Reader, I Think She Probably Should Have Taken a Few More Months to Think Over Her Options

Jane Eyre

Though I'm generally of the view that arguing over details of the plot is not a particularly interesting way of reacting to a book,* and better analyses involve considerations of structure, pacing, voice, composition, etc, here we go:

I don't see how anyone could possibly root for Rochester.

The absolute worst thing one could say about St. John would be to make him equal to Rochester in ill-treatment of Jane. Both are attempting to use her for their own ends, and want to cultivate her responses to them without informing her about what is going on. St. John, however, reveals his motivations much faster, of his own volition, and at least has them aimed toward a noble purpose. As Jane herself admits, but for his insisting on marriage without love, there's nothing wrong with his plan. (A significant 'but,' of course, though it seems less a fault of an unforgiving nature than a crucial mistake made by someone focused on his vocation/too young to think through all the consequences involved.) Rochester, by contrast, holds his peace until he is forced to reveal all, and would implicate Jane in a crime without her knowledge or consent--I presume his requirement that she wait a year and a day after the wedding to ask about the other woman in the house to be one that would make annulment impossible. He is, in other words, willing to run her great legal and social risks without informing her. That's not to say St. John is better--I think the obvious best outcome for Jane is to live at Moor House with Diana, and never marry.**

The novel itself is lively and modern, and the direct narration a good deal more sophisticated than, say, David Copperfield. It's rather, in its own way, a good commentary on the action delivered by one of its players, not unlike All About Eve. That it unfolds as a combination of the most unlikely happenstance is not a matter of great concern to me as a reader--Jane is discovered in the end by the family she did not know herself to have, but the knowledge is not at all essential to the action as it is happening.


*Not interesting because it involves arguing over a stipulated and limited set of facts (the text), which then involves one in the equally difficult games of guessing the author's intention (as something distinct from the actual words the author chose to write, and retained after editing; for which there might be supplementary evidence in notes and letters, but for which none often exists) or reading facts and relationships not written into those stipulated, an endless game. It is also almost always an exercise in wish fulfillment or enforcement of orthodoxy--making the novel into The Thing The Reader Wants It To Be, which is flattering to their own beliefs and prejudices, rather than The Thing That It Is.

**And, yes, I get that the point of the novel is that circumstances come about wherein Jane can freely choose Rochester, and we are meant to acknowledge it as a free and unforced choice, and that is a good thing. But we've also probably all had the experience of dealing with friends who make free and unforced decisions that are nevertheless poor.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption, Movies About Women Edition

Cléo from 5 to 7
Ida

The idea of experimental or avant-garde--it might be better to say the aspiration--is that formal experimentation with the structural components of a work of aesthetics can result in the unexpected. In the case of Cléo from 5 to 7, that unexpected thing is romance. In the early parts of the film, one can see the way that the camera is playing at the conventions of typical action shots, conversation shots, and the like, in the same way that the action itself is mannered and fractured, occurring in real time but with almost Fellini-like interludes. The camera will drift out of frame to pick up someone else's conversation; it will land at unexpected angles; the screen goes black or almost black several times; it will occasionally and without explanation shift the camera from a view of the characters to the character's own view. It reminds one of the story about Akira Kurosawa, who was asked by a famous director--John Ford, maybe--why he had composed a particular shot in a film in the manner he did; the answer was that to move the camera an inch to one side would have shown the Tokyo airport, not ideal for an epic set in medieval times. The direction shows such masterful control to work in so many continuous takes, and controlling for so many things that would traditionally be offscreen. When we meet Antoine at the end, the film can suggest several possibilities for what the encounter might be--unexpected street harassment, a tryst, a threat, an awkward encounter--that when it turns into none of these, it focused quite intently on the restorative power of conversation, of art, of beliefs, of humor, of human connection. But it requires that potential volatility, and sense of the unanticipated as built up throughout the film, to make its ending so transformative.
Obviously quite an inspiration for the Before trilogy, as well.

Ida received a lot of buzz for its artistic affectations: black and white, each shot framed with minimal camera movement (most with none), use of framing to emphasize the painterly aspects of each shot, and light that borrows fully from Baroque chiaroscuro and most specifically from Vermeer. When I was a younger man, I would have undoubtedly preferred this to the chaos of Cléo specifically for its affectations and classicism, and, as an older man, was prepared to dismiss it for those affectations. But over the course of the film, the action in each scene increases, to the point that the last shot, a long take of Ida walking, is the only one done with a hand-held camera. One has to account for both the technical aspects of the film as well as its subject matter, not least because the story centers around two characters, one of whom does not reveal very much about herself. The reading I am left with is that the final shot represents the only, or first true, action taken by someone who has mostly followed the course they were on, or simply reacted to events. The young man makes the mistake of offering her all the things she only knows by their absence, or as a source of pain, and she ultimately feels unable--or unwilling--to do any of that. Ida saw herself, as her aunt repeatedly insisted, as having a duty to people like her, until she no longer knew any people like that.

Tina Fey, Bossypants
Amy Poehler, Yes Please

The remarkable thing about Tina Fey: she will give lots of individual details and tell stories about her family members and her child, and you will be left with exactly zero information about them, an act of obfuscation that is very impressive. Amy Poehler says she doesn't want to get into the details of her personal life but inadvertently reveals a lot: the basic dimensions of what happened between her and Will Arnett that led to their divorce are clear. Fey's method is more cerebral and she is clearly a better writer--better not so much because her jokes are funnier, more because she understands very well what a joke needs to be surrounded by--while Poehler seems like the best possible person to work with.

I have mixed feelings about Brooklyn 99, a show I enjoy a great deal, but one that falls too unthinkingly into "cops are good, anyone who doesn't help them is a bad guy, and isn't it cool how they're so determined to break the rules as needed like cool people and not squares?" for these times. The mixed feelings do not extend in any way to Terry Crews, who plays a hyper-masculine dad who takes his role as father to daughters very seriously: being concerned for them, believing they can do whatever they want to, and not worrying in the slightest what indulging them in princesses, tea parties, and the like might mean for his masculinity. Turns out he's an awesome dude in real life, too.

One little thing to add to the discussion around Bill Cosby, who has taken some heat about a number of long-standing allegations of sexual assault. The new swarm of attention started when the comedian Hannibal Buress decided to do a little attention-grabbing shout-out on stage. Though a lot of the subsequent attention has focused on why a man completely unrelated to any of the incidents has credibility when the original accusers were ignored, and many have underestimated how career-boosting this move might be for Buress,* it remains a remarkable thing to do. It's the very rare example of someone with a public platform--a man with a public platform--using the sensationalist tastes of the internet-media complex to bring attention to an issue that is actually important.

See also Chris Kluwe on that troubling internet phenomenon: he will say a number of things that need to be said about the way women get treated because he has the unimpeachable confidence that, as a man, no one is going to attempt to hurt him as they have hurt the women who have done the same.

When you're in a position of power, or relative power, there are a lot of options: a problem can be ignored, or it can be subjected to an analysis that makes it partially the fault of all involved, it can be understood as a call to dignified suffering on the part of those who are hurt, it can be made the fault of those who provoked a response, or one can look with incredulity on the behavior of people who are like you to people who are not. The thing about being an educated white male heterosexual Christian in America is that while there are both many people who are like me and many who aren't, my thoughts, opinions and perspectives are going to be more respected on average than those people who are 'other' in some relevant respect. For people like me, Buress and Kluwe have to be the model: when a situation is intolerable, you have to use your position, no matter that you've done nothing to deserve it and it's not quite fair that you have it, in order to do something. For a few years now, the central question I ask myself about an issue is: "would any consequences flow to me if I chose to ignore this?" When the answer is 'no,' that's a sign that I should be concerned, that this is a place for moral inquiry to begin.


* "Fearlessly dedicated to the truth no matter the consequences" is a good look for a comedian, see also Chris Rock, Louis CK, Jon Stewart, and the long run of Lewis Black.

The thing that's funny about this:

"But surely some of the frustration with [Greta Gerwig's decision to do a CBS sitcom] is actually a projection of frustration at the medium she is (perhaps only temporarily) leaving behind, which is now so dominated by effects-driven—not to mention male-oriented—spectacles that there is no money for movies about people, emotions, and ideas—not to mention women. "

...is that all the examples of innovative TV work and movie-stars-going-to-tv are all white men. And it makes me wonder whether the relentless hyping up of Girls has at least as much to do with the fact that Lena Dunham must be present to balance out all that Great White Maleness so that tv looks more inclusive and radical.

Co-sign on the underlying question here, a leftover of last year's teaching. The lack of interest in justice is only partly explanatory of the reasons feminism and racism tend to get short shrift compared to LGBT questions. Let me suggest another possibility: if the relevant category is 'fairness,' there was something patently unfair in the treatment of that group of people which cannot (in the minds of students) be attributed to anything but animus. However, students tend also to be of the belief that the ultimate explanations for things lay in 'science.' No one will dispute the biological differences between men and women, and so there's a reluctance to believe that social roles are entirely determined by society. Feminism, in other words, is nice and all, but since only women can have babies, we can never dismiss the possibility that womens' difficulty in achieving social and political equality has something to do with biology.

The interest in evolutionary biology doesn't help: here it's apposite to note that the most susceptible audience for big, poorly sourced 'explain it all' non-fiction books are high schoolers who like the air of sophistication and can't notice the problems with the argument. Steven Pinker knows very little about the social sciences, but you'd never know it to talk to them.

The same also with race: students tend to think that all people should be treated equally, but seem fuzzy on whether all people are actually equal. (If you were so inclined and wanted to look for a place where the dearth of religious education negatively affects the young, the inability to recognize that the equality of people is a moral facet independent of any physical or mental characteristics would be it. Judaism and Christianity are quite clear that the equal status of persons has little to do with anything tangible about those persons.)

My exposure to Nicki Minaj came from her guest verse on "Monster," so I never quite understood the backlash: she's massively talented, and she wants to get paid. Hip-hop is not, and has never been, punk or indie when it comes to authenticity and credibility; they have their own hobby-horses to beat. Nevertheless, it's good to see that she's now destroying all comers.

It's not the direction in which the comments thread went, and so here rather than there, but my understanding has always been that the civil rights movement--and associated movements for recognition of racial and ethnic identities--have had a feminism problem, not the other way around. My history's a little rusty, but I recall that white women were among the strongest supporters of abolition and full civil rights for slaves and former slaves, with the understanding that pushing for black voting rights would also include their pushing for women's voting rights. This did not happen, obviously, with varying degrees of blame apportioned depending on which party you're listening to. But that seems to me to be the explanation for the whiteness of the feminist movement: an institutional legacy of things that happened 150 years ago.

On Schwyzer himself, I'm in agreement with Russell Arben Fox: he was a figure most interesting to me just before he became famous, when he was working in a more explicitly Christian frame of reference, and when he had a lot of sensible things to say about how men and women should interact. He seems to me now not unlike what one might imagine Augustine to have been like in the middle-early chapters of the Confessions, knowing that the things he does are wrong, completely unable to stop doing them, and tearing himself to pieces as a result, obvious disanalogies notwithstanding, including the fact that Augustine didn't do this process in public. He's a man with problems, and it'd probably be better for him if people stopped paying attention to him--not maliciously, not wishing him ill, but with the understanding that straightening his life out is by far the most important thing he has to do, not make amends to strangers over the internet.

"Go Slow"

The oddest thing about teaching Classics of Social and Political Thought this past year was the students' attitude towards racism and sexism. To their minds, both were deeply-seated problems and would take a long time to resolve. One student thought Emma Goldman's "The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation" was a 21st century piece, rather than one written at the turn of the 20th century; they noted the similarities between Tocqueville or DuBois' observations on the treatment of black people. They took to heart Tocqueville's idea that society doesn't change until mores change, and mores take a long time to change, but they did so in the oddest of ways: by assuming this gets everyone in history, and themselves, off the hook. Changing attitudes is complex, and people can't do it overnight.

Raising the issue of justice rarely helped, as their tendency was to think in terms of efficiency and ease. Justice being neither efficient nor easy, they looked on this as a needless muddying of the waters. I offered the comparison with homophobia, which they all think untenable, and pointed out that American society has reversed itself on the question within the last 20 years. No effect. Even pointing out that racism or sexism is just a choice--one that can be undone with so little effort as 'now I'm going to treat this person like a person, as I do every day with lots of human beings I encounter'--did not dissuade them from the idea that these problems would take hundreds of years to solve. I found their position disturbing because of the quietism it seems to imply--that political and social conditions are a given, that individual effort matters very little, that the resolution of problems is largely out of their hands and is somewhere far off in the future. And I am not quite sure how to address it in the future.

This is a trainwreck, and being pilloried quite deservedly. What happened the The Awl and The Hairpin?

And it goes without saying, one hopes, that hip-hop nevertheless has a serious problem dealing with women, and Gil Scott-Heron remains as relevant as ever on this score.

Teaching continues to be quite the experience, one I mostly neglect to talk about because I have many of the same students throughout the year. The pedagogical insights I've gained, such as they are, have to wait until I'm no longer teaching them. They're not embarrassing, of course, but ethics and all that. I will make a brief exception because a. it was something genuinely surprising to me and b. it may be of interest to my readership: marriage, and the societal pressure to marry as perceived by women.

Mill's On Liberty, which we were reading, is primarily concerned with domination--the way in which social forces (not legislation) can limit people's perceptions of what they can do. I was stressing that liberty isn't a matter of individual decisions, but of a 'plan of life,' the ability to form goals for oneself and bring them about over a long period of time. Mill has a parenthetical section where he talks about polygamy, essentially, "look, it's bad, but if you're a woman and therefore strongly encouraged to marry, it's not clear that this is worse or less free than any other marriage." Having a class that is largely female, I suggested this as an example: can you form a plan of life that doesn't include being married and/or having kids, and if you can, do you still feel the need to justify this? If so, that's an example of domination.

Boy, did this ever connect: a lot of very-present concerns about "having it all," the "window of opportunity," and the difficulty of navigating societal approval and disapproval of one's decisions, from (mostly, one guesses) 19 year old women who have probably not even chosen a major, but feel the need to have adjudicated the question of their future relationship status, in part because people keep asking them about it. I legitimately did not expect to hear that, though a better illustration of the principle would be hard to come by.

The fiancee suggested I perhaps underestimated the propensity of the average college student to have thought about this, but I'm more inclined to believe my surprise is a feature of having been male. Despite a few people in class suggesting it was also a problem for men (it's not, and social standards are, if anything, making it easier for men to not worry about it), this is a strictly female phenomenon. I didn't worry about being single until I moved to Euphemistic New Jersey after grad school (at 28), and it was no longer clear where I'd go to meet women, not that there were any around anyway.

This made me think of a line from High Fidelity: "it takes a certain type of person to worry about being alone for the rest of their life at 25." The sort of person who only has to begin worrying about it at 25 (or thinks it neurotic to be worrying about it at that point!) is best described as 'a man,' which makes much sense of the whole Nick Hornby thing.

This, pretty much:

"None of this has anything to do with gender or even with roles as such. It’s just about figuring out (a) what needs to be done and (b) who, at the moment, is better placed to do it. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that, does it?"

I'm pretty sure this is the rule in our household, minus a few weeks of the year when everyone is stressed and has no time. But that's what pizza delivery is for.

(I'm also in the process of reading Michael Chabon's essays about manhood, which I for the most part find to be of indifferent quality, hence the very slow process of reading. He has an essay on this topic where he does a pretty good job of demonstrating the way in which gendered home expectations have changed over the generations. But I'll also say this: when my grandfather, definitively of the old school, was all of a sudden made to be the one who had to do everything, he did it. And didn't seem to particularly complain about it, either: taking care of my grandmother meant a lot to him, and he would recount the various things he had done with pride, and very little concern about whether they would be perceived as masculine or feminine. They had to be done, so they got done.)

Adventures in Cultural Consumption, Don't Even Get Me Started Edition:

Broadcast News: Do people like this movie? I know people who like this movie. What on earth could be wrong with them?

Albert Brooks stars as a Nice Guy™. He is also a Serious Journalist. He identifies himself as a Nice Guy by, at turns, acting like he is much, much smarter than the woman he is in love with but will never make an active move to pursue, and through being her best friend, which apparently involves telling her she's a terrible person and emotionally manipulating her to undermine her decisions. You also know he's a Serious Journalist because he only does stories about war.

Now, it's possible that if you saw this movie when it came out, you may have some recollection of it being praised for being an incisive critique of the way TV journalism traded out substance for flash. That is, indeed, the point, and to make it clear, the William Hurt character (not a bright guy) gets the idea to do a story on a very frivolous and un-newsworthy topic: date rape. Yes, kids, that's right: war is news but letting people know about a widespread behavior they might not know existed is not, if it involves a woman crying, because it's just emotional manipulation and, as Brooks' character puts it, "complaining about nookie." Yeah, those women who were raped: what's wrong with them? This movie was made in 1987. The feminists were right, people.

The actual plot of the movie is supposed to turn on William Hurt's journalistic deception, about which I could not even bring myself to care. Was it personally unethical to cry when he didn't cry in actual response to hearing the story? Yes, if the goal of doing so was to boost his own career. Does it make anything else about the story invalid? Not if everyone accepts that he could have done a reverse-shot after the interview to give him something to cut to (which it appears everyone does, Holly Hunter included); at that point, you're already deceiving in some relevant sense, and Hurt's initial, perhaps-as-moving reaction (commented upon by the producer and the interviewee) was also lost. But, people, come on: if you're editing, you're already lying.

At the end of this term, which included Plato and Aristotle, I had my students read John Calvin. This was for a few reasons, one of which is that the division of terms at my present university usually means that the first ends with Machiavelli and the second begins with Hobbes, between which were a few events of significance in European and world history that would otherwise be neglected: the Reformation, the Peace of Augsburg, the Thirty Years War, etc. I also am of the opinion that Calvin is the interpretive key for the next term: Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau are all working in a world defined by, and reacting to, the concept of government espoused by Calvin.

Calvin does have a bad reputation, though, so I wasn't certain how the class would respond to it. Someone brought up the following passage, in particular:

This feeling of reverence, and even of piety, we owe to the utmost to all our rulers, be their characters what they may. This I repeat the oftener, that we may learn not to consider the individuals themselves, but hold it to be enough that by the will of the Lord they sustain a character on which he has impressed and engraven inviolable majesty. But rulers, you will say, owe mutual duties to those under them. This I have already confessed. But if from this you conclude that obedience is to be returned to none but just governors, you reason absurdly. Husbands are bound by mutual duties to their wives, and parents to their children. Should husbands and parents neglect their duty; should the latter be harsh and severe to the children whom they are enjoined not to provoke to anger, and by their severity harass them beyond measure; should the former treat with the greatest contumely the wives whom they are enjoined to love and to spare as the weaker vessels; would children be less bound in duty to their parents, and wives to their husbands? They are made subject to the froward and undutiful. Nay, since the duty of all is not to look behind them, that is, not to inquire into the duties of one another, but to submit each to his own duty, this ought especially to be exemplified in the case of those who are placed under the power of others.

To my surprise, the students found this to be reasonable: assuming away the worst possibilities of violence, it is generally true that duties don't (and cannot) depend on others first exercising their duties toward you. I think that's correct, but I was (erroneously, it seems) under the impression that it takes a greater amount of life experience to get to that point.

As I've thought about this passage more, though, there's something else that jumps out at me: it requires imaginative identification by Calvin and his reader with the role and station of women, and requires normalizing the complaints of the wife in this circumstance. It displays, in its way, a significantly more progressive attitude toward women than the other major figures of the term (who are, it must be said, a sorry lot, on the woman question). Normalizing the complaint of the wife: the role of the unhappy citizen is equated to the role of the unhappy wife. Calvin doesn't excuse or accept the bad behavior of the ruler; he considers the ruler to have a duty to act well, and thus the subject to have a right to expect that behavior; the citizen has been wronged in this process and the ruler stands under the judgment of God for having done so. It's merely that this wrong does not release the subject from their own obligations, so far as they go. Which means, for the analogy to work, that Calvin and his reader must think all the same things of the wife in this situation: if her husband fails to meet his husbandly duties she has been identifiably wronged, and he stands under the judgment of God for his failure. Moreover, the primarily male readership must admit the force of the wifely complaint in order for their own to have any merit. It's not feminism by any stretch, but it is a recognition that women are subjects in the social life of the polity and not merely objects to be acted upon (because men as citizens are subjects and not simply objects). Considering the last thing my students read before this was Machiavelli's suggestion that fortune is a promiscuous woman who must be beaten to give you what you want, Calvin is surprisingly enlightened.

I read Phoebe's review of Tiny Furniture with some interest, and I finally-for-real think I have solved my Lena Dunham problem, because the description of the movie made it sound a lot like Kicking and Screaming, but for women. Dunham as the functional equivalent of Noah Baumbach seems about right: talented, certainly; avid chronicler of a certain demographic slice, but only that demographic slice*; occasionally over-cute or insufferable. Baumbach is someone whose work I have no particular interest in but no desire to interact with: he's not worth hating even if the praise directed his way is occasionally unmerited.


*Not, as an avid chronicler of another certain demographic slice would say, that there's anything wrong with that, but it does put a limit on the appeal of the work. The same goes for, oh, Saul Bellow, or J.D. Salinger, or David Foster Wallace: all things where it's possible to have good and serious taste and still not really be into.

On occasion I make note of the very strange state of dating and relationship theory amongst (particularly conservative) Christians. Having been through a few iterations of it in my life, it's a continual source of fascination, if only because it's one of those places where quote-unquote biblical or quote-unquote traditional norms are very clearly the preferred norms of a particular subculture rather than any sort of general standard or guide. In particular, the problem is to be found in the idea of 'roles,' which are the sort of things individual people can develop on their own, apart from relationships with people of the opposite sex. When a man who knows and understands his role comes together with a woman for whom the same is true, they get married and that's that. There's little recognition that people are individuals with idiosyncrasies that don't map onto this.

Which is why I found this post on male spiritual 'leadership' quite interesting: men can exhibit many different gifts, which are meaningful and important, helpful in a relationship, integrated into a serious adult personality, and yet not in any way resemble a vision of leadership. The post is good in that it recognizes that the problem is the expectation, and not the men themselves.

(Of course, in a later post on First Things, the following counterargument was raised: of course some men are like this. Men have access to all the gifts! Implicit was the idea that women do not, or at least not the gift of leadership. Thus does the attempt to give nuance to the role of men who do not fit particular culturally-bound masculine stereotypes become a means of asserting the superiority of men to women in all circumstances. I sometimes think that it's not so much that liberal Protestantism has a nominalism problem as that conservative Christianity has a realism problem--the inability to see any distinctions or particularities as mattering.)

I have a lot of respect for Joe Carter, but, seriously: if you haven't read the book, don't talk about it, because you're not in a position to judge whether the critical views are correct in their treatment of the book, or whether the people who praise it have somehow lapsed in their otherwise fine judgment (and, really, their quote-unquote otherwise fine judgment should probably give pause in dismissing their praise).

I find myself moderately in sympathy with Rachel Held Evans on a number of questions: i.e. not always in agreement, but finding the areas of disagreement to be reasonable enough. But nothing makes me as sure she deserves to be heard as the uncharitable responses which her work generates, of which the link is a mild example (I have seen others that doubt whether she's a Christian). Most of these reviews have a characteristic form: include many quotes, ignore any context which might be relevant to what's being said, and impute the worst possible motives to any action (she only did various things for a month because she doesn't take the Bible seriously!).

People: she's almost certainly right that the willingness of major Christian bookstores to carry titles (or, rather, their willingness to not carry certain titles) has an effect, even largely unobserved, on the sorts of books that get written and published. And that's a bad thing (those unclear on why should refer to The Captive Mind. Or perhaps Persecution and the Art of Writing). Also: if there is any one characteristic of American Christianity writ large, it's the inability to see that our personal lifestyle choices are not the only valid options for everyone else: gospel and culture are not the same thing, "I have become all things for all men..." etc. But hammering away at her does reinforce the idea that American orthodox Christians are people who are narrow-minded, distrustful of those who do not look and speak and think they way they do, and particularly threatened by women for whom any of those are true (someone could do useful work by looking through criticism directed at her for examples of 'mansplaining,' of which I think there'd be no shortage). So people: chill out.