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Jul. 7th, 2014 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI think I promised more Apathetic Ambiguously Gay Lawyers Who Don't Lawyer? LET'S TALK ABOUT DICKENS' OUR MUTUAL FRIEND.
...actually there is quite a lot to talk about in Our Mutual Friend that I'm interested in, so let's break it down into some sections.
Our Mutual Friend has so MANY interesting women in it that I may have to request it for Yuletide. I'm just gonna list them off:
Lizzie Hexam: one of two heroines, and the most classically angelic woman in the book -- she's kind! she's virtuous! she sacrifices everything for her brother's education! But, man, how much do I love her for the fact that she sees a classically Dickensian Careless Rich Man, Ruined Poor Woman plot coming in her direction and just NOPES STRAIGHT OUT OF THERE. "But darling, I've never made a move on you yet, so why can't we at least be friends?" "We can't be friends because you're upper-class, I'm penniless, we're both hot, and I'M MOVING TO ANOTHER CITY WITHOUT GIVING A FORWARDING ADDRESS, SEE YOU NEVER!" I think a strong argument can be made that Lizzie Hexam is the most genre-savvy character in all of Dickens. Anyway, Lizzie Hexam is basically perfect, but she's one of the only perfect women in the novel; everyone else is kind of weird and sometimes terrible, which ... is why they're wonderful ....
Bella Wilfer: heroine #2, an irritable and mercenary young lady who gets adopted by a rich couple and cured of her mercenariness by the Power of Love. I spent 3/4 of the book super into Bella Wilfer and her clear-eyed self-assessment and her wildly Austenian romance; I had completely forgotten about the throw-the-book-across-the-room final twist, when it turns out that literally everyone she knows and loves has been involved in an incredibly elaborate and manipulative plot to get her to Learn a Valuable Lesson and Marry Her Impoverished (But Secretly Rich) Boyfriend, and she tearily thanks them for being so kind to her awful little self and ugh, ugh, A MILLION TIMES UGH. But mid-book Bella is wonderful. Mid-book Bella, who calmly describes herself as a 'limited little B,' who is very well aware that money is not the greatest way to happiness but damn, it's better than the alternative.
Also, Bella Wilfer and Lizzie Hexam have the most hilarious one-scene friendship ever, which mostly consists of staring at each other in gape-jawed, teary-eyed recognition of each other's glorious attractiveness. "It's a pleasure to me to look at you." "No, no, it's a pleasure to me to look at YOU." JUST GET A ROOM ALREADY.
Jenny Wren: Jenny Wren was my favorite the first time I read this book ten years ago. Nobody is surprised by this, because I love cranky little girls and Jenny is the CRANKIEST LITTLE GIRL, an angry disabled thirteen-year-old seamstress with a bad back and legs who loves Lizzie and thinks everyone else is pretty much shit, especially Lizzie's terrible romantic options. Jenny has the good fortune to receive an early variation on 'NOT ALL MEN,' and is having none of it:
Miss Wren wrinkled her nose to express dislike. ‘Selfish. Thinks only of himself. The way with all of you.’
'The way with all of us? Then you don't like ME?'
'So-so,' replied Miss Wren, with a shrug and a laugh. 'Don't know much about you.'
'But I was not aware it was the way with all of us,' said Bradley, returning to the accusation, a little injured. 'Won't you say, some of us?'
'Meaning,' returned the little creature, 'every one of you, but you. Hah!'
Then Bradley tells Lizzie that he can't help the violent passion she brings out in him, and eventually attempts to murder her other love interest. NOT ALL MEN! Dickens is often actually surprisingly good with Nice Guy syndrome; many of his heroines are followed around by apparently deserving but obviously awful young men who claim to be entitled to their love, and it's always presented as a deeply horrible and skin-crawling experience.
But anyway, back to Jenny Wren. I find her incredibly interesting. Her relationship with her father, in particular, is really awful and unhealthy on all sides -- he's a drunk who does nothing to support her, so she calls him her child and flips the situation so she becomes the abusive parent instead. Probably not the best way to handle things, Jenny Wren! But, like, she's a thirteen-year-old kid who's never had support, so it's not like she's emotionally capable of handling it better.
Sophronia Lammle: ALSO FASCINATING. The Lammles are a couple of fortune-hunters who accidentally marry each other and then find out that they are, respectively, penniless. Neither are amused. Subsequently they join forces to attempt to shake the world down for money while pretending to be vastly rich. Alfred Lammle is just a straight-up villain, but Sophronia is vastly more complicated; she's totally willing to throw 90% of the world under the bus, but when she finally does find she cares about someone, she coolly surveys the room, picks an ally, and chucks both herself and the husband she's kind of afraid of straight under the bus instead. And then goes on to select a different victim. Dickens doesn't like Sophronia Lammle particularly despite her occasional acts of heroism, which is fair -- she's not a very good person -- but I kind of love her.
Georgiana Podsnap: Sophronia Lammle's one true love? PERHAPS. Georgiana Podsnap is an unhappy, deeply socially awkward heiress with terrible self-esteem. The Lammles makes great efforts to become her first-ever friends, with the intent of basically selling her to a terrible fortune-hunting friend of theirs for a cut of the profits. However, Georgiana's EARNESTLY TRUE FRIENDSHIP and COMPLETE WEIRDNESS eventually win Sophronia's affection and she takes steps to cut herself and her terrible husband out of Georgiana's life. After which Georgiana comes running back in to offer to sell all her jewelry for her because she loves her SO MUCH. There is a Yuletide fic here, is what I am saying.
There are tons of other women in the book as well but Mrs. Boffin doesn't merit a section because I'm still mad at her about the end of the book, and this entry is already a million years long and I'm still on section one. (Though I will add I am also a big fan of Pleasant Riderhood.) It is really interesting how many women have important connections in the book, though. The only time two women meet and don't impact each other in enormous, positive ways is when Sophronia Lammle meets Bella and decides she doesn't care what happens to her because SHE'S CERTAINLY NO GEORGIANA PODSNAP. I'm no Dickens expert, but the only other Dickens I can think of with such intense female friendships is Bleak House's Esther and Ada, and to a lesser extent Esther and Caddy Jellyby. But here you have Sophronia and Georgiana, Jenny and Lizzie, Lizzie and Bella, Bella and Mrs. Boffin (ugh, but still) -- it's a lot! I'm a fan.
Right, OK, let's move on to Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn, AMBIGUOUSLY GAY LAWYERS WHO DON'T LAWYER. Eugene is full of apathy and ennui, and would rather spend his time being ironic than actually doing ANYTHING; Mortimer is full of apathy and ennui because Eugene is full of apathy and ennui, and he thinks Eugene is AMAZING and his jokes are HILARIOUS and would just sort of like to follow him around forever.
The thing that's consistently astounding to me about Mortimer and Eugene is how contemporary they feel. Like, it's hard to imagine running into Lizzie Hexam, for example, in the real world. But everyone knows a Eugene and Mortimer. They are the ultimate Victorian hipsters. They hang out with rich upper-class twits, but they hang out with them ironically. They're sort of sad about social injustice, but not really sad enough to do anything about it. Eugene is kind of in love with Lizzie, but, like, he doesn't know, kind of, maybe? Ugh! Being an adult and committing to a course of action is hard! Much easier to hang around being apathetic and making sarcastic commentary.
Which, I mean, goodness knows I sympathize with that feeling. It's easy to make fun of Eugene and Mortimer for the ways in which they are terrible, but it's also easy to identify with them. When you're young, and things are OK enough for you, but you know they're not OK for everyone, but the weight of the social pressures that keep you comfortable enough seem too heavy to shove off -- what do you do with that? Well, if you're in a Dickens novel, you get beaten over the head with the near-death experience of symbolism and try to change your ways, but most generally well-intentioned but kind of useless young hipster lawyers out there are not living in Dickens novels.
MOVING ON. The last thing I want to talk about -- and the reason I always remember Our Mutual Friend better than most of the Dickens novels I read in my teens -- is Mr. Riah, Our Token Sympathetic Jew.
Dickens did not always write sympathetic Jews! The most famous Dickens Jew is Awful Fagin, the villain of Oliver Twist, who turns innocent small children into thieves and keeps them from their loving families. Then after Oliver Twist came out, Dickens got a letter from a Jewish woman named Mrs. Eliza Davis.
MRS. ELIZA DAVIS: I love your work! Great social justice reporting! Which is why I am so disappointed that Oliver Twist is INCREDIBLY ANTI-SEMITIC.
DICKENS: What! No! I mean, I am totally not anti-Semitic! Some of my best friends are Jewish! There are lots of Christian villains in the book too!
MRS. ELIZA DAVIS: ...
DICKENS: .... ok, now that I have thought about it, yes, it is possible that was a dick move.
So then he writes Our Mutual Friend, in which an evil Christian moneylender to whom Mr. Riah owes a debt FORCES Mr. Riah to play the ROLE of Evil Jewish Moneylender, because everyone will believe it because of STEREOTYPES ABOUT JEWS. To which Mr. Riah humbly submits, because he is pure and saintly and symbolic of Jewish suffering, until eventually he decides he can't go on with it because he feels responsible ON BEHALF OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE for contributing to stereotypes.
"Men say, 'This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks.' Not so with the Jews. Men find the bad among us easily enough -- among what people are the bad not easily found? -- but they take the worst of us as samples of the best; they take the lowest of us as presentations of the highest; and they say 'All Jews are alike.'"
Which is fascinating on a number of levels, because, on the one hand, this is almost a straight-up apology from Dickens for writing Fagin to begin with; but on the other hand, it puts the onus of the effort to change people's minds on Riah and other Jews, to be a model minority. There is no blame or responsibility attached to any of the notably anti-Semitic people who immediately jump to conclusions about Riah or other Jewish characters -- only to the evil moneylender who's manipulating the stereotype to begin with. So, I mean, there's a lot to unpack here, and I'm not going to go on writing an essay; there's a lot you can say about Earnest Victorian Writers' efforts to tackle the issue of Jewish prejudice, in general (see also: Daniel Deronda.) But it's super interesting.
....uh, so this has become a very long entry. Our Mutual Friend! It's a book about a bunch of women, some ambiguously gay lawyers, a Jewish guy, and I guess an A-plot about a dude who fakes his own death to nobly avoid inheriting a large fortune, even though I have completely not mentioned this at all. But that is what the book is actually about. FOR THE RECORD.
...actually there is quite a lot to talk about in Our Mutual Friend that I'm interested in, so let's break it down into some sections.
Our Mutual Friend has so MANY interesting women in it that I may have to request it for Yuletide. I'm just gonna list them off:
Lizzie Hexam: one of two heroines, and the most classically angelic woman in the book -- she's kind! she's virtuous! she sacrifices everything for her brother's education! But, man, how much do I love her for the fact that she sees a classically Dickensian Careless Rich Man, Ruined Poor Woman plot coming in her direction and just NOPES STRAIGHT OUT OF THERE. "But darling, I've never made a move on you yet, so why can't we at least be friends?" "We can't be friends because you're upper-class, I'm penniless, we're both hot, and I'M MOVING TO ANOTHER CITY WITHOUT GIVING A FORWARDING ADDRESS, SEE YOU NEVER!" I think a strong argument can be made that Lizzie Hexam is the most genre-savvy character in all of Dickens. Anyway, Lizzie Hexam is basically perfect, but she's one of the only perfect women in the novel; everyone else is kind of weird and sometimes terrible, which ... is why they're wonderful ....
Bella Wilfer: heroine #2, an irritable and mercenary young lady who gets adopted by a rich couple and cured of her mercenariness by the Power of Love. I spent 3/4 of the book super into Bella Wilfer and her clear-eyed self-assessment and her wildly Austenian romance; I had completely forgotten about the throw-the-book-across-the-room final twist, when it turns out that literally everyone she knows and loves has been involved in an incredibly elaborate and manipulative plot to get her to Learn a Valuable Lesson and Marry Her Impoverished (But Secretly Rich) Boyfriend, and she tearily thanks them for being so kind to her awful little self and ugh, ugh, A MILLION TIMES UGH. But mid-book Bella is wonderful. Mid-book Bella, who calmly describes herself as a 'limited little B,' who is very well aware that money is not the greatest way to happiness but damn, it's better than the alternative.
Also, Bella Wilfer and Lizzie Hexam have the most hilarious one-scene friendship ever, which mostly consists of staring at each other in gape-jawed, teary-eyed recognition of each other's glorious attractiveness. "It's a pleasure to me to look at you." "No, no, it's a pleasure to me to look at YOU." JUST GET A ROOM ALREADY.
Jenny Wren: Jenny Wren was my favorite the first time I read this book ten years ago. Nobody is surprised by this, because I love cranky little girls and Jenny is the CRANKIEST LITTLE GIRL, an angry disabled thirteen-year-old seamstress with a bad back and legs who loves Lizzie and thinks everyone else is pretty much shit, especially Lizzie's terrible romantic options. Jenny has the good fortune to receive an early variation on 'NOT ALL MEN,' and is having none of it:
Miss Wren wrinkled her nose to express dislike. ‘Selfish. Thinks only of himself. The way with all of you.’
'The way with all of us? Then you don't like ME?'
'So-so,' replied Miss Wren, with a shrug and a laugh. 'Don't know much about you.'
'But I was not aware it was the way with all of us,' said Bradley, returning to the accusation, a little injured. 'Won't you say, some of us?'
'Meaning,' returned the little creature, 'every one of you, but you. Hah!'
Then Bradley tells Lizzie that he can't help the violent passion she brings out in him, and eventually attempts to murder her other love interest. NOT ALL MEN! Dickens is often actually surprisingly good with Nice Guy syndrome; many of his heroines are followed around by apparently deserving but obviously awful young men who claim to be entitled to their love, and it's always presented as a deeply horrible and skin-crawling experience.
But anyway, back to Jenny Wren. I find her incredibly interesting. Her relationship with her father, in particular, is really awful and unhealthy on all sides -- he's a drunk who does nothing to support her, so she calls him her child and flips the situation so she becomes the abusive parent instead. Probably not the best way to handle things, Jenny Wren! But, like, she's a thirteen-year-old kid who's never had support, so it's not like she's emotionally capable of handling it better.
Sophronia Lammle: ALSO FASCINATING. The Lammles are a couple of fortune-hunters who accidentally marry each other and then find out that they are, respectively, penniless. Neither are amused. Subsequently they join forces to attempt to shake the world down for money while pretending to be vastly rich. Alfred Lammle is just a straight-up villain, but Sophronia is vastly more complicated; she's totally willing to throw 90% of the world under the bus, but when she finally does find she cares about someone, she coolly surveys the room, picks an ally, and chucks both herself and the husband she's kind of afraid of straight under the bus instead. And then goes on to select a different victim. Dickens doesn't like Sophronia Lammle particularly despite her occasional acts of heroism, which is fair -- she's not a very good person -- but I kind of love her.
Georgiana Podsnap: Sophronia Lammle's one true love? PERHAPS. Georgiana Podsnap is an unhappy, deeply socially awkward heiress with terrible self-esteem. The Lammles makes great efforts to become her first-ever friends, with the intent of basically selling her to a terrible fortune-hunting friend of theirs for a cut of the profits. However, Georgiana's EARNESTLY TRUE FRIENDSHIP and COMPLETE WEIRDNESS eventually win Sophronia's affection and she takes steps to cut herself and her terrible husband out of Georgiana's life. After which Georgiana comes running back in to offer to sell all her jewelry for her because she loves her SO MUCH. There is a Yuletide fic here, is what I am saying.
There are tons of other women in the book as well but Mrs. Boffin doesn't merit a section because I'm still mad at her about the end of the book, and this entry is already a million years long and I'm still on section one. (Though I will add I am also a big fan of Pleasant Riderhood.) It is really interesting how many women have important connections in the book, though. The only time two women meet and don't impact each other in enormous, positive ways is when Sophronia Lammle meets Bella and decides she doesn't care what happens to her because SHE'S CERTAINLY NO GEORGIANA PODSNAP. I'm no Dickens expert, but the only other Dickens I can think of with such intense female friendships is Bleak House's Esther and Ada, and to a lesser extent Esther and Caddy Jellyby. But here you have Sophronia and Georgiana, Jenny and Lizzie, Lizzie and Bella, Bella and Mrs. Boffin (ugh, but still) -- it's a lot! I'm a fan.
Right, OK, let's move on to Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn, AMBIGUOUSLY GAY LAWYERS WHO DON'T LAWYER. Eugene is full of apathy and ennui, and would rather spend his time being ironic than actually doing ANYTHING; Mortimer is full of apathy and ennui because Eugene is full of apathy and ennui, and he thinks Eugene is AMAZING and his jokes are HILARIOUS and would just sort of like to follow him around forever.
The thing that's consistently astounding to me about Mortimer and Eugene is how contemporary they feel. Like, it's hard to imagine running into Lizzie Hexam, for example, in the real world. But everyone knows a Eugene and Mortimer. They are the ultimate Victorian hipsters. They hang out with rich upper-class twits, but they hang out with them ironically. They're sort of sad about social injustice, but not really sad enough to do anything about it. Eugene is kind of in love with Lizzie, but, like, he doesn't know, kind of, maybe? Ugh! Being an adult and committing to a course of action is hard! Much easier to hang around being apathetic and making sarcastic commentary.
Which, I mean, goodness knows I sympathize with that feeling. It's easy to make fun of Eugene and Mortimer for the ways in which they are terrible, but it's also easy to identify with them. When you're young, and things are OK enough for you, but you know they're not OK for everyone, but the weight of the social pressures that keep you comfortable enough seem too heavy to shove off -- what do you do with that? Well, if you're in a Dickens novel, you get beaten over the head with the near-death experience of symbolism and try to change your ways, but most generally well-intentioned but kind of useless young hipster lawyers out there are not living in Dickens novels.
MOVING ON. The last thing I want to talk about -- and the reason I always remember Our Mutual Friend better than most of the Dickens novels I read in my teens -- is Mr. Riah, Our Token Sympathetic Jew.
Dickens did not always write sympathetic Jews! The most famous Dickens Jew is Awful Fagin, the villain of Oliver Twist, who turns innocent small children into thieves and keeps them from their loving families. Then after Oliver Twist came out, Dickens got a letter from a Jewish woman named Mrs. Eliza Davis.
MRS. ELIZA DAVIS: I love your work! Great social justice reporting! Which is why I am so disappointed that Oliver Twist is INCREDIBLY ANTI-SEMITIC.
DICKENS: What! No! I mean, I am totally not anti-Semitic! Some of my best friends are Jewish! There are lots of Christian villains in the book too!
MRS. ELIZA DAVIS: ...
DICKENS: .... ok, now that I have thought about it, yes, it is possible that was a dick move.
So then he writes Our Mutual Friend, in which an evil Christian moneylender to whom Mr. Riah owes a debt FORCES Mr. Riah to play the ROLE of Evil Jewish Moneylender, because everyone will believe it because of STEREOTYPES ABOUT JEWS. To which Mr. Riah humbly submits, because he is pure and saintly and symbolic of Jewish suffering, until eventually he decides he can't go on with it because he feels responsible ON BEHALF OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE for contributing to stereotypes.
"Men say, 'This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks.' Not so with the Jews. Men find the bad among us easily enough -- among what people are the bad not easily found? -- but they take the worst of us as samples of the best; they take the lowest of us as presentations of the highest; and they say 'All Jews are alike.'"
Which is fascinating on a number of levels, because, on the one hand, this is almost a straight-up apology from Dickens for writing Fagin to begin with; but on the other hand, it puts the onus of the effort to change people's minds on Riah and other Jews, to be a model minority. There is no blame or responsibility attached to any of the notably anti-Semitic people who immediately jump to conclusions about Riah or other Jewish characters -- only to the evil moneylender who's manipulating the stereotype to begin with. So, I mean, there's a lot to unpack here, and I'm not going to go on writing an essay; there's a lot you can say about Earnest Victorian Writers' efforts to tackle the issue of Jewish prejudice, in general (see also: Daniel Deronda.) But it's super interesting.
....uh, so this has become a very long entry. Our Mutual Friend! It's a book about a bunch of women, some ambiguously gay lawyers, a Jewish guy, and I guess an A-plot about a dude who fakes his own death to nobly avoid inheriting a large fortune, even though I have completely not mentioned this at all. But that is what the book is actually about. FOR THE RECORD.
