Technical Difficulties

I love Idols of Perversity, but seem to be the only person in the world who can't stand Parallel Lives.

Feel better soon!

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I dislike a number of Rose's ideological assumptions about marriage (including the heterosexist, monogamist tunnel-vision), but I find the chapters themselves readable and fascinating. What do you dislike about her?

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Review here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/melymbrosia/206851.html), helpful exchange with Here's Luck in comments.

It was the heterosexist, monogamist tunnel vision, and the insistence on playing the blame game with all the marriages, even though she said she wasn't, I think. The book did make me want to read more on everyone mentioned -- so I think I had essentially the same reaction as you, except the proportions of annoyance and fascination were different.

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Yes, and I must have read that review and completely flaked on it. V. sorry. Bad brain.

I agree that Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill come off very badly--especially, now that I think of it, in that Rose mentions Harriet's crippling carriage accident, but doesn't seem to consider it as an explanation both for Harriet's subsequent domineering behavior and J.S. Mill's acceptance of same. And you're right that Rose doesn't seem to be able to keep away from blame and fault.

Partly, I think, I was less offended because I know almost nothing about the people under discussion (more now, as I read Haight and inevitably seek out other biographies). I knew nothing about Dickens' homelife except the excessive number of children and his fondness for the role of paterfamilias. I knew nothing of John Ruskin's personality and life except some oblique comments in Alison Lurie's Don't Tell the Grown-ups: Why Children Read the Books They Do (which, parenthetically is a egregious example of the evils of Freudian biographical criticism) suggesting he was sexually fixated on prepubescent girls. I knew even less about the Carlyles or about J. S. Mill and Harriet Taylor. The only relationship of the five I knew anything about was Eliot and Lewes which, as you say, is the only chapter that doesn't try to upset the narrative shaped by the male party--because Lewes died first and didn't leave one. Actually, that's her project. In four out of five (Carlyle, Mill, Dickens, Ruskin), the man has left a record of the marriage, with apparent bias either in favor of (Carlyle, Mill) or against (Dickens, Ruskin) the wife, while the wife has not left a similar testament. Which explains why the Gray-Ruskin and Dickens-Hogarth chapters didn't bother me in that respect, because they fit so perfectly the feminist reclamation pattern of the early 80s. Effie and Catherine were maligned by their husbands as insane and evil; Rose is reinterpreting the evidence against the patriarchal text. But if your starting point is that the narrative of the relationship left by one party is wrong (and when those narratives are extreme in either blame or praise), it's no wonder that you start to look more than a little partisan. I, too, wish that Rose would have stopped and examined her own biases first.

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Claire Tomalin's The Invisible Woman is a very good read and absolutely fascinating on Dickens's wife and how Dickens maintained his paterfamilias role while throwing her over. It's a biography of Nellie Ternan.

As for Ruskin, there's a good biography, hmm, my brain's gone blank on the author, and it's someone I know as well, which is embarassing. But anyway, the one definite thing on his sexuality, after which all is speculation, is that he was squicked on his wedding night by the fact that his wife had pubic hair. This can be seen as a fixation with pre-pubertal girls, or it can be seen as a fixation on classical marble nudes. I've always felt rather sorry for him -- for her too, of course, but it's all mixed up in what I think about Ash's marriage night in Possession.

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Francis O'Gorman is the author of the Ruskin bio.

Sorry.

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If you think of the author of the Ruskin biography, let me know.

And that's exactly what I mean by Lurie committing the worst sins of Freudian biographical criticism. Her focus is on Kate Greenaway, so she doesn't give Ruskin much space, but she moves straight past what HAPPENED on the infamous wedding night to "fixation with prepubescent girls." Although, if her facts are accurate, Ruskin besought Greenaway repeatedly to draw him what amounted to child-porn ... but I have no idea if that's the real story, either. Lurie's sympathies are definitely with Greenaway.

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I debated whether to be horribly offended you didn't put me at the center of your intellectual universe and remember everything I'd ever posted, but then I decided to get real.

I'd also recently read two very good biographies (Nancy Milford's of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Penelope Fitzgerald's of Edward Burne-Jones), and it suffered from the comparison.

Have you read Dijkstra's follow-up to Idols of Perversity about twentieth-century art, Evil Sisters? I think it didn't work as well, mostly because although there's certainly a strong strain of misogyny in many 20th-century male artists, it's less overpowering and much more successfully contested.

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Mely, you are the center of my intellectual universe. But since the universe is continually expanding, it gets harder and harder to find anything in it.

I haven't read Evil Sisters, I think because I read a review of it that said basically what you just did (and if you say that's because it's a review you posted, I shall go crawl under my bed and die of shame). But it's a pity he didn't handle it better, because some of the best moments (IMO) of Idols of Perversity is when he talks about artists fighting the hegemony (there's two examples in the last chapter: Woolrych's Judith and Pell's Salome). I actually wished he'd done a little more with that theme--more with women artists in general--so it's especially disappointing that when he had the chance, he muffed it.

*notes down more biographies to look for*

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The center of your intellectual universe is blushing. Just so you know.

(I wonder what that does to red shift?)

No, that's definitely not a review I've posted. You've reminded me that what I'd really love to see from him is not so much a 20th-C. sequel to Idols as a 19th-C. companion piece, covering women and/or feminist artists. I don't know much about female artists in the 19th century in general, and I'd love to know more.

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And this is basically a tangent, but wotthehell.

Last year, in either Chicago or St. Louis, we went to an exhibition of paintings by two artists, father and daughter. I think they were Renaissance, and I think they were Italian. A couple of historical novels about the daughter had just recently been published (she was raped by one of her father's students and went on to have her own career, Triumphing Over Adversity as we like all our historical personages to do), which is probably why I figured I'd remember her name without writing it down.

Silly Truepenny.

Her work was amazing, and it's now driving me nuts that I can't think of her name.

Which, to hook back to your comment (ha-ha!), is more evidence in favor of a book like Dijkstra's but focused on women artists. Because they were there and they were working, and they're still mostly ignored.

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Artemisia Gentileschi, I bet. And her father was Orazio.

I keep meaning to read up on her and not getting around to it. I haven't seen any exhibits on her.

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Yes, that's her.

If you ever get a chance to see an exhibition of Artemisia's work, I highly recommend it.

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marith.livejournal.com

Aha! I was reminded of her as well by this thread and planning to ask Google for her name, only you and melymbrosia are way ahead of me. My best memory of art history class is an essay the TA brought in comparing her "Susanna and the Elders" to I think Tintoretto's.

*thoughtfully adds "art history" to the list of classes to take next year*

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rysmiel.livejournal.com

And I find it funny and touching and sad that George Eliot was, all unintending, a home-wrecker.

Do please enlighten us ?

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When she first moved to London in January 1851, George Eliot lodged with the publisher John Chapman, who lived with both his wife and his mistress (Elisabeth Tilley, also the Chapman children's governess). Within less than a month, both wife and mistress were insanely jealous of Eliot (Elisabeth once found Chapman and Eliot holding hands, and they spent a prodigious amount of time in each other's company, although it doesn't seem likely that their intimacy was physical), and there were a number of what (even filtered through Chapman's diary) must have been incredibly nasty fights--Susanna and Elisabeth united against Eliot, and she had to return to Coventry in March.

It says rather a lot about Chapman's charm that he managed to convince all three women that Eliot should resume lodging in the Chapman house, and did it before the end of September. Some sort of truce was worked out, for she stayed there for the next two years with no further romantic upheavals (she had also transferred her affections from Chapman to Herbert Spencer, which doubtless helped)>

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Is that the Chapman? Translator of Homer?

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Nope.

The translation-of-Homer Chapman is George Chapman, who was almost in my dissertation as the author of the Bussy D'Ambois plays. George Eliot's Chapman is John Chapman, who seems to have been a man of great energy and an inflated notion of his own intellectual prowess.

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Oh, and the crud? I'm exactly the same, exactly.

For a moment, in a kind of dream-logic way, I was convinced I must have caught it from you.

(In fact it's a known-but-rare menstrual complication for me, and I should be fine tomorrow.)

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Gracious, really? I wonder if that's what's going on with me, too. I was assuming it was just the forces of evil aligning against me, that I should have low-level crud and menstrual cramps at the same time, but perhaps I was mistaken. I've certainly had the two coincide before, and it would definitely explain why I get the low-level crud so often.

Is there somewhere, do you know, that I can find out more?

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When I started getting menstrual headaches and wobbles, after Zorinth was born, the doctor said: "It's something that happens, take aspirin, lie down, cope. What, you never had worse than blood in the previous fifteen years? Aren't you lucky!"

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Somehow, I was afraid that was what you were going to say.

Gynecology, the final frontier.

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pameladean

I can try to dig up the references for you -- my knowledge of this kind of thing comes from coping with perimenopause. In any case, there's a pretty firm link of some indeterminate kind between hormonal fluctuations, whether the ordinary monthly kind, those caused by pregnancy, or those caused by perimenopause and menopause, and immune system changes. Like absolutely anything else having to do with reproductive hormones, the effects can go either way -- your immune system can be either depressed or stimulated by the changes.

Pamela

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That would be very kind.

Thank you.

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libskrat

I knew I had finally recovered from grad school when I could pick up a non-fiction book at the library and get all the way through it. I've been a non-fiction-readin' fiend ever since, and I never was before. Non-fiction is cool!

I don't want to tell you how long it took me, though. Nor do you want to know.

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I've only managed to get back into it this year, and only in areas other than my academic specialty. Grad school really does raze that part of the brain flat.

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oracne.livejournal.com

What is Idols of Perversity?

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