Hey! Jude!

Some hardcore interpellation needed here -- poor Jude Fawley! You just want to shake him -- not just call him out, but pick him up, take him home, maybe feed him some soup? His life's not actually that bad, until God, the church, and marriage step in and fuck it all up for him.

So then - Jude's horrible marriage. Both of them! Where shall we start?

(Jude on Arabella) Illuminated with the sense that all was over between them, that it mattered not what she did, or he, her husband stood still, regarding her. Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with the affinities that alone render a life-long comradeship tolerable (64)

On marriage, then -- focusing on divorce laws, but also Hardy's critique of common-law marriage? On marriage, sex, and children (a BIG issue), and why contracts are something to be wary of.

There's a really interesting point about halfway through, when Sue is worried about her marriage, and Jude says something to the effect of "Nobody cares!" Meaning, marriage among the poor is largely invisible -- if they were lords, it would matter, but because they are poor, they actually have a tremendous amount of freedom do "do as they like," (in Arnold's words).

(Jude - on divorce) There is this advantage in being poor obscure people like us -- that these things are done for us in a rough and ready fashion. It was the same with me and Arabella. I was afraid her criminal second marriage would have been discovered, and she punished; but nobody took any interest in her -- nobody inquired, nobody suspected it. If we'd been patented nobilities we should have had infinite trouble, and days and weeks would have been spent in investigations (248).

This is obviously not true in practice -- the book spends an inordinate amount of time looking at how communities police themselves. The uncanny ability to know when someone is married or when they aren't is an interesting point here - Hardy emphasizes the *visibility* of marriage quite a bit, whether on paper or in practice (this is something that Sue, at least, never seems to get). Certainly relevant re: common-law marriages (vs. more formalized unions). Also relevant re: marriage by deception -- in Arabella's case - where one can stumble into marriages before even realizing what is happening.

I have no idea where spiritualism comes in here. To be honest, I don't feel like I 'get' any of the conversions in the novel. They don't seem to be nearly as persuasive, as a critique of social practice than the community scenes (where Jude and Sue are being ejected / where Jude is speaking among a group of people). Personal conversion is all fine and dandy -- and may be a good way to read Sue, separately -- but it doesn't seem to fit within the broader context of the quartet, especially with the main focus on Jude, whose loss of faith seems solid throughout.

Point of order: Conversion MIGHT be an interesting place to bring in D.H. Lawrence - especially since he really wants to focus on Sue, an dmake her the central point of the novel


A few sections I want to look at:

1. Phillotson's conversion (Section IV) - his arguments for free love to Gillingham (along with Eliza, one of the only characters outside the quartet) --> as a defense of free love / of common-law marriage - a Platonic union (223)

(Though later, we find out that he justified this mostly because he assumed Sue was having an affair - i.e. having sex with Jude)

2. Section V (in Aldbrickham) -- the "domestic" section, where Jude and Sue live happily with Father Time, Idyllic domestic bliss -- also, the point where the social body (the gossiping townspeople) come most stringently to the fore. Notably, the section where Arabella is not permitted into the house. Introduction of children (Father Time). Also, later, the section where Jude and Sue become transients.

3. Section VI (in Christminster) as a critique of homelessness - especially when the family is literally forced to split up for the evening. The fear is that Sue will have her baby -- what actually happens is the triple / homicide (notably, when Jude is not around)

Throughout the novel:

Male friendship vs. female friendship -- why do Sue and Arabella never connect? Not in comparison with Jude, but with Phillotson, who has male friends throughout (first Jude, then Gillingham) --> later, the failure of male friendship? (SUE as Jude's only friend? 350)

Hardy's relationship with the Bronte sisters -- Arabella as a succubus (Jane Eyre, the returning wife) -- also Wuthering Heights -- the transient lovers (in the end, treated ironically) - Arabella - a working-class Bertha Rochester? (a way to bring this character to life?) --> an ironic inversion of the succubus wife?

Arabella: She may swear that on her knees to the holy cross upon her necklace till she's hoarse, but it won't be true. She's never found peace since she left his arms, and never will again till she's as he is now (397)

Oh, that English Jutish blood...

Hammond: As to our looks, the English and Jutish blood, which on the whole is predominant here, used not to produce much beauty. But I think we have improved it. I know a man who has a large collection of portraits printed from photographs of the 19th c., and going over those and comparing them with the everyday faces in these times, puts the improvement in our good looks beyond a doubt

Now, there are some people who think it not too fantastic to connect this increase of beauty directly with our freedom and good sense in the matters we have been speaking of: they believe that a child born from the natural and healthy love between a man and a woman, even if that be transient, is likely to turn out better in all ways, and especially in bodily beauty, than the birth of teh respectable commercial marriage bed....They say, Pleasure begets pleasure. What do you think?

Guest: I am much of the same mind (96)

Five British Socialists I'll Bet You've Never Heard Of

I've got two (Shaw, Morris). Three are news to me. (Kropotkin, Stepniak, Bernstein).

1. S. Stepniak: Russian anarchist turned liberal, Stepniak published Underground Russia in 1883, arguing that acts of terrorism were a crucial line of defense against the Tsarist regime. He was the most visible advocate of the Terror (1870's) in Britain, called assasination "the collective act of reformers," and writing vivid profiles of revolutionaries (including Kropotkin). He spoke forcefully against Tsarist despotism, arguing for free speech and freedom from political orthodoxy. Though ostensibly a socialist, Stepniak had no affiliation with Marx and was primarily concerned with liberalizing Russia rather than exploring Hegelianism or class struggle; Kropotkin later wrote that he was largely disillusioned by conspiracies and bickering in Socialist factions (though an active organizer himself).

Why he's important: William Morris read his book and said that it "ought to open people's eyes a bit and do good" -- he later became friends with Stepniak, who contributed one of the first articles to Morris' newspaper The Commonweal.

Major works: Underground Russia (1885), which reappropriated the term "nihilism" for revolutionaries of 1870s in the service of terrorism and warfare. The Career of a Nihilist (1887?), a romantic novel loosely based on Stepniak's early political life.

Closest native affiliation: Christian Socialism, particularly in his later years, as he became more cautious about the use of violence in revolution.

2.

The Line, the Human Body

In line with that last excerpt:

There is only one best way of teaching drawing, and that is teaching the scholar to draw the human figure: both because the lines of a man's body are much more subtle than anything else, and because you can more surely be found out and set right if you go wrong...The sense of pleasure in drawing a good line, would really, I think, be education in the due sense of the word for all such people as had the terms of invention in them (248)

What's interesting here, incidentally, is not that the line serves as evidence of work or labor (or alternatively, the pleasure, as after-effect / evience, of making the line in the first place) -- but its sympathetic (and markedly erotic) association with human-feeling in the present moment. The lines are subtle because the body itself is subtle - which is something you don't get, unless you're actively trying to draw it. The artist understands work, in part, because they directly enact it by putting ink to paper -- for Morris a deeply physical move, the enactment of labor through the production of art. The movement of the body - enacting labor *through* the body - is a key part of what seems to sublimate labor through the work of art.

On second read, maybe what he's actually doing here is just putting the 'work' back into 'work of art' - taking it down off the pedestal, and making it analogous to other forms of labor. Still, it seems worth parsing out the difference in these terms -- looking at how 'pleasure' and 'leisure' are correlated, if ever so slightly different ways, with Morris' broader definition of 'work.'

Elaine Scarry would probably be a good place to go for this. Might be worth looking into.

Pleasure, Leisure, Work?

1. Morris on education

In the first section of New from Nowhere, Dick says to a gaping William Guest:

I can assure you our children learn, whether they go through a 'system of teaching' or not. Why, you will not find one of these children about here, boy or girl, who cannot swim, and every one of them has been used to tumbling about the little forest ponies - there's one of them now! They all of them know how to cook; the bigger lads can mow; many can thatch and do odd jobs at carpentering...I tell you they know plenty of things (66)

This seems a bit strange, given Morris' later statements on leisure (leisure as work, etc). I don't know how far Morris got into educational reform - on art education, his thoughts seem pretty straightforward - but it would be interesting to read these early passages against J.S. Mill (or Dickens, for that matter) - or anyone else interested in educational reform.

More to the point -- how Morris approaches childhood here! I don't think this was one of his major issues (handcrafting and workers' education being quite a different creature than secondary school reform). If he was, though, these are some pretty interesting passages. Especially given the following section:

You don't mean that children learn all these things?

That depends on what you mean by children: and also you must remember how much they differ. As a rule, they don't do much reading except for a few storybooks, till they are about fifteen years old; we dont encourage early bookishness: though you will find some children who will take to books very early; which perhaps is not good for them; but it's no use thwarting them....

You see, children are mostly given to imitating their elders, and when they see most people around them engaged in genuinely amusing work, like house-building and street-paving, and gardening, and the like, that is what they want to be doing, so I don't think we need fear having too many book-learned men. (68)

It's blunt-force reform-speak here -- see the children frolicking! - so I'm not sure how much to read into this. At the same time -- an odd thing to say, given that Morris' utopian is predicated (through Dick / Clara / Ellen) on being in a state of perpetual childhood. Children learn from imitating their elders -- but what their elders give them (what Hammond gives Guest; what Ellen's grandfather provides) is a pretty ambiguous rendering of the recent past -- which children, more often than not, patently reject in favor of this state of feigned ignorance.

Strange indeed. How does history get taught, if utopia is fundamentally ahistorical? (at the very least, this seems like an important divergence from Marx -- might be more to say on this topic)

2. Morris on art - on aesthetic production

Cooking and carpentry aside, this passage implies that pleasure rests in the cessation of that labor. The actual work involved here -- swimming -- is far removed from the 'work' of the classroom. Sure, there is 'work' involved (learning how to swim), but what's really being pictured here is pleasure as leisure -- enjoying an act as an end in itself, regardless of whether it serves a higher purpose.

This takes us far away from education, and into labor proper -- specifically, at this broader corollary drawn between labor / pleasure, and where leisure (as cessation?) falls into this mix. Morris describes this pleasure - the active "pleasure" of labor (as I take it, the pleasure of using one's body for the production of goods, where pleasure is strongly correlated with use-value). Morris writes:

Nothing can be a work of art which is not useful; that is to say, which does not minister to the body when well under command of the mind, or which does not amuse, soothe, or elevate the mind in a healthy state.

The point being, the swimming hole is maybe not the best example here, insofar as it implies a cessation of labor - swimming in lieu of school - over and above the transmutation into a higher form. Here, swimming as an end in itself doesn't cut it -- pleasure and work come together in this particular nexus over artistic production, which requires this higher form of transmutation. Making art, on the other hand, is a whole different ballgame.

This, I guess, is why he's writing utopian fiction rather than political economy. You can let these things slip a bit, and people don't get mad. I'm not sure how far I want to push this distinction -- Morris makes this case for all kinds of work -- for farming, hoeing, selling wares, as well as the more 'artistic' trades -- but the fact that his heart is in the aesthetics seems to insist on some kind of implicit differential here. More to the point, aesthetics sublimates the physical part of this, in a way that mere physicality (and leisure) don't.

William Morris: Where have all the Communists gone?

Things I want to say about News from Nowhere:

1. Communism and the money economy - Did political economists read this book? WHAT DID J.S. MILL SAY ABOUT THIS BOOK? How about Keynes? Look up contemporary reviews -- what was the standard position on the "abolition of money" question?

2. Morris on the River Thames - old-school environmentalism, with a couple of key jibes at the Thames Conservatory Association. Might be interesting to look at re: Woolf, Conrad, and others (specifically - portraiture of the river -- the lifeblood of England, the spigot of industry, etc) --> also re: Morris' pastoralism, especially in the second half of the book -- what happens, for instance, when you go upriver.

3. (Morris on sustainability) -- "There are matters which I should have thought easy for her [Science]; say for example teaching Manchester how to consume its own smoke, or Leeds how to get rid of its superfluous black dye without turning it into the river, which would be as much worth [science's] attention as the production of the heaviest of black silks, or the biggest of useless guns" (252)

4. Dress and architecture? What are the ladies wearing?
Morris and Walter Gropius --> "As to their dress, which of course I took note of, I should say they were decently veiled with drapery, not upholstered like arm-chairs, as most women of our time are. In short, their dress was somewhat between that of the ancient classical costume and the simpler forms of the fourteenth century garments, though it was clearly not an imitation of either: the materials were light and gay to suit the season (53)

Mostly, though, I just want to look at these weird literary references -- "I'm curious about where you come from for good reasons, literary reasons." (Dick, who also can't identify a book to save his life) --> why these attacks on novelists, specifically? Is there something I'm missing here? --> specifically, thinking about why Morris would write a utopian novella, rather than a bit of muckraking journalism (more in the realist vein)

Much learning is spoiling you. You remind me of the radical cobblers in the silly old novels, who, according to the authors, were prepared to trample down all good manners in the pursuit of utilitarian knowledge" --> why novels over tracts? (Morris on Dickens? On Disraeli? Who's he talking about here?) --> linking realism explicitly to reform fiction?

Why is it that we find the dreadful times of the past so interesting in pictures and poetry? --> It is true that in the 19th c., when there was so little art and so much talka bout it, there was a theory that art and imaginative literature ought to deal with contemporary life; but they never did so; for, if there was any pretence of it, the author always took care (as Clara hinted now) to disguise, or exaggerate, or idealize, and in some way or another make it strange, so that, for all the verisimilitude there was, he might just as well have dealt with the times of the Pharaohs.

(Dick) Well surely it is but natural to like these things strange; just as when we were children, as I said just now, we used to pretend to be so-and-so in such-and-such a place. That's what these pictures and poems do; and why shouldn't they?

(Hammond) Thou hast hit it, Dick. It is the childlike part of us that produces work of the imagination. When we are children time passes so slow with us that we seem to have time for everything.(131).