Technical Difficulties

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England by David D. Hall

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


(2022) This is an excellent book about seventeenth-century New England. Hall is talking about religious belief---which, of course, was massively important to the Puritans, but, as he proves, not monolithic. He discusses the Puritans' interest in "wonders"---by which they meant anything out of the ordinary, e.g., rainbows, though most of the wonders they collected were disasters or portents of disaster: earthquakes and comets and monstrous births. He also talks about their literacy rate, and what it meant to come as close as they did to achieving the Protestant ideal of every person able to read the bible for themselves. (They came very close, and it did not go as expected.) He has chapters on the uses of ritual (in a culture that had deliberately stripped all the ritual out) and the meetinghouse as the interface between the clergy and the laity, and his last chapter is on Samuel Sewell's* understanding of his world, as revealed in his diary, and it's strange and sad and alien. (I find the Puritans and their City on a Hill fascinating, but I also think it's the most unappealing utopia anyone has ever imagined.)
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*(In)famous as the only judge in the Salem witchcraft crisis who made a public apology.

(2020) So this is a book that I should have read for my dissertation but did not find until 15 years too late. It's about religion and popular culture in 17th century New England, and so was actually illuminating for one of my obsessions, the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692.

Hall talks about the ways in which both ordinary people and the learned elite experienced religion in their lives. For most people, this meant most immediately the Bible (and other books: catechisms, psalters, sermons, chapbooks and "penny godlies"), so he's talking also about literacy and print culture, and about the way the Bible saturated the lives of the colonists. (In Samuel Sewell's house, they read aloud from the Bible every evening, from Genesis to Revelations, and when they got to the end, they started all over again at the beginning, and I'm sure Sewell---who was a magistrate, not a minister---was not unique in this.) He also talks about the role of organized worship and the many uses of ritual. And he discusses the controversies of the day (like Antinomianism, the Halfway Covenant, the Quakers), and does a really good job of conveying how something like baptism looked very different in the popular understanding from the way the ministers meant it to be seen. (MINISTERS: Baptism is a sacrament of admission to the church. PEOPLE: Baptism means my children won't go to hell when our shocking infant mortality rate catches them.)

This is an academic book, so the prose is not lively (I *have* read academic books with lively prose, but I can count them on the fingers of one hand), but it's very clearly written and clearly argued.



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Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts by Richard Weisman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As the title suggests, this is a very academic approach to the wider subject of witchcraft in colonial New England. Weisman is a sociologist (which shows a bit in his prose style), and he lays things out in an orderly and easy-to-follow fashion. He's interested in what the colonists thought witchcraft was and why they prosecuted the people they prosecuted, and he's also interested in what social functions witchcraft served for various levels of society. He is not the only person to talk about the disjunct between what people who brought witchcraft accusations thought they were talking about and what the people who adjudicated witchcraft accusations thought they were talking about, but he does a good job of explaining what that meant.



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The Life and Times of Cotton Mather by Kenneth Silverman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a very even-handed biography of a very difficult subject. Cotton Mather was such a jumble of things, good and bad, that it's hard to sort them out into any kind of assessment. Silverman does a great job, both with that and with exploring the political/religious/cultural changes in Massachusetts during Mather's lifetime. He uses Mather's diaries wherever possible, his letters and sermons and books for the gaps where the diaries are missing. He's very honest about Mather's failings (he invents the term "Matherese" for Mather's particular habit of deprecating himself on one hand and bragging on the other, generally in the same sentence), but also points out his extraordinary accomplishments---including the championing of smallpox inoculations in 1721---and I ended up feeling like I know Cotton Mather as well as anyone can from three centuries away.



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Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie A. Fiedler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a comprehensive discussion of American novels, from the first novel written in America (The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature, 1789)---before that, actually, since he starts talking about novels with Clarissa (1748)---up to the current productions in the 60s. It is engaging and entertaining, and I do genuinely feel I learned a good deal from it.

However, it has major drawbacks. Fiedler is enlightened for 1966, but---while he admits that (white) women and Black men write novels, and is even enthusiastic about Invisible Man---it never occurs to him that either (white) women or Black men have subject positions (and Black women do not exist). He completely falls for Humbert Humbert's story in Lolita, and never questions that OF COURSE a twelve-year-old girl seduced him and OF COURSE HH is the injured party. And he is quite unnecessarily catty about Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," calling it an "unwitting travesty" of the American adaptation of Kafka by writers like Nathanael West and Isaac Rosenfeld (492). In general, he suffers greatly from the idea that literature should be divvied up into highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow (with such gradations on the scale as "upper middlebrow," which is where I stopped being annoyed and just became amused by his posturing). Only highbrow literature is worth consideration and highbrow literature is, of course, only written by men. (George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans would get a pass, I think. But, being English, she does not get discussed.) The vast audience of novel-reading women merely serve to drag potentially highbrow male authors down to their middlebrow level. He is dismissive of science fiction, and detective fiction after Poe, and although he clearly loves the gothic, he only loves it if it remains pure and does not debase itself with what he calls "horror-pornography."

It is also notable and instructive that I do not recognize the names of most of the (white male) writers he mentions after WWII.



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Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is an anthology of essays, arranged chronologically by subject, that talk about, in the broadest possible senses of the words, "hauntings," "ghosts," "phantoms," etc. Most of the essays are 2nd tier; their subjects are interesting enough, but the writing is no more than get-the-job-done passable. (And I think the one essay is wrong about Christine---Christine is sort of the opposite of a ghost, in that she is intensely physical and one of the things the book is very uneasily about is the fact that her physicality is inexorably self-repairing, you can't get rid of the physical 1958 Plymouth Fury, no matter what you do; although I think it's fair to say she is also haunted, the two phenomena shouldn't be elided, and she certainly shouldn't be described as a "ghost-car"---and very possibly wrong about From a Buick 8, but that's based only on the description of the book in the essay, so.) The two I thought were the best as pieces of writing as well as academic essays were 1 about the phenomenon of "hysterical fugues" in 19th century America and the academic genealogy of what is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder (like I said, the concept of "haunting" is being stretched to its utmost limits) and 1 called "The Politics of Heaven: The Ghost Dance, The Gates Ajar, and Captain Stormfield," which I'm finding a little difficult to explain, except that it's about depictions of Heaven in late 19th century America.

(Yes, I did notice that I spent the most time in this review talking about Christine.)

Three and a half stars, round up to four.



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Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story From Le Fanu To Blackwood by Jack Sullivan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is good, thoughtful, appreciative literary criticism of ghost stories by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, and Algernon Blackwood. It is also very short (154 pages with notes and index and very generous margins). Since M. R. James is one of my favorite writers, I am naturally inclined to look kindly on Dr. Sullivan's project, and I think he is very smart about what makes James so good at what he does. There's less to say about Blackwood, who is not as good at writing ghost stories---although I was sorry Sullivan didn't say more about "The Wendigo," which I think is successful almost despite itself---and while I very much enjoyed the chapters on Le Fanu, I have never been able to get into his writing and so can't say whether they were illuminating of their subject.

Not surprisingly, there are almost no women in this book, either as characters or as critics, though he does mention Elizabeth Bowen's The Cat Jumps favorably, which means I will have to find it.



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Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville by David S. Reynolds

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I had high hopes for this book, but it turns out that when Reynolds says "subversive" he means a very particular thing he has come up with himself, which isn't actually subversive. And I profoundly disagree with his beliefs about the way writers write. So I spent most of this very long book annoyed.



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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a book with decided strengths and decided weaknesses.

Strengths: Saunders knows his material well, loves it passionately, and is very good at explaining how it does what it does.

Weaknesses: He is almost entirely uninterested in reading against the text, and so does not discuss misogyny or classism (except to bring in Tolstoy's extremely problematic ideal peasant mythology), even though both are RAMPANT in these texts. (Ed., this aside is operating under an insufficiently nuanced and extremely American assumption about race in Russia. The texts also have what you might call passive racism, in that there are no non-white characters, and I'd need to know more about nineteenth-century Muscovite Russia to be able to comment on whether that's because there were no non-white people to be seen. Except, of course, for Alexander Pushkin.) Saunders is also, I think, a little too starry-eyed about Tolstoy and Tolstoy's literary genius, which leads to bad choices about material: the last story he discusses, "Alyosha the Pot" (which Tolstoy trunked), is not a good story, and it is not an interesting story, except to Saunders. (It looks to me like a story Tolstoy started well and kept going until he got into a bind---and then he killed his protagonist. Which is not how Saunders sees it at all.)

I admit that I am not an ideal audience for this book, since I dislike most of nineteenth-century Russian literature (with an exception for Dostoevsky and a half-exception for Gogol, who I should like but don't). And I also admit that I enjoyed both Saunders's exegesis and his discussion of his own writing. It's just that the second time I read the book, I skipped all the stories.

Three and a half stars, round up to four.



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The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


As is obvious from my own bibliography (The Angel of the Crows), I am deeply interested in Jack the Ripper, not because I admire him, but because he is so deeply baffling. I'm fascinated by the investigation into his crimes and the ways in which that investigation failed, the ways in which Victorian policework was simply unprepared to deal with a phenomenon like him. (The same can be said for the Thames Torso Murderer(s).) I have, I admit, followed where I was led in terms of the Ripper's victims. All the books say prostitutes, and I accepted that at face value. What Rubenhold's excellent book proves is that I should not have done so, that for three of the five, there's no proof of any kind, and while Elisabeth Stride had been a prostitute earlier in her life, there is no proof that she was soliciting around the time of her death. Only Mary Jane Kelly is demonstrably a prostitute.

So what happens to the idea that his victims led their murderer to a safe place to murder them, which had always seemed to me to be a catch-22 in which the women were trapped? Rubenhold's idea is even simpler than that. She thinks Jack the Ripper was purely an opportunist, that he murdered his victims as he came across them "sleeping rough"---that is, sleeping on the streets because (as is demonstrable), they didn't have the money for a bed. This explains why his victims never cried out. They were dead before they knew they were under attack. Only Elisabeth Stride is (possibly) different, and of course there's never been consensus among Ripper historians that she was one of his victims. (My only question is whether Kate Eddowes actually had time to fall asleep, but that's an unanswerable question, not meant as a quibble.)

This is an exhaustively researched book. Every time I thought, this needs a footnote, it was either footnoted or simply in the text, such as the history of tin working in Wolverhampton or the difference between a coachman and a stud groom. And she found out amazing amounts about the women's early lives. Except for Mary Jane Kelly, who never told the same story twice and who never told a story that Rubenhold could find evidence to support. But of course Mary Jane Kelly never got past her "early life."

My only complaint is that Rubenhold slid a little bit past historical speculation and into fiction in imagining the women's last hours and what they did and HOW THEY FELT. But this is a hobby horse of mine.



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Approaches To Teaching Gothic Fiction: The British And American Traditions by Diane Long Hoeveler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a collection of essays mostly about actual courses people have taught, so it's mostly rather dry, factual reporting of practical applications of various kinds of pedagogy to the Gothic. (The stand-out exception was the guy who brilliantly made his class of non-majors write an epistolary novel together.) I found it interesting mostly because I want to incorporate more Gothic in my teaching (although even there, I would have preferred at least partial focus on more modern Gothic, instead of the one essay about teaching Anne Rice and Stephen King*). I mean, it's an MLA book, I should not be surprised that the approach is, ahem, conservative. (And I did appreciate Tamar Heller pushing the boundary with her essay on teaching race, gender, and imperialism in Victorian Gothic.)

So, yeah, not of interest unless you really are interested in teaching 18th and 19th century Gothic. (Or, of course, Anne Rice and Stephen King.)

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*Because of which, I think, all the other essays in the book, when they mention modern Gothic/horror, do so as if "Anne Rice and Stephen King" is a suitable synecdoche for the whole shebang (instead of just two examples of an extraordinarily diverse genre) which is the kind of superficial understanding I was actually hoping a book about teaching the Gothic would not have.



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