Victorian bad girls

[sartorias]

I was also going to mention having ripped through a Frances Hodgson Burnett last night late, as it was far too hot to sleep, called The Barbarian.. It's pretty slight, though it stands out from many of hers in that the heroine is unrepentantly American. Burnett, who never met a noble title she didn't worship, shifts back to her roots in her Mary

Comments

[queenoftheskies]

I'm compiling a list of all these recommendations you've been posting. I'd love to check them out when time permits.

I'm fascinated by your comments regarding steampunk. Do you think it would work in a truly Victorian setting, as opposed to the alternate history/universe type of setting?

[sartorias]

I think that depends on the readership? I do think a great story could be got from the tensions inherent in the changes of technology vs a hearkening back to a (perceived) good old days.

Well, actually, a great many of the mid-century books are just that. Middlemarch is definitely about that, with the heroine championing a modern hospital in the teeth of resistance. But many of those books are set in a kind of amorphous previous generation, i.e. previous to the noise and horror of trains mucking up the countryside with their noise and speed.

A sidestep: one of the most horrific descriptions in Dickens comes in Dombey and Son: you think at first he's describing the effect of an earthquake or some natural disaster, but no, you discover that it's the total destruction of a poor neighborhood in order to ram the railroad through. (Because, exactly like now, where freeways somehow never are built through the land owned by the rich, it was the poor who must be displaced to benefit everyone else with the new form of transportation

[whswhs]

I'm ambivalent about steampunk as it is now. I actually wrote the game supplement on it for Steve Jackson Games (which was a good start to my game writing career) . . . but steampunk was a bit different back then: It hadn't drawn in the masses of costumers and makers and other mainly visually oriented people. For me what was compelling about the genre was "here are the Victorian technological changes than can be used as an analog for our society's technological changes"-whether real tech such as the telegraph or unrealized possibilities such as the analytical engine. I find it hard to be excited about purely decorative treatments of the past, and current steampunk often seems to tend that way.

[sartorias]

Yeah, certain aspects do seem to be all about the pretty clothes and shiny orreries, and there is a subset of rather self-congratulatory "Oh, look how very modern I am in my leather corset and goggles and Attitudes, unlike all these niminy-piminy peeps who bow down to the outmoded past."

[asakiyume]

I think the thing that seems interesting about stories by someone like Meade is precisely that there *are* consequences that the character cares about. If you don't care at all about society, or if you think the rules are dumb, it makes your decision an awful lot easier--and that's the problem with a lot of the modern books set in the past. It's hard to make a persuasive character nowadays who, say, cares deeply about her virginity, because a majority anglophone readers (not all! but a majority, I'd guess) not only don't care about it, but really can't get into the mindset of caring. They might be able to think about it in terms of the health risk (the pregnancy = possible death thing), and they can understand the social consequences for the era.... but they think the attitudes that are behind those consequences are stupid. (I'm obviously generalizing about readers, but you know what I mean?) Whereas, even if someone like Meade also thought, personally, that they were stupid, she was much more steeped in them, and so for her and her

[sartorias]

That's exactly it. If everyone thinks keeping your virginity is stupid, that reputation is stupid, that going to church is stupid, etc etc etc, and not only are there no real consequences but the story rewards them for their attitude . . . well, then what we have are modern people in bustles.

Again, nothing wrong with it. Many modern readers will find that world convincing, and want the protags to represent their own worldview.

Sidestep: the other day, my book group decided to do a read-aloud of Sheridan's School for Scandal. It was tremendous fun, but afterwards, some of the younger members of the group were commenting on the hidden assumptions in the play. "Hey, this is almost sympathetic to the Jewish character," one noted. "Really unusual for the time, wasn't it? I wouldn't have even noticed that, before I joined this group."

[asakiyume]

That's very cool about the comments on reading School for Scandal. I definitely feel as if conversations about literature and about these sorts of issues--along with more general issues (racism, sexism, colonialism, etc.)--make me a more sensitive reader (and, I hope, writer...)

[fidelioscabinet]

In your Odd Coincidence of the Week Department, I just watched a production of that (Broadway Theatre Archives series) courtesy of Netflix. The costumes were wonderful (a real Macaroni! Mrs. Candour's panniers were so wide she had to fold them up to get through narrow spaces!) but they also caught the social significance of the things Sheridan is taking digs at.

[houseboatonstyx]

I can't 'get' steampunk either, for much the same reason! I grew up reading the real Kipling, and MacDonald, and Nesbit, and Colette, and L.M. Montgomery, and Burnett, and Rose Macaulay!, and and and. And nobody wore goggles or went out in corsets! (Except me, at age 6, in my grandmother's corset, with real whalebones, but no rose.)

[sartorias]

Well, they might have worn corsets, but NOT as outerwear!

But I know what you mean.

[whswhs]

A different direction of departure can be found in Kipling's two-part story "William the Conqueror." William, despite her name (which Kipling never explains), is a young woman, living in India with her brother, who is in the Civil Service. She travels with him and his friend to a remote district where they have been sent on famine relief. The story is a story of courtship, but the surface of the story is about desperately hard work and struggling with despair. It's perhaps the most attractive of Kipling's relatively few stories about courtship, at least to my taste.

[sartorias]

He really didn't do courtship, did he?

Actually, he really didn't do women.

[whswhs]

Curiously enough, though, he admired Jane Austen extravagantly, and her novels are filled with women and courtship.

[sartorias]

One of his oddest stories is "The Janeites." I suspect he didn't do women because he didn't grow up around them day to day, though he certainly was related to some very, very strong female personalities (the Macdonald sisters, etc)

[sartorias]

I wish I could afford JSTOR. The others look interesting! Thanks.