Movie: Lizzie, about Lizzie Borden. With Chloe Sevigney and Kristen Stewart

I wasn't feeling great today, so I watched Lizzie, a movie I've wanted to see for awhile, on HBO Max. It's not supposed to be nonfiction, but it sticks close to the facts--except that it combines Uncle John with the town constable. This is unfair. The real Constable/Sheriff did a great job, actually, while the real Uncle John was indeed a shady character. As shady as he is in the movie, I don't know, but rather shady.

This movie tries to answer the Why more than the How. It shows that Lizzie did indeed commit the murders. It is very well directed and very well acted. If you have an interest in Lizzie Borden, it is well worth your time. If you don't, though, this may be a tough sell for you. It stretched the truth a little, but it really focuses on Lizzie Borden's possible lesbianism, and Bridget's, too, for that matter. I disagree with this approach for two reasons. A) though her lesbianism is possible, it isn't definitely proven in anything I've ever read--and this was the most heavily-covered crime of the 1890s, and it's still very popular. I'm not saying she wasn't gay. I'm just saying it isn't established fact. She did provably live with an actress from NH and NY for awhile at Maplecroft, but that doesn't mean she was heavily active as a gay woman. Had she been, someone would've proven it so. No one did, and no one has. And, B) Her possible lesbianism doesn't matter in terms of whether she committed the murders. She definitely and provably did, and her being gay actually didn't have anything to do with it. I'll come back to that.

The biggest difference of this movie, compared to other movies/shows/books, etc., is that Lizzie killed Abby while naked. John Douglas, in his book The Cases That Haunt Us, doubts that she did. (He mentions the movie, and the Elizabeth Montgomery flick.) He says No simply because Victorian women of a high class wouldn't do such a thing. I agree with almost everything Douglas has said about any crime or culprit in any of his books, but I disagree here. The problem with that logic is that it's the same thought the all-male jury had when they voted Lizzie not guilty. They simply couldn't believe a Victorian woman could commit these murders. They were very wrong. There was definitely a temporary insanity going on with Lizzie that day, and crazed people do things they wouldn't normally do, by definition. Now, this doesn't mean that she did kill Abby while naked, but it also doesn't mean she didn't. Being naked solves the problem of quickly washing in a basin (the house didn't have a tub or shower, or piping of any kind; Andrew was a miser in many ways), burning the clothes in the stove or fireplace, and re-dressing. Ultimately this doesn't matter; there's plenty of evidence that she killed Abby Borden. But the movie goes into Why, beyond the financial reasons.

The movie shows Bridget, the housekeeper, as a lover of Lizzie's, which is almost definitely false. It shows Bridget stripping naked to kill Andrew because he'd been sexually assaulting her. (And of failing to kill him, so Lizzie did, instead.) This is also not a proven thing, though it is a very commonly expressed option. It was common at the time for some wealthy men to assault the hired help. The movie also insinuates that he'd been doing the same to Lizzie beforehand. This has also never been proven, though it was not unheard of. In fact, it's a bit of an 1890s Victorian stereotype. But commonality isn't proof. John Douglas thinks it's possible that he did maybe assault Lizzie. I've read that in a few places, and that her kleptomania, the overkill, and other behaviors were indicative of that. But it's never been proven, and commonality isn't proof. I like to stick to the facts. And, again, I think the overkill could've been due solely to the proven fact that Andrew was leaving Abby almost everything in the will, and snubbing his daughters. This also explains why Abby was killed first, by an hour-and-a-half. His last existing will stated that in his demise, Abby got everything, but that if she deceased first, the money goes to his daughters. Which is what happened. Had he died first, the money immediately goes to Abby, and if she dies, even moments later, the money goes to her family--and Lizzie and Emma get nothing. That was reason enough for the overkill, IMO. Provably, before and after the murders, Lizzie cared a lot for her perceived social standing. An awful lot. For example, after the acquittal, she and her sister had millions. She could've gone anywhere in the world and started over. She could've lived in luxury anywhere. Changed her name. Become a new person. Been loved by new people. Instead, she returns to Fall River, buys Maplecroft and has that name engraved on the stairs and a gate--unusual for the time, even amongst the very rich--and lives on the hill, where she'd provably said a ton of times that she always wanted to be. It's just blocks from the modest house/murder scene. And the town ignored her. And she never left.

I'll backtrack for a second. It's almost definitely not true that Bridget and Lizzie were lovers for a few reasons. First, there were no secrets in that house, and nobody proved they were lovers. (Admittedly, it's also possible that nobody from law enforcement ever asked. Such questions were not asked--and the law enforcement did a good job here. Even though 90% of the city's police were at Rocky Point that day!) Second, Bridget would never have jeopardized her job like that. Plenty of evidence showed that she needed it badly, and that she liked working there. Which leads to, third, she and the two sisters have not been proven to actually get along. Lizzie and Emma called her Maggie, after the former housekeeper, and that may also have been a possibly-negative name for Irish help in general. Andrew and Emma called her by her actual name, and there's a ton of evidence that she really liked and respected Emma. And Bridget was not one who would lie well enough to get away with it. And she almost definitely wasn't in the house at all when either of them were murdered. I'll get back to that.

So, about the time of the murder, and the suspects. I've never read anywhere how incredibly convenient it was that Lizzie was the only one in the house at the time. If I were to write a book about all this--which I hope to hell I will--I would focus on how much Emma, Bridget and maybe (but probably not) Uncle John had to know about the murders in advance. I say this because a) Emma went to see friends in Fairhaven for a few days before the morning of the murders. Okay, she did this often, but it's still a coincidence that she and Bridget and Uncle John were all out of the house at the same time. But it's also been proven that Emma waited a few days to return when she was informed of the murders. There were three or four train trips between Fall River and Fairhaven before she finally took one. You get the call--yes, a phone call--that your father and step-mother have been murdered, and you...wait a few days to return? Seems like she wanted it all to blow over a bit, to get her bearings, to rehearse what she was going to say and do, doesn't it? And b) Bridget was washing windows and hanging up laundry the whole day. Sure, washing all the windows of the house is an all-day job, but she is coincidentally doing them on this day. And, she was violently ill that day, provably throwing up lots of times that day. Whether it was because of another failed all-family (or, accidentally, for Bridget) poisoning, or whether it was because Andrew was so cheap, he'd made everyone eat bad mutton stew for a few days (both have been proven; Lizzie went to three or four places that week to buy poison, which she said she needed to kill lice on capes and coats. Every store proprietor refused to sell it to her--because she'd bought some weeks before, and because you needed a prescription at the time to buy poison for any reason, and she never had one)--still, do you climb ladders and stand in the August heat all day if you're nauseous and throwing up all day? You do if you have to be out of the house and seen by others, right? Because she was seen by neighbors and by people on the busy street. The house was sandwiched between other homes and the busy street, and still is. And, c) Uncle John was again walking around town that day, as he had the previous few days he'd stayed over. He'd been doing small errands for Andrew, his brother, and he'd also just been hanging around town. But the day of the murders, when he approached the house, he was seen lingering outside for a few hours, eating pears from their tree, standing around the yard, talking to people. You see tons of townspeople, and the police and doctors, at your brother's house, where you've been a few days, and you don't break down, cry, yell, push past people to get inside, to see if everyone's all right? Seems just like Emma in Fairhaven, doesn't it? 

Emma and Bridget had a life-long falling out with Lizzie. Bridget, after she was brought back from the inquest and testifying, packed up, spent time with people in the city, and ultimately moved to Montana. (My novel starts there. Bridget had gotten deathly sick at some point, and told a loved one she had something about the case to confess. But she got better before she did, and apparently never again spoke of it.) Emma moved in with Bridget in Maplecroft for awhile. She left during the time Lizzie had tons of parties there for her actress lover--who also left her quickly. Emma moved to NH and lived in solitude, unmarried and without lovers or children, just as Lizzie did. They'd also had an earlier falling out while Lizzie was in prison awaiting trial, but reconciled before they split again.

So the movie doesn't show any of that. It focuses on the unnecessary (to evidence and to history), possible gayness of Lizzie and Bridget. Some nice touches in the movie include:

--using the same hatchet that Andrew had used on her favorite birds when she'd broken into his office and into Abby's room and stolen jewelry. The killing of the birds is a possibly apocryphal story that John Douglas didn't think actually happened. Andrew was said to be cheap, cold and cruel, but not necessarily a killer, of animals or otherwise. I agree, because I think he'd be too cheap to sacrifice eggs and meat later. Anyway, that same hatchet was then washed thoroughly by Lizzie, and then she used it to kill more birds, so that when it was found, the blood tested would just be the birds'. The movie shows her breaking off the wooden handle and burning that, to get rid of the fingerprints.

This is awesome stuff! It explains the real hatchet that was found and put into evidence as the murder weapon, minus the shaft. The labs did test it and it did have just birds' blood and hair on it. This did make the police look bad at the actual trial. This is great stuff, except--could Lizzie be as CSI aware as we are today? Could she have known to do that, knowing the police would find it, test it, and look bad, thereby making her look more innocent? I don't think so. I'm not saying she wasn't dumb or calculating; I'm saying nobody in 1893 would know to do this, for these reasons. But that's a nice irony, using the same hatchet as Andrew had to kill him, and then to hide her guilt by killing her favorite birds with it, as he is said to have done. But I don't think so. Could she have done this, in a fit of frenzy, just in case? Maybe. If so, she was lucky. But during the investigation and the trial, she had in fact been very lucky. Today, the labs would find microscopic particles of their blood on it. Or, the police just got unlucky and bagged the wrong hatchet. There had to be others. Or, maybe she just got rid of it somewhere entirely.

--after killing Andrew, in a moment of love and pity, she placed a pillow, and then his folded coat, beneath his very bloody head. This is great, too. There had never been a pillow beneath his head, just his folded jacket, and this has perplexed us for over a hundred years. Would a miser infamous for his cheapness fold his expensive coat like a pillow and take a nap on it, awkwardly, in a half-seated position, on the couch? Investigators say No, but the evidence shows that he did. He'd been whacked with the hatchet while his head was on the folded coat, close to the arm of the couch, while his feet were still on the floor, like he'd just passed out. This was very possibly the case, as he'd also been sick from his own ripe mutton stew (and maybe a little poison) and he'd just returned from overseeing a few of his businesses and property, on a very hot day. He could've just sat down, realized he was going to pass out, and folded his coat and half-lied down and passed out. It's plausible. But what this movie shows, that he was killed while simply sitting there, and in the process he'd fallen sideways with his feet still on the floor, and that Lizzie had lovingly placed the coat beneath his head afterwards--Man, that just fits his personality better, and it's just a helluva nice touch. Haven't you ever fallen asleep on an arm of a couch when you can't find a pillow? Have you put a coat or a backpack beneath your head moments before you passed out? I've done both. Behaviorists and profilers like John Douglas (and I'm an acolyte) would like that, too. He's shown a ton of times how when someone kills a loved one, they do something loving and personal--like but a blanket over the body, cover the face, fold the hands over the stomach, or in this case, give the father a pillow that he wouldn't have given himself.

Well, that's it! Thanks for reading my geek-out about Lizzie Borden and the case. Lizzie is currently streaming on HBOMax.

A Somewhat Victorian Life--A Book Review

Under discussion: Sarah A. Chrisman's This Victorian Life.

I first became interested in reading this book while I was researching books about living in Victorian New England. I found a clip online of a modern man looking like a Victorian man jumping on the back of a two-wheeled Victorian bicycle and then sort of leap-frogging to the top of the gigantic front wheel. Beneath this clip was an article that was itself mostly well-written, but angry towards this modern / Victorian man. The gist of the articles anger can be summed up by saying the writer was pissed off at the attitude of the bicycle man and his wife. The wife, as it turned out, wrote this book.

So I read the book hoping for New England Victorian-era stuff and got current-day Washington state married couple living like they're in the Victorian Era, but with the internet and other conveniences. I have to admit that I also read it to see what the article writer was so pissed off about. So this couple wants to mostly pretend they live in the Victorian Era, minus all the horrible class and racial struggles that went on, and forgetting that they wouldn't be able to live where they do (on the Puget Sound) because that wasn't part of America yet, and they'd have to displace indigenous Indians to live there. But I have some Victorian things around here (an 1895 drum table; two 1870s chairs; an 1890s rocker with the original leather headrest and seat, and pins in the leather, and some 1888 Old Judge tobacco baseball cards) and I love certain homey-like, fantasy aspects, like woodstoves, and candlelight, etc.

I read this thinking it would be another example of some eccentric but determined people trying to live their lives as they wish, and modern America not leaving them alone. I was ready to appreciate what they do, and to defend them.

While I do (mostly) appreciate what they're trying to do, and while I do steadfastly defend their right to do it, I have to say with regret that the article writer had a point: Chrisman's (and, to a lesser extent, her husband's) tone and attitude are irksome, and the way she states things, and the way she is able to devote an incredible amount of time to things like bread-baking, sewing, and looking for those little ornamental things that hung off women's clothing--well, he was right: her tone is terrible, and it will at least make you annoyed, if not outright angry.

Chrisman isn't so much fascinated by the Victorian Era as much as she is horrified by the present era. She runs to the later Victorian Era, I suspect, because it's the newest oldest era we could still mostly retreat to. There is a lot of attitude towards modern technology (of which I am also not a complete fan, as I believe it we have let it further ostracize and de-humanize us) and towards modern people. This is fair enough, as far as it goes, except that she also needs the modern reader to read her books and blog, as that's how she makes the majority of her income. (She also seems to have an at-home massage business. She mentions this once or twice, but never once refers to a client. Left unanswered is whether she would massage the client in her Victorian wear.)

A further point raised by the many upset people on the internet (and this does, in fact, seem like overkill, despite the Chrisman's tone and attitude) is that she never refers to the horrors of Colonialism of the Victorian Era, whether it be the American's treatment of African slaves or American Indians, or the British conquest of lands and the virtual annihilation of those lands' people. Though I suspect that the average Victorian never gave a thought to the slaughter of whales, for example, that provided much of the oil that lit their sconces, as a self-proclaimed expert and living historian of the time, she should have at least touched upon it.

She never does.

And so it all comes across as play-acting as life, or of a lifestyle in a vacuum. Yes, she uses Victorian iceboxes, and heaters, and bicycles, and clothing, and furniture, and so on--but it seems like she's maybe a Victorian Era Barbie, and these are all of her props and toys. It seems a willfully narrow life. And more than a little bit, it's a big, giant ef-you to this modern era and to everyone (besides her friends) in it. She never once touches upon that, either. So this is a tunnel-visioned memoir.

Having said all that, there's a lot of really interesting things in here, if you're interested in history, or in the Victorian Era, or in trying to at least a little bit live like that era, or to understand the similarities and differences between that era and ours. You may find, like I did, that you don't need to read long chapters about finding Victorian buttons, let's say, but it's okay to skip some pages every now and then. I don't normally advise this, but I had to skip over the occasional off-puttingly toned sentences, and so I was already skipping.

I'm guessing that Chrisman does not realize she produces this tone in writing. And if she does it in writing, she'll do it when talking, as well. Because she does not seem aware of her tone, or of people's response to it, or of social cues and such, I do suspect an at least slight disorder, such as Asperger's. (A retreat from your current era or reality often has a traumatic event as the cause of that withdrawal, or escape. I can only guess as to what that may be, but the guess makes me feel badly for her. I'm guessing that she suffered an event [or events] that she never mentions in this book. Maybe she will in a future memoir. But this is one thing her [many] critics haven't considered: The trauma that made her withdraw. Sort of like Dickinson, in a way)

She also reminds me of a time in which a high school kid told me she didn't like her English teacher because this teacher didn't realize how offensive she was when she talked to her students. This teacher, apparently, thought she was simply communicating, but actually she was consistently offensive. (I happened to know the woman this kid spoke of, and I'm tellin' you, the kid was spot on.) Anyway, Chrisman strikes me as someone very much like that. She'd be offensive and off-putting and not know it. She's the one at a party (though she would not go to parties) who you want to get away from, but you can't because she does say some interesting things every now and then that makes you stay to listen to her talk (at) you some more, which then makes you regret immediately that you've done that.

She's an obviously talented internet researcher (which is a very heavy irony she never addresses). If you're reading this book, you'll be interested in much of the information she provides. A lot of it I already knew from my own research, but there was a lot I didn't know. For instance, her inclination to only buy from companies around since Victorian times will give you a surprisingly long list of such companies. She also goes into some interesting local and natural history. And this is really the closest I've seen of a living person trying to live as a Victorian, including all of the daily nuances and problems that only living like that, and not just researching living like that, can give you.

Chrisman does mention the hatemail they get, and the vicious ill-behavior they have to suffer through, which she says happens on a literally daily basis. I'm not surprised by this, and you probably won't be, either. It only re-fuels their fire to get away. Though I was annoyed and sometimes borderline angry at the tone and attitude shown by the author and her husband, this also made me angry. Why can't we just leave each other alone? They're eccentric, and perhaps a little off-putting, but, hell, can't we all just get along?

So, yeah, a mixed bag here. Sometimes I had to put the book down in annoyance because I just couldn't take the tone anymore, but I always picked it back up again, curious about what new interesting thing I might learn next. If you read this in that vein, it'll be productive and worthwhile.

Dracula

If the Mystery Science Theater 3000 guys got together with a Victorian expert and a diehard fan of everything vampire, and then they all read Bram Stoker's Dracula together, they would write The Annotated Dracula, by Leslie Klinger. As it turns out, Leslie Klinger is all of those types of people, as well as an extremely intelligent and philosophical guy. It reads like you and Klinger got together and read every single word of Dracula (not an easy task), which has something to say on almost every single page.

You'll learn more than you thought possible about Victorian England. You'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about the railway schedules for almost every train in England and Europe. (I'd forgotten how much train travel there was in this book.) You'll also learn much about specific London streets and whereabouts, as well as about Carfax, Parfleet, and many other places in England. You'll learn the rivers, streets and locales of Buda-Pesth (I did remember that this was--and maybe still is--the original spelling of Budapest. But now I know why it is.) You'll learn everything you'll ever want to know about everything vampire and Dracula--including the surprising fact that the original Count had no problem at all walking around in the daylight. (That's a movie construct, mostly from 1922's Nosferatu.)

You'll see all of the discrepancies, minor (none of the journal and diary dates jive) and major (I did remember that Stoker had his characters give poor Lucy many blood transfusions--without concerning themselves with blood type. Even as a kid I knew you can't do that, as you can't empty and change a person's blood like you can a car's oil. But blood transfusions were a relatively new-ish thing in 1897, and Stoker took a chance and threw it in there.). Many of these discrepancies, like how there seems to be a full moon every single night, and how one train in Varna couldn't have gotten someplace as it says because it would actually take a lot longer, you could probably do without. But it's like MTV's Pop-up Videos: if you're in the mood for such arcania, you'll love it, if for no other reason than to just pass the time. (You don't watch Pop-up Video to learn something, do you?) Anyway, if you don't enjoy that kind of quaint nothingness, you probably shouldn't be reading this.

I'd read Dracula twice before, but I wanted to read it again with somebody who knew a lot about everything Victorian, as my current WIP partially takes place in 1890s New England. (Not the same, I know, I know.) But I wanted a feel for the time. And Klinger is an expert on everything Victorian, as he has also written a book that annotates every single Sherlock Holmes short story and novel that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote. Klinger did the same for Poe, too, but of course Poe was of an earlier time. (These books are all on my list of things to do.)

The constant sidenotes don't deter from the actual reading of Dracula, though someone who's never had to read scholarly things with a ton of footnotes, endnotes or sidenotes may take awhile to get used to this. I read the book and stopped to read the notes every time a little number appeared, and never got sidetracked. Some of these notes are short, some very long, and often there are consecutive pages of notes without the novel, to get caught up with itself. And the print of these notes are not the super-small letters you may remember from the glosses of your collegiate or academic days, so they're fine to read, without straining.

My one caveat is that Klinger uses a conceit that all of the characters are real people, and that the discrepancies are an intentional attempt to hide the truth that they don't actually kill Dracula at the end, and that he lives to fight another day--in tons of other books, movies, comics, graphic novels, etc. You get the idea. Occasionally this conceit did stay me, and I swiftly moved on over such notes. Klinger did this in his Annotated Sherlock Holmes as well, and I wish he hadn't done so here, but how else can you do this kind of thing and yet make it different from all of the similar annotated books of Dracula out there? (Yes, there are several.) Klinger also had to convince his publisher to print such a book as this, and I guarantee this conceit was in his pitch. Otherwise, it may have come across as yet another glossed scholarly work, and who the hell wants to publish or read another one of those? (Well, okay, I read a lot of the scholarly articles Klinger cites in his bibliography, cuz I'm cool like that.) Still, you've got to make it different, and you've got to make it interesting.

So I forgave Klinger this trespass (and I skimmed over many of those annotated conceits) and I read it to enjoy all of the other notes--plus the book itself. Don't forget about the book! It was still as clumsily written as I'd remembered it, and yet it was still as effective as I'd remembered it--sometimes in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 kind of way. (Everyone interrogates Renfield as he's dying, and then they all leave him to die alone on the floor as they--finally!--run to Mina's room.) And, yeah, Dracula, as it turned out, was hiding in the building next to Seward's asylum almost the whole time. Whatever.

So if you like Dracula, the book, or the movies, or the Victorian Era, or if you're in the mood for a MST3K riff on all of these things, then this is the book for you. It also comes with the famous short story, "Dracula's Guest," that looks like an early attempt at a Dracula chapter, but not a "missing" or edited-out chapter, like you may have heard. There are many more discrepancies between novel and story than similarities, and it wasn't published at all until after Stoker died, which means it probably was never supposed to see the light of day. (See what I did there?) He published a few books of collected short stories, so if he'd wanted to publish it, he would have. This story looks like a discarded draft of a chapter that was going to show part of Harker's journey to Transylvania, but it's obviously not necessary, and Harker himself is never mentioned in it, so you should enjoy it as a separate story. It's still cool, as "The Dead Travel Fast," is still there, and it's still creepy enough.

Overall, highly recommended, especially in an appropriately-nerdy, have fun as you learn kind of way. And there's nothing at all wrong with admitting that.

A Sense of Wonder--Time and Again

I read this book partly because I'm researching a book of my own that takes place partly in 1892--ten years after the 1882 of this book, but still, I didn't have any 1880s information at all.  Turns out, Finney infamously uber-researched for this book.  In fact, it seems that the sole reason he wrote this book is to simply describe 1882 until it felt like he lived there.

This he does.  If you're at all interested in the past--and the 1880s in particular--you should read this book.  If you live in New York City and want to know how Broadway and Fifth Avenue and the many buildings constructed in that time became alive in their own right, and then grew into the life's fabric of the city, you should read this book.  If you're even a little bit a traveler or an explorer at heart--if you're even a little curious or interested in history and people at all--you should read this book.  And if you think it's interesting to understand the people of the era--the actual, flesh-and-blood people of a time--more than just the important historical facts themselves (as I do), then you should read this book.

In short, this was quite a little pleasure, a rare, quaint joy that reading should bring but often does not, even when reading a good or important book.  This gets you away.  Not just into 1882 NYC, but the mid- to late-Victorian Era of your own town and city.  Have you ever wondered what it was like in 1882 where you are?  This book may give you an idea.  Chances are, it was like this, just maybe on a lesser scale.

But the air was clean and the people were evidently a little more carefree than the early pictures would have us believe.  There were horses and sleighs everywhere; children played outside, even in the winter.  There were no screens to enslave us, no computers to weigh us down.  People awoke early, at sunrise, and went to bed just after sundown.  There were telegraph wires everywhere, like electric wires today, so the landscape wasn't as bare as you might think.  The el rattled the city, and electric trains shouldered aside horse-drawn carriages and coaches.  Everyone walked, and people probably spent more time with each other.

This is romanticized history, of course.  You won't see how the very poor live here; in fact, the author just barely refers to them at all.  Most of the action takes place in the richer Broadway, Fifth Avenue part of Manhattan.  There aren't minorities here, either--these things, and the way Finney handles female characters, make the book seem a little less sophisticated than what we may be used to today.  They aren't jarring, and they aren't what this particular story is about, but there it is nonetheless.

It was written by the guy who wrote the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (that was the other reason I wanted to read this), so there's a slight sci-fi aspect here, but it is very slight.  This is more historical fiction than it is science fiction.  It's a bit of fantasy, too, if you think of 1882 NYC as another world, which it sort of is.

My favorite thing about this book (and books like it) is the sense of wonder that it instills in the reader.  Finney clearly was enjoying himself as he wrote this, and the writing and tone exude a sense of wonder that he himself must have been feeling while writing this.  You get the feeling that if Finney has the chance to walk into 1882 NYC and to stay there, he would have as well.

Would you want to stay in the 1882 of your own place?

"The Little Room" by Madeline Yale Wynne

 photo: Picaresque but creepy photo of Madeline Yale Wynne's final little room (sorry), in the Berkshire Mountains, from Find A Grave's website.  (I couldn't find a Wikipedia page or anything else less creepy.)

The latest in the series from The Library of America, this for Week #42, "The Little Room" was first published in Harper's Magazine in 1895.  (Because of this, one assumes that when a character asks another if they'll be heard "in the car," she must be referring to a train; funny how it's so assumed by the author and characters that this would be the case, as the automobile itself had just been invented maybe three years before, and it hadn't yet entered the vernacular as a "car.")  You can read the story here.  It's very short and very easy to read, though you might come out of it underwhelmed as I did.

I've never heard of the author or the story before, despite the Library's insistence that it is a heavily anthologized and well-known story.  And I'm a pretty well-read guy, too.  Wynne never wrote anything else of value, apparently, though artisans in the Berkshires would remember her as a supporter of those local arts, and as quite the artisan herself.

The author might be more of a story than her story, but we'll start with that first.  (Skip the remaining paragraphs if you want to read the story first.  If so, do that first, now, and then come back.)

The framework of the story is interesting.  The beginning is mostly told via conversation, as per Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; this was the norm for late Victorian stories.  Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was written this way, too, if I remember right.  Anyway, you've got a newly married young couple and they're on their way to visit the bride's reclusive and eccentric half-aunts.  She tells the story of how her mother was brought up there for most of her childhood, and afterwards her mother grew up in Brooklyn.  When her mother returned to the aunt's the day of her own marriage, she was horrified and mystified to find that the room she more or less grew up in--and was memorably sick in for some time as a youth--had been done over and made into a china closet.  When she asked the aunts about it, they had no idea what she was talking about, and said so with old-time New England steadfastness, and with no emotion at all, not even behind the eyes.  The mother, however, remembered every single little thing about the room, and some memorable conversations in the room, and the reader agrees with the bride telling the story that her mother couldn't have made all that up, and that there's something weird going on in that house and with the aunts.  Ultimately, the mother never recovers from the weirdness and dies at a young-ish age.

So the bride and her husband get there, and he immediately notices that they're served with gilt-edged china, so there has to be a china room somewhere.  (I keep mine in a hutch, and in one of the kitchen cabinets, but whatever.)  They investigate what the woman had said should be a little room, but it's just a china closet, and the husband basically rolls his eyes at his new wife and acts a bit verbally condescending.  The bride asks the aunt about it, and she gets the same answer that her mother had, in just the same stoic way.  The aunts didn't even remember that the bride's mother had asked them about the china closet/little room as well.  The new bride takes a long while to get over this, but she finally does, and she and her husband move to Europe and have a few kids.  (The reader assumes he's gotten over the condescending attitude, as well.)

Fast forward five years.  The wife asks her cousin to visit the aunts to tell them goodbye for her, as she's now in Europe and had been too afraid to go say goodbye to them herself.  Her cousin agrees to do this, and intends on bringing another woman with her.  But they have a failure to communicate, and as it turns out, they each go by herself at different times.  As it happens in stories like this, the two women get together with their kids (Where are the husbands?) while camping, and they tell each other their stories, each believing beforehand that the other had blown her off, and that she had gone there while the other one hadn't.

One of the women saw a little room, and wrote to the newly married couple in Europe about it.  The other had seen just a china closet.  They argue for awhile, each believing that the other one's lying.  Finally, they decide to go back to the house together.  When they're close, they're told by a local that the house had burned to the ground the night before, with everything in it.  The reader is never told what happened to the aunts.

And that's it.  The story is told with a little more unease about it, and I suppose it's somewhat effective, maybe.  The Library says of the theme that some see it as a woman's need to have a room of her own, which I get; the Library also says others see a "closet of domestic confinement."  I can see that, too, in the story.  But I can't say I agree with literary scholar Alfred Bendixen (go to the head of the class if you've ever heard of this guy, or of Madeline Yale Wynne, for that matter), who says that the story is "one of the most effective 'puzzle stories' ever written."  Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King have written more effective "room" short stories than this, as has Arthur Conan Doyle.  "The Yellow Wallpaper" works better for me as a "room" story with a feminist bent, as well.

Are the aunts domestic servants?  Well, I guess, except they never married, and they actually have a former slave on the grounds to help them, too.  So what husbands or sons do they serve?  The china is theirs, and their company is theirs--and very infrequent, too.  (I might actually have more people over.)  And the story is very feminist and rather easy to see that way, so I don't know what Bendixen was so puzzled about.

I see the flip-flopping china closet / small room situation as an extended metaphor of how women are expected to shell out the china from a china closet as they serve their husbands and families and entertain their guests, but how actually what a woman (and yours truly) really needs is a room of her own, to just be her own individual, independent and creative self in.  The aunts, after all, never married or had kids.  Wink, wink.

Which segues nicely to the author.  Madeline Yale Wynne was, in fact, the daughter of the guy who created the lock company.  Yale was also a heckuva artisan himself, apparently, as he taught the craft to his daughter and sons.  According to the Find A Grave website (No, not creepy at all; I Googled her name and that's what came up first.  No one's made a Wikipedia page of her, I guess), she married Henry Winn in 1865, when she was 18.  They had two sons before they separated in 1874.  By 1883 she was sharing her studio and home with a Miss Annie Putnam.  (Ah-ha! you say.  Fits the story a bit, right?  Except the aunts really were sisters to each other, I think.  But they had their own secret little room, apparently in a Victorian/Freudian way.  Perhaps that room was a china closet only when they had family over, yes?)  They stayed together for about 30 years, until she died.  Putnam put together her various unpublished writings, none of them of any note, and printed them posthumously.  And somewhere in there, Madeline Winn changed her last name to Wynne, thereby still sticking to the social mores of carrying the (ex-)husband's last name, while yet slapping him across the face at the same time.

There's a little of that in the story as well.  The little room was the elephant in the room that the aunts never spoke of, and it apparently never bothered them at all that a village of people kept asking them about the china closet / small room thing.  It's as if they were like, "Nope, la la la, not there, nope, no room there, la la la..."  There's a symbol or metaphor with the chintz going on in the story, too, as the very mention of it almost (but just almost) causes one of the aunts to blush, but I'm not sufficiently up on my fabrics to figure that out.

Musings--Heart of Darkness

Photo: Man Who Laughs, Conrad Veidt


A few quick snippets that occurred to me today about this seminal work:

1.  I was wondering today why so many works circa 1890-1900 centered around the mask we wear to keep apart the good and bad parts of our nature--or, rather, that we all wear to separate the good and bad parts of human nature.  Take a look at all the works published between 1890-1900 about this theme:

Heart of Darkness (1899)--Joseph Conrad
Dracula (1897)--Bram Stoker
Phantom of the Opera (1909)--Gaston Leroux (vastly different plot than its films)
The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890)--Oscar Wilde
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)--Robert Louis Stevenson
Many works by Freud (1897 to The Ego and the Id in 1923)

The list could go on.  Was this always the case, that works about the mask of civilization upon our primitive nature have always been with us?  I don't know.  Rousseau certainly railed against much of this; his works and beliefs, still very strong with us, certainly had an effect on the French and American Revolutions, and still created heated debate in the 1890s, if not today.  He was very popular in 1890s Europe and America.

But I think it was Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, and Freud's massive popularity starting in the 1880s, that re-ignited this debate.  And at the end of the Victorian Era, maybe many artists realized how supposedly suppressed they were, but yet weren't, and a lot of works and thoughts erupted from that.  It continues today, but in an interesting reversal--

(to be continued)

Library of America--Paste, by Henry James

Photo: "Portrait of Henry James," an oil painting by Joseph Singer Sargent, on James's Wikipedia page.

Nice little story, written very stiffly and badly, of course, by a very Victorian writer who could never seem to get out of his own way.  The language is of the supreme upper echelon of society, as are the mannerisms, which may have turned off the readership masses--if the poorer could afford books at the time, which maybe they couldn't.  In that case, James knew his audience very well and wrote directly to them.

This story is a mirror image of Guy de Maupassant's (righteously) more famous "The Necklace."  In that one--and if you haven't read it, you should; it's short and written better--a young woman, very poor, borrows a necklace from her much richer friend, then loses it after a ball.  Thinking it was real, she and her husband sign their lives away and work to exhaustion for ten years.  Finally coming clean to her friend, she's informed that it was paste (fake) and that she'd made herself even more of a pauper for nothing.  And, if she had just admitted she'd lost it, the friend would have told her.

James's story is about a young woman of better means who is given a necklace by a man of much better means, who tells her it's a fake piece of her now-dead aunt's.  This woman's friend, Mrs. Guy (Get it?), tells her it's real, and says she's a fool for wanting to bring it back to the guy who gave it to her, who has mistakenly thought it fake.  If it's real, you see, that means his aunt had to receive it as a gift from someone not her husband, as he had been very poor.  And this woman had been an actor, which in the story explains the moral situation very well.

So the young woman does the moral thing and tells the guy it's real.  He's aghast and affronted, and says she can't have it back, that he'll get it appraised and tell her that he was right after all.  What he does instead is sell it, because it was real, and the young woman's friend, Mrs. Guy, buys it for, as she says, at a good price.  So the one honest character, the young woman, ends up with nothing to remind her of the dead aunt, and with none of the money that the thing was worth.

I tell you all this to save you from reading the story.  Read "The Necklace," or James' "The Turn of the Screw", which is just as stilted, but much more famous.  As it should be.  Very scary and psychologically chilling.

And I'll leave you with this connection.  After my second deviated septum operation, I was given a bottle of pain meds that are quite popular.  I hate taking pills, and told some friends that I wasn't sure I'd ever take them.  Every single well-to-do or of-average-means friend, in total seriousness, told me to sell them if I didn't take them.  I ended up taking them, as I'd been in a lot of pain, but I've never forgotten their responses.

There's another short story in there somewhere.

Speaking of short stories, I finished one recently, an 11-page zombie story called "Too Dumb to Die."  Yeah, I like the title, too.  ("Hide the Weird" was good, too.)  I'll keep you informed.

P.S.--Okay, while getting a picture for this post, I read a really long article about James on Wikipedia, and I'm forced to admit that my terseness maybe was a bit overwrought about his work.  He obviously wrote some great things, not just "The Turn of the Screw," and I'm going to have to get a copy of his Complete Works.  But I'll be damned if I know how I'm going to get past the brick and mortar of his writing.

Drood: What Is Good Mystery Writing?

Photo: Charles Dickens


See below for the 5th and last part of my short story, "Shadows."  I hope everyone's liked it.  I have been away for a few days; an immediate family member has been diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer--in five different areas.  This is bad enough, but there's also a major deadline at work: tons of things due this coming week.  Of course.

So what does one do when faced with all this?  He escapes!  He reads!  I finished Dan Simmons' Drood--all 771 pages of it.  It's taught me a few things about mystery writing, and maybe writing in general (I warn that there may be some spoilers below):

1.  It starts with a quick introduction by the narrator (Wilkie Collins) and the main mystery of the whole 771 pages.  Why did Dickens perform a "murder" of one of his characters that so engaged--and horrified--his pre-Victorian audience?  This was apparently opposite his normal character.

2.  Did Dickens murder someone?  The method is explained in one sentence.  Very specific detail.

3.  Did Dickens become obsessed with a person/thing named Drood?  (Avid readers will know that Dickens was in the middle of a masterwork when he died, titled The Mystery of Edwin Drood.)

4.  The main settings are described in very specific detail--good writing, never boring--by the end of page 2.

5.  The style, tone and mood of the narrator are established by then as well.

6.  The famous Staplehurst train wreck that Dickens was a part of about 5 years before he died is used as a springboard for the whole novel, and is very well-written and well-used.  This starts on page 3 and ends on page 11.

In short, this bestselling novel does what mysteries should do, what agents want mystery manuscripts to do: it poses the mysteries immediately.  It advances very interesting questions that readers would want answered: Did Dickens kill someone?  What was that Drood business?  It sets Dickens up as the focus of the novel, despite Collins being the narrator--which astute readers will realize as another point.  Collins should be the main character of Collins' narration/memoir; he is, perhaps, but Dickens is definitely the focus.  This establishes another huge theme: Dickens overshadowing Collins in life, as in this "memoir."  Again, this is established immediately and solidly by page 11.

Main characters; main themes; main settings; main mysteries; main questions--in short, everything, established in the first few pages, and then springboarded tremendously well using the train accident Dickens was in--with his young mistress and her mother, by the way, and not with his wife.  By page 11, the reader wonders a ton of interesting things and has no choice but to read on.

Agents have mentioned this time and time again.  Do this, and do this well, and they will represent the work and it will get published.  Dan Simmons had 771 pages to work with--and an already-impressive bestselling status--so he could have done whatever he wanted, at whatever pace he wanted.  He still did all of this by the first 11-15 pages.

It isn't selling out.  It's good writing.