July 27th, 2008
by
Shannan Palma
I haven’t posted anything here in quite a while, but I came across a conundrum while writing a book review for my other blog that I thought perhaps you all were the people to ask about. Namely, what to make of the race and gender politics in Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell? I’ve cross-posted my review below in the hopes that someone here has read the book and might have thoughts of their own to share.
cross-posted on Foul Papers
The premise: Mr. Norrell is the only practical magician in nineteenth-century England. A self-involved recluse, he is nevertheless determined to restore magic to its rightful place of honor in English society (if loathe to share that honor with anyone else). Then recently married Jonathan Strange appears on the scene, demonstrating an equal talent for practical magic, if not equal learning, and Mr. Norrell is at last persuaded to take an apprentice. At first uneasy friends, later they are bitter rivals. But despite their public poses, neither fully understands the consequences of the magic they tangle with, or accounts for the people who’ve been unwillingly drawn into events the two magicians have set in motion.
Warning: Major spoilers in this review (and it is a bit of a review and not just a recommendation)
I had this book sitting next to my bed for over a year and I finally got a chance to read it earlier this summer. Not only is it a remarkable stylistic achievement — it really does read like a nineteenth century novel — it’s a delightful story of magic and manners in an alternate history England. You can tell one of Clarke’s favorite authors is Jane Austen — they share a certain merciless clarity for the vagaries of human nature.
For this reason, I’m sorry to say that it’s yet another tale of two magicians where the women fare exceedingly badly (a la The Prestige). I’m not sure how far I want to take that critique however. (Hence bringing the question to you). Unlike The Prestige, this book maintains the focus on the points of view of the male characters without eliding the female characters’ implicit anti-tale. I can’t help but believe this choice is intentional, and that’s why I’m only semi-critical of it. I’m also a little bemused by the fact that the only other character given as much page-time as the two leads is Stephen Black, a black man drawn into events in the aftermath of one of Norrell’s enchantments.
Clarke’s London is a London of its time. (White) men do, and (white) women are done to. The only character of color is Stephen Black, a servant, and his isolation and liminality are made clear. The oppressions and privileges surrounding race and gender function just differently enough in this world that Stephen Black’s POV is allowed, and the women’s are only reported second hand. (This isn’t, I think, as much a commentary on hierarchical oppressions as it is on the peculiarities of his particular circumstances). He, like the white women, is “done to.” However — and here we come to the peculiar circumstances — Black also happens to be in between worlds — literally in fact — and this seems to be the factor that actually allows his suffering the voice that is denied the others. It’s a choice on the part of the author that leads me to believe there is some reflexivity and implicit commentary going on here about who speaks and who is spoken about. The only one who sees the women’s pain is Stephen Black, because he shares it. If it were left to Strange and Norrell, we’d know barely anything of them at all. Black’s voice is not allowed solely because he is male, but neither is it disallowed solely because he is not white.
Clarke’s characterizations and narrative choices have made me think hard about race and gender in a book that isn’t explicitly about either. I think part of my conundrum in recommending the book is from trying to figure out how many of my conclusions are actually from the book and how many are coming from my reading of it, so I’ve settled for the moment on a sort of middle-ground “huh” response, and I’m asking for feedback, should you have any.
As for the aforementioned women, there are two female characters who play heavily into the story: Arabella Strange and Lady Emma Pool. Both are extremely compelling. As I read the book I found myself longing for more of them, and when I finished the book I thought to myself: if only we could have the same tale, or future ones, from the point of view of Lady Pool and Mrs. Strange! I have a feeling it would look quite different. Lady Pool for instance goes through an extraordinary off-screen journey. And Arabella likewise has been affected a great deal by the end. Clarke has said she’s working on a not-quite sequel. Of all the characters, it’s the ladies I would like most to see again.
At a certain point I found myself at a complete loss as to how Clarke could end the book in a satisfying way after so much drama, but upon finishing it and taking some time to think about the ending, I do think she ended it on just the right note. I would have been extremely uncomfortable if Jonathan and Arabella had reunited, and quite frankly I thought Strange and Norrell deserved eternal night and each other. Stephen Black fared better than anyone in some ways, as at least he belonged somewhere in the end.
So this is my sort-of recommendation, sort-of review, sort-of opening conversational gambit. Thoughts?
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- More blogging by
Shannan Palma at
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Filed under Books & Literature, Race & Racism, female characters, people of colour | Comments (19)
Well, one criticism I have read of JS&MN is that it doesn’t read as a 19th century novel in one important respect:
If it were a 19th-century novel by a woman, it would tend to focus on the point of view of the female characters, not the male. Susanna Clark is a 21st-century novelist, writing within the tradition outlined by Delany’s publishers in the 1960s and Beta Candy’s teachers at film school in the 21st century: that unless a novel is to be explicitly aimed at women and to deal exclusively with topics “of feminine interest” (which was very much assumed to be true of novels in Jane Austen’s time, and even later) then the novel must have a male protagonist, and better, two male protagonists, so that they can move the plot along without a woman in the room at all.
As I recall, JS&MN fails the Bechdel Test: there are no woman who talk to each other about anything other than men. (Mansfield Park, which is a genuine 19th century novel, passes the Bechdel Test – admittedly one of the examples I can think of is Mrs Norris talking to her nieces about Fanny Price, and another is Fanny talking to Mary Crawford about memory, to which Mary is not attending. Still.)
It is curious to think what JS&MN might have been like if the author had been able to write a 19th-century novel with two female protagonists… with the fairy tale element of the husband (or prospective husband) lost in a fairy sleep from which only his true love could awaken him.
Hi,
I had some of the same issues with the book, mostly the invisibility of the female characters and the powerlessness of Steven Black.
It really annoyed me in the end that after all he had suffered, Black seems to intend to set himself up as the butler of the fairy kingdom – something about “this house is in disorder”. If he had gone into the kingdom with more of a purpose in mind (he’s always such a reactive character) and if Arabella had gotten the last word (if she told Jonathon she would think of him with his nose in a book, for example), the ending would have been nicer.
Alternate history where nothing really changes annoys me! Magic can exist and stones can talk, Southern England can have a Fairy King mentioned in its constitution, but white women are still voiceless and black men are still slaves (and black women don’t seem to exist. Oh, except for Black’s dead mother).
Very annoying.
I have the same problem with the Temeraire books (while I enjoy them a lot). [Admittedly I don't know enough history to see if things are exactly the same but they seem to run fairly closely].
On the other hand, “A princess of Roumania” by Paul Parkes (?) is alternate history that is really different but still very compelling.
Sorry, end of rant !
I should add, I’ve only read the first three Temeraire books, and I love how the second and third started to explore issues of dragon agency / intelligency that I wondered about in the first.
And how young Roland completely flattens Laurence with “what, oh, my mother told me about that. But I haven’t started bleeding yet, and I don’t want to have sex with any of them anyway.”
(^^)
I didn’t manage to read the whole novel, but here are a couple of links to older discussions and reviews of it by other people, on Whileaway: Cija’s review (June 2005) and Akycha’s review (July 2006).
You might perhaps be interested then in the short story The Ladies of Grace Adieu, collected in the similarly named short story collection. It’s situated in the same world as Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but is about three women’s venture in magic, and early 19th century gender relations to boot.
I was going to post the Whileaway links for you but I see Ide Cyan has already done so. :-)
Susanna Clarke commented on how the novel represented women in an interview; the relevant part is transcribed here.
I read through the various links posted so far, and I’m glad to read that I’m not alone in having a mixed response to the book. Cija’s response probably comes closest to my own:
“This is a writer who, one can safely assume, has read her Joanna Russ, as it were – or other feminist equivalent. This is not someone who thinks women are boring or unimportant, and when she writes about characters who do think that – as she is certainly doing in JS&MN – I believe we, as readers, are expected to notice that fact and to come to some conclusion about it. … But what conclusion are we to draw?”
But I also share Akycha’s frustration, namely with the seeming powerlessness of the women and Stephen Black.
Part of my conundrum is/was that I couldn’t figure out how much of what I liked about the book was actually on the page and how much was going on in the alternate story of Lady Pool and Arabella I was piecing together from footnotes and asides in my head. I have this lingering feeling that only half of the book I “read” is available for purchase by others. Cija’s review confirms that at least some of it was there on the page. I didn’t imagine that. ::sigh::
I read this about three years ago and was decidedly unimpressed for similar reasons–I don’t always need a female main character, but I certainly don’t enjoy having women who are interesting dangled in front of me with no one going anywhere. Even if it is to prove some sort of point about the women men don’t see in Victorian and Georgian novels, it was still frustrating.
And since I found the book itself too long by half, I didn’t end up finding the second story as you did, sadly, which is a shame. I’d reread it, but I was bored with it enough to not really consider a reread.
In 1806, the year Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell opens, it was taken for granted as a fact of nature that women were inferior to men.
The laws of the United Kingdom did not permit a wife financial independence from her husband – everything she owned was legally his property unless it was bequeathed or given to her with legal conditions that did not permit her husband the right to take and make use of it at will. (There was a distinction between “personal property” which was a husband’s absolutely, and “real property”, over which he had only “managerial control”.) Anything she earned herself, or anything given to her without such conditions, was his absolutely. It was legal and expected for women not to be allowed to work at the same jobs as men, and for women’s jobs to pay less than men’s jobs. It was normal and expected for the kind of work offered women to pay them far less than a living wage. It was unheard of – and considered markedly unnatural and strange – for a woman to be educated “like a man”.
In 19th-century Scotland, thanks to several Acts of Parliament in earlier centuries, it was normal for a woman to be able to read and write – all children went to local schools to learn the three Rs from the schoolmaster. Even in Scotland, though any intelligent boy could aspire to go to the nearest High School, and any boy who succeeded in going to High School could aspire to going on to university and taking a degree, no girl was expected to do more than become literate and numerate. Even that was more than most girls in England could hope for.
It was legal for a father to leave his daughter a share of the family property (her mother would most likely have nothing to leave) if and only if she married a man her brother approved of. It was also legal for a father to leave his daughter nothing at all, not on any conditions. While entails (by which a property devolved on the nearest male heir, leaving all the daughters destitute) were less common than they had been in past centuries, they still existed.
A woman couldn’t divorce her husband. A woman’s children belonged to her husband, and if he divorced her (in 1803, this was difficult and expensive, but if he could afford it, he could do it), he could legally prevent her from ever seeing her children again. A husband had a right to sexual use of his wife, and had the right under civil law to prosecute her if she refused him. A husband had a right to beat his wife providing he didn’t permanently injure her, and had also the right under civil law to prosecute anyone who tried to stop him from beating his wife: anyone who tried to stop him would have to prove that they had cause to think he might kill his wife. If she left him because he beat her, until or unless he divorced her, he could at any time take anything from her – there are actual instances of a man abandoning his wife for decades, returning to find she’d set up a successful business to support herself (she had no right to be maintained by her husband unless she was living with him) and taking all the money for himself.
And this was all normal – as normal as black people being property. Stephen Black may have been made free by Act of Parliament in 1807, but Lady Pole would not have had the right to legal custody of her children until 1839, nor the right to keep money she earned for herself until 1870.
Maintaining that any of this was unjust or unfair was radical feminism, which was as unpopular and mockable by the mainstream as radical feminism still is today. Arguing that women were the equals of men was just acceptable as light drawing-room chat (Jane Austen touches on this in her final draft of the letter scene in Persuasion) but not as any serious argument for women’s legal or human rights.
Women were considered to be the inferiors of men – neither as physically nor as mentally capable. That was normal. A man was supposed to take care of his wife and his daughters – if he didn’t or couldn’t, well, that was too bad for them. In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs Bennett’s desperation to have at least one of her daughters marry a wealthy man was cheerfully mocked by a young Jane Austen: Mrs and Miss Bates in Emma receive more respectful treatment, but their poverty was the state to which Mrs Bennett knew she would be reduced if her husband died leaving any of her daughters unmarried.
Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Elliot, Charlotte Yonge – all of them wrote 19th-century novels in which they make clear their mental discomfort as intelligent women living in a society in which they were legally and socially discriminated against. All of them were aware that the treatment women received was unjust. But they lived in a culture in which the inferiority of women and the rightfulness of legal and social discrimination against women was taken for granted as normal. Susanna Clarke was born after a hundred and forty years of feminist activism had greatly changed what was considered “normal” for women: when she writes of that culture, she cannot convey either a 19th-century woman’s sense of injustice nor a 19th-century woman’s ingrained knowledge that this injustice and inequality is normal.
“Susanna Clarke was born after a hundred and forty years of feminist activism had greatly changed what was considered “normal” for women: when she writes of that culture, she cannot convey either a 19th-century woman’s sense of injustice nor a 19th-century woman’s ingrained knowledge that this injustice and inequality is normal” … hogwash. This has everything to do with her skill as a writer and nothing to do with ANY of what you just said. This is on par with saying white people shouldn’t try to write black characters or that gay people shouldn’t write straight ones.
Dave: This has everything to do with her skill as a writer
Of course it is.
It is also an acknowledgment that it would take a writer of some considerable skill to be able to write with a 19th-century woman’s sense of injustice and normality rather than a 20th-century woman’s sense of injustice and normality – which has changed noticeably even in the 10 years that Susanna Clarke was writing JS&MN, and radically between Clarke’s childhood in the 1950s and today.
By the time Susanna Clarke was born, it had become normal and mainstream to say that enslaving black men was wrong and freeing them was right.
It is still not considered normal and mainstream in some circles to acknowledge that women in the 19th century were legally enslaved to men – nor to admit that while radical feminist ideas do gradually become mainstream and even their feminist source is forgotten, radical feminism is itself always regarded as abnormal and mockable – until the feminist revolution moves on another turn, and what was radical becomes normal.
I think we might be looking at this crossways … I would posit that Ms. Clarke’s skill level isn’t mean by any sense of the word (the tone and style of her novel demonstrates a very considerable control over the language). Also that those 19th-century attitudes require skill but are not beyond modern ability to convey. The manner in which you suggest that seems to me similar to the sort of where people speculate barriers to understanding beyond one’s lived experience, which is a speculation I heartily disagree with.
But by the tone of your response I gather you intend something quite different?
The disappointing thing about this is that presumably Clarke should *know* that, despite women’s legal status in the 19th century, plenty of women *did* defy the status quo in various ways, and got away with it in varying degrees of success and controversy. And yet none of that shows up in Jonathan Strange et al.
I never took a women’s history course (something I am occasionally accused of being brainwashed by in college, to my vast amusement) – much of my articulation of feminism came as a result of reading John Stewart Mill, quite a few years after graduating from a Benedictine (as in the monks) college. Very little of what Mill said in the 1860s (about much of anything, including the desire for mindless conformity for the proles generally by the plutocratic elite) isn’t still applicable today – including all the sexist memes he catalogued and denounced in his day, and which is still regularly vivisected by feminist bloggers, particularly political ones, since the memes are still beloved of the likes of David Brooks, Steve Sailer and John Stossel and the NRO Cornerites (most of whom subscribe to VDARE philosophies, as well) and regularly appear in the punditry of the Wall Street Journal, the NYT etc.
But just as an amateur history junkie, and an art/art history buff, even one raised to be anti-feminist in the “Women don’t NEED special rights!” way, I couldn’t help but encounter both challenges to that, and to the “Women weren’t important in the past” memes – reading Mary W’s essay on how marriage was naught but legalized prostitution made me physically ill with fury, because I couldn’t admit that she was only saying what I’d long suspected watching all the Traditional Families around me (including mine) and couldn’t dare to say…two hundred years later.
Art history, and archeology, gave me not only Artemisia but obscure anecdotes that remain half-remembered after all these years: the mid-1700s widow who ran several businesses and had her own portrait painted at her desk as though she were a man, instead of demurely holding children or pets or leaning on some male relative’s shoulder; the penniless turn-of-the-18th-century amateur scholar Celtic stone carvings who married an orphaned heiress who was happy to support his studies and monographs – so long as he took her last name, which he happily did; and, of course, the way that all London society – and the officers’ quarters of the Royal Navy – was buzzing over who “A Lady” could possibly be, who was writing all these best-selling novels.
Yes, to be perfectly authentic, any “Master & Commander” type story *should* have the quarterdeck reading “Pride & Prejudice” and speculating on which famous socialite was hidden by the pen-name, according to surviving letters home from sea by Jane Austen’s brothers…
Very disappointing “safe route” choice on the part of Clarke, though there was a pleasant bit of agency on the part of the protagonists of “The Dweller in High Places” – which passes the Bechdel-Wallace test handily, rather uniquely among short fic these days.
Also, I’d say that the fact that women did win increasing rights throughout the 1800s show that it *was* being talked about, that the patriarchal privilege was being challenged and confronted a lot more on an everyday basis than most novelists have (or still) dare to deal with, the same way that civil rights in America were a burning controversy *long* before the 1960s, though you will have to go and actually read physical newspapers and magazine issues in the library’s archives, most likely, to find discussion of such things during, frex, WWII – as I have.
In fact, there was a Universal Suffrage plank in the platform at the fatal rally of Peterloo, in which at least one woman demonstrator was killed by the government cavalry, which outrage was what led to the founding of The Guardian a few years after, which newspaper quite blatantly called out the misogyny in “Wanted” just the other day, comparing it to a mixture of coal-tar and garbage-pail rinsings for effect…
I don’t think I can comment unbiased on this issue — although I did read and love the book — because I read it concurrently with the “Seminar” on the book at Crooked Timber. There are several articles regarding this and similar issues, and ends with a “response” by the author herself.
With that said, while certainly there were “more emancipated” women who could have made fascinating characters, I think that a lot of the force of the story — at least as relates to the woman who is literally “silenced” through a curse that won’t let her talk of her troubles — would have been weakened if the silencing of women was not a solid background feature outside of the curse.
[...] require the baby’s father to pay child support as an absent parent. (As I noted in a comment in an earlier thread, two hundred years ago in the UK it was quite lawful for a man to abandon his wife – with or [...]
I just finished reading the book. Loved it. I think it is one step below top tier. My only wish is that it was about 5 or 10 pages longer. If Ms Clarke spent 10 years on this, surely, she could have found some time for clarifying the relationship between Jonathan and Arabella. We were told that they adored each other and spent much time in intimate conversation. It makes no sense that Strange would feel so strongly about retrieving her, and then, simply, walk away. Everything about the story and the characters was very tightly defined, except this. IMO, this was, simply, an oversight by the author. This book was big work for her.
I wish Ms. Clarke would have given more insight into the relative ease by which Jonathan and Arabella walked away from each other. What were they thinking? What were the factors that drove the nature and attitudes of their parting? Without that explanation, I feel that the Arabella character was less of a part of the world (which was so well defined) and more of a plot device for enhancing the lethality and relevance of Thistlehead. We need Arabella to provide Strange with a good reason to go after Thistlehead. We need Arabella to push the pawns (Strange & Norrell), of the Raven King’s plan, across the board. In order to make the story whole, the relationship between Jonathan and Arabella needs to be every bit as three dimensional as the everything else. Possibly, I have missed something? What pages?