School and Sentimentality

We've just eaten a splendid dinner by Papa, consisting of a chicory-and-orange salad as well as roast pork. Mama is at an Amnesty meeting, T. is on the web, Gi. is trying to go to sleep, Ge. is reading Lord of the Rings and thereby preparing to try to go to sleep, and J. is slumbering peacefully on the broad living room couch.

Today it was the first day of school for my brothers. Gi. came home first, cold and damp from the rain that he encountered while riding his bike home. Ge. and J., who had taken the U-Bahn home, came soon after. J. had two mishaps in his "Sport" class, but he was in good spirits, as were Gi. and Ge. The latter soon did their homework; they answered questions about fermentation for their Chemistry class, and looked over a text about the book Das Parfum, which they have to read for German. The discussion about fermentation, ATP, etc., reminded me pleasantly of Biology 12, though, as I remarked to Ge., I hadn't really paid attention when we learnt about that.

As for me, I went for a walk around the Kleistpark, played from Schumann's Album für die Jugend and Beethoven's sonatas, browsed the web, and read more of At the Mercy of Tiberius, which is also by the author of St. Elmo (which I haven't read yet). The plot: a woman living with her invalid mother in New York travels to the South in order to ask for money (desperately needed to finance an operation on the mother's aneurysm) from her mother's father. The grandfather grudgingly obliges; the beleaguered grandchild goes on her way, only to be arrested for murdering her grandfather just before she reaches home. Heroine charged with the crime; circumstantial evidence accumulates that seems to render her guilt indisputable, but actually points to a good-for-nothing brother whom no one else knows about; heroine decides not to denounce her brother, but to sacrifice herself because she promised her mother to do everything possible to protect said brother. Heroine rewarded with five years in jail for manslaughter; clear proof of innocence however eventually surfaces; happy ending. A likely story. (c:

The questions that arise in the book about crime and the way that society handles it, as well as about the courts and their relation to the ideal of justice, are equally relevant today. If certain other questions arise about scientific probability, oh, well . . . Other things bother me more. For instance, the author's implicit parallels between the heroine and Christ make me queasy. And the author overindulges in describing feminine weakness; bouts of diphtheria, brain fever, and pneumonia -- the latter two almost fatal -- assail her poor heroine, and the effects of unhappiness and illness on her face are described in aestheticized detail; besides which the heroine often says that she wants to die. Pfft! Speaking of femininity, the author is probably reflecting her time when she makes a fuss about the treatment of her heroine. Why should it matter whether the accused in a court case is female or not? Of course women can do terrible things; the author gives examples herself. One can argue that suspects and convicts should all be treated with greater dignity. But not to charge a woman, however attractive and outwardly pious, with murder when all the circumstantial evidence points that way, would be injust and frankly stupid. The circumstantial evidence was really enough for a conviction.

It being a novel set in the south, African-Americans come up too. I would say that they are sympathetically portrayed, and that they are by no means considered as untouchables, but at the same time the author (a staunch Southerner) pretends that their situation was much better than it really was. She only mentions one case, as far as I remember, where a slave is beaten, and she has the gall to make a "Yankee" overseer responsible for it.

I have often wondered why the author, Augusta Jane Evans, isn't better known. She has a good ear for language, a broad and varied perspective, keen observation, and is, as far as I can tell, quite original (though Charlotte Bronte seems to be a major inspiration). I think the answer is that her books are simply too sentimental. Because of this sentimentality her gifts are squandered: her main characters and her dialogue are unlike anything ever heard or seen on land or on sea (or probably even on the stage), her prose is purple, and her plots are not realistic. Her views on issues like the nature of woman are, it is true, also outdated. Yet she was very open-minded for the time -- for example, even though she clearly dissociates her heroine from real criminals, she argues against the "pharisaical" way that society ignores and neglects these others, and describes her heroine trying to help them. She also has a propensity for obscure references to Greek and Norse mythology, Roman history, the Bible, etc., and for philosophizing in highly elaborate phrases for a paragraph or two every now and then. But I like this, and it's a nice and new experience to consult a dictionary or an internet search engine while I'm reading a work of fiction.