Currently Reading: Susan Sontag - Illness as Metaphor
I picked up this slim (90 pages and pocket-sized) essay from a used bookstore this weekend, and it is absolutely fascinating. I’ve only just started it, but so far the rough shape it takes is a comparison between metaphorical perceptions about tuberculosis in the 19th century and perceptions of cancer in contemporary society. We can still see the TB trope in adaptations of 19th century works–the sensitive artist who coughs weakly and surreptitiously into a handkerchief on which we catch a glimpse of a smattering of blood. Even as germ theory became a mainstream belief, the idea of “disease” being linked to the psyche and the character still hadn’t completely shaken loose. Sontag contrasts this perception with the modern perception of cancer, which is often seen in a more negative light.
What I can’t help thinking about is that Sontag wrote it in 1978–just 10 years later it would become more relevant than she could have imagined as the AIDS crisis exploded. The 20th century quickly proved it was no better than the 19th–AIDS is still seen as a disease that is solely the domain of gay men and drug abusers, and mainstream reactions to Charlie Sheen’s admission of his HIV positive status are a testament to that. If you’re looking for a fast but revelatory read that links the past painfully to the present, this is a text for you.
Check out the full gallery behind the above link for an exhibition currently on display in London of studio portraits of Black Victorians, because they are absolutely stunning.
Black Chronicles II is a public showcase of Autograph ABP’s commitment to continuous critical enquiry into archive images which have been overlooked, under-researched or simply not recognised as significant previously, but which are highly relevant to black representational politics and cultural history today. For the first time a comprehensive body of portraits depicting black people prior to the beginning of the second world war are brought together in this exhibition - identified through original research carried out in the holdings of national public archives and by examining privately owned collections.
I’m so ready any time somebody tries to claim that Black people did not exist in England during the Victorian period. I’m so ready every time they tell me they’ve never read books about them, or seen photos of them, or seen them in movies set in the period. I’m ready with a mess of arguments that go something like this:
Race’s intersection with class means that few Black people had the money for the then-highly expensive photographic processes
Systematic inequality kept Black achievements from being recognized or recorded contemporaneously
Pop culture has furthered this erasure by drawing its source material from the very same mainstream historical records that, during the Victorian era, consciously removed Black writers, artists, inventors, etc.
What I was NOT ready for was being slapped in the face by this archive, which has existed all these years, entirely unresearched, unnoticed and hidden away. Here is real proof that we can all always try and get better; what I’ve written in the above bulleted list is certainly a component in the erasure of Black Victorians, but it’s not the whole story, and it was offensive on my part if I ever made it appear as if it was.
Sometimes the achievements of oppressed classes are destroyed or ignored in their own time, but sometimes they are destroyed or ignored in ours. Documents, compositions, plays, patents, photos, stories, and so much more by marginalized people in history exist, and if we mourned them all as lost, no one would have ever gone digging for this archive. So keep on looking with a critical eye, at our stories, and at how we talk about them. If you see a big yawning gap in history, chances are, that’s a shadow, not an absence.
Above, John Xiniwe and Albert Jonas, London Stereoscopic Company studios, 1891.
CALLING RESIDENTS OF MASSACHUSETTS AND GEORGIA!! This exhibition is currently on the road! I just got to view it in person in Cambridge, MA where it will be residing for just about two more weeks, and it is positively breathtaking in person. The photographs were all, I believe, taken with glass plate photography, meaning some of these photos are so exquisitely detailed and high-resolution that even blown up to massive scale in the gallery, they retain perfect photographic quality.
I’m sure you’ve seen this post and others like it discussing the inherent racism in the design of color film; I couldn’t find the exact one, but I distinctly remember a post about how it wasn’t until Hershey’s raised a fuss that they couldn’t film their chocolate for commercials that film manufacturers started to work on widening the light range of their color film technology. There is no such problem in the glass plate photography–the photos and their subjects are luminous and stunning and captured in perfect detail.
COOPER GALLERY - CAMBRIDGE, MA: Currently on view until December 11 SPELMAN COLLEGE - ATLANTA, GA: January 28-May 14
The only surprise is that when the danger closes in at last, and with a golden doctor on the doorstep to rescue her, Edith takes a knife and starts stabbing her own way out. It’s Del Toro’s most satisfying story trick that no one in the movie takes much notice. Often in the gothic, monstrous women are objects of horror—look no further than Countess Zaleska and her Sapphic ilk. But Crimson Peak itself gives no indication this isn’t the way a woman behaves; Lucille is a serial killer who views Edith’s violence as fair play. It’s the traditional gothic that’s taught us to expect a woman paralyzed by fear. That expectation makes Edith’s arc a slowly unfurling subversion.
It finally happened. I finally saw Crimson Peak. And it was everything I hoped it would be. I’ll just point to this A.V. Club article, because it captures almost everything I want to say about it.
A major part of why I love Victorian lit so much and why I ended up studying it is that troping and archetypal stories zing around in my brain like a pinball machine. They do something to me that just lights it up; far from mere narrative laziness, tropes are a message in a bottle, a time capsule. They tell us what that bubble of culture was collectively trying to work through, understand, or solve, and they vary so wildly from place to place and century to century that they provide a highly-specific window into the anxieties of a particular place and time.
And Crimson Peak is clearly crafted by a seasoned gothic horror fan. Every review I’ve read so far (rightly) makes comparisons to a range of gothic horror standards: Rebecca, Jane Eyre, The Monk, etc. The pure innocent pulled into a sexual and murderous death game, the fascination with decay and decadence and rot, the land itself as metaphor, all these are the central calling cards of the genre.
This A.V. Club article comes closest to saying what I wanted to say, though: reusing and rehashing old tropes is lazy. Subverting them is narrative ingenuity. Edith taking up a knife herself, and the narrative refusing to turn her into a monster for it, is incredibly subversive at its heart. The idea that Edith can end the movie changed by what she’s experienced but not a villain herself is incredibly rare and incredibly powerful. A weaker article from the Guardian claims that Crimson Peak is empowering simply for portraying monstrous women, which is not entirely wrong, but misses its mark a bit. Monstrous women are everywhere, and have been forever. From Grendel’s mother to the vampiric women of Dracula, women are monstrous when what makes them women is perverted. In the case of Grendel’s mother, her maternal instincts are over-exaggerated, becoming vengeful bloodlust (though comparing tropes in Beowulf to 19th century ones is a bit anachronistic). Most often, we see monstrous women’s perversion as a warping of their sexuality; Lucille lines up perfectly with her predecessors–overdeveloped appetites, sexual and bloody, is what makes her a monster. The female vampires of Dracula drip sexuality–my jaw actually dropped when I first read this paragraph:
Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer–nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited–waited with beating heart.
Like, even now, this is diiiiirty. But they don’t even match Carmilla, the “sexuality as vampirism metaphor” to end all sexy vampirism stories. In Carmilla, a pure and innocent girl is perverted by the aggressive sexual advances of her female friend, until she is revealed to be a vampire and killed by a stake through the heart (is it Freudian in here or is it just me?). If you think that surely, no one could have written a lesbian story in 1872, it must have been more subtle than how I described it, see for yourself:
Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever”.
Women are monstrous when they want too much, and Lucille is no exception. If I’m remembering correctly, she’s two years older than her brother, which makes the revelation of their long-running sexual relationship even more horrifying and abusive. But she’s not new. Women who have grown too powerful and need to be culled have been around for as long as sexism has taken its contemporary form. But Edith getting powerful, refusing to be the delicate butterfly that Lucille thinks she is? Now, that’s new. And it’s incredible. She gets powerful and she stays powerful, she gets big and bigger.
That story, like so many that we tell about our nation’s past, has a tricky relationship to the truth: not quite wrong, but simplified; not quite a myth, but mythologized. For one thing, far from being centrally organized, the Underground Railroad was what we might today call an emergent system: it arose through the largely unrelated actions of individuals and small groups, many of whom were oblivious of one another’s existence. What’s more, even the most active abolitionists spent only a tiny fraction of their time on surreptitious adventures with packing crates and the like; typically, they carried out crucial but banal tasks like fund-raising, education, and legal assistance.
It’s worth noting that before the Victorian era, history was considered more an art than a science. History was meant to be instructive, so stories of military leaders and politicians were openly modified to be more heroic and have a clearer positive message. Over time that shifted (in time with many attitudes about public education, citizenship, and empirical studies). Now we lament all the histories inaccurately reported and recorded as history has become more and more like science; but history is never, has never been objective and unbiased. To call it so, or to read and study history operating under the assumption that it is, is highly dangerous.
After his emigration on the doomed Demeter, Dracula terrorizes the novel’s narrators not just by his predation of their women, but by his mastery of English accent and mannerisms, and his accrual of English property. Yet he has made this desire for complete absorption into English life clear from the beginning: in one of the book’s most telling and oddly poignant moments, Jonathan Harker enters Dracula’s study and finds him “lying on the sofa, reading, of all things in the world, and English Bradshaw’s Guide”—a railway timetable.
Did you know that Jack the Ripper, anti-semitism, and Draculaall hang on the same thread of national fear? Well, they do.
Yet the tens of thousands of Americans who lived in these communities were not fools. To be sure, in an era thick with cranks and faddists, the utopias sheltered more than their share. But the majority of the communitarians were intelligent, hardworking people. They came from every denomination and every social class. Significantly, unlike the utopian communalists of other eras, they were not primarily young people. They were blacksmiths and farmers, journalists and lawyers, tailors and scientists, teachers and clergymen. A few of them were among the most articulate and prescient reformers of their day. After their respective sojourns in utopia, many went on to illustrious careers elsewhere. They may have been dreamers, but they did their dreaming out loud, with their dollars, their arms, and their time. They tried to manifest their impractical visions with great practical skill.
This article was a rare first for me: I placed an order for the book before I even finished reading this excerpt. It’s definitely a lengthy one, but if you have any interest in the little-known history of utopian socialist movements in the U.S., I can’t recommend reading this enough.
Jennings covers five communalist movements through their successes and failures with great understanding and respect. Needless to say, none of them exists today, but Jennings treats each one with absolute understanding. After all, no movement, however nutty it sounds, springs from whole cloth without being in some way a reaction to the context in which it emerged, and Jennings takes the time to contextualize each movement and pay appropriate respect to their respective followers.
On another level, this excerpt hits so many check boxes for me because the 19th century tends to get aesthetically pigeon holed. You know how certain contemporary subcultures tend to feel affinity with and gravitate towards certain historical moments or cultures? Many members of today’s psychedelic drug culture look to the 70s for musical, artistic, and aesthetic inspiration, fans of fantasy largely control the modern image of the medieval period, and the 19th century? Its image is largely controlled by costume drama and literary adaptations or steampunky mashups. But 19th century folk weren’t just sipping tea in cravats or doing whatever they do on Penny Dreadful (still never watched it, if I watched it I might not be able to use it as my whipping boy anymore)–the Luddites were smashing factory equipment, early environmentalists were rallying to protect the Earth, and these socialist radicals were making their vision of a perfect communal world a reality by founding enclaves and encampments in the woods of 19th century America. The more you read about it, the more punk the Victorian era becomes.
Give this one a read, if you’ve got half an hour to spare–I’d lend you the book, but I’m busy with it.
“[Fyodor] Dostoyevsky told Anna [Snitkina] that he would like her opinion on a new novel he was writing. But as soon as he began telling her the plot, it became apparent that his protagonist was a very thinly veiled version of himself, or rather of him as he saw himself — a troubled artist of the same age as he [45 years old], having survived a harsh childhood and many losses, plagued by an incurable disease, a man “gloomy, suspicious; possessed of a tender heart … but incapable of expressing his feelings; an artist and a talented one, perhaps, but a failure who had not once in his life succeeded in embodying his ideas in the forms he dreamed of, and who never ceased to torment himself over that fact.” But the protagonist’s greatest torment was that he had fallen desperately in love with a young woman — a character named Anya, removed from reality by a single letter — of whom he felt unworthy; a gentle, gracious, wise, and vivacious girl whom he feared he had nothing to offer. Only then did it dawn on Anna that Dostoyevsky had fallen in love with her and that he was so terrified of her rejection that he had to feel out her receptivity from behind the guise of fiction. Is it plausible, Dostoyevsky asked her, that the alleged novel’s heroine would fall in love with its flawed hero?”
—
“Anna Dostoyevskaya on the Secret to a Happy Marriage: Wisdom from One of History’s Truest and Most Beautiful Loves" by Maria Popova
Fyodor and Anna were married on February 15, 1867, and remained besotted with one another until Dostoyevsky’s death 14 years later. Although they suffered financial hardship and tremendous tragedy, including the death of two of their children, they buoyed each other with love. Anna took it upon herself to lift the family out of debt by making her husband Russia’s first self-published author. She studied the book market meticulously, researched vendors, masterminded distribution plans, and turned Dostoyevsky into a national brand. Today, many consider her Russia’s first true businesswoman.
The Kochli Sapphire Tiara. Made in 1894 by Friedrich Koechli, part of a parure consists of a corsage ornament or brooch, a tiara and a necklace. Commissioned by Tsar Alexander III and Tsarina Marie Feodorovna for the last Tsarina of Russia, Alexandra Feodorovna, nee Pss Alix of Hesse upon her marriage to their son Nicholas II the same year. Intertwined scrolls in which 16 sapphires are set mounted in gold; the diamonds are mounted in silver and linked with gold.
Mathilde Kschessinska was a Russian ballerina from a family of Polish origin. Her father Feliks Krzesiński and her brother both danced in St. Petersburg. She was a mistress of the future Tsar Nicholas II of Russia prior to his marriage, and later the wife of his cousin Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich of Russia.
New to my Etsy shop:‘Ophelia’ necklace, inspired by Opheliaby John Everett Millais (1851-52). In the painting Ophelia is seen wearing a chain of violets around her neck: the flowers in this necklace and earring set are made from lucite, their vibrant blue echoing that in the painting, and the small glass bead reflect her silvery grey dress.
I’ve never quite understood what the difference between abolishing property and “democratis[ing] property […] by universalising it, in such a way that every citizen without exception may be a proprietor” is supposed to be
I understand that Hugo is saying he doesn’t agree with Communists here, but from a practical pov, how would one “universalise” property in a way that didn’t, in effect, amount to abolishing it? Does anyone know what contemporary discourse he might have been talking into here?
My best guess on this (and I emphasize this is a Best Effort, not a barricade I’m willing to fight on) is that he’s talking about making everything state owned/ commons (abolishing property) vs making sure everyone is financially able to buy their own (well. let’s be real, HIS own) property, by ensuring better wages etc (universalizing /democratizing it)?
hello I have some experience in this, there was a lot of discourse in the 19th century that apparently went away with time in most places but since brazil is a country where most land is owned by a handful of families and farms are like bigger than most european countries and created entirely for producing materials for exportation, this never stopped being a concern
what I’m pretty sure he means is to seize large properties (I assume the government would do this) and chop it up and redistribute it (maybe even sell it at a much lower cost) to small farmers that can return the production into assets for the community. Or maybe let the farmers who live and work in the estates own the property they rent. It’s basically a direct action anti-monopoly legislation. Sort of another version of the american idea that if you build and work in a land for a few years you officially own it, back in the days of western expansion, but with a heavy focus on giving back to the local community
EDIT:the land reform wikipedia article it’s definitely a socialist/left wing ideology but it isn’t as radical as abolishing property per se
Oooh,thank you!
- How does this sort of plan reckon with people like workers in the large cities? Would they own their apartments and part of their factories, or what? (given that every citizen without exception is to be a proprietor, but a chunk of arable land is of dubious immediate value to someone in a city far from that land– and Hugo is certainly not an advocate for ending cities, like some theorists.)
well I mean, land reform is an idea that’s pretty focused on farmland and not to urban areas? There are some activist groups I’ve dealt with that apply the same principle to buildings in the city that are idle
mandatory cambridge hotel tangent: it was a big old hotel here in sao paulo, it was abandoned and the owner was using it for real estate speculation and never payed taxes on it, so a group ‘invaded’ it and established a sort of tenants union, they themselves fixed the building up and they keep it functioning. So now they’ve successfully sued for ownership. They still pay taxes as a group, the inhabitants have to pay a small fee to live there so that all the people who do work to maintain the building get payed, if you can’t find work outside you can pretty reliably find a job inside. Most (if not all?) of the people who live there were homeless and part of the way they managed to convince the government give them ownership was to prove that they can keep paying taxes regularly
So like, clearly it’s almost the same as regular private property, minus the abuse that comes from real-estate speculation, and with focus on community (and unions). We could use something like that specially nowadays, cities so full of developing companies building empty houses and on the other hand more and more people becoming homeless, this is a general fix for that. You could be more or less radical with the idea, include the whole economy and have the workers the ones who share in the profits they produce (rad!), or you can just have the factories be government owned and they provide services to make sure everyone lives comfortably, this is what the democratic government was supposed to be doing anyway?
So for example, in the book the kind of building that might become social interest housing would be the Gorbeau house. I imagine there were a ton of big houses like that in Paris at the time. The rue Plumet could comfortably fit like 3 families in there. The soviet union did this, successfully or not that depends on how much you think the soviets actually represented the population? So imo what he’s saying here is straight up what the socialists were trying to do when the russian revolution happened
