Mansfield Park (1814)

Jane Austen’s canonical works could be described as, instead of a complete six, five complimentary works — and that other one, called Mansfield Park. It’s one of those novels that’s been dissected the world over and yet, still, no one can figure out whether they like it or not; but that doesn’t exclude it from most certainly being important to the literary canon in general. Invaluable historicity, exceptional character study, nuance of inter-familial relationships, these are among a few of the reasons for why this is the case. To date, Austen’s novels have been subjected to the kind of scrutiny that leaves their position as markers in the evolution of the novel almost forgotten, in favor of movie renditions. The canonical six have been ingrained into our society on the level of sensation so that the importance of their status as stepping stones to the common novel of the day is no longer recognizable. But it’s true: set aside Hollywood’s need to cash in on Austen’s genius and we have the novels bare bones, of which Mansfield Park is no less than a masterpiece of literary art to be rightfully included along with the other five.

The novel’s form is an essential reason for why it tends to fit in as part of the canonical six. It’s written in three volumes, and though most of the canonical six have been written like this (Northanger Abbey and Persuasion have two volumes a piece and were published together, intended to be a four volume set), it’s a critical point to reiterate nonetheless. The Wiki page on the “three-volume novel” will tell you how this structure was important to nineteenth-century writing and publishing, an indicator that Austen was at the forefront in the rise of the novel tradition. (It’s amazing to recall this every time a movie reviewer thinks of their subject in “three acts.”) Consider also the year Mansfield Park was written, around 1813, and we have our explanation for the traditional “once upon a time” type introductory diegesis; and yet it’s unique for the way Jane tweaks the mode by immediately providing necessary story facts through un-staged moments of dialogue. “[They] cannot be equals,” Sir Thomas tells his female counterparts, as we learn there’s a child relative coming to stay with them. Mansfield Park later strays slightly from the other novels by wrapping up on an equally, even heavier diegetic mode, where we learn the outcome of all the characters without written scenes to show us how it all went; which keeps the narrative from being longer than its already 160,000 word count. But it’s on the whole that in three volumes, with a diegetic opening, that the novel stands complimentary.

Of course, Jane Austen and “form” cannot be discussed without mention of her perfected, narrative technique. She’s renowned for what’s been termed throughout the world of English studies as “free indirect discourse.” The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory describes it as the “presentation of thoughts or speech of fictional characters which seems by various devices to combine the character’s sentiments with those of a narrator.” Katheryn Sutherland calls it “Austen’s mature narrative mode, whereby a central fictional consciousness (usually the heroine’s) is absorbed into the omniscient narrator’s voice — a fusion of first- and third-person narrative” (from her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition). Example given, when Fanny watches Edmund assist the lovely Miss Mary Crawford with horse riding, the narrative medium states: “[W]hat could be more natural than that Edmund should be making himself useful, and proving his good-nature by any one?” Here, Fanny is wrestling with minute feelings of jealousy, and we are privy to her thoughts as she rationalizes the situation so that she can accept what she’s seeing. Fanny isn’t speaking, but we know what she’s thinking nonetheless.

Frances O’Connor stars as Fanny Price in one of the film versions of Mansfield Park (1999).

On that note, Mansfield Park surprised me for the one thing I hadn’t noticed in the other five novels: I felt that for minute there, I had met Jane herself. If I’m not mistaken (please correct me if I’m wrong), but I think this is the first time I’ve encountered her inserting herself into the narrative, in the first-person. In Volume II, Chapter Six, she fears for her protagonist, personally. After Henry tells his sister he’s going to go after Fanny for marriage, Jane goes on to describe women who are not susceptible to this kind of scheming, and then she — the narrative — states, “I have no inclination to believe Fanny one of them.” (Her opinion is that Fanny could potentially be swayed.) At the end of the novel, again, she inserts herself, five more times, the last in reference to Edmund and Fanny: “I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire.” No one’s ever mentioned these self-inserts to me; I’ve never seen them mentioned at all, and yet I find it calmly exhilarating that Jane Austen herself is speaking to me, as one of her readers, through her book from over 200yrs ago. [Side note: I also found it exhilarating that I had never seen use of the word “eclaircissement” in a book before, so how’s that for the reading of a classic?]

The content is what has everyone up in arms about Jane Austen’s third published novel. Apparently Fanny is too innocent for some; or maybe she knows how to judge the character of people a little too precisely; alternatively, it’s been hailed as one of the bleakest looks at family relationships compared to Austen’s other stories. Such as Sir Thomas’s daughters, who don’t feel for him, and Mrs. Norris’s perpetual lowering of Fanny, and Lady Bertram, who sometimes seems to love her Pug more than anything else; and even the ending presents us with a failed marriage amid scandal in tandem with an elopement. The material for a dissertation here is fascinating, in spite of the negative associations, but I will say that for my part, this is the novel that shows one scene at its harshest, resulting from Fanny’s denial of Henry Crawford. Realizing that she’s being obstinate, Sir Thomas feels it necessary to scold Fanny in her room for the way she feels, and she begins to cry in a very serious way; she’s wounded, severely; the entire thing becomes a brutal ordeal and is, in essence, the plot-point of the entire novel. The descriptive nature of this scene is dark, but I have to state that it was because of things like this and — Fanny’s isolation at times, her feelings because of Mrs. Norris, her resilience working to defy Henry and Sir Thomas no matter the cost — that I found myself feeling for her, even as I’m aware of her detractors and the reasons they have for not liking her.

A portrait of Princess Ekaterina Dmitrievna Golitsyna (with her pet Pug) by Louis-Michel van Loo (1759) Moscow, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts; Lady Bertram can be imagined in this fashion, coveting her precious animal.

Mansfield Park may be the black sheep of the family, for the world of Austen readers and all those who feel that close connection to her novels, but there’s no denying that it participates in the larger understanding of Austen’s genius. The book is necessary and Fanny is fine; she’s not a harmful person and she loves one man; she has integrity whether anyone likes her or not. What the novel itself shows can be likened unto that view we get of nature sometimes, when we find ourselves loving the world even when a series of darkening clouds move in — it’s part of the majesty of the planet, just like Mansfield Park is part of the majesty of Austen’s canon. In fact, the idea that Mansfield Park can be dark seems to fly in the face of wonderful scenes like when we observe Mary playing the harp, or spending time with Fanny when we learn how important the solitude of the East Room is to her, and how she likes to read. It’s even kind of nice to see her bonding with Susan after the tender moment where we learn about Little Mary. Mansfield Park isn’t Pride and Prejudice, so it’s true, but it’s the contrast that we perceive that allows us to know how life can really be, as told through the eyes and mind of Jane Austen.

Mansfield Park: Character List

THREE SISTERS
1. Lady Bertram (née Miss Maria Ward): a baronet’s lady, Fanny’s aunt; she was a “woman of very tranquil feelings, and a temper remarkably easy and indolent”; married young to Sir Thomas Bertram and had four children; she keeps a small dog with her and comes to rely on Fanny for much of her emotional and mental well-being (see “lady’s companion“).
2. Mrs. Norris (Miss Ward): Fanny’s other aunt; curiously, Mrs. Norris is the one who suggests adopting the child of her and her sister’s other sister (Frances); her disposition is at odds with itself in that she does the right thing by Frances, according to what her heart tells her about the situation, but does the wrong thing by viewing the child as less-than as a human being — for she “could never feel for this little girl the hundredth part of the regard” she felt for the Bertram children.
3. Frances Price: Fanny’s mother; since she realized that both her sisters married well — perhaps suspecting that she might not be able to pull off the same — she married lowly so as to “disoblige” her family; after causing estrangement with them, she bears nearly ten children, only to reach out to them years later asking for help.

THREE HUSBANDS
1. Sir Thomas Bertram: Baronet of Mansfield Park, Fanny’s uncle; owns property in the West Indies (Antigua); he’s skeptical about taking on one of the children of Frances, for fear that the essence of vulgarity might rub off on his daughters; his traditional views about marriage and society, combined with his status as the person who’s in charge of everyone is, in effect, the root cause of his future problems; it’s also the cause for why his daughters aren’t attached to him as a parent.
2. Rev. Mr. Norris: friend of Sir Thomas, to be Mrs. Norris’s husband; had complaints of gout; died when Fanny was nearly 15.
3. Mr. Price: Fanny’s father, Frances’s husband; an uneducated lieutenant of the marines who knew no one of importance; disabled, he was “delicate and puny” and he liked to drink alcohol.

BERTRAM CHILDREN
1. Tom: first-born son to inherit the Mansfield Park estate; he was “careless and extravagant” in his behavior.
2. Edmund: friend and confidante to Fanny throughout her adolescence; had “good sense and uprightness of mind” and is set to be a clergyman; he always tried to have Fanny’s best interest in mind, knowing how she was viewed from the family perspective.
3. Maria: eldest daughter; has no feelings for her father; she has trouble navigating her life course because her sense of duty to marriage to a particular man (Rushworth) and the way she feels about another (Crawford).
4. Julia: like her sister, she too has no feelings for her father; though she could’ve ended up in a fixed marriage, she escapes by allowing herself to be taken away by Mr. Yates.

PRICE CHILDREN
1. William: eldest child of the family and Fanny’s dearly beloved older brother; he becomes a lieutenant in the Royal Navy.
2. Fanny: eldest daughter of Frances; at age 10 she’s taken in by the Bertrams at Mrs. Norris’s request; Sir Thomas cautions of “gross ignorance, some meanness of opinions, and very distressing vulgarity of manner” — because of her lowly status; Fanny is insightful and intelligent, traits that were enhanced by Miss Lee’s education; she withstands being looked down upon by Mrs. Norris with great patience and in the end, the whole of her character as a person of integrity leads to a life of positivity.
3. Susan: Fanny’s sister closest in age; she stands to follow in the path that Fanny took thanks to the kindness of Sir Thomas inviting her to the estate.
4. Betsey: littlest girl in the family; she’s remembered for her needs to posses the silver knife that was to belong to Susan, a problem resolved by Fanny’s interest in the matter.
5-9. John, Richard, Sam, Tom and Charles: John and Richard are out in the world working (“one of whom was a clerk in a public office in London, and the other midshipman on board an Indiaman”); the other three are noted for their continuous activity as young boys living in a port-side town.
10. Little Mary: died shortly after Fanny left for Mansfield Park; Fanny has fond memories of her, in slight preference over Susan; Little Mary had originally bestowed the silver knife upon Susan before she passed away.

THE REST
Henry Crawford: half-brother to Mrs. Grant (shared mother); “though not handsome, had air and countenance” and he was “absolutely plain, black and plain”; he’s possessor of the Norfolk estate; in other worlds, Henry could’ve become a Rake, and in this case he always has eyes for more than one girl.
Mary Crawford: half-sister to Mrs. Grant (shared mother); “remarkably pretty” with a “lively dark eye, clear brown complexion, and general prettiness”; she plays the harp, she’s worth 20,000lbs, and is in some ways fixed to marry Edmund, which challenges her ideas about London life.
Mr. James Rushworth: inherited one of largest estates in the country; he was a “heavy young man”; he’s perceived as not the smartest person of the group.
Mrs. Rushworth: Rushworth’s mother; her stay at Bath required a ride home by James sometime after the marriage to Maria, providing the opportunity for the scandal to unfold.
Mr. John Yates: “younger son of a lord”; John loved the theater and was one of the champions for producing Lover’s Vows at Mansfield Park; he comes to like Julia.
Dr. Grant: fills the place of Rev. Mr. Norris; he was “fond of eating” and often quarreled about green geese; complains of gout.
Mrs. Grant: “Nobody loved plenty and hospitality more than herself; nobody more hated pitiful doings”; it’s through Mrs. Grant that the Crawfords are introduced.
Admiral Crawford: Henry/Mary’s uncle; he loved Henry, but was nevertheless a “man of vicious conduct”; through Henry’s effort, Admiral Crawford is how Fanny’s brother William was promoted. [Admiral Crawford was the brother of Henry and Mary’s father.]
Mrs. Crawford: Mrs. Grant’s, Henry and Mary’s mother, who died; she had “doted on her daughter Mary.”

Nanny: Lady Bertram’s “chief counsellor”; goes to Portsmouth to retrieve the child Fanny.
Miss Lee: “regular instructress” — as in, the governess to Maria, Julia and Fanny.
Ellis: servant-maid at Mansfield Park.
Rebecca and Sally: servants of Frances at Portsmouth; Frances has little faith in these two.
Pug: Lady Bertram’s beloved pet, the offspring of which may become a part of Fanny’s life with Edmund.

OTHERS IN THE STORY
Anderson, Smith, Marshall, Green, Groom, Jefferies, Whitaker, Jackson, Maddox, Lee, Mrs. Chapman, Amelia, Mr. Owen, Harrison, Wilcox, Brown, Baddeley the butler, Owens, Mrs. Janet Fraser, Mr. Fraser, Margaret, Lady Flora Ross Stornaway, Lord Stornaway, Mr. Campbell, Turner, Captain Walsh, Old Scholey, Mrs. Admiral Maxwell, Lady Lascelle, Baron Wildenheim, Maddison, Aylmers, the cousins who lived near Bedford Square, Mr. Harding, and possibly more…

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem feels, in some ways, like one of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which may explain why it was dubbed by Robert Southey as a “Dutch attempt at German sublimity” (Source). Coleridge went on to compose works that were anything but imaginative poetry — highly intellectual essays that spoke well to his critical abilities; therefore it’s perplexing that he’s so remembered for this exercise in fantastical story-telling. His collaborator, William Wordsworth, came to dislike the poem, a feeling inspired by lackluster reviews, and so it is that time is once again the true arbitrator as to what can stand as a lasting, beloved phenomenon of literature.

The story is about a ship’s captain, the Mariner, who comes to suffer consequences after he shoots a bird with his cross-bow. The moment when he commits this act is tinctured by the temporal aspect of the poem; that is, we’re introduced to the Mariner, in the present, as a “grey-beard loon” with a “glittering eye,” only to learn about him as someone, in the past, who was capable of being in charge of a ship at sea, with the kind of impulses that would lead him to kill a harmless animal. The technique of introducing these contrasting versions of the mariner at the outset is masterful for the way it coaxes us into wanting to know more about how the change took place.

What follows comes the answer to our questions: the change took place because the Mariner has endured suffering, to which we are then forced to ask, rhetorically, “Why did the Mariner have to endure suffering?” The obvious answer is because he killed a bird, the Albatross, and it’s in this manner that the fairy tale touch steps in to play its role, the moral lesson. Which is odd if you look at it from the perspective of all the English land owners at the time — who shot pheasants regularly. Exactly what moral imperative is Coleridge trying to establish? Is an albatross to be distinguished from a pheasant? The poem certainly induces a sort of societal cognitive dissonance, that uneasy distinction we’ve come to make between dog and pig, horse and cow. The story has not only drawn us in to be entertained, it’s forced us to think.

Moral quandaries aside, it’s that the poem is, in fact, a story is why it has endured in its own unique way. It was published as part of a collection entitled Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798), and stands in sharp contrast to the poem that follows it on the table of contents, “Lines written above Tintern Abbey” by William Wordsworth. Tintern Abbey contributes to the breakthrough in poetry characteristic to the age, but it has no plot; it provides a vivid display of the poet’s experience — “A worshipper of Nature, hither came,” — but there’s nothing interesting really happening. The Ancient Mariner, alternatively, feeds on that craving for experiencing the unknown. Remember the Virgin Queen’s comment to Sir Walter Raleigh (from the movie), where she’s jealous of him, how she desires to explore the ocean? Coleridge with incisive skill has tapped into this seemingly ever-pervading desire to explore the realms of the unknown, the kind we find nowadays in our vibrant need to explore the universe.

Coleridge fuses a sense of story-telling adventure with a setting that satisfies our craving with supreme effect. The Mariner’s crew traverses the wide open sea before a storm blows them into the “mist and snow” — “And ice, mast-high, came floating by, / As green as emerald.” To be sure, common English folk knew full well the sights described in Wordsworth’s poem, but the thought of ice mast-high has to be one of awe and intrigue. Following the Mariner’s crime, the fusion of story-telling and descriptive setting becomes intensified by the element certain to raise eyebrows: the element of the supernatural. Personifications of Death appear, spirits materialize, humans become zombies, and in the water, “Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea.” It’s a brazen move for a poet to dive into this realm, but we’re very glad to this day that he did.

Commemorative statue of the Ancient Mariner at Watchet, Somerset

Of particular note, for my part, is a motif that is interesting for the way it appears twice, before and after the crime. Before, we are told that the ship drove fast, “As who pursued with yell and blow / Still treads the shadow of his foe.” Later in the poem the same sentiment is expressed as part of the Mariner’s submission to dread:

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

I can understand the second iteration, since the crime has been committed, which makes it essential to the Mariner’s punishment; the earlier iteration, then, must be a kind of foreshadowing. The feeling itself can be likened unto the feeling of, say, walking late at night alone through the downtown area, worse even if you have enemies. It makes sense to incur this feeling of intimidation onto the Mariner after he’s committed the crime, because he deserves it. But to observe the sentiment before the crime, however, injects the poem with some kind of subtextual foreboding which concerns a more generalized thought of walking alone in fear, whether a person has enemies or not. Either way, it creates the sensation that someone or something malevolent is watching us; it speaks to some sense of anxiety on behalf of the English social atmosphere of the day.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of those literary masterpieces that can be situated in the canon as being slightly above works like The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis, or Vathek (1786) by William Beckford, because of the intellectual prowess that Coleridge developed throughout his life, serving to polish his reputation; because of his collaborative effort with William Wordsworth, serving to establish the foundations of a new outlook on poetry; and because the work is, indeed, a poetic effort and not prose, allowing for a sense of mystique that prose may not have provided. The oddity of the situation is that the poem’s meter, combined with the element of the supernatural, make it a target for a certain range of critics. Consider the opening pentameter lines from Tintern Abbey:

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur. Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

Compared to Coleridge’s tetrameter:

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

Naturally the tetrameter has more of a nursery rhyme feel; combine this notion with plot elements of spirits and zombies, and the field is wide open for criticism, a load of “cock and bull” as one contemporary critic so eloquently put it. But it’s Coleridge who has the last laugh because, as Drew Barrymore would say, he “let his freak flag fly,” without even really realizing it. Like his other famous poem, “Kubla Khan” (1816), Coleridge hadn’t intended for these fantastical poems to stand as his trademark, and yet they’re mostly what we remember about him. It’s because of the response of readers through the passing of time that has shown us how interested we are in things we can’t explain or truly define, like spirits and zombies; the genre of the paranormal in the modern age, for example, is a never-ending source of income for those who know how to tap into it. The poem additionally has that readerly intrigue that couples with the ever-infamous stormy night, for who doesn’t love a good ghost story on a stormy night?

Published July 10, 1854, engraved by Samuel Cousins (1801-1887) after a painting by Washington Allston, private collection. (Photo by VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)

The Arabian Nights

The Arabian Nights is an explosion of the imagination, a cacophony of the impossible, a cornucopia of fairy tale delights. At once it has you appalled by savagery, and impressed by the human heart; it tickles the mind with magic and strokes the heart with emotions, all the while leading you through a world that is nothing short of dazzling, for the difference it is so much from our own. And yet the similarities are there, which explains why The Arabian Nights withstands the test of time. Because it shows us that no matter how much we sense the essence of difference as we turn through the pages, it’s the commonality of the human condition that remains forever transcendental.

Scheherazade by Sophie Anderson, circa 19th Century.

Scheherazade is the star of The Arabian Nights. She’s archetypal, a woman of courage and intelligence (she’s strong and she’s smart). She is courageous for her self-sacrifice, which means that her courage is imbued with second-sight: no matter the cost, she’s possessed of the urge to implement change, according to the injustice that she perceives. And she’s intelligent for the way she calculates her solutions — for the treatment of women — and equally so for the preservation of her own life. Her method of operation, the telling of stories, is as spell-binding as the tales which are told. I mean, who defeats the enemy by telling stories?

What we find within the stories is the reason why The Arabian Nights is so captivating: the feature of elevated implausibility. In the first story there is the merchant, which gives us our someone to identify with; and then there’s the genie that accosts him, who transforms reality into spectacle. His behavior adds to this spectacle. He threatens to execute the merchant because he’s killed his son, a situation made stranger for the way the son died: the merchant had been throwing stones while eating, and had accidentally hit the genie’s son in the eye, causing instant death. The merchant is horrified by the thought of being executed and pleads — that he may return in one year to receive his sentence.

The Merchant and the Genie, illustrator unknown.

We have to consider the intended audience when we realize how ludicrous this all sounds. Are we to believe that the ancients believed genies existed? Did people back then really keep their word like that? It’s a clue that ties into Scheherazade’s tactics: she’s trying to exact an outcome by activating the imagination. The story-writer of The Merchant and the Genie has a mission to accomplish as well, both of whom seek to occupy the faculties of the mind with the power of elevated implausibility. The goal for one is to save lives while the other is to lay a moral groundwork — but then, Scheherazade’s story is a work of fiction, which means the wool has been pulled there as well. It’s all geared to keep listeners focused on being distracted until goals have been achieved.

Does this mean The Arabian Nights is solely didactic? Not hardly, and that is why the first question that really comes to mind when considering a review remains: Where do we even begin? Each story that is told may boil down to a storyteller attempting to entertain, all the while providing a moral to consider. But rumor has it that the collection has its roots in ancient Persian, Indian, Chinese, Greek and Jewish lore, for starters. The stories of Sinbad, with mention of the many “islands,” leads me to consider input from Indochina and the Indonesian Islands among others. On the whole, we’re not learning about the lives and ways of any one particular group, only to close our study guides and move on to the next text. We’re talking about the cross-pollination of world culture over the span of hundreds if not thousands of years, over a vast area, effecting stories that seem to have materialized from everywhere out of thin air. It’s staggering to think of and tends to induce a sort of literary vertigo.

In 1981, British explorer Tim Severin led The Sohar, a ship constructed in the vein of Sinbad’s voyages, along a route that could potentially have been taken by Arab explorers over 2000 years ago.

The form is based on the morphing of the oral tradition into the written. Now, because we’re dealing with “ancient” material, it’s for a dissertation to define exactly “why” people began telling these stories, but it’s fair to say that keeping hold of the attention span had been of vital importance: hence the form of getting right to the point, going from one plot point to the next in a matter of sentences, not chapters. We’re so attuned to vivid passages of description that reading The Arabian Nights can seem rushed; it’s hard to remember that it’s meant to be heard, not read. And if this comes across as the “fairy tale” form, then the collection has a distinct trait unto its own, not only in the “frame narrative” (the story told is a about a woman who tells stories); but also in what I would call the “Russian Doll” narrative technique (nesting), wherein a story is told about someone who is telling a story, wherein another character has a story to tell, and so on and so forth. Maybe The Arabian Nights takes time for acclimating, but encountering the Russian Doll narrative technique for the first time is really something else.

Russian Dolls are renowned for being self-replicating down to the smallest size. When packaged, they are “nested” into each other for easy transport.

The thematic aspects speak to some of the more profound characteristics of humankind. This is because the stories come to us from an ancient world and yet, if there’s something we can relate to as modern people, then it becomes possible to understand how humankind has fared throughout the passage of time. For example, there’s a visible preoccupation with wealth. In the Gutenberg-Lang text, the word “gold” is mentioned 114 times. Sinbad’s second voyage has him finding a spot where the “ground was strewed with diamonds.” An orphan grows up to gain access to a “treasure so great that if my eighty camels were loaded till they could carry no more, the hiding place would seem as full as if it had never been touched.” And Ali Baba can be remembered for the “bags of gold which he carried in to his wife.” Stories that revolve around the accumulation of abundant wealth, as it comes to us from ancient times, are indicative of a collective consciousness that pits mankind as forever anxious about the prospect of poverty, forever mired in the need for money.

Kasim went to the cave of treasure, based on his brother Ali Baba’s story; he becomes trapped and his demise is not so pleasant. From Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

These dreams of wealth are offset in the slightest way — the word “alms” comes up 4 times. In The Merchant and the Genie, during the year before he’s scheduled to die, the merchant is sure to give “large alms to the poor.” On returning home after finding wealth, Sinbad’s “first action was to bestow large sums of money upon the poor.” Sinbad additionally feels obligated to give money to a wretched man who had complained about his wealth. In The Story of the Blind Baba-Abdalla, the Caliph tells the beggar: “I will see that enough money is given you day by day for all your wants.” In fact, the word “poor” is used 33 times which means, in comparison to the amount of gold mentioned, the thought of being poor is a much less-attractive topic for discussion; but it doesn’t detract from the notion that some collective conscience is at work which considers the plight of the less-fortunate.

Inevitably, this leads into the long-standing theme and phenomenon of class distinction. The Arabian Nights is about the story of a great king and from there, the word “king” is used 174 times. “Prince” comes in at 235 and “Princess” at 243. The awareness of class superiority is lucidly evident: people were orating about the nobility (notorious 1%) because it’s dreamy to think of being a king, or a prince, or a princess. Or maybe it’s envy, or being respectable, or obsessiveness — as our modern Brits are infatuated with the royal line. From the modern perspective, the phenomenon explained is frustratingly simple: life once it forms cannot progress without dividing into social strata, in which, some people will always have it better than others.

Aladdin and Princess Jasmine ride a magic carpet in Disney’s Aladdin (1992).

The problem with considering additional themes concerns the nature of the text itself. That is, I want to discuss Morgiana the slave-girl who, along with Scheherazade, function to defy the female stereotype that Schahriar establishes in order to justify his actions. But Morgiana’s story is from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, which is not included in the Gutenberg-Lang version, nor is the conclusion to Scheherazade’s story. The only way I knew about either of these was through research, but the question stands: Why am I thinking about them if they’re not part of the text? The problem opens up a can of worms as to constitution, provenance and interpretation. The best that can be done for a blog-post is that we know, with some degree of certainty, that The Arabian Nights exploded onto the world stage circa 1704-1717 by the efforts of a Frenchman named Antoine Galland (1646-1715). Grub Street produced the English version Jane Austen would’ve read, and the versions we have today start with Lane and Burton, on to the Lang version which I’ve read; from which nowadays any number of versions can be chosen from in most languages from around the world.

First European edition of Arabian Nights, “Les Mille et une Nuit” by Antoine Galland, Vol. 11, 1730 CE, Paris.

The Gutenberg-Lang text is one of the many online versions of The Arabian Nights.

The table of contents to the Gutenberg-Lang text shows that many of the stories are missing, along with no conclusion to Scheherazade’s story, which is somewhat understandable since it’s purported that at one point, there were 1,001 stories for 1,001 nights. That’s a lot of reading.

The timeline that extends from Galland-past and Galland-forward spells disaster for trying to define exactly what The Arabian Nights is and the specifics of the content that it delivers; which means it’s problematic for thematic interpretation. For example, the Youtube version of Scheherazade’s story does not include her sister, Dinarzade. This poses a difference to be discerned between work accomplished as an individual versus accomplishment as a team. Would women of the time have thought more in terms of individual agency versus the enlisting of a family member to attempt dangerous efforts? This is only the tip of the iceberg as to the messiness of the interpretive scheme. Additionally speaking, having read Burton’s Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves after reading the entirety of Lang’s version had me feeling queasy, because I enjoyed the one and singular Burton experience more than I did the entire Lang reading. The aesthetics of a text can play a large role in how we feel about the story points and characters of a story to which we’re exposed.

During Sinbad’s adventures, he encounters the egg of a mythical bird known as a Roc. He sees the bird itself and latches onto it for a ride.

Without delving too far into how destabilized the original version of The Arabian Nights has become, there seems a curious reliability in that which remains the most intriguing aspect of the collection, the spirit of elevated implausibility. Apart from genies the stories include talking fish, giant birds, magic spells, magic lamps, fairies, spirits, demons, ghouls, horrible giants, creeping snakes, flying carpets, enchanted horses, people-dogs, etc., etc. — the list could go on and on. This is the world of the imagination that comprises the storyteller’s toolbox, because everyone knows that stories of the mundane do not work. We don’t want to hear about how long it took to pull a donkey back and forth along a field so that some seeds could be planted, really. We want to hear about magic genies who threaten our lives and we want to know how people escaped danger. We want to dream that we were the ones who found bags of gold, and we want listeners to consider the value of sharing the wealth we find. For all the princes that find their princesses, we want to dream about living happily ever, and for the voyages that are taken, we want to know that life has meaning. And when we tell these tall tales to our children before they go to bed at night, we take great pleasure in how it feels to tuck their angelic forms in, ready for sleep, so that we can kiss them goodnight knowing that life really isn’t so bad. In this way, The Arabian Nights of new are The Arabian Nights of old, transmogrified from ancient times, because there’s something about the magic they contain that is purely unchangeable.

Summer of 1816: Villa Diodati on the Shores of Lake Geneva

“DURING A STRETCH OF COLD, dismal summer days brought about by an environmental catastrophe, two of the most influential Gothic horror stories were born within the walls of this villa.” — atlasobscura.com

Non-comprehensive timeline:

July 18, 1814 — Percy and Mary’s initial elopement, with Jane (Claire): first to Calais, then to Paris, and on to Switzerland. Back in England by September 13, 1814.

February 18, 1815 — Mary gives birth prematurely, baby dies in infancy.

April 10, 1815 — Eruption of Mount Tamboro in Indonesia; causes worldwide climate change such that the following year became known as the Year Without a Summer. This is to explain the excessive amount of darkened skies and rainfall at Villa Diodati, Summer 1816.

January 15, 1816 — Lord Byron experiences the official loss of his wife; Lady Byron and daughter Augusta Ada left London by carriage for Kirkby Mallory before Byron rose that morning.

January 24, 1816 — Mary Shelley gives birth to a healthy son, William.

Spring 1816 — Jane (Claire) deepens her status as Lord Byron’s mistress. Later, she persuades Percy and Mary, with Baby William, to travel to Switzerland to meet up with Byron at Lake Geneva.

May 25, 1816 — Lord Byron with John Polidori arrive in Geneva, Switzerland; Percy, Mary, Baby William, and Jane (Claire) are waiting for them. Byron and Polidori lease the Villa Diodati, a large porticoed house once occupied by John Milton; Percy will lease Maison Chapuis at Montalègre.

June 10, 1816 — There begins days of ongoing darkness and rainy weather, which led to immense boredom among the group.

June 16, 1816 — A book of ghost stories entitled Fantasmagoriana (1812) is presented as a means to quell the ennui. Lord Byron then suggested having a contest in which each of them would write a ghost story. Byron didn’t follow through entirely, producing what has come to be known as “A Fragment.” And yet this is the work which John Polidori built upon to produce The Vampyre (1819). Percy wrote “A Fragment of a Ghost Story” while Mary conceived and essentially drafted what was to become her master-stroke of unparalleled, literary art.

By the hearth at Villa Diodati. From the left: Mary Shelley (Elle Fanning), Claire Clairmont (Bel Powley), Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge), John Polidori (Ben Hardy), and Percy Shelley (Douglas Booth). As seen in the movie Mary Shelley (2017).

July 1816 — Percy and Mary travel through the valley of Chamonix, which contributed to the realism of setting in Frankenstein.

August 29, 1816 — Percy and Mary are returned to England where, over time and with input from Percy, Frankenstein is refined into its 1818 version.

December 30, 1816 — Percy and Mary are married.

January 1, 1818 — Publication of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

April 1, 1819 — Publication of Polidori’s The Vampyre

October 31, 1831 — Publication of revised edition of Frankenstein

The publication of these two works will go on to become supreme icons of literature, phenomena unto themselves by which, their status as influence over the realm of storytelling approaches that of existing among the gods. The level by which the Villa Diodati and its surroundings contributed to the production of these works cannot be understated.

Polidori’s Vampyre

Lord Ruthven is John Polidori’s Vampyre. As a nobleman, he stands at the pinnacle of England’s Great Chain of Being, corresponding eerily with his status at the top of the food chain. Together these attributes make him an apex predator. He lurks among the fashionable elites of London high society, scanning the scene as an outsider looking in, not because of some neurotic insecurity, but because he simply doesn’t relate to people, because people are his prey. No one’s able to figure out what is so exotic about him and thus, paradoxically, he is wanted in every household for the nature of his “peculiarities.” That he exudes the essence of power and domination is undeniable; this is the source of his attraction, to those who are blind to what he really is — a very dangerous individual.

Supreme in his narcissism, the ability to manipulate is foremost in Lord Ruthven’s skill set. He combines his charismatic singularities with a “hatred of vice,” obscuring the view into his natural disposition. Believing him to be a man of wealth who is, in the same vein, a man of morals, women of rank seek to have him, and women with eligible daughters heed him in the hope that he will marry into the family. Likewise, when his sovereignty is threatened, he does not act on his emotions irrationally, lashing out with carelessness. Instead he showers his rivals with friendship and compassion, keeping his enemies close if you will, before going in for the kill, devouring them without mercy.

Lord Ruthven’s manipulative prowess is concerned with accessing, and protecting that access, to women, but there is more to what makes him dangerous. He’s sadistic. “[H]is eyes sparkled with more fire than that of the cat whilst dallying with the half-dead mouse.” This refers to his penchant for creating and increasing the suffering of those who participate in dissipation. When a drinker needs wine, he provides plentiful; when a gambler needs more money for gambling, he gives freely. Lord Ruthven takes it a step further by employing subtle tricks of the supernatural to influence the future: when a player at the table is winning, he will ensure many wins to come, increasing the likelihood of an addiction to form within said player. Lord Ruthven’s beneficiaries live to see their families starve, and on to face the most abject misery, and may even come to be “led to the scaffold.” It is all the kind of sadism that becomes glaring when, on encountering virtuous beggars merely fallen on hard times, he becomes indignant knowing that he cannot ruin them further because of their innate goodness.

We don’t grasp the full iniquity of Lord Ruthven as a vampire until we witness the actions of his bloodlust. Following the screams of a young woman and the “exultant mockery of a laugh,” we find that “upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein.” It is the defining moment, the everlasting trope of the vampire: Lord Ruthven’s immortality is secured by partaking of the blood of an innocent, young female. The associative power which extends between the mocking laugh, the draining of another’s life-force for the sake of self, and the resulting loss of life, forever enjoins the larger phenomenon of vampirism with the essence of pure evil. John Polidori’s work is done.

Polidori’s story, The Vampyre, was published in the April 1819 issue of The New Monthly Magazine. Much to both his and Byron’s chagrin, it was released as a new work by Byron. The poet released his own “Fragment of a Novel” in an attempt to fix the misunderstanding, but The Vampyre continued to be attributed to him nevertheless.

The interpretive framework from here is multitudinous, the main one being Lord Ruthven as a stand in for the aristocracy. But there are gray areas to explore: as a hunter himself, the “female hunters after notoriety” seem to get what they deserve when they chase after him, at the level that they play. For those who insist on leading lives of dissipation, the negative effects of Lord Ruthven’s actions function as a form of karma. And for notions of good vs. evil, what are we to think when we learn how Lord Ruthven’s nemesis, a young man named Aubrey, “ridiculed the idea of a young man of English habits, marrying an uneducated Greek girl.” Lord Ruthven is most certainly despicable, but this person Aubrey is actually more of a snob.

Claes Bang stars as the vampire-as-nobleman in BBC’s Dracula (2020).

The subject of attraction is difficult to miss throughout. Scientific research has produced a term called “baby schema,” which concerns the care we as humans extend towards our offspring based on the level of how “cute” we believe them to be. Of course that’s only part of the equation, but it’s behavior that is based on visual cues; and we can find the same kind of visual cues provoking behavior in the realm of physical attraction. Lord Ruthven’s vampiric activity may be nefarious, but his sustenance is derived “by feeding upon the life of a lovely female.” There is knowledge to be gleaned in understanding that the female he chooses has to be “lovely.” From an evolutionary standpoint, the human species has propagated itself by becoming better looking: people distinguish between what is attractive from what isn’t, in terms of their sexual practices, and the next generation comes into being.

But it’s not the just the “lovely female” that defines the phenomenon. Consider the amount of times the term “tall, dark and handsome” has been tossed about, and the opposite side of the coin presents itself. Lord Ruthven is the quintessential lady’s man, adapted and represented across thousands upon thousands of romance novels, their lustrous manly book covers seething with raw, masculine sexuality, archetypical of Lord Ruthven himself. The grayness of the question becomes: What is it about the stereotypical, potentially dangerous, tall, dark and handsome male that functions to trigger the interest of a “lovely female”? Is this really the evolutionary medium at work, or is there something more to the picture?

John Polidori’s The Vampyre has served as the blueprint for the vampire as we know it ever since its publication. From here we get tales such as Varney the Vampire (1845), Carmilla (1872) [which is curiously out of place since it involves lesbianism], Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and so forth and so on until we find, in some of its latest incarnations, the vampire is still a tall, dark and handsome aristocratic leaning creature in the film, Fright Night (1985/2011), with Chris Sarandon and Colin Farrell respectively. Love them or hate them, it’s certainly peculiar, even oxymoronic, that vampires have become one of humankind’s most beloved creatures of literary and filmic lore.

Chris Sarandon and Colin Farrell play modern versions of Lord Ruthven in separate versions of the film Fright Night (1985/2011).

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Other Characters:

Aubrey is an orphan from a wealthy family entering into manhood; he is “handsome, frank, and rich.” It’s a mistake when, new to London life, he decides to study the mysterious Lord Ruthven. He draws attention to himself and becomes a study unto himself. When Aubrey foils Ruthven’s plan to victimize an Italian countess and her daughter, he becomes an enemy. Aubrey’s ensuing situation formulates the viewpoint by which Lord Ruthven’s depravity is perceived.

Miss Aubrey is Aubrey’s 18-year-old sister. She’s Aubrey’s only family and dearly beloved by him. Though she is connected to the wealth of the family, she is nevertheless subject to the necessary rite of marriage during age. This is the means by which Lord Ruthven enacts his horrid scheme against Aubrey.

Ianthe, sweet and infantile, can do no wrong in the eyes of Aubrey. Her beauty and simplicity as a peasant girl endears him to her, though her stories about vampires cause him to see her as rather overly provincial. Her demise is tragic and it symbolizes the beginning of Aubrey’s descent into madness.

Lady Mercer was an adulteress fallen from grace, “who had been the mockery of every monster shewn in drawing-rooms since her marriage.” She’s one of those who sought Lord Ruthven for the sake of looking to be associated with the aristocratic classes, only to have her life ruined in the process.

The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage is a compact novel of character development that distinguishes itself with the visceral elements of sheer battle terror. Henry Fleming is a young man who is more than aware that a war is taking place, he’s compelled to make decisions with regard to his relationship with that war. This is a personal affair that doesn’t concern the larger issues at hand but rather, focuses on the effects that war can have on a person who is eligible for recruitment. Crane’s novel delivers on the introspection required to understand how someone in this situation might really feel, while naturally questioning the purpose of enduring the experience.

Now, if there were any novel in print that would demand analysis for its “form and content,” this is one that most certainly fits the bill. With its one and two sentence paragraphs, each of their terse and concise natures, always avoiding the drawl and forever getting to the point, reading through the chapters is exceptionally navigated — much like the act of being suctioned into a war might actually be. And because the overall narrative clocks in at around 50,000 words, every sentence, every word, becomes critical to a storytelling performance that is mired in a sense of being hurried along: Henry Fleming had taken note of the atmosphere of war around him, made the announcement to his mother that he’s joining rank, and was thrust into the life of a soldier — the elevated rate of the memory is supremely crafted, as it takes place during the regiment’s tense wait for its first battle. What we get is the realistic sensation of what it might be like to learn that a family member has decided to join the armed forces: time runs out; the person is at once, there with us, and is soon, gone, off in the military for reasons that seem to defy rational explanation.

Stokes County Arts Council presents the community theater production of The Red Badge of Courage (Summer of 2016).

By Crane’s masterful understanding of the art of literary storytelling, there’s a sort of fearful sublimity that trickles in and even comes to dominate the narration. That is, in a manner that comes off as innate, gifted, yet not overbearing, he colors his passages with imagery and metaphor so that the mind is frightfully energized by the relational power of the technique. Here are some lines taken at random to illustrate the point:

“The slaves toiling in the temple of this god began to feel rebellion at his harsh tasks.”

“He knew at once that the steel fibers had been washed from their hearts.”

“It was not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws.”

“The song of the bullets was in the air and shells snarled among the treetops.”

This last one is my favorite for the way it transforms the turbulence of battle into a musical piece in which the instruments themselves assume the prospect of being animals that snarl — it’s metaphor within metaphor, simply phenomenal.

The action of this linguistic power goes beyond mere “showing” vs “telling.” In fact, what it tends to reveal is how the writerly act of “showing” is nothing more than the process of giving narrative stage directions, which can often become tedious in and of themselves, e.g. “she rolled over in the bed and slammed the alarm off,” or the “dog’s ears fell over the bowl as he ate.” Skilled used of the metaphor does more; it conveys meaning in the act of showing so that not only is the reader perceiving what is happening, but by the associative imagery, comes to “understand” the messages that are being conveyed at a deeper level, as they relate to the overall narrative arc.

Audie Murphy as Henry Fleming in the movie version of The Red Badge of Courage (1951).

The war’s causes themselves are not mentioned and so the thematic material is different from what it could’ve been; that is, issues of slavery and secession are not intended to play a role in the novel’s design. Instead, at surface level, the main theme is brought to us not only by the progression of Henry Fleming’s psychological development, but the narrative exposition itself even speaks about “manhood” during its final passages. Part of the trick up the author’s sleeve is that people knew in advance that the book was about the Civil War when it was published — and so it is, in this way — Henry’s transformation into manhood has been coupled with and sanctified by the notion that he was fighting for the good guys (on the side of the “blue demonstration”), all the while becoming a man. The result is a feel good moment, for the individual, for the moral portrait.

Consider by contrast that the causes of the war have nothing to do with Henry’s transformation, and the matter becomes more complicated. We learned at the beginning that Henry had become alert to his surroundings, because there was obviously something going on in and around the community. The scale of these activities “might not be distinctly Homeric, but there seemed to be much glory in them.” When the church bell rings, he becomes overwhelmed and decides to join in on the effort, but there doesn’t seem to be any critical thinking as to exactly why he should be fighting. Henry probably knew the politics of the war, but his feelings are drawn towards glory for glory’s sake. The moral portrait in this case is happenstance, rendering the morality itself moot: as he went through the journey of becoming a man, he just so happened to be fighting for the good guys.

If we imagine in the same vein some soldier, say, during the Stalin era, who heeds the call of service without completely understanding this leader’s propensity for evil, the question becomes: Can manhood be achieved out of loyalty itself, blind to the larger reasons at hand? Why would anyone take up arms for a man who killed millions of his own people? For glory? Likewise, if Henry saw glory in the fight, it’s safe to say that a rebel soldier felt the same and thus, if the south had won the war, would that make this person a man?

By not delving into the causes of the Civil War, and instead focusing how recruitment might’ve really felt, we do get the story of overcoming cowardice, learning how to be brave. At a different level, though, the novel’s message seems in some ways to be, that this is how the battles are fought — by destroying the lives of citizens no matter what they may or may not believe, and that valor is a means by which the motivation to fight can be secured. Of the statistics that emerge from the American Civil War, one in particular is exceptionally depressing: “[O]ver 30% of Union bodies in national cemeteries are marked as ‘unknown,’ and the ratio of Confederate unmarked graves likely exceeds 50%, which deprived hundreds of thousands of surviving loved ones a sense of closure” (Source). This is a statistic that represents a vast gulf of death in its ultimate form: the effacement of the individual from the realm of existence, never to be heard or known of again for all time. It’s obliterative, such that Stephen Crane has given them a name in the person of Henry Fleming. These men may have fought for glory or they may have been die-hard abolitionists or they may have been completely on the wrong side of the fence, but they’re existence was served at the grunt level, which means, in all honesty, most were probably and merely plain people with feelings and emotions of their own, and now they’ve been erased from the book of life.