Mazes

Haywood’s Fantomina drew me into British eighteenth century. The protean Fantomina herself seems to stand in for the instability of the period’s texts and reading experiences--and the  mysterious quality of those experience. Is Fantomina more pleased by the strength of her genius or the prospect of renewed amorous attentions? And to which pleasure is the reader drawn? What did it feel like to read prose in 1724?  How might prose fiction be particularly useful for women to read or to write?  

In the years since, my scholarship has centered on issues of readerly freedom and readerly constraint.  How much freedom do readers have and how might readers benefit from reading within prescribed reading positions, or from externally constructed lenses or filters? What is a modern reader and when and how did she/he emerge? 

I have spent the last few years teaching writing, in a topics-oriented program; my class is designed around problems of media change and media history, broadly construed.  Occasionally, I prompt students to write about and discuss their own reading habits.  There usually is a clear correlation between students who describe themselves as avid readers and students who are accomplished writers--a surprise to no one, I think! What is a surprise, though, is that even among students who admit that they read infrequently, who describe reading as a chore, or mention the many ‘unnecessary details’ of much of their assigned reading, there is a sadness for lost reading habits and a sense that they would be smarter and better thinkers if they had a better foundation built upon the habits of print reading (the habits, not necessarily the print). Their habits and their sense that such habits have larger consequences is, of course, confirmed by recent studies on the nation’s reading habits performed by the NEA.  All of this is to (vaguely) gesture toward the connections between habits of reading and the big educational picture--not to mention the possible roots of our culture’s anti-intellectualism and increasing suspicion about the project of public education--in attitudes about reading.  And all of this is note additionally, of course, that we are in a very eighteenth century sort of moment as we debate and work out these connections and experience the transition away from--or profound changes in--print culture. 

As Danielle above, “The eighteenth century’s privileging of the self and the social over domestic relations provides a provocative point of comparison and contrast for our own transitional moment.”  I have leapt rather quickly into the present (perhaps a reflection of my teaching, which holds me fairly firmly there), but the questions of how the eighteenth century can shed light on this historical moment--and the problems of the mazes that connect past and present--remain key and  I hope we will discuss them more here. 

Dangerous Liaisons

At an academic job interview several years ago I was asked what had drawn me to the study of eighteenth-century literature in the first place. I wasn’t prepared for such a personal question. I blame it on Dangerous Liaisons, I said, referring to Stephen Frears’ 1988 film (based on the 1985 play by Christopher Hampton based on the 1782 novel by Choderlos de Laclos) which I had seen two or three times the year it came out and which I had glimpsed again at the gym a few days before. The movie was my first exposure to the period, I said (probably true), and I was instantly gripped by the intelligence and cruel wit with which the libertine protagonists, the Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) and the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovitch), pursue their sexual intrigues, by their insight into and unflinching honesty about their motivations in playing their private game-turned-war together, and by the tragic ending, gorgeously encapsulated in matching images of mounds of snow stained red after a duel and bloody smears across a face that has, until this final, violent démaquillage, always been impeccably painted and utterly implacable.

Several years later I took a course on gender and authorship in the British writing of a slightly earlier period. Encountering England’s “merry monarch” Charles II, sexual satirists like Aphra Behn, the Earl of Rochester, and William Wycherley, and historical courtesans like Lady Castlemaine breathed new life into the glamorous European court culture of my imagination. I eventually wrote a Master’s thesis exploring female libertinism in the Restoration. Some of my early research questions were undoubtedly inspired by my initial Hollywood-mediated view of the period. It was clear that male writers like Rochester and Wycherley identified strongly with aristocratic notions of libertinism but weren’t women like Behn and Castlemaine libertines too – the predecessors of the Marquise? And how did status affect historical ideas and practices of sexuality? (What difference did it make, for instance, that Wycherley and Behn were not thoroughbred nobles like other court writers?)

As I explained to my interviewers, similar concerns with the relation between status and sexuality have persisted through my doctoral (now book) project on intimate settings in eighteenth-century writing, especially insofar as I am interested in how noble codes and practices of intimacy are passed along and/or modified as the elite private space of the closet begins to find a home beyond the court. I was pleased. I had managed to improvise a coherent little narrative of the evolution of my research in response to a question that took me by surprise. Well done, I thought, but I didn’t get a callback.

After watching the film again last week I have to say that it really does represent much of what I find satisfying about the historical and cultural period I study, but that the reasons I came up with at the interview only just begin to explain it. It is true that Dangerous Liaisons gives a fresh (old) perspective on the passion and elegance and trauma of male-female relations and the double binds faced by women who dare(d) to seek autonomy within them. But it struck me during this recent viewing that there is much more to it than that. To begin with, while some of the intimate duos that form or transform over the course of the film are interesting in and of themselves (especially that of Valmont and Merteuil), they are, without exception, all more interesting in terms of their impact on (a) the individual participants and (b) the larger social network to which they belong. While sexuality is the medium the two former lovers use to make other men and women their pawns, power is the ultimate object. Physical pleasure is incidental. Merteuil and Valmont’s shared aim, at first, is quietly to wreck havoc on the lives of selected targets from within their elite circle. Then, more complexly, the competition becomes about the degree of self-control each can exert as they confront their own unwilled and unwanted desires for intimacy: Who can dance longest in the flames of attraction without being burned by love? The film’s emphasis on both the personal stoicism demanded by and the social consequences of dangerous liaisons (thus the frequent close-ups of faces and bodies at war with themselves and long shots of audience members regarding one another at the opera house or concert hall) reflects an orientation of the period as a whole that appeals to me. The couple and especially the family have dominated the twentieth-century social imaginary but that is starting to change, especially in the context of the proliferation of digital media. The eighteenth century’s privileging of the self and the social over domestic relations provides a provocative point of comparison and contrast for our own transitional moment.

Finally what probably appeals to me most about Dangerous Liaisons as a representation of the eighteenth century is its theatrical Baroque aesthetic. The ordered intricacy of the plot, which repeatedly circles back to the growing tension between the central characters, is everywhere mirrored in the film’s lush visual and aural landscape. The players are all elaborately coiffed and powdered, and their gestures shaped by layer upon layer of embroidered fabric in luscious colours. The same swirling symmetrical patterns cover the heavy furniture they perch or lounge upon, or where they prepare to pounce. The gardens have mazes, and the interiors are often en filade, each room giving way to the next. At one point, after a heated confrontation with the Vicomte, the Marquise retreats to a mirrored gallery where her frazzled visage appears in infinite regress before she plants a smile and slips away to meet a lover waiting in a hidden boudoir. The original score by George Fenton and contemporary incidental music from Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel slows and swells with the same combination of restraint and excess. Ditto the rhythms of spoken language. (Some critics did not like John Malkovich’s self-conscious staccato delivery but to my ear this audible artifice is apt, especially when punctuated by moments of uncontrolled rage or pain.) Director Frears, like an artist of period he seeks to represent, makes character, narrative, and theme subordinate to – or rather co-ordinates of – style.

Ultimately I think it’s this ordered intricacy and the keen sense of correspondence between the conceptual and the material that draws me to the literature and art of the long eighteenth century. My modern hunger for psychological depth and complexity is not left wanting, yet these features are ultimately inseparable from the myriad formal and visible structures by which they are unfolded.