If Keats’s father was thrown from his horse, Keats's mother was thrown by this accident from life, never really to recover. Nor did her family, which henceforth lived in permanent disarray Frances Keats abandoned her family for an unfortunate second marriage, a mere two months after her husband's death, which, under English marital law of the day, denied her children their legal patrimony. Her second marriage ended in separation two years later. Meanwhile the Keats children, essentially orphaned, lived with their grandparents. The original plan was to send the Keats boys to Harrow, but this had to be abandoned when thet maternal grandfather, with whom the children were living, died in 1805. Five years later their mother would die, of what has ame been thought tuberculosis, which would eventually kill Keats’ youngest brother Tom in 1819 and eventually John Keats himself. at his lodgings at 26 Piazza di Spagna in Rome, and, later still, kill his brother George, then in his early forties, in Louisville, Kentucky,
&
‘France in the Enlightenment,” first published in French five years ago and now expertly conveyed into English by that canonical translator of our time, Arthur Goldhammer, is the best cultural history of that extraordinary episode now available. Drawing on a whole generation of new work, it shares the fundamental premise of most historians now. active in the field: that to study the Enlightenment is not simply, or even primarily, to study the origins of the French Revolution..Contemporaries did not know what would happen next. That was precisely why the Revolution came as such a shock. And to write the history of a whole century in terms of its last 10 years, however momentous, can only distort historical perspectives on three or four earlier generations, unaware of or indifferent to what would befall their descendants. It is not that the Revolution is entirely absent from Roche’s portrait of the age. But instead of scouring the Enlightenment for symptoms of revolution, he quarries the Revolution for echoes of the Enlightenment. For this is a study of cultural transformations in the broadest sense: how the outlook and behavior of a whole society evolved between the death of Louis XIV and the collapse of Louis XVI's monarchy, The first section describes the face of the kingdom, its socloeconomic structure and the way pervasive urbanization was forcing all those who lived in cities to change their habits and expectations. The second part takes us through the world of public affairs in a time when conflicts were no longer resolved by force of arms or rebellion, but not yet by debates and votes in representative assemblies. To an extent scarcely understood before the current genera tion of historians, political disagreements were still couched in religious language, and claims were staked in terms of jurisdiction rather than rights. But as the century went on, the elites on whom the monarchy traditionally relied were finding the institutional apparatus within which they operated increasingly unrewarding. They articulate their dissatisfactions in the language of the Enlightenment, to which a third and final part, “Enlightenment and Society,” is devoted. But the Enlightenment was not, as used to be thought, an ideology of opposition. The rich range of quotations enlivening Roche’s text shows an age keener to analyze and reflect than to denounce. And although one of the most momentous cultural developments of the century was the emergence of an independent public opinion, no longer contolled by authority, it is far from clear whether authority really wanted to control it any longer. The public sphere, after all, being public, did not exclude the government; and as the century went on the Kings’ ministers came to see more advantage in trying to influence and lead public opinion than in trying to stifle its expression.
PUBLIC debate was educative. Conducted by civilized people, it could pre-empt more problems than it created. And so the state was an increasingly active participant in the cultural world of the Enlightenment. It encouraged the proliferation of academies; sponsored reform in the church; tried to impose rationality on urban expansion; groped toward freeing the grain trade and colonial commerce; and engaged on all these fronts with the most advanced ideas of the day in order to improve the lot of the Kings’ subjects. By the reign of Louis XVI, ministers had even introduced some representative institutions to channel the cooperative energies of men of wealth and leisure into the grand project.
Never was government more enlightened than in its belief in the self-evident rightness of such policies. The rhetoric of the Enlightenment took for granted the sureness of its own analyses, and perhaps the most fateful flaw in the enlightened mind-set was its failure to find space for legitimate disagreement. Yet the interests threat
Yet the interests threatened by enlightened reform were not paper tigers, nor were they confined to a few bloated enclaves of privilege. Implementing enlightened reform posed challenges to every level of society, as the testimony of the inimitable Meénétra is repeatedly invoked by Roche to show. What destroyed the ancien régime, along with the world of the Enlightenment portrayed in this book, was a collapse of confidence. While the impatient enlightened elites lost faith in the monarchy’s halting commitment to progress, those below the level of their notice felt betrayed and bewildered by the pace of change and reform. And so when it entered its final agony, the French version of enlightened absolutism found itself without support from anyone, enlightened or otherwise.
&
Teachout on Powell
In fact, issuing orders is Widmerpool’s only real sensual pleasure, and it is at least as significant that he is a teetotaling philistine as that he may have helped sneak Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean out of England. Whenever Powell: informs us that one of his characters takes no pleasure in drink or the arts, or that he prefers power to love, it’s a safe bet that unsavory revelations are just around the corner. Herein lies the theme of ‘‘A Dance to the Music of Time,’’ stated explicitly in ‘‘A Buyer’s Market’’ (1952), the second volume, in which Jenkins remarks that ‘the arts themselves, so it appeared to me as I considered the matter, by their ultimately sensual essence, are, in the long run, inimical to those who pursue power for its own sake. Conversely, the artist who traffics in power does so, if not necessarily disastrously, at least at considerable risk.”’ Some will doubtless find this distinction a recondite premise on which to erect a 12-volume novel.
In any case, few great novels -and I incline increasingly to calling ‘‘Dance’’ great — are altogether free of flaw. In ‘““Messengers of Day’ (1978), the second of his four volumes of memoirs, Powell dilates briefly on the ‘“‘vulgarity”’ and *““implausibilities’’ of Balzac before dismissing them as unimportant: ‘‘Besides — something never to be forgotten — with all novelists one must put up with something.” To read ‘‘Anthony Powell: A Life’ and ‘‘Understanding Apthony Powell’’ is to be reminded of just how much “‘A Dance to the Music of Time” is worth putting up with.
&
The years of vaudeville — from the 1880’s to the 1930’s — is entirely like that: an eerie familiarity peeks through its alien surface. It’s like seeing a family photograph in which ancestors bear an uncanny resemblance to their living descendants.
For it was during this period that American popular culture began to take shape. And the minstrel singers, circus acts, ethnic comedians, cross-dressing entertainers, chorus line beauties and early jazz performers, who were booked in ornate theaters across the country by a new class of managers and agents, may have been sSuperseded by 20th-century entertainments, but not before shaping the future of Broadway, radio, film and American culture.
There's something about thie that goes to the very heart of vaudeville Under the leadership af producers and theater owners like Tony Pastor, in the late 19th century, vaudeville tranaformed the taucoua and ribald variety acta thal had heen a etaple of American entertainment Vaude Ville, in its prime, made ii-repute reputable Women and children could sometimes attend When live performances and film were com bined tn the early picture palaces of the 1920's, theaters included play rooms with toy carousels
But impulses and attitudes within vaudeville remained at the very edge of respectability. Its stock characters were representatives of particular ethnic and racial groups — blacks and immigrants — and all were presented in caricature. Blackface singers like Al Jolson were imitating the way black singers showed themselves in vaudeviile’s version of minstrelsy. Irish, German and Yiddish accents were part of the patois of vaudevillian comedy, the mangled sentences echoing the increasingly familiar immigrant sounds of cities like New York.
Oddly, though, these exaggerations were not generally an occasion for bigotry or hostility. There was an element of celebration wm Uke mockery, partly because the actors were often themselves from these groups. Even stranger, eho actors would adopt alien ethnic identities for the sake af the comedy, making the artifice even more apparent. Blacks appeared as Chinese, Jews as Irish. it was as if, by some unspoken agreement, Marginal groups had joined forces in displaying, to each other, “the comic absurdity of their position.
&
...“pelvic hyperemia,” or congestion of the genitalia.
Vibrators were also marketed to women, as home appliances. In fact, the vibrator was onty the fifth household device to be electrifred, after the sewing machine, fan, teakettle and toaster, and preceding by about a decade _ the vacuum Cleaner and electric iron — perhaps, Dr. Maines suggests, “‘reflecting consumer priorities.”
Advertised in such respectable periodicals 2s Needlecraft, Woman’s Home Companion, Modern Priscilla and the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, vibrators were pitched as ‘“‘aids that every Woman appreciates,” with the delicious promise that “all the pleasures of youth ... will throb within vou.”’
Sigmficantly”’ the vibrators were almost always designed to be used externally. As a result, medically indicated massage therapy could be pitched as upstanding and asexual — and less risque than the gynecologist’s speculum, which came under heavy ethical fire when it was first introduced in the late 19th century.
Dr. Maines, head of Maines and Associates, a firm that offers cataloguing and research services to museums and archives, first stumbled on her piquant subject while researching the history of needlework. Thumbing through a 1906 needlepoint magazine, she found, to her astonishment, an advertisement for a vibrator. When she realized there was no stholarly history of the device, she decided to take on the topic.
Her investigations led her to conclude that doctors became the keepers of the female orgasm for several related reasons. To begin with, women have been presumed since Hippocrates day, if not earlier, to suffer from some sort of ‘“womb furie’’....
&
Flaubert urged Maupassant to describe something common —and then search for the “unexplored” element in it. According to Flaubert, even the commonest thing contains something that no one has noticed, “because we are accustomed to seeing things only through the memory of what others have said about them.” Next, Maupassant recalled, “he forced me to describe, in a few phrases, a creature or an object so that it was ciearly distinguishable from all other creatures or objects of the same race or species.”
No comments:
Post a Comment