist and the most compassionate, both.
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