A novel that combines spectacle with secret, the supernatural with bitter reality, and editorial authority with subjective narration, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter demands a psychological reading. Its characters are so complex, their motivations and desires hidden from each other, the reader and ostensibly from the author himself, that we are compelled to view them in part as psychological case studies. This is no doubt what has made the book a constant feature in English Literature syllabuses, and accounts for the hundreds of academic papers written on the inner workings of both its characters and author alike.

The psychological effects of guilt, repression and shame are central to understanding the novel, and Pearl, “that little creature, whose innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of Providence, a lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty passion”, serves as their embodiment. The metaphor is not disguised. Hawthorne states that she is “the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter endowed in life”. Hester holds her child at her breast besides the symbol she is forced to wear; when Pearl grows she even dresses her in red. The fact that Pearl is “the object of her affection and the emblem of her guilt and torture” is plain.

Poster for the 1926 MGM film starring Lillian Gish

Hester and Pearl’s relationship is one of particular interest because of the conflicting emotions the mother has towards this reminder of her disgrace. “She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no faith, therefore, that its result would be good. Day after day, she looked fearfully into the child’s expanding nature, ever dreading to detect some dark and wild peculiarity, that should correspond with the guiltiness to which she owed her being.” Indeed Pearl soon becomes quite the little terror. From violence against small animals and other children to sudden and unexpected changes in temperament, the little girl torments her mother.

Here is clearly a case of the ‘sins of the father’. But perhaps the central question to be asked is whether Pearl’s unnatural and unnerving, even satanic, character is a straightforward matter of a wrongdoing producing an inherent wrongdoer, or whether Hester’s attitude and apprehension towards her child since birth creates the monster she fears. On the one hand, Hawthorne suggests that there is something fundamentally nefarious within her:

“Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants… If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered about her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill, incoherent exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because they had so much the sound of a witch’s anathemas in some unknown tongue.”

On the other, the fact of growing up in a “circle of seclusion from human society” seems bound to leave its mark on a developing child. Moreover, Hester’s paranoia about the effects of her exile and adultery on Pearl appear to be projected onto her, distorting innocent childlike behaviours into something much more sinister. From the moment the baby first touches the scarlet letter embroidered onto her mother’s dress, “Hester had never felt a moment’s safety; not a moment’s calm enjoyment of her”. Henceforth, after the living and the emblematic symbols of her adultery are first viscerally connected, Hester begins to interpret Pearl’s every action as a reminder of, or punishment for, her sin.

“She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor, would flit away with a mocking smile…Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush towards the child,—to pursue the little elf in the flight which she invariably began,—to snatch her to her bosom, with a close pressure and earnest kisses,—not so much from overflowing love, as to assure herself that Pearl was flesh and blood, and not utterly delusive.” Yet could this not simply be the natural games of a mischievous infant, misinterpreted by a mother looking for evil?

Likewise, when she sees in the reflection of a brook “the shadowy wrath of Pearl’s image, crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot, wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of all, still pointing its small forefinger at Hester’s bosom”, might she not be taking a child’s demands for its mother’s attention as a malevolent and threatening reminder of the brand of shame on her chest? These questions are magnified by the ambiguity of the novel’s narration.

Hester’s interactions with Pearl are often framed in ambiguity: the “mother could have fancied that the child had absorbed [the sunlight] into herself”; she sees her “now like a real child, now like a child’s spirit”; “she fancied that she beheld…a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice…It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in mockery”. Hawthorne’s frequent use of phrases such as “she fancied”, “she doubted” and “as if” point towards the uncertainties and instability of Hester’s perceptions. Indeed at times these verge on hallucinations and dangerous impulses:

“There was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere. At times, a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to send Pearl at once to heaven, and go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice should provide.”

Such uncertainty is amplified by the narrator’s own role in the story.  The lengthy introduction to the novel introduces the narrator, who shares many traits with Nathaniel Hawthorne himself, and who discovers in the Customs House at Salem a hundred-year-old historical account of the affair of the scarlet letter, which had occurred the previous century. The narrator, despite professing doubts about his own writing abilities, decides to undertake a fictional retelling of the affair, thus producing the novel, The Scarlet Letter. These layers of narrative ambiguity, of which the reader is reminded by syntactical structures revolving around the terms “whether…or…” and “it seemed”, force us to question whether the demonic presentation of Pearl is an accurate reflection of the child’s nature, or an interpretation distorted by so many unreliable perceptive strata.

Nathaniel Hawthorne. Daguerrotype by anonymous photographer c.1850

Distortion is cast on Pearl from all sides: by society, which sees the child born of adultery as an aberration, herself blameworthy for and tarred by the sin that begot her; by Dimmesdale, her absent father, who covertly acknowledges his position but swears that “the daylight of this world shall not see” his paternal connection; by her own mother, to whom she is a constant reminder of her shame; and by the narrator, who deliberately shows her as both demonised and demon. Her name has often been taken as a symbol of purity, white and precious, calculated to contrast Hester’s sin and symbol. The iridescence immediately associated with pearls, however, may also reflect the spectrum of forms she takes on depending on the gaze and attitude levelled at her.

Pearl is liberated from these sources of distortion one by one. Dimmesdale finally confesses his relation to the child before the town and swiftly dies; soon Chillingworth, Hester’s husband who had sworn vengeance for her adultery, also dies and leaves Pearl a substantial inheritance, allowing the mother and child to leave the Puritan community of New England and travel to Europe. Finally Hester returns to Salem, leaving Pearl “not only alive, but married, and happy” in England. The mother, with the living symbol of her sin absent, is able to resume “a more real life”, while the daughter, safely removed from the depleting forces of Salem, her family and the narrator, who “[n]ever learned, with the fulness of perfect certainty” what became of her, is finally able to live a contented life unhindered by the misperceptions of those around her.

Hawthorne himself was a religious man, with a great faith in and gratitude towards God, but he eschewed organised religion throughout his life, disavowing his own Puritan roots, criticising the Catholic church, and rebuking the Transcendentalist movement to which his wife belonged. His letters speak of a personal relationship with God, and although sin and shame appear to have blighted him as they do his characters, he did not exhibit his turmoil in the public sphere, except arguably through his writings, but was known to be withdrawn and veiled, often literally. The Fall of Man and human imperfection was, for Hawthorne, a demon to be wrestled with in private, not to be placed under the control or regulation of an earthly authority. This opinion can be applied directly to the story of The Scarlet Letter, in which external pressure and societal standards drain characters of their humanity. It is only when they relieve themselves from these debilitating forces that they can become psychologically healthy and at peace.

Main image: 1995 Entertainment/Hollywood film with Demi Moore and Gary Oldman. Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Poster for the 1926 MGM film starring Lillian Gish. Credit: Entertainment Pictures / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Nathaniel Hawthorne. Daguerrotype by anonymous photographer c.1850 Credit: ARCHIVIO GBB / Alamy Stock Photo

For more information on the life and works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, visit The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society

Our edition can be found here: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Guests at a traditional Burns Night supper are greeted by the blare of the bagpipe, its fierce notes unmistakable and unignorable. It would be hard to conceive of a more suitable opening for a celebration of Scotland’s most important poet, for in the work of Robert Burns the reader is immediately struck by sound. Burns’ poetry makes a direct appeal to the ear. Through his mastery of rhythm and rhyme, he manipulates pace and tone in a way that can transport his audience from the dizzying frenzy of a supernatural revel to the somber recollections of a veteran soldier:

“As Tammie glowr’d, amaz’d, and curious,

The mirth and fun grew fast and furious:

The piper loud and louder blew;

The dancers quick and quicker flew”

– Tam o’Shanter

“And the Moro low was laid at the sound of the drum.

…

I’d clatter on my stumps at the sound of a drum.

…

As when I used in scarlet to follow a drum.

…

I could meet a troop of hell at the sound of the drum.”

– The Jolly Beggars A Blog for Burns Night

The Robert Burns Birthplace Museum

Burns celebrates “wit’ merry sangs”, tell stories “wi’ rhymes well-turn’d an’ ready”, and sees throughout “the deep green-mantled Earth…joy and music pouring forth In ev’ry grove”. He mourns, however, in silence. Silence and reticence are the markers of death and despair; grief supresses song, and the absence of sound leaves a vacuum in which sorrow rings all the louder.

“His grief-worn heart, with truest joy,

Shall meet the welcome shock;

His airy harp shall lie unstrung

And silent on the rock.”

– Elegy

“No idly-feign’d poetic pains,

My sad love-lorn lamentings claim;

No shepherd’s pipe – Arcadian strains;

No fabled tortures, quaint and tame”

– The Lament

Music is both for and from the heart. Burns speaks in an almost Platonic way of the harmonising and transcendent power of song, describing how worshippers “chant their artless notes in simple guise; They tune their hearts, by far the noblest aim”. It grows within, from the “rudely-caroll’d, chiming phrase, In uncouth rhymes” of the inexperienced young poet, to the passionate outpouring of the rhapsode:

“And when the bard, or hoary sage,

Charm or instruct the future age,

They bind the wild poetic rage

In energy”

– The Vision A Blog for Burns Night

The task of the poet is to tame the organic, vitalising force of sound, and transform it into a song that “at once ’tis music – and ’tis love”. According to The Joly Beggars, this can be done by a simple fiddler: “I am a fiddler to my trade, And a’ the tunes that e’er I play’d, The sweetest still to wife or maid, Was whistle owre the lave o’t”. Elsewhere Burns seems to confirm that any humble being with a musical soul may transmute nature’s sounds into song, “the simple Bard, rough at the rustic plough, Learning his tuneful trade from every bough”. Nonetheless, he undoubtedly believes in an artistic hierarchy, that some poets are better than others.

“In Homer’s craft Jock Milton thrives;

Eschylus’ pen Will Shakespeare drives;

Wee Pope, the knurlin’, till him rives

Horatian fame;

In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives

Even Sappho’s flame.

But thee, Theocritus, wha matches?

They’re no herds’ ballats, Maro’s catches;

Squire Pope but busks his skinklin’ patches

O’ heathen tatters:

I pass by hunders, nameless wretches,

That ape their betters.”

– On Pastoral Poetry

So what is it that determines poetic quality? With classical imagery – the Muses, their mountain home on Parnassus, the harp or lyre, Pegasus and Mount Helicon – Burns presents the idea of sacred, lasting verse that immortalises both creator and subject. The poet who can tame the winged horse and soar on him to Parnassus’ heights is entrusted to preserve human achievement and memory for posterity, to sing of it “to endless generations”.

A bard was selected to witness the fray,

And tell future ages the feats of the day;

– The Whistle

A rustic bard

‘To give my counsels all in one,

Thy tuneful flame still careful fan;

Preserve the dignity of Man,

With Soul erect;

And trust the Universal Plan

Will all protect.

– The Vision

This humble tribute with a tear he gives,

A brother Bard, who can no more bestow:

But dear to fame thy Song immortal lives,

A nobler monument than Art can show.

– Inscription on the Tombstone A Blog for Burns Night

Robert Burns Mausoleum in St Michael’s Church yard, Dumfries

The bard is aware that greater heights are to be reached, and that the world will speak the words and name of those that attain them: “And as he touch’d his trembling harp, And as he tun’d his doleful sang, The winds, lamenting thro’ their caves, To echo bore the notes alang”. This concept of immortalising verse is a hallmark of classical poetry, showing its influence Burns’ work and outlook. The legacy of the creator living on in his creation, particularly the poetic, is an overarching theme in ancient poetry. There awaits, for he who “glows with all the spirit of the Bard, Fame, honest fame, his great, his dear reward”. Such glory belongs to the poet whose song is considered worthy of singing, whose themes and style are not bound by time and place, but whose message resonates with all people in all places.

Naturally, themes of love, death, victory and human nature extend across this vista. By contrast, poetry written on contextual themes does not, according to Burns, deserve this glory, as he acknowledges in his own epistolary verses. These short poems, written to friends and acquaintances, are often described in self-deprecating terms, as “puir silly, rhymin’ clatter” and “idle rhyme”, one even signed off “yours, Rab the Ranter”. They are merely “to pass the time”, an amusing activity for “when ye hae an hour to spare”, but one in which the “Muse dow scarcely spread her wing!”

With this precedent of great verse on lofty themes and recreational poetry on mundane matters established, Burns sometimes exploits it for comedic effect. Poor “Poet Willie” in The Kirk’s Alarm is emblematic of one who fails to live up to the legacy of the poetic masters: “O’er Pegasus’ side ye ne’er laid a stride, Ye but smelt, man, the place where he shit”!

In one epistle, the pompous poet proudly declaims that he is scaling new artistic heights, but turns out simply to be drunk: “I’m on Parnassus’ brink, Rivin’ the words to gar them clink; Whyles dazed wi’ love, whyles dazed wi’ drink”. The theme of alcohol-induced poetic pretension continues in Scotch Drink, on one of Burns’ most cherished topics.

“Let other Poets raise a fracas A Blog for Burns Night

‘Bout vines, an’ wines, an’ drunken Bacchus,

An’ crabbèd names an’ stories wrack us,

An’ grate our lug;

I sing the juice Scotch bear can mak us,

In glass or jug.

O thou, my Muse! guid auld Scotch Drink,

Whether thro’ wimplin worms thou jink,

Or, richly brown, ream owre the brink,

In glorious faem,

Inspire me, till I lisp an’ wink,

To sing thy name!”

– Scotch Drink

Talk of “glorious faem” and “my Muse” puts Burns’ beloved whisky on the highest pedestal of poetry alongside love and loss, while his light-hearted disdain for the “fracas” raised over wine demotes the drink beneath the scope of even the humblest verse. Likewise victims of Burns’ scorn are paid poets and their commissioned rhymes. The “mercenary bard” or “venal gang” of poets-for-hire cannot produce the great works of the true bard, whose “dearest meed a friend’s esteem and praise”, but rather “may jingle and rhyme In hopes of a laureate wreathing, And when he has wasted his time He’s kindly rewarded with naething”. Such minstrels degrade and demean poetry by writing whatever their patron demands, “stringin’ blethers up in rhyme, For fools to sing”, and in Burns’ opinion, “that’s nae flatt’rin’”.

Commissioned poetry, which comes not from the heart but from the offer of financial reward, lacks sublimity, and cannot compete with the authentic passion displayed by the true poet. In Willie Chalmers, written for the eponymous acquaintance in a response to his request for an epistolary poem to his beloved, Burns discusses the struggle that he himself faced when trying to write great poetry on behalf of another:

“My Pegasus I’m got astride,

And up Parnassus pechin’;

Whiles owre a bush wi’ downward crush,

The doited beastie stammers;

Then up he gets, and off he sets

For sake o’ Willie Chalmers.”

– Willie Chalmers A Blog for Burns Night

In fact Burns quite frequently laments that his own poetic powers are no match for the mighty subjects he longs to speak of. Whether the beauty of his beloved – “My Muse, to dream of such a theme, Thy feeble powers surrender!… I’ll drap the lyre, and mute admire The charms o’ lovely Davies” – or the otherworldly dance of a witch – “my muse her wing maun cour; Sic flights are far beyond her pow’r To sing how Nannie lap and flang” – he claims his skill cannot meet the demands of such elevated themes.  The irony, of course, lies in the medium of this claim. Despite what he may assert, Burns’ songs, ballads, epistles and elegies make it clear that “our bard like a prophet” has scaled Parnassus’ heights and immortalised through verse many of his most revered subjects – women, whisky and Caledonia – for both his own and Scottish glory.

Main image: The poet Robert Burns statue in Dumfries town centre, Greyfriars Church behind at night. Credit: Dave Porter / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: The Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, Burns Cottage. Credit: Stephen Dorey / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Robert Burns Mausoleum in St Michael’s Churchyard, Dumfries. Creditor: Richard Newton / Alamy Stock Photo

For more information on Robert Burns, see Robert Burns Country: The official Robert Burns site

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It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles”

Tennyson and his family

Many of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s most beloved poems are set on the water. In Crossing the Bar, the eighty-year-old poet, writing as he passed over the Solent to the Isle of Wight, hopes that his own death will resemble “such a tide as moving seems asleep”. Hallam Tennyson later wrote of his father’s passion for the water, recording how he would gaze endlessly into the depths of the sea on voyages.

The prominence of the ocean in Tennyson’s poetry needs come as no surprise. Steeped in Classical influences, he drew a great deal of inspiration from the literature of a time and place when seafaring was necessary, dangerous and, consequently, often heroic. Despite its secrets and its risks, the sea offered those with enough skill and courage the opportunity to discover new places, people, riches and knowledge. It also offered Tennyson the perfect symbol with which to explore ideas about curiosity, the unknown, and the extent to which humans are able to exert control over nature.  Islands play a central role in this exploration, where the safety and familiarity of the land give way to the excitement and adventure of the open sea.

Liberated from the mainland, the island offers an unimpeded view of a vast and seemingly endless frontier bursting with unknown possibilities. Timbuctoo, one of Tennyson’s earliest published poems, which won him the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for poetry at Cambridge, begins with the speaker standing on the peak of a mountain and looking out over the ocean. He imagines a scattering of islands, each with its own natural pleasures, painted in jewel-like hues and infused with a sense of the supernatural, even the divine:

“Where are ye,

Thrones of the Western wave, fair Islands green?

Where are your moonlight halls, your cedarn glooms,

The blossoming abysses of your hills?

Your flowering Capes, and your gold-sanded bays

Blown round with happy airs of odorous winds?

Where are the infinite ways, which, Seraph-trod,

Wound thro’ your great Elysian solitudes,

Whose lowest deeps were, as with visible love,

Fill’d with Divine effulgence, circumfused,

Flowing between the clear and polish’d stems,

And ever circling round their emerald cones

In coronals and glories, such as gird

The unfading foreheads of the Saints in Heaven?”

Images of untrammelled, exotic locales would certainly have appealed to the Victorian imagination; ongoing British exploration and colonial influence in every continent meant that Tennyson’s contemporaries were well-fed on a diet of exciting reports, stories and drawings from far-away lands. The Victorian fascination with the exotic is reflected in the idealised image of the island found in much of his poetry. The unnamed protagonist of Locksley Hall, for example, longs

“…to burst all links of habit – there to wander far away,

On from island unto island at the gateways of the day.

Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,

Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.

Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,

Slides the bird o’er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer from the crag;

Droops the heavy-blossom’d bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree –

Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea.”

In The Islet, however, which Tennyson started in the mid-1850s but did not publish until 1864, this blissful image is cast into doubt. The poem, which has been read as a reaction against or parody of pastoral verse, takes the form of a dialogue between a singer and his new wife. Upon her asking where they are to live together, the singer begins by describing

“’…a sweet little Eden on earth that I know,

A mountain islet pointed and peak’d;

Waves on a diamond shingle dash,

Cataract brooks to the ocean run,

Fairily-delicate palaces shine

Mixt with myrtle and clad with vine,

And overstream’d and silvery-streak’d

With many a rivulet high against the Sun

The facets of the glorious mountain flash

Above the valleys of palm and pine.’”

And yet, when she demands that they leave for this wonderful destination at once, he denies her wish:

‘No, no, no! For in all that exquisite isle, my dear,

There is but one bird with a musical throat,

And his compass is but of a single note,

That it makes one weary to hear.

…

No, love, no.

For the bud ever breaks into bloom on the tree,

And a storm never wakes on the lonely sea,

And a worm is there in the lonely wood,

That pierces the liver and blackens the blood,

And makes it a sorrow to be.’”

Tennyson Down, Isle of Wight

The singer dispels the illusion of the island as a paradise on earth. His complaint against its one and only songbird suggests that perfection, or perceived perfection, soon becomes tedious, while the worm carries connotations of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, which helped bring about the first sin and the fall of man. In this way, Tennyson suggests that their islet is not necessarily the idyllic embodiment of exoticism, freedom and possibility that it first appears.

Indeed, islands often have an uncanny or sinister side to them in Tennyson’s work, their liminality reflecting the fractured or disoriented state of mind and being experienced by his characters. His Ulysses is not the same hero we know from Homer’s poem: now an old man, he is caught between the life he strove so intensely to regain on Ithaca, and the rekindling spark of adventure. The warrior who once fought at Troy, courted demi-goddesses, escaped giants and monsters, and weathered heaven-sent storms cannot abide a life where, “Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole / Unequal laws unto a savage race”. Although “Made weak by time and fate, [he remains] strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.

What is more, his desire “to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars” until death, is not simply driven by physical restlessness or borne out of an affinity with the sea per se. It is a longing for experience and knowledge, which he is determined to follow, “like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought”. Beyond the horizon are not only untrodden lands, but also unfathomed ideas, both of which the aged Ulysses yearns to explore. The barren crags of Ithaca give him a vantage point from which to contemplate this frontier; standing on the island’s cliffs he is poised between his duty as king and husband and the pull of his own heart and mind.

Published over twenty years later in 1864, Enoch Arden also draws on the story of Odysseus. The title character is shipwrecked on a desert island where he remains alone for ten years, during which his wife, presuming her lost husband dead, remarries his old friend and has another child. For both Enoch and Ulysses, being on an island prevents his life from advancing in a favourable direction, but whereas the former is hindered purely by the constraints and obstacles set in place by nature and geography, the thing keeping the latter in place is his sense of kingly duty. Yet he swiftly delegates this to his son, Telemachus, after deciding that he “cannot rest from travel”.

Tennyson once again uses an island as the setting for a struggle between duty and desire in The Lady of Shalott. Sitting embowered by the silent isle, the title characters is cursed to weave a tapestry day and night, never leaving her turret or turning to glance out of her window at the scenes beyond. Her exposure to the outside world comes from “a mirror clear / That hangs before her all the year / [where] shadows of the world appear”. But the Lady of Shalott is “half sick of shadows”. She wants to see the willows and aspens, brooks and rivers, the castle of Camelot, and, above all, other people. And so, not knowing what the consequences would be, “she left the web, she left the loom, / She made three paces thro’ the room, / She saw the water-lily bloom / She saw the helmet and the plume, / She look’d down to Camelot”.

Interestingly, the curse is not yet ready to strike her down. Although her tapestry flies away and the mirror shatters, the Lady of Shalott is able to descend from her turret, get in a boat, inscribe it with her name and sail down the river towards Camelot singing her final song. It is not until just before “she reach’d upon the tide / The first house by the water-side, / Singing in her song she died”. On the water she finally realizes her fate; she is “Like some bold seër in a trance, / Seeing all his own mischance”.

Neither Ulysses nor the Lady of Shalott knows what will happen when they leave the safety of their islands, but the mundane routine of their daily lives means that they are willing to risk the dangers of the unknown for the chance to discover a new and more meaningful existence. For the Lady of Shalott, this lies in love, as it is the sight of two newly-weds that forces her to acknowledge her own loneliness, and then the appearance of the handsome Sir Lancelot that spurs her to abandon her loom, while Ulysses is driven by ceaseless curiosity and a longing for adventure. Only by leaving their islands and venturing out into unchartered waters can they can escape the state of limbo in which they are trapped.

The Lotos Eaters hints at the danger of failing to break out of such a state. Also based on the ancient tale of Odysseus, the poem ends with his crew’s decision to give up the oar and roam no more:

“They sat them down upon the yellow sand,

Between the sun and moon upon the shore;

And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland,

Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore

Most weary seem’d the sea, weary the oar,

Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.

Then some one said, ‘We will return no more;’

And all at once they sang, ‘Our island home

Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.”

Farringford, I.O.W.

Despite the attractive imagery Tennyson conjures up to describe the island with its “charmed sunset”, “winding vale / And meadow” and trees “Laden with flower and fruit”, the reader is aware that remaining in such a place offers the men only a half-life. To stay there, although immediately gratifying, is to submit to a state of intoxication and stasis that will deny them the endless possibilities of “the wandering fields of barren foam” or the households that await them in their fatherlands. The same sense of oblivion permeates The Sea-Faeries, written in 1830, in which a group of mystical water-dwelling women implore passing sailors to remain with them on “blissful downs and dales” of their “islands free”. Its gentle repetition and irregular rhyme give the poem a hypnotic quality, as the sea-faeries entice the mariners with promises of an island paradise:

“We will sing to you all the day:

Mariner, mariner, furl your sails

For here are the blissful downs and dales,

And merrily merrily carol the gales,

And the spangle dances in bight and bay

And the rainbow forms and flies on the land

Over the islands free;

…

We will kiss sweet kisses, and speak sweet words:

O listen, listen, your eyes shall glisten

With pleasure and love and jubilee:

O listen, listen, your eyes shall glisten

When the sharp clear twang of the golden chords

Runs up the ridged sea.

Who can light on as happy a shore

All the world o’er, all the world o’er?

Whither away? listen and stay: mariner, mariner, fly no more.”

The invitation to furl the sails and stay on the island, with its songs, dances and natural beauties, is undoubtedly tempting. Like the lotus-eaters, the mariners of this poem are given the chance to escape the toil and hardship of normal life but, although Tennyson does not say so explicitly, it is clear to the reader that they will also be obliged to give up their pursuit of adventure, the expansion of their knowledge, and whatever family and human ties that they previously held.

While the island can offer pleasure, safety, and certainty, it ultimately demands a sacrifice; to live in such a liminal space denies one the opportunity to explore, take risks and test oneself. Despite the dream-like quality of much of Tennyson’s poetry, he is no escapist. His paradisiacal descriptions of exotic islands are inevitably tinged with an eerie sense of stagnation or danger that discourages his  reader from over-indulgence in the idyllic imagery. It is particularly telling that two of his most memorable and treasured poems feature protagonists, quite opposite in their characters, who abandon the security and familiarity of their island-homes in order to experience the world to its fullest. Tennyson’s symbolic use of the island reminds us that, if we want to “drink Life to the lees”, we must sometimes set off into unchartered waters.

Main image: The Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse (1849-1917), oil on canvas, 1888, based on Tennyson’s poem. Contributor: IanDagnall Computing / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Tennyson with his wife Emily Sellwood and sons Hallam (left) and Lionel. Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Tennyson Down, Isle of Wight and its memorial cross to Tennyson. Credit: Steve Taylor ARPS / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 3 above: Tennyson’s house Farringford on the Isle of Wight. Credit: Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo

Our edition of The Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson can be found here

For more information, visit The Tennyson Society

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D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow contains all the features of a Victorian story that so appeal to the critical eye of modern literature undergraduates: there are gender stereotypes, the woes of industrialisation and the transition of a nation from one age to the next. Indeed, Lawrence was well-placed to talk about such changes; born in 1885 and living in Britain until 1919, his novels, poetry and even his paintings capture the slow march of time through the mid-nineteenth century towards the beginning of the twentieth.

Born in a mining town in the Midlands, Lawrence was aware from childhood of the effects of industrialisation on Britain’s rural communities, and with The Rainbow finished during the First World War, he was publishing at a time where the devastating effects of technology and machinery on human life was becoming all too clear. The Industrial Revolution, although rarely lauded by contemporary authors and poets, was particularly abhorrent to Lawrence because of his intricate, and perhaps intrinsic, understanding of nature. In his personal letters, he describes the Surrey landscape with adoration – “the masses of gorgeous foliage, the sharp hills whose scarps are blazing with Autumn, the round valleys where the vivid dregs of Summer have collected” – and he appears to have had a rare feeling for the seasons of things: “who cares about growing old! Moonlight is as beautiful as sunlight, and night-flowers have more sweetness if less hot colour than poppies and marigolds”. Even death, according to his poem The Ship of Death is but one of nature’s transitions:

“Now it is autumn and the falling fruit

and the long journey towards oblivion.

The apples falling like great drops of dew

to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

And it is time to go, to bid farewell

to one’s own self, and find an exit

from the fallen self.”

Caricature of D.H. Lawrence by Coia

Lawrence understood death and renewal as biological phenomena, appreciated the changing seasons of both year and life, and marvelled at the metabolising force of nature.  He likewise took relationships to be alive, biological. A pencil cannot be said to have a relationship with a piece of paper, except when a writer uses them together to transmute his thoughts into written words. Nor in any real sense is there a relationship between any inanimate objects. They can be used, or can stand, in a certain relationship to one another, but the ideas of connection and feeling represented by the word can only truly exist between living beings, mutable and responsive. For Lawrence, and for his characters, real relationships can function only when this prerequisite is acknowledged and fulfilled, which for the Bragwen family of The Rainbow means maintaining their ancestral connection to the earth.

The novel begins “the Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm”. As growing tensions pull at the legacy of the family farm, we see how the vital energy of the land, plants, flowers and animals had catalysed and nourished the bonds between them. As Britain and the Brangwens leave behind their rural roots for the industrialised modern world, their relationships, no longer earthed in the Nottinghamshire soil, break down.

The Rainbow traces the lives of three generations of Brangwens, beginning with Tom, a true farmer who resisted his mother’s attempts to make a gentleman of him through education. Having inherited Marsh Farm at just seventeen years of age after his father’s sudden death, he is uncompromisingly tied to the land. Through him, Lawrence introduces the vitalising force of nature:

‘Tom Brangwen was glad to get back to the farm, where he was in his own again… He had too low an opinion of himself. But he went about at his work on the farm gladly enough, glad of the active labour and the smell of the land again, having youth and vigour and humour, and a comic wit, having the will and the power to forget his own shortcomings, finding himself violent with occasional rages, but usually on good terms with everybody and everything.’

As the story progresses and the following generations lose their connection to the earth, these traits – humility, youth, vigour, humour, and peaceableness – are gradually corroded. Traditionally, it is the men who keep the family tied to the land. Fathers interact with their children through the earth. Fred, Tom’s brother, “was his father’s very son, the two men, father and son, were supremely at ease with one another. Fred was succeeding to the farm”. Likewise, Tom’s adopted daughter Anna “was only easy at home, where the common sense and the supreme relation between her parents produced a freer standard of being than she could find outside. Where, outside the Marsh, could she find the tolerant dignity she had been brought up in?”. Anna “loved driving with Brangwen in the trap” and regularly accompanies him to the cattle-market.

It may at first seem obvious that in a farming family bonds are likely to be forged over their shared land, labour and home, but a later parallel scene between William, Tom’s son-in-law and nephew, and his own daughter Ursula, helps to emphasise the importance of nature as a medium for inter-generational relationships. Ursula joins her father to help him plant potatoes, and whether due to her own inability or his failure to explain the task, the project ends with Will telling her, ““You didn’t help me much”. The child looked at him dumbly. Already her heart was heavy because of her own disappointment. Her mouth was dumb and pathetic. But he did not notice, he went his way.”

Despite Will’s admittedly flawed parenting techniques, it is clear that Ursula does not have the same intuitive grasp of her relationship to the land as former generations of Brangwens had done: “she was always tormented by the unreality of outside things. The earth was to walk on. Why must she avoid a certain patch, just because it was called a seed-bed? It was the earth to walk on. This was her instinctive assumption”. She does indeed become the first major character whose daydreams of leaving home for adventures abroad come close to reality. She travels to London and beyond, and almost sets off for India before the end of her engagement to Anton Skrebensky. Ursula herself speaks in the same breath of the loss of both family and land:

“Repeatedly, in an ache of utter weariness she repeated: “I have no father nor mother nor lover, I have no allocated place in the world of things, I do not belong to Beldover nor to Nottingham nor to England nor to this world.”

She discovers that life away from her ancestral land is not one of vitality; although liberating, it does not invigorate. In fact it is only at home, in the triumph of nature over artifice, that she once again feels hopeful, at the very end of the novel:

‘She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.’

Land is inheritance, not only of a valuable asset, but of everything passed down from one generation of Bragwens to the next: knowledge, values, customs, love. The erosion of the rural culture uproots the family’s connection to the earth and breaks these generational bonds. The miscarriage Ursula suffers at the end of the novel, although read by some as the ‘birth of the self’, seems ultimately to seal the fate of her line, at least within the remit of The Rainbow.

The same calamitous effect of industrialisation and detachment from nature is shown to be true for “the blackened colliers trooping from the pit-mouth”. The miners’ job it is to pillage the land, but it is often they who find themselves the victims, sometimes fatally so, in their fulfilment of this task. “Colliers hanging about in gangs and groups, or passing along the asphalt pavements heavily to work, seemed not like living people, but like spectres”. Anonymous and unimportant, any one of them does just as well as a father or husband to their families as another; when one collier dies, his widow will “be getting married again directly. One man or another—it does not matter very much. They’re all colliers.” It is as though the “proud, demonlike” coal mines that Ursula so hates have destroyed not only vegetative life but also the natural energy that sustains family life, maintaining certain timeless and universal consistencies across generations.

In addition to the intergenerational upheaval, Britain’s transition from a rural to an industrialised society also disrupts romantic and sexual relationships within the Brangwen family. Despite the numerous fluctuations their marriage undergoes, Tom and his wife, Polish refugee Lydia Lensky, largely enjoy a healthy relationship. “The intimacy and nakedness of marriage”, although trying at times, brings them together and their union is described in terms that are both spiritual and profoundly natural: “it was the entry into another circle of existence, it was the baptism to another life, it was the complete confirmation”. Soon after Lydia meets Tom and he proposes to her, the intense depression she had been living under is alleviated, again in a deeply organic way. The universality of nature, which neither time nor place can hold, brings the refugee immeasurable comfort:

“But a sunshiny day came full of the scent of a mezereon tree, when bees were tumbling into the yellow crocuses, and she forgot, she felt like somebody else, not herself, a new person, quite glad. But she knew it was fragile, and she dreaded it. The vicar put pea-flower into the crocuses, for his bees to roll in, and she laughed. Then night came, with brilliant stars that she knew of old, from her girlhood. And they flashed so bright, she knew they were victors.”

Church Cottage, Cossall

The later marriage of Lydia’s daughter, Anna, whom Tom gladly adopts as a girl, and William Brangwen, is also described in natural terms. Will proposes to Anna while they sit arranging sheaves of corn together in the moonlight, and during the honeymoon period after their wedding they completely isolate themselves from the world in their cottage near Marsh Farm, “buried like a seed in darkness”. Long-term their relationship faces more tumult that Tom and Lydia’s, mainly caused by their selfishness. Will feels entitled to his wife’s undivided attention and affection, whereas Anna is content only when she is pregnant or taking care of her many children. Each expects to receive; neither has learnt to give. Despite spending their time divided between church and the land, the lesson of ‘a time to sow and a time to reap’ never reaches them.

Anna and Will do, however, sustain their marriage without calamity, with numerous offspring and with mutual respect. The final important sexual relationships presented in The Rainbow are those of their daughter Ursula, whose story, although the shortest in years, occupies around half of the novel. Her most infamous relationship, almost entirely contained within a chapter entitled ‘Shame’, occurs between herself and an older woman. At the time of publication homosexuality was of course taboo, if not illegal, but in addition to all the societal criticisms that can be read into the prominent lesbian affair, it is important to bear in mind that such a relationship is inherently non-generative.

Their brief affair is, however, broken off and Ursula strikes up an affair with the young Lieutenant, Anton Skrebensky. The pair fall in love while Ursula is preparing for her final school exams, and after the intervening years in which he is abroad during the Boer War, they rekindle their romance and even take a summer holiday together to the continent. Despite being taken as husband and wife during this trip, Ursula “seemed to ignore what he said about marriage. It did not come home to her”. Indeed, “at the thought of marriage and living with Skrebensky amid the European population in India, her soul was locked and would not budge. She had very little feeling about it: only there was a deadlock.”

As a result Skrebensky leaves for his posting in India without her, after which Ursula discovers that she is pregnant. Although she writes to him with promises of a future together, she loses the child and a letter later arrives informing her that he has married the daughter of his commander. Critics have often read the scene in which Ursula gets trampled by horses, resulting in her miscarriage, as a hallucination, owing to various literary features and a general tendency to prefer psychological readings of a character’s subconscious as a means of explaining their actions. Whether hallucinatory or literal, the horses evidently represent a powerful organic, animal vitality. Ursula, who gloried in the idea of breaking “from the confines of all the life she had known”, who was tempted by the mysterious notion of “London, through the grim, alluring seethe of the town”, and who travels regularly by that greatest symbol of the Industrial Revolution, the train, finally finds out that the force of nature cannot be resisted.

Upon seeing once more the eponymous rainbow in the novel’s final paragraph, Ursula undergoes the same transformative and invigorating experience that her grandmother Lydia had decades earlier on that “sunshiny day”. The sight of the rainbow and nature’s promise of renewal and purification fills her with hope that “new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven”.

The Rainbow is a spectacularly complicated novel, with a huge host of dramatis personae who sometimes even share names. D. H. Lawrence was too sophisticated an author to simplify emotions, relationships or events in order to convey a message. In fact, the immersive nature of his writing is built upon the realistic human nature of the characters, who may be kind but act in malice, or loving but become enflamed with rage. It would therefore be easy to find anecdotal exceptions to any broad statement about his characters, their evolutions and their motivations. Nonetheless, in the mind and works of D. H. Lawrence, a correlated and indeed causal relationship exists between the dwindling importance of nature and the tie to ancestral land, and the breakdown of family cohesion. Through the generations of Brangwens whose stories he tells, he presents this decline in grave and sometimes tragic terms. And yet in his sublime descriptions of the land, he assures the reader that there is always hope to be found in nature, life-giving, forever changing but ever-present.

Main image: Bust of D. H. Lawrence at Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire. Credit: John Eccles / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Caricature of D.H. Lawrence by Coia. Credit: Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Church Cottage, Cossall, the previous home of DH Lawrence’s fiancé, Louie Burrows. In the book it became Yew Cottage and Cossall became Cossethay. Credit: Gavin Gillespie / Alamy Stock Photo

For more information on his life and works, visit The D.H. Lawrence Society

Our edition of The Rainbow is here

D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Rainbow’

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The Count of Monte Cristo begins and ends with voyages. The opening line heralds the arrival of the hero, the young sailor Edmond Dantès, in his native Marseilles after a voyage across the Mediterranean, while the final image of the novel is a sailing ship set against the horizon, captained by the same man. During the intervening 30 years and 1300 pages, in which Dantès is wrongly imprisoned, escapes disguised as a corpse, discovers a hidden treasure-trove of riches, reinvents himself as the wealthy and mysterious Count of Monte Cristo, and dedicates himself to a series of elaborate revenge plots, his character undergoes an extreme and cryptic transformation. To understand Dantès’ development, which is both brought about by and reflected in his travels across Europe, Asia and Africa, it is necessary to consider the historical setting of the book.

At the outset of the novel, which begins in 1815, Dantès is a simple sailor, unaware of the complex political webs spun across France throughout the previous decades. Sadly this ignorance leads him to fall foul of the system. Unlike the characters that come from better stock, such as Gérard de Villefort, the double-dealing prosecutor who imprisons him, Dantès had never learnt that loyalty in early-eighteenth century France must primarily be to oneself. In a time of such rapid changes, it had been shown that the humble could ascend to power and the mighty fall without warning, as demonstrated by the plight of the exiled Napoleon:

“The emperor, now king of the petty Island of Elba, after having held sovereign sway over one-half of the world, counting as his subjects a small population of five or six thousand souls,—after having been accustomed to hear the “Vive Napoléons” of a hundred and twenty millions of human beings, uttered in ten different languages,—was looked upon here as a ruined man, separated forever from any fresh connection with France or claim to her throne.”

Prison cell in the Chateau d’If

In fact, Dantès was arrested on the false grounds of being a Bonapartist agent, “and as the most sanguine looked upon any attempt of Napoleon to remount the throne as impossible” his suffering was overlooked and ignored. And yet, just as he was being moved to his cell in the Château d’If fortress, Napoleon was launching another attempt to re-establish his power in France, moving against the Bourbon Monarchy during the so-called Hundred Days. Although his campaign failed, it provided a painful reminder for those who then considered themselves elites and authorities that their power was not as unassailable as they liked to believe. Ultimately, the events of the Hundred Days and the intricate designs of the Second Bourbon Restoration and later the July Monarchy have little bearing on the fate of Dantès, but do hold up a revealing mirror to his own life.

Just as the Revolutionary legacy Napoleon purported to uphold consisted in the abolition of France’s old and corrupt systems, Dantès’ series of revenges represents an attack on the country’s exploitative judicial, financial and political systems. These are embodied by his three main enemies: Villefort, who represents the law; Danglars, an important player in the banks; Fernand, an general in the army, a government official, and a recent-made nobleman. Beyond their betrayal of the protagonist, each man is shown to be an active agent in the twisted game they play.

Casually brushing off the appeals of a family whose son had been massacred in the French Army, Villefort states that “‘Every revolution has its catastrophes…Your brother has been the victim of this; it is a misfortune, and government owes nothing to his family’”. Danglars is likewise impervious to the suffering of others, caring only for the increase of his own estate, in the success of which he takes great pride and the failures of which he blames on others: “I increased our wealth, which continued to grow for more than fifteen years, until the moment when these unknown catastrophes, which I am still unable to comprehend, arrived to seize it and cast it down—without my being to blame, I might say, for any of it.” Fernand is the arch-traitor, showing no loyalty to anyone. He has Dantès sentenced to the Château d’If in order to marry his fiancée, fights against Spain despite being himself a Spaniard, and, as is later revealed, betrayed and killed the Ottoman ruler Ali Pasha, before selling his daughter and wife into slavery.  As such, the ruin these three men face at Dantès’ hands is presented as deserved retribution for their corruption.

And yet far from epitomising the brave and honourable Frenchmen in this revolutionary act, Dantès is instead shown to have an affinity with foreign minority groups, those on the margins of society who notably lack Villefort’s power, Danglar’s riches and Fernard’s status. His origins as a sailor place him in the ranks of the Mediterranean seamen, whose various dialects, including Catalan, Neapolitan, Rumelian and Corsican, are all languages associated with separatist movements, attempts to challenge central powers and establish independence. Likewise, his native Marseilles is described as a centre of revolutionary spirit, its people desiring, “in spite of the authorities, to rekindle the flames of civil war, always smouldering in the south”.

At the start of the story, Dantès is preparing to marry Mercédès, a Spanish girl from the Catalan village situated quite apart from the French centre of Marseilles, again drawing him to liminal spaces. As the Count, he lauds the culture of the individual Italian states, celebrating both the pastoral society of the rural areas, where men work for themselves and benefit from their own efforts, and for their custom of vendettas, where “justice is only paid when silent”. Nowhere is more admired and more antithetical, however, than the mystical region known as ‘the East’.

“The Orientals, you understand, are the only people who know how to live”, states Dantès, promising that “when I have finished my business in Paris, I shall go and die in the East; and then if you want to find me, you will have to look in Cairo, Baghdad or Isfahan”.

‘The East’ or ‘The Orient’ in the novel has no clear geographical boundaries; sometimes it is India and China, sometimes Russia, but most often the Ottoman Empire, which at the time covered Turkey and the Caucasus, many areas and islands of Greece, the Levant and western Arabia, large swathes of the Middle East, and much of North Africa. A significant sub-plot revolves around the story of Ali Pasha of Ioannina, who during the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries ruled the Ottoman territory of Rumelia, that is, the empire’s European possessions. The Greek peoples and lands Ali commands are definitively included in the writer’s conception of ‘the East’. Even his portrayal of Marseilles is flavoured with exoticism, with its “burning…sun” and “Saharan winds”, the picturesque Oriental costumes, “suggestive of Greece or Arabia”, and the many dialects heard around its port.

Dumas had travelled to some so-called Eastern lands before and while writing The Count of Monte Cristo. In 1836 he attended feasts and visited great monuments in Tunisia, while in Algeria several years later he was hosted by his compatriot General Bugeaud, who had been consolidating the recent French control over the country with notoriously brutal tactics. Indeed, the conquest of Algeria takes place during the novel’s timeline, and Bugeaud himself is even referenced, although not by name.

At this time of imperial expansion, the East was often superficially perceived by Europeans as a mysterious land of occult knowledge and hidden riches, an impression naturally reinforced by the Napoleonic campaigns in Egypt. For this reason a distinction must be made between the East and Eastern peoples, the actual lands and inhabitants of Asia and North Africa with all their natural diversities and nuances, and the Orient and Orientals, those same people seen through the cosmopolitan, imperialist and Orientalist lens of the Europeans. It is a lens of which Dantès appears fully aware, and which he uses to his advantage. Before returning to France to seek vengeance, he adopts a persona much like that of an Oriental ruler, and is even bold enough to allude to this stratagem:

“Have you read the Thousand and One Nights? Can you tell if the people in it are rich or poor? If their grains of wheat are not rubies and diamonds? They look like penniless fishermen, don’t they? That’s how you treat them and suddenly they open up before you a mysterious cavern in which you find a treasure vast enough to purchase the Indies.”

In fact it is the fantasy of the Thousand and One Nights with which Dantès seems most enamoured, eagerly appropriating its tropes. As well as enriching himself with improbable treasures found in a hidden cavern, and assuming the pseudonym of Sinbad the Sailor among his many disguises, Dantès also infuses his revenge plots with smaller details borrowed from the Arabian Nights, from invisible ink to hidden compartments, hashish-induced escapades to slow and secret poisonings, noble bandits to enslaved princesses.

Dantès, as the Count, moves easily between opposites. He is a Frenchman but has adopted Oriental customs and aesthetics, he is now fabulously wealthy but knows what it is like to have nothing, and despite his acceptance into the highest ranks of Parisian society, continues to rely on bandits, smugglers and slaves to assist him. The cleverest part of the entire scheme is that through this mutability, he utilises the mechanisms of empire against those who symbolise it.

In the same way as the French were determined to subdue parts of the East, with one general writing in 1843 that “All populations who do not accept our conditions must be despoiled. Everything must be seized, devastated, without age or sex distinction: grass must not grow any more where the French army has set foot”, so Dantès too devotes every effort to the annihilation of his opponents, using a wide range of duplicitous, sometimes cruel, but ultimately very effective tactics. He is able to do so by creating a persona that combines the respectability and power of the French aristocrat with the mystery, allure and perhaps even savagery of the Oriental.

In travelling to Paris, where the majority of his adversaries now live, Dantès enters a city and a society that is supposed to be the antithesis of the East. As a great centre of European history, learning, art and religion, Paris is meant to epitomise western values and virtues. While they may joke about their vices, the aristocratic crowd certainly see themselves and their culture as superior to any found in the East. The mystery, exoticism and novelty of the East might hold a certain appeal in their eyes, but no serious comparison could be made between the importance, value and dignity of the two worlds. This too, however, is shown to be an illusion. Dantès tears at the façade of virtue held up by the Parisians, lifting the veil on their affairs, corruption and sins. Even as a Count, he refuses to fully enter their society, identifying as he does with the Orient; for this reason he is free to reveal and dismantle the rotten foundation on which it had been built.

Within the novel, the revenges of Edmond Dantès serve as a chilling reminder to the French authorities that their power can be challenged by those whom they have been used to commanding, oppressing and ignoring, a lesson that ought to have been learnt during the periods of violent upheaval recently seen in their country. Perhaps Dumas is also suggesting that ‘the East’, those places and peoples that Europe had invaded and exploited, might reappear one day as an avenger.

James O’Neill, playing the role more times than you can Count

Interestingly, Dantès affinity with the East in no way lessens his Christian faith. The Ottoman Empire was of course Islamic, although numerous other religions continued to be practiced within its borders, but despite his adoption of many Oriental customs, there is no implication that Dantès is ever tempted towards a conversion of any sort. In fact, the only French character to be described in relation to Islam is Bonaparte himself, with Villefort claiming “Napoleon is the Mahomet of the West, and is worshipped by his commonplace but ambitious followers, not only as a leader and lawgiver, but also as the personification of equality.”

Dantès’ uncompromising Christianity in the face of Eastern influences appears to reflect Dumas’ own perceptions. Writing about his visit to Tunisia, he comments that “The Arabs…saw no difference between the tomb of a French and a Muslim saint”. Although perhaps a somewhat naive view of religious tolerance, this suggests that the author saw the East as a space for the fusing, or at least the coexistence, of cultures, much like the character of Dantès.

Again when it comes to religion, although he makes continued references to God and his faith, the protagonist once more serves as a meeting point between two opposites. After slight moments of doubt during his imprisonment in the Chateau d’If, Dantès lives with a deep-seated conviction of God’s justice. Parallels between him and Jesus are evident: from humble beginnings he is betrayed, suffers terribly at the hands of the state authorities, but eventually returns with far greater power than they, as the Count of Monte Cristo, no less.

As he does with the secular aspects of Parisian society, Dantès also exposes the hypocrisy and demoralisation of religion within their ranks. Most of the aristocratic characters make reference to God only in passing, in oaths or curses, and the repeated claim that one is “a friend to the throne and religion” only highlights their caprice in a society where the throne had changed hands often, quickly, and violently. Criticism is also levelled at the contemporary church. The reader is reminded of the corrupt history of the Vatican through the story of the infamous Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI, to whom the treasure of Monte Cristo is said to have originally belonged. Furthermore, at Rome, an excited crowd gathers to witness brutal executions, bringing to light the hypocrisy of their judgements against the Orientals as barbaric, cruel peoples.

One of the most important questions, however, that Dumas implicitly poses to the reader in The Count of Monte Cristo also concerns Dantès’ religion. In the Chateau d’If, his fellow inmate Abbé Faria tells him that “God has supplied man with the intelligence that enables him to overcome the limitations of natural conditions”. His actions after escaping the fortress led the reader to wonder whether he might not have misinterpreted the Abbé’s words. In exacting his revenges, Dantès views himself as the executor of God’s judgement, one of “the men whom God has put above those office-holders, ministers, and kings, by giving them a mission to follow out, instead of a post to fill”.

Disguised as an abbé himself, he asks a man who has been stabbed as part of one of his schemes, “[do you] not believe in God when he is striking you dead? you will not believe in him, who requires but a prayer, a word, a tear, and he will forgive? God, who might have directed the assassin’s dagger so as to end your career in a moment, has given you this quarter of an hour for repentance.” Here Dantès indicates that his plots are the direct realisations of God’s will. Thus he seems to set himself on a dangerous path, justifying his manipulation and harm of others through his confidence in heavenly support. It is not difficult to see how this type of thinking could lead to the same sort of corruption that he initially appears to be challenging.

Dantès continues in his self-appointed role of divine agent throughout the series of revenges he enacts, and only at the very end of the novel does he realise that he had, “like Satan, thought himself for an instant equal to God,” and then “acknowledges with Christian humility that God alone possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom”. The abruptness and lack of explanation around this last-minute awakening seems anomalous in a work of such epic proportions. Moreover, the fact that it is revealed just as Dantès leaves France indefinitely for the East forces the reader to contemplate how sincere he truly is.

A man of many disguises, Edmond Dantès, the Count of Monte Cristo, deceives his opponents through the multifariousness of his identity. Both Frenchman and alien, he is impossible to pin down, not only for his fellow characters but also for the reader. Alexandre Dumas leaves us with the lingering question of how well we can know his protagonist, asking where the personas become the person.

Main image: Chateau d’If, Marseilles Credit: Anne Rippy / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Prison cell in the Chateau d’If. Credit: Giovanni Guarino Photo / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: The actor James O’Neill who, from 1875, played the Count more than 6,000 times. Here he appears in the 1913 silent film version. Credit: Archive PL / Alamy Stock Photo

More information on the works of Alexandre Dumas can be found here: Alexandre Dumas Works

Our edition of The Count of Monte Cristo is here

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It cannot be denied that Complete Nonsense is above all intended to entertain. The sudden occurrence of the unexpected is generally regarded to be among the most successful ways of generating comedy, and Lear takes this to an extreme. All bets are off when the reader of Nonsense Cookery, instructed in the art of making of an “Amblongus Pie”, is finally directed to “serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible”. Likewise, the reader cannot possibly predict that the eponymous Four Little Children would “return immediately to their boat with a strong sense of underdeveloped asthma”. In the limericks, which account for a large portion of Lear’s output, there is no logical connection between the location by which the character is identified (“Old Man of the Hague”), their state (“whose ideas were excessively vague”) and the action (“he built a balloon to examine the moon”). Each element is linked by rhyme rather than rationale. Such unpredictable and incongruous twists and turns are Lear’s most consistent way of ensuring his stories and songs elicit a humorous response.

For the same reason he frequently employs fanciful made-up vocabulary, the most famous of which is “runcible”: the “runcible spoon” from The Owl and The Pussycat inspired so much curiosity that many different, and contradictory, rumours circulated regarding the origin of the neologism. As well as completely invented terms, such as “slobacious”, “beasticles” and “scroobius”, Lear also engaged in witty word-play at all points along the spectrum of sophistication. Two of his characters, for example, leave home to play “battlecock and shuttledore”, a spoonerism of the early sport battledore and shuttlecock. Two others, searching for sage to season their stuffing, are told that they can find some on the hill, and indeed, upon climbing up “among the rocks, all seating in a nook, They saw that Sage a-reading of a most enormous book”.

Satire also plays its part in Lear’s comedy. Although he insisted that “in no portion of these Nonsense drawings have I ever allowed any caricature of private or public persons to appear”, he still found ways to poke fun at features and characters of real life. Some of the ribaldry is self-directed, with a high proportion of the caricatures and limericks focusing on characters with large or ridiculous noses:

“There was an Old Man with a nose,

Who said, “If you choose to suppose

That my nose is too long, you are certainly wrong!”

That remarkable Man with a nose”

In the autobiographical How Pleasant to Know Mr Lear, the poet himself acknowledges that:

“His mind is concrete and fastidious,

His nose is remarkably big;

His visage is more or less hideous,

His beard it resembles a wig”.

One of the most important relationships in Lear’s life was his friendship, which is said to have bordered on obsession, with Sir Franklin Lushington, a barrister and judge. When the Four Little Children spot “somebody in a large white wig, sitting on an arm-chair” which actually turns out to be “the co-operative Cauliflower”, we might wonder whether this is Lear lightly teasing his old friend. And in telling his young audience that “you have only not to look in your geography books to find out all about” the places he describes, Lear is hinting that not all useful knowledge need be learnt in the formal environment and manner usually associated with education.

In fact, in addition to the “innocent mirth” of Complete Nonsense, it also has evident educational value itself. The advanced vocabulary, as well as its historical and cultural references, indicate the type of child the author imagined reading his work. Talk of Vitruvius, Homer and Xerxes (often when Lear seems lost for another word beginning with X) would not have been lost on the “the great-grandchildren, grand-nephews, and grand-nieces of Edward, 13th Earl of Derby” to whom the first book was dedicated. And yet there is also much that is more readily accessible in the nonsense writings too. Perhaps the most comprehensible of Lear’s many forms are his alphabets, which are largely devoid of neologism and avoid random jumps between subjects. Each short poem focuses on a word beginning with a letter of the alphabet, a model still used today in even the most stringently academic children’s books:

“L was a lily,

So white and so sweet!

To see it and smell it

Was quite a nice treat””

“R was a rattlesnake,

Rolled up so tight,

Those who saw him ran quickly,

For fear he should bite.”

As well as this straightforwardly educational content, Lear’s nonsense also conceals a number of complex ideas about society and identity. Although told with fanciful language and impossible narratives, his stories and songs convey real and important human emotions including love, curiosity and insecurity. The Dong with the Luminous Nose tells the tale of unrequited love:

“The Dong [who] was happy and gay,

Till he fell in love with a Jumbly Girl

Who came to those shores one day.

…

For day and night he was always there

By the side of the Jumbly Girl so fair,

With her sky-blue hands and her sea-green hair;

Till the morning came of that hateful day

When the Jumblies sailed in their sive away,

And the Dong was left on the cruel shore

Gazing, gazing for evermore.”

The Nutcrackers and the Sugartongs, despite the evident impossibility of the situation, expresses an all too authentic concern about one’s own ability, a desire for adventure and the satisfaction of achievement:

“The Nutcrackers sate by a plate on the table;

The Sugar-tongs sate by a plate at his side;

And the Nutcrackers said, “Don’t you wish we were able

Along the blue hills and green meadows to ride?

Must we drag on this stupid existence forever,

So idle and weary, so full of remorse,

While everyone else takes his pleasure, and never

Seems happy unless he is riding a horse?

…

The Frying-pan said, “It’s an awful delusion!”

The Tea-kettle hissed, and grew black in the face;

And they all rushed downstairs in the wildest confusion

To see the great Nutcracker-Sugar-tong race.

And out of the stable, with screaming and laughter

(Their ponies were cream-colored, speckled with brown),

The Nutcrackers first, and the Sugar-tongs after,

Rode all round the yard, and then all round the town.”

The overcoming of one’s own insecurities and of one’s critics is a constant theme throughout the nonsense stories and poetry. Just as the Nutcrackers and Sugar-tongs prove the Frying-pan wrong, so too do many other characters defy the naysayers. Interestingly, their triumphs are often paired with, or the result of, a journey far away. The last words from these particular kitchen utensils is “We will never go back anymore!”, a sentiment echoed throughout many stories. The wall-climbing Mr and Mrs Discobbolos, having decided that to “never go down again” happily pass their life “far away from hurry and strife”. “They never came back” is a repeated motif in Calico Pie, and in The Pelican Chorus, the leading pelican literally flies the nest, leaving her fellows remarking that:

“She has gone to the Great Gromboolian Plain,

And we probably never shall meet again.

She dwells by the stream of the Chambly Bore,

And we probably never shall see her more.”

Lear himself travelled frequently from the age of thirty, most often visiting Italy, where he eventually settled at the San Remo home he nicknamed Villa Tennyson. The youngest surviving child of 21 and raised by his elder sister after his father’s bankruptcy, his early years cannot have been easy. In view of this childhood upheaval, it is easy to see Lear’s departure for Italy as an escape from negative influences and memories at home, a hypothesis that seems all but confirmed by the theme of separation and distance that persists throughout even his most light-hearted work.

Rainbow Lorikeet

A similarly weighty topic sometimes veiled by the frivolity of Lear’s style is that of death. Death has its place in many of the nonsense writings, but in none more so than The History of the Seven Families of Lake Pipple-popple. In this story, the parents of seven families, each a different species of animal, send their young off into the wild with one clear warning. For the parrots, it is “‘if…you find a Cherry, do not fight about who should have it”, for the geese “whatever you do, be sure you do not touch a Plum-pudding Flea”, and so on. On venturing into the wide world, each group of siblings eventually falls foul of the very trap illustrated for them by their parents. In fact, all the young animals die, and on hearing the news the parent animals commit a sort of ritual suicide: “they filled the bottles with the ingredients for pickling, and each couple jumped into a separate bottle, by which effort of course they all died immediately, and become thoroughly pickled in a few minutes.”

Lear had started his artistic career as an ornithological draughtsman for the Zoological Society and although, rather unusually, he drew birds from the live animals rather than skins, he would no doubt have been used to seeing dead specimens on a regular basis. In general, Victorian society was far from shy when it came to the subject of death, exemplified by the Queen’s decades of elaborate mourning for Albert. The mortality rate, although much improved from the preceding centuries, was far higher than today’s, especially among children, and many more deaths occurred in the home surrounded by family. It was thus an inescapable part of life, as indeed it is.

As evidenced by the references to the ancient world, the children for whom Lear writes would have grown up on stories of the Trojan war, where death abounds with ruthless finality. Contemporary children’s literature, by the likes of Lewis Carroll, William Blake and later J.M. Barrie, also carry a similar undercurrent, with characters well aware “that sudden death might be at the next tree, or stalking him from behind”. These writers have by no means been cast from the canon, but their popularity has been superseded by modern children’s books and entertainment, which by and large avoid the explicit theme of death.

It is difficult to image a parent today choosing The History of the Seven Families as a bedtime story for their child. Simple reasoning might say that it runs the risk of frightening or upsetting them, and in the short term this may be true, but omitting the concept of death from early development must have long-term effects. How much more terrifying to discover it as an unexpected and unavoidable fact when confronted with the real thing, rather than coming to know the realities of life through story and song. Death gives meaning to life, and Lear provides an important service in introducing it gradually, gently and even with humour in his Collected Nonsense.

Main image: Drawing by Edward Lear from his book ‘Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets,’ first published in 1871. Credit: The Granger Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Edward Lear 1862. Credit: Ian Dagnall Computing / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Rainbow lorikeet, after an illustration by Edward Lear. Hand-coloured lithograph from Georg Friedrich Treitschke’s Gallery of Natural History, Naturhistorischer Bildersaal des Thierreiches, Liepzig, 1840. Credit: Florilegius / Alamy Stock Photo

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“The curse of our house”, said the old man, looking kindly down on her, “has been the love of self; has ever been the love of self.”

This uncharacteristic acknowledgement is made at the end of Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit by the sullen and stubborn old man forced to compete with his namesake nephew for the honour of title character. Although both Martin Chuzzlewits are certainly among the many characters that the reader would readily identify as ‘selfish’, it is perhaps not until this statement that we look back and realise how prolifically “the love of self” has pervaded and perverted almost every relationship and endeavour described over the course of the long novel. Admittedly, this often contributes to the wry humour of the book, with the hopelessly incompetent nurse-cum-mortician, Mrs Gamp, for example, wistfully reflecting on how her patient “would make a lovely corpse”. In literature as in life, however, selfishness is an undeniably destructive force, and indeed it serves to bring the majority of characters to near-ruin until those who shift their gaze from the internal to the external are eventually reprieved.

Best illustrating Dickens’ handling of this theme is his portrayal of mid-nineteenth-century America. The addition of a trip across the Atlantic was the result of poor sales of the early monthly instalments when they first appeared in 1842. Earlier that same year the author himself had visited the States, and his less-than-friendly depiction of the country in Martin Chuzzlewit has been attributed to the disagreements he had had with American publishers over the copyright of his work there. Likewise, the younger Martin Chuzzlewit also fails in his own expedition to America, to which he sets off in order to seek his fortune after a row leaving him estranged from his wealthy uncle.

We get a hint at how Dickens is preparing to present the country while Martin and his naïve but well-meaning sidekick Mark are still aboard The Screw. While preparing to disembark, the only American passenger on board “walked the deck with his nostrils dilated, as already inhaling the air of Freedom which carries death to all tyrants, and can never (under any circumstances worth mentioning) be breathed by slaves.” It probably comes as no surprise to those who associate Dickens with philanthropy and charity, both personal and public, that he would have been just as opposed to slavery as he was to the workhouse. We soon see, however, that it is not only blatant atrocities that are the subject of his scathing satire. From the moment he sets foot in New York, Martin encounters all manner of individual and collective vice concealed beneath a façade of liberty, hard work and resilience.

He arrives the day after a local elections, “and Party Feeling naturally running rather high on such an exciting occasion, the friends of the disappointed candidate had found it necessary to assert the great principles of Purity of Election and Freedom of opinion by breaking a few legs and arms, and furthermore pursuing one obnoxious gentleman through the streets with the design of hitting his nose”.

Dickens’ sarcasm does an excellent job of conveying to the reader the disconcerted feeling experienced by the newly-arrived Martin Chuzzlewit, a feeling that is only to intensify as he meets more and more Americans. Many of these have ludicrously patriotic names, and almost all of them are introduced to him as “one of the most remarkable men in our country”. The phrase is repeated so often that the Englishmen themselves begin to poke fun at it: unlike in many satires, here the author recruits some of his characters to join him in deriding society. Mark soon observes that “they’re so fond of Liberty in this part of the globe, that they buy her and sell her and carry her to market with ’em. They’ve such a passion for Liberty, that they can’t help taking liberties with her”.

Martin, although somewhat irritated by the flamboyant claims of the natives, is nonetheless still “well assured that if intelligence and virtue led, as a matter of course, to the acquisition of dollars, he would speedily become a great capitalist”. Thus encouraged, he spends everything he has on a plot of land in the idyllic-sounding settlement of Eden, planning to set himself up there as a renowned architect. Upon their arrival at Eden, however, it immediately becomes clear that Martin has been conned. Although he had been warned on first setting foot in New York that the American aristocracy was comprised “of intelligence and virtue. And of their necessary consequence in this republic—dollars, sir”, and had himself quickly observed that “all their cares, hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations, seemed to be melted down into dollars”, Martin was nonetheless too wrapped up in his own aspirations that he failed to spot in others the very same self-interest at work in his own manoeuvres, and was consequently stripped of every last dollar. Thus Dickens shows us how a solipsistic society in which each person cares only for his own wants and needs is bound to remain dangerous and obstructive despite any pretences otherwise.

Yet even when it becomes clear that the land sale was a scam, Martin and Mark decide to make the best of their situation, emulating what they have been told is true American vigour. In vain, they try setting up shop and engaging with the few other settlers in Eden. Remarking to a local that “The night air ain’t quite wholesome, I suppose?’, Mark receives the blunt reply that “It’s deadly poison”. Despite never claiming to be “one of my most remarkable men in the country”, the local in question, Mr Hannibal Chollop, is an effective representative of the American psyche as portrayed by Dickens. He is extremely proud of the great nation of his birth, and when Martin and Mark, now dwelling in “utter desolation and decay”, reveal that they are not such big fans, he admits that he is “is not surprised to hear you say so. It re-quires An elevation, and A preparation of the intellect. The mind of man must be prepared for Freedom.”

Like his compatriots, Chollop vehemently extols the invariably capitalised values of Freedom, Liberty, Independence and Moral Sensibility upon which America was founded and flourishes, but unlike his more urbane New York counterparts, he is not so adept at holding up the pretence. Taking umbrage at an unspecified but undoubtedly innocent comment of Mark’s, he launches into a tirade that reveals the real limit to the freedoms and opportunities one can expect in the States:

“I have know’d men Lynched for less, and beaten into punkin’-sarse for less, by an enlightened people. We are the intellect and virtue of the airth, the cream Of human natur’, and the flower Of moral force. Our backs is easy ris. We must be cracked-up, or they rises, and we snarls. We shows our teeth, I tell you, fierce. You’d better crack us up, you had!”

This parody of an American prepared to beat detractors “into punkin-sarse” has undeniable comedic value, but the way in which Chollop threatens violence while preaching virtue epitomises the failing that Dickens finds so repellent in the States, even more so than the injustices he sees and criticises in his own land. Whereas “in the Commons House of Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland…it is the custom to use as many words as possible, and express nothing whatever”, the citizens of the United States use as many words as possible to express a lie. Now disillusioned with the nineteenth-century American dream, Martin dares to challenge the sincerity of its principles:

“Are Mr Chollop and the class he represents, an Institution here? Are pistols with revolving barrels, sword-sticks, bowie-knives, and such things, Institutions on which you pride yourselves? Are bloody duels, brutal combats, savage assaults, shooting down and stabbing in the streets, your Institutions! Why, I shall hear next that Dishonour and Fraud are among the Institutions of the great republic!”

And yet such institutions endure. Selfishness ensures self-preservation:

“if I was a painter, and was to paint the American Eagle, how should I do it?… I should want to draw it like a Bat, for its short-sightedness; like a Bantam. for its bragging; like a Magpie, for its honesty; like a Peacock, for its vanity; like an Ostrich, for putting its head in the mud, and thinking nobody sees it …And like a Phoenix, for its power of springing from the ashes of its faults and vices, and soaring up anew into the sky!”

But while the individual may persist and even prosper, the network of relationships he forms around him is weaker and less reliable. Observing this in such vivid colour in America, “Martin – for once in his life, at all events – sacrificed his own will and pleasure to the wishes of another, and consented with a fair grace. So travelling had done him that much good, already.” He is the first of the Chuzzlewit clan to undergo this crucial transformation, pushed to it by his near-death experiences in a society utterly riddled with egoism. In contrast, those who fail to realise the destructive nature of their hereditary “love of self” find that it leads them to ruin.

Apparently, America avoided this pitfall.

In 1868, Dickens returned to New York much changed during the interim decades.

He commented at length on the improvements he saw during a dinner held in his honour (they had apparently resolved the copyright problems), speaking of “how astounded I have been by the amazing changes I have seen around me on every side” and how he had “been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the privacy daily enforced upon me by the nature of my avocation here and the state of my health”. Furthermore, Dickens promised that a copy of the laudatory speech would be appended to every future edition of the two works in which he had criticised the States most fiercely: American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit.

Whether all those “remarkable men”, becoming aware of their conceit, had dropped the title, embraced humility and learnt to consider the will and wishes of others are doubtful. But moves such as the Emancipation Proclamation, the Homestead Acts that allowed most people to apply for ownership of public land, and the growing influence in New York of Tammany Hall, which advocated for immigrants, constructed orphanages and almshouses, and boosted the city’s social services, must have contributed to Dickens’ refreshed view of America. These examples were all essentially efforts directed externally rather than internally, for the benefit of the other, of the whole as well as the individual. This philosophy of altruism lies at the heart of many of Dickens’ works, and Martin Chuzzlewit is a colourful and compelling study of what happens when a family or society tries to function without it.

Further reading about the Life and Works of Charles Dickens: The Dickens Society

Main Image: Mark Tapley and other passengers on board The Screw, bound for America. Illustration by Fred Barnard (16 May 1846 – 28 September 1896)
Credit: Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo

Image above: Charles Dickens while on his second visit America in 1867-1868. Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

The post Mia Forbes takes up the story of Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

Leo Tolstoy wrote The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) after an existential crisis which entirely reshaped his life and which he describes profoundly in A Confession (1882). The two works, although different in kind, present such similar accounts of a man’s struggle with mortality that long passages could be interchanged without disrupting the meaning, tone, or even plot of either text. Tolstoy uses the character of Ivan Ilyich to explore what could well have happened to him had he failed to come to a crucial realization about the meaning of life, or come to it too late.

A well-respected government official, Ivan Ilyich enjoys a standard middle-class life of dinner parties, cards and obligatory family engagements. Everything is done in good taste, “with clean hands, in clean linen, with French phrases, and above all among people of the best society and consequently with the approval of people of rank”. He has a rather simple and satisfactory metric for making decisions: he chooses those courses of action that, a) bring him the most pleasure and, b) are endorsed by his highly placed associates. The two criteria never contradict one another. His marriage, for example, “gave him personal satisfaction, and at the same time it was considered the right thing by the most highly placed of his associates. So Ivan Ilyich got married”.

Ivan Ilyich revels in the praise, attention and envy he receives from others in his class, who of course support and share his hedonistic lifestyle. Each man is out for himself and his own. The novella opens with the announcement of the protagonist’s death, and the first reaction of his colleagues and even his wife is to consider how much they individually stand to gain, hiding their self-interest behind a veneer of sadness and pity. No mention is ever made of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ when it comes to their decisions, words or actions. Ivan Ilyich was “correct in his manner”, yes, but with “correct” determined by social expectations rather than any higher code of conduct. In fact, morality is entirely subsumed by the pursuit of social approval. Tolstoy admits in A Confession that he too was sucked into such a state of moral complacency: “the new circumstances of a happy family life completely diverted me from any search for the overall meaning of life. At that time my whole life was focused on my family, my wife, my children, and thus on a concern for improving our way of life”. Likewise, Ivan Ilyich devotes himself entirely to the enhancement of the family home, a project in which he is so absorbed that he begins to neglect his official duties, let alone any moral ones.

Indeed, it seems to be assumed that, as long as one adheres to the unspoken rules of one’s class, one will be living a good life: “[Ivan Ilyich] succumbed to sensuality, to vanity, and latterly among the highest classes to liberalism, but always within limits which his instinct unfailingly indicated to him as correct”. Thus when he first considers the possibility that he “did not live as [he] ought to have”, the ghastly prospect is “immediately dismissed from his mind… as something quite impossible”. For he had been “liked by all”, and therefore could surely not have done anything so very terrible.

Such values come directly from Tolstoy’s own experience as one of Russia’s elite. In A Confession, he recalls that “ambition, love of power, self-interest, lechery, pride, anger, ven­geance – all of it was highly esteemed. As I gave myself over to these passions I became like my elders, and I felt that they were pleased with me. A kind-hearted aunt of mine with whom I lived, one of the finest of women, was forever telling me that her fondest desire was for me to have an affair with a married woman… Another happiness she wished for me was that I become an adjutant, preferably to the emperor. And the greatest happiness of all would be for me to marry a very wealthy young lady who could bring me as many serfs as possible.

“Lying, stealing, promiscuity of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder-there was not a crime I did not commit; yet in spite of it all I was praised, and my colleagues considered me and still do consider me a relatively moral man”. And so, like Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy lived without criticism or censure in a meaningless but pleasurable way for many years. In 1869, however, the author had an existential crisis:

“At first I began having moments of bewilderment when my life would come to a halt as if I did not know how to live or what to do; I would lose my presence of mind and fall into a state of depression. But this passed, and I continued to live as before. Then the moments of bewilderment recurred more frequently, and they always took the same form. Whenever my life came to a halt, the questions would arise: Why? And what next?

It happened with me as it happens with everyone who con­tracts a fatal internal disease. At first, there were the insignificant symptoms of an ailment, which the patient ignores; then these symptoms recur more and more frequently until they merge into one continuous duration of suffering. The suffering increases, and before he can turn around the patient discovers what he already knew: the thing he had taken for a mere indisposition is in fact the most important thing on earth to him, is in fact death”

This is precisely the process of Ivan Ilyich’s decline. His health steadily deteriorating, and he begins a long and terrifying journey towards death. Its suitably trivial impetus is a fall that he suffers while instructing the upholsterer on exactly how he wants the curtains hanged in his thoroughly middle-class new house. At first, he laughs off the accident, but from that point onwards he starts to experience discomfort that soon becomes pain, and weaknesses that soon become debilitating. Upon realising the extent of his illness and being forced to contemplate his own mortality for the first time, Ivan Ilyich sinks into depression. Like Tolstoy’s own, it is a fluctuating state, alleviated when the dying man briefly manages to convince himself that he will live, and intensified when reality returns.

After struggling for months to diagnose and treat a physical pathology, Ivan Ilyich realises that “it’s not a question of appendix or kidney, but of life and death… Why deceive myself? Isn’t it obvious to everyone but me that I’m dying… I was here and now I’m going there! Where?” A chill came over him, his breathing ceased, and he felt only the throbbing of his heart.

“When I am not, what will there be? There will be nothing. Then where shall I be when I am no more? Can this be dying? No, I don’t want to!… Anger choked him and he was agonizingly, unbearably miserable. “It is impossible that all men have been doomed to suffer this awful horror!”

Thus author and character both face by the awful question of why. Why are we alive? If life is simply to end in death, as of course, it must, why do we live? What meaning can there possibly be in an existence that is bound to end in annihilation? In A Confession, Tolstoy isolates four means of escaping from the torment this question brings on any who dares to ask it. The first is the path of ignorance. In failing to ever consider the issue, the blissfully ignorant are free from the terrible shadow of mortality. Tolstoy himself, unfortunately, was not ignorant of the problem, so this was no way out for him. Many characters in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, however, do enjoy a state of ignorance. Ivan Ilyich’s colleagues take comfort in the fact that “he’s dead but I’m alive!”. On seeing the corpse, his friend Peter Ivanovich considers the notion of death “not applicable to him”, and yet he still “felt a certain discomfort and so he hurriedly crossed himself once more and turned and went out of the door”. This awkwardness indicates that the colleagues, undeniably intellectual men that they are, maintain their ignorance of death deliberately, distancing themselves from thoughts of mortality through avoidance and distraction.

And so they actually fall into Tolstoy’s second category, those who pursue an Epicurean means of escape. In this case, people distract themselves from the hopelessness of life, of which they are indeed aware, by diving headfirst into the ocean of worldly pleasures. Lack of imagination, selfishness and immorality prevent such people from contemplating the inevitable. Tolstoy himself “could not imitate these people, since I did not lack imagination and could not pretend that I did. Like every man who truly lives, I could not turn my eyes away from [the problem]”.

Before his illness, Ivan Ilyich’s professional duties “filled his life, together with chats with his colleagues, dinners, and bridge. So that on the whole Ivan Ilyich’s life continued to flow as he considered it should do—pleasantly and properly”, with little time and no desire to consider questions of life and death. After paying the respects demanded by propriety, his acquaintances swiftly discard any thought or conversation of their late colleague, so that “there was no reason for supposing that this incident would hinder their spending the evening agreeably”. Much the same is true of his wife and daughter, who increasingly detach themselves from their dying husband and father as his condition worsens. They continue to engage wholeheartedly in every middle-class pursuit, and by doing so bring upon Ivan Ilyich the realisation that this way of living is “not real at all, but a terrible and huge deception which had hidden both life and death”.

Tolstoy’s proposed third means of escape is that of suicide. “It consists of destroying life once one has realized that life is evil and meaningless. Only unusually strong and logically consistent people act in this manner. Having realized all the stupidity of the joke that is being played on us and seeing that the blessings of the dead are greater than those of the living and that it is better not to exist, they act and put an end to this stupid joke”. He admits that this path was attractive to him, but he had not the strength of soul, i.e. the courage, to go through with it. No character in The Death of Ivan Ilyich commits or even contemplates suicide, reflecting the weakness of the character Tolstoy attributed to most members of the middle class.

The fourth and final means of escape is also the most pitiful and painful. It is that taken by those who are aware of life’s meaningless, and who know that death if preferable, but who do not have the will to act on it by committing suicide. Nor can they fully distract themselves, being all too aware of the problem, but instead drag out their lives in a state of hopelessness, waiting for death. Tolstoy put himself in this category of people, and it is clear that Ivan Ilyich is also among them after his illness pulls him out of his Epicurean distraction:

“Ivan Ilyich was left alone with the consciousness that his life was poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others, and that this poison did not weaken but penetrated more and more deeply into his whole being. With this consciousness, and with physical pain besides the terror, he must go to bed, often to lie awake the greater part of the night. Next morning he had to get up again, dress, go to the law courts, speak, and write; or if he did not go out, spend at home those twenty-four hours a day each of which was torture. And he had to live thus all alone on the brink of an abyss, with no one who understood or pitied him”.

These four ways of living were the only options that Tolstoy observed among those people. There were those who were unaware of the problem, those who distracted themselves from it, those who acknowledged it and rid themselves of it through suicide, and finally those who knew of it but could do nothing but exist beneath its shadow it in a profound depression. To live in this last way was unacceptable to Tolstoy, but it seemed inevitable until he began to search elsewhere for an answer:

“I looked around at the huge masses of simple people, living and dead, who were neither learned nor wealthy, and I saw something quite different. I saw that all of these millions of people who have lived and still live did not fall into my category… It turned out that all of humanity had some kind of knowledge of the meaning of life which I had overlooked and held in contempt.. As presented by the learned and the wise, rational knowledge denies the meaning of life, but the huge masses of people acknowl­edge meaning through irrational knowledge. And this irrational knowledge is faith, the one thing that I could not accept. This involves the God who is both one and three, the creation in six days, devils, angels and everything else that I could not accept without taking leave of my senses”.

It was only when he removed himself from the intellectual, wealthy but ultimately fatuous circles in which he had previously lived and worked that Tolstoy realised there was an alternative answer to his problem. The four means of escape that he had observed were only the sole options if death did truly make life meaningless. Nihilism was the unrivalled perspective held by Tolstoy’s rationality-obsessed peers, explaining why all those the writer knew fell into one of the categories he outlined. In interacting with the Russian peasantry, however, he found that the majority of people did not see life as meaningless. Even if they did or could not understand it, they had a firm belief that human existence had some point. Their faith in a higher power gave them both meaning and a moral code by which to live. This is expressed in The Death of Ivan Ilyich through the character of Gerasim, the family servant. Gerasim first appears after his master’s death, when Peter Ivanovich is leaving the house.

“Well, friend Gerasim,” said Peter Ivanovich, so as to say something. “It’s a sad affair, isn’t it?”

“It’s God will. We shall all come to it someday,” said Gerasim, displaying his teeth—the even white teeth of a healthy peasant—and, like a man in the thick of urgent work, he briskly opened the front door, called the coachman, helped Peter Ivanovich into the sledge, and sprang back to the porch as if in readiness for what he had to do next”.

As Ivan Ilyich’s health declines, Gerasim is his sole source of comfort. He admires his vitality and cheerful constitution and enjoys talking to him. Tolstoy does not, however, offer his readers a dialogue between master and servant. The direct speech they exchange is largely concerned with simple tasks or with Ivan Ilyich’s comfort, and no profound theological ideas ever escape Gerasim’s lips. Just as Tolstoy, “listening to an illiterate peasant, a pilgrim, talking about God, faith, life, and salvation,… began to understand the truth”, so to does Ivan Ilyich’s fear of death diminishes when he is in Gerasim’s company. This is in direct contrast to the doctors who attend him. “Gerasim alone did not lie; everything showed that he alone understood the facts of the case and did not consider it necessary to disguise them, but simply felt sorry for his emaciated and enfeebled master”, whereas the doctors called to treat him are scornful, patronising and false. Upon hearing from Ivan Ilyich’s wife how the patient found relief when his servant held up his legs, “the doctor smiled with a contemptuous affability that said, “What’s to be done? These sick people do have foolish fancies of that kind, but we must forgive them”. Again Tolstoy unfavourably compares the respected intellect, whose complex ideas and extensive learning come to nothing, against the peasant, whose simple ways are healthy and effective, even if they cannot be theorised and rationalised.

After months of suffering, questioning and exploring, both internal and external, Tolstoy concluded that “to know God and to live come to one and the same thing. God is life”. Although his views on Christ and the Bible were far from orthodox, as detailed in What I Believe (1884), Tolstoy lived the latter half of his life as a religious man, and it was this conversion that allowed him to escape from the misery of a meaningless existence. After months of suffering, questioning and exploring, Ivan Ilyich reaches a similar verdict. Speaking to his family in his final moments, “he tried to add, “Forgive me,” but said “Forego” and waved his hand, knowing that He whose understanding mattered would understand”.

Here it is useful to look at the original words, although English translators have undoubtedly chosen apt etymological counterparts in “forgive” and “forego”. The former is a translation of прости́ть (prostít), which means “forgive” in the same sense; what is typically translated as “forego”, however, is пропусти́ть (propustít), which means ‘let go’, ‘let pass’ or ‘relinquish’. It does not have the same sense of giving up pleasures or resisting temptation as the English word “forego”, but instead suggests that Ivan Ilyich has accepted his death and is ready to pass on from the world, especially when spoken to “He whose understanding mattered”.

Straight away, Ivan Ilyich’s pain and fear are lessened. “He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. “Where is it? What death?” There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light”. It is while holding the hand of his young son that Ivan enters this semi-serene state. “Vasya was the only one besides Gerasim who understood and pitied him”, and at thirteen, is probably still too young to have fully adopted all the vices of his society. At last someone besides the sickbed declares that “it is finished”. “He heard these words and repeated them in his soul. “Death is finished,” he said to himself. “It is no more!” He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died”.

In a way, this is a happy ending. By starting the novella with the news of Ivan Ilyich death and presenting his friends and family’s reactions as insincere and self-interested, Tolstoy prepares us for a story about a callous society and a life that amounts to very little. Ivan Ilyich’s biography only reinforces this impression, and it is not until the final page that a ray of hope is offered. Tolstoy’s complex theology seems to deny life after death on an individual basis, and it is not clear whether his protagonist believes that he will ‘pass on’ into another realm, but the meaning has been found in God, and light has replaced the darkness. Tolstoy lived another forty years after his awakening, Ivan Ilyich only a few seconds; closing the book the reader cannot help but wonder why. The ending deliberately opens the floodgates for a cascade of questions about forgiveness, redemption, time and death.

Finally, it is interesting to consider why Tolstoy, who was of course perfectly able to convey his own emotional turmoil in A Confession chooses to put a physical illness at the heart of Ivan Ilyich’s struggle. It could simply be that such an illness or ailment is more explicit and relatable, allowing any reader to understand the protagonist’s fear and pain. Ivan Ilyich’s physical decline describes certainly serves as a powerful illustration of his destructive lifestyle, his broken body mirroring his broken soul. The ambiguity of his illness and its strange origins, seemingly triggered by the minor fall, might even cause us to question whether there is a physical pathology at all.

More than a matter of literary symbolism, could the affliction be a somatisation of his meaningless and pernicious way of living? After all, his symptoms seem to correspond in intensity with his emotional state: they “seemed to have acquired a new and more serious significance from the doctor’s dubious remarks”; it “seemed to him that he felt better while Gerasim held his legs up”; and after his final revelation, he notices the pain only when “he turned his attention to it”. But ultimately it does not matter what particular illness Ivan Ilyich suffered, or whether indeed there was a medical pathology at all, as it is his engagement with his affliction, and more importantly with death, that contains the novel’s most important message. His death casts an unfavourable light on the lives of those around him, and on all those who choose to respond to the perceived meaningless of life with hedonism, falsehood and self-interest.

Image: Leo Tolstoy with daughter Tatyana in Gaspra on the Crimea, 1902.

Credit: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

The post Mia Forbes looks at The Death of Ivan Ilyich appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

Although best known as a playwright and novelist, not to mention as a character himself, Oscar Wilde spent his entire career writing poetry. From the prize-winning Ravenna that he presented at Oxford, to the haunting Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde’s verse provides a complex and perplexing lens through which to examine his life and other creations.

In fact, it was with his poetry that Wilde first attempted to cement his place among the London literary elite. Although his father had been knighted for his services as a surgeon and his parents, therefore, enjoyed the titles of Sir and Lady Wilde, the young Oscar could not truly consider himself a member of the aristocracy. Moreover, his Anglo-Irish heritage meant he could never sincerely assume the role of English gentleman. Such circumstances necessitated the manufacture, or at the very least the embellishment, of his persona. And this is the way in which Wilde led the remainder of his life, with some parts of himself hidden or diminished, others created or exaggerated.

Ideas of duality and duplicity are evident in many of his works. Jack Worthing and Dorian Gray are two of his most notably binary characters: the former modifies his attitude and opinions depending on the company, going by “Ernest in town and Jack in the country”; the latter becomes increasingly reckless and cruel while maintaining the façade of “one who had kept himself unspotted from the world”. Writing provided Wilde with a valid way of giving voice to the contradictions that he observed in the world, and particularly in his own life, and where could such inconsistencies be more freely realised than in poetry?

Rennell Rodd, a friend from Wilde’s Oxford days, had once warned him of the dangers of indulging in these contradictions: “You see you’ve no one to contradict you!—Which is bad for you!”. The very nature of verse makes its messages and meanings far more difficult to overtly challenge or contradict than the speech and actions of the stage, or the more easily decipherable words of prose. Perhaps it is for this reason that Wilde’s poetry did not generate as much scandal as some of his other work, and yet it contains much the same sense of duplicity, hedonism and unorthodoxy that offended the sensibilities of many of his Victorian contemporaries.

His poetry makes it abundantly clear that, for Wilde, reality itself was a disappointment. Of course not every poetic speaker is a direct mouthpiece for the poet, but certain ideas appear so consistently and have such appreciable parallels in his own life, that it does not seem too presumptive to read Wilde’s own views in them. In some poems, his disappointment at the world around him takes the form of general concern about declining standards of decency, morality and goodness, stemming from a very human empathy he felt for the suffering of others: “Christ, dost thou live indeed? or are thy bones / Still straitened in their rock-hewn sepulchre?” (On the Massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria). But more often, his disappointment comes from a more personal place, a taedium vitae (‘boredom of life’), as one of his poems is entitled. In The Burden of Itys, he expresses the desire to “forget the wearying wasted strife, / The riven veil, the Gorgon eyes of Truth”, to escape “the dull insensate air”, and instead to “be drunk with life, / Drunk with the trampled vintage of my youth”. In Γλυκυπικρος Ἐρος (glukupikros eros, ‘bittersweet love’), love and life are destroyed by reality:

Two young lovers lying in an orchard would have read the story of our love.

Would have read the legend of my passion, known the bitter secret of my heart,

Kissed as we have kissed, but never parted as we two are fated now to part.

For the crimson flower of our life is eaten by the cankerworm of truth,

And no hand can gather up the fallen withered petals of the rose of youth.”

(Γλυκυπικρος Ἐρος)

And so in the face of this disappointing and destructive reality, Wilde and his characters create alternatives, losing themselves in fantasies and escaping into illusory worlds and experiences. Dreams are a frequent feature, truth is often the adversary of happiness, and most of the narrative poems are set in environments stripped of any vulgar trivialities or mundane hallmarks of everyday life: money, buildings, work, and crowds. Things appear in the wrong times and places, reflecting Wilde’s romantic nostalgia for the epic grandeur and pagan mysteries of the classical civilisations, his “fond Hellenic dream” (Ravenna):

For well I know they are not dead at all,

The ancient Gods of Grecian poesy:

They are asleep, and when they hear thee call

Will wake and think ’tis very Thessaly,

This Thames the Daulian waters

(The Burden of Itys)

“But when they had unloosed the linen band

Which swathed the Egyptian’s body, – lo! was found

Closed in the wasted hollow of her hand

A little seed, which sown in English ground

Did wondrous snow of starry blossoms bear

And spread rich odours through our spring-tide air.”

(Athanasia)

Despite voicing disgust at the façade of “pomp and pageantry and powers” that he saw disguising the “dull and grey” realities of British society, “changed unto a mimic play” (To Milton), Wilde does quite the same, colouring dismal and disappointing reality to his own fancy, embellishing it with impossible pleasures and interpolating wonders from distant times and places.

Where love sits in this dichotomy between sad reality and idyllic illusion is difficult: sometimes love is the fantasy destroyed by reality, “the crimson flower…eaten by the cankerworm of truth” (Γλυκυπικρος Ἐρος), and at other times the reality of love is what leads the lover to create the fantasy: “When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance” (The Portrait of Dorian Gray). At whichever point the cycle starts, it is clear that love and truth are opposed in Wilde’s poetry. Often this is expressed with an elevated, whimsical and dreamlike air:

“And Love! that noble madness, whose august

And inextinguishable might can slay

The soul with honeyed drugs, …

… made my youth

So soft a swoon of exquisite indolence

That all the chiding of more prudent Truth

Seemed the thin voice of jealousy”

(Humanitad)

Look upward where the white gull screams,

What does it see that we do not see?

Is that a star? or the lamp that gleams

On some outward voyaging argosy, –

Ah! can it be

We have lived our lives in a land of dreams!

(Her Voice)

Sometimes, however, Wilde explores the murkier side to the illusion of love:

Like wire-pulled automatons,

Slim silhouetted skeletons

Went sidling through the slow quadrille.

They took each other by the hand,

And danced a stately saraband;

Their laughter echoed thin and shrill.

Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed

A phantom lover to her breast,

Sometimes they seemed to try to sing.

Sometimes a horrible marionette

Came out, and smoked its cigarette

Upon the steps like a live thing.

(The Harlot’s House)

Thus he presents love and sex as existing on the borders of reality. Something else that floats in this liminal zone, and perhaps the most important of all, is art. The artist works where reality meets irreality, whether it be the musician: “Her ivory hands on the ivory keys / Strayed in a fitful fantasy” (In the Gold Room); the actor: “How vain and dull this common world must seem / To such a One as thou” (Phèdre, dedicated to Sarah Bernhardt); or poet, who at times is merged with the philosopher:

O come out of it,

Come out of it, my Soul, thou art not fit

For this vile traffic-house, where day by day

Wisdom and reverence are sold at mart,

And the rude people rage with ignorant cries

Against an heritage of centuries.

It mars my calm: wherefore in dreams of Art

And loftiest culture I would stand apart,

Neither for God, nor for his enemies.

(Theoretikos)

Ultimately, however, these artists, if submerged too deep in their creations as perhaps all great artists must be, will find themselves unable to sustain a harmonious balance between reality and fantasy. They will end up consumed by the illusory world, making a return to reality impossible. A question that any reader of Wilde’s work must ask is whether this omnipresent duality strengthens the characters and the author, adding to their interest, abilities and artistry, or weakens it, dividing them with a dichotomy that can never be resolved.

Written in 1881, Hélas! is a sonnet of introspection, its speaker an artistic soul whose references to the lute and “idle songs for pipe and virelay” immediately identify him with the poet. He wonders how best to handle his art, and whether something more important must be sacrificed when one fully indulges in the sensual, that is, whether “to drift with every passion till my soul is a stringed lute on which all winds can play” inevitable means “los[ing] a soul’s inheritance”. The “austere control” of reality is set against the freedom of art which allows the artist to “drift” from truth when it becomes unpleasant or ugly:

To drift with every passion till my soul

Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,

Is it for this that I have given away

Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?—

Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll

Scrawled over on some boyish holiday

With idle songs for pipe and virelay

Which do but mar the secret of the whole.

Surely there was a time I might have trod

The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance

Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God:

Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod

I did but touch the honey of romance—

And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?

(Hélas!)

What is so troubling about this sonnet, and which explains the lament with which it is titled, is the doubt that has crept into the artist’s reflections on his art: “Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll / Scrawled over on some boyish holiday / With idle songs for pipe and virelay / Which do but mar the secret of the whole”. His work is nothing but “some boyish holiday…which do but mar the secret of the whole”. In other poems, we see the same thing occurring in a romantic sense: the speaker realises that the love which has altered their world and freed them from the bonds of reality cannot be sustained if not grounded in truth:

Look upward where the white gull screams,

What does it see that we do not see?

Is that a star? or the lamp that gleams

On some outward voyaging argosy, –

Ah! can it be

We have lived our lives in a land of dreams!

How sad it seems.

…

And there is nothing left to do

But to kiss once again, and part,

Nay, there is nothing we should rue,

I have my beauty, – you your Art,

Nay, do not start,

One world was not enough for two

Like me and you.

(Her Voice)

Within this restless, hurried, modern world

We took our hearts’ full pleasure – You and I,

And now the white sails of our ship are furled,

And spent the lading of our argosy.

(My Voice)

Wilde acknowledges that the types of art and love which allow one to escape from reality are ultimately untenable, and yet equally he shows them to be irresistible. In fact, the delight and freedom that they bring is often presented as a worthy exchange for the ruin in which they all too often end:

Nay, if it be thy will I shall endure,

And sell ambition at the common mart,

And let dull failure be my vestiture,

And sorrow dig its grave within my heart.

…

Many a man hath done so; sought to fence

In straitened bonds the soul that should be free,

Trodden the dusty road of common sense,

While all the forest sang of liberty,

…

But surely it is something to have been

The best belovèd for a little while,

To have walked hand in hand with Love, and seen

His purple wings flit once across thy smile.

(Apologia)

Enough, enough that he whose life had been

A fiery pulse of sin, a splendid shame,

Could in the loveless land of Hades glean

One scorching harvest from those fields of flame

Where passion walks with naked unshod feet

And is not wounded, – ah! enough that once their lips could meet

In that wild throb when all existences

Seemed narrowed to one single ecstasy

Which dies through its own sweetness and the stress

Of too much pleasure,

(Charmides)

Anyone familiar with the dramatic and tragic story of Wilde’s personal life will immediately be able to distinguish the parallels between his own experiences and beliefs, and those voiced by his poetic speakers. In the context of the conservative and reputation-driven society of the late nineteenth century, it is no doubt easier to see why, for Wilde, reality meant rules, conventions and restrictions that cost him his freedom and happiness. Both his art and his love, hovering at the edge of this reality, eventually crossing the boundary of what it deemed true and acceptable. In arguably his greatest poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde indicates that the cause of his ruin lay not so much in the content of his scandal-raising works, nor in the very fact of his homosexuality, but in the duplicity with which he led his life and handled his relationships with others, and in his refusal to be tied down by reality:

“…the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats

None knew so well as I:

For he who lives more lives than one

More deaths than one must die.”

(The Ballad of Reading Gaol)

Mia Forbes

Image: Statue of Oscar Wilde in Dublin’s Merrion Square. Credit: Liam White / Alamy Stock Photo

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