Today Samara Learned... [Day 14]

that Heart of Darkness is even more intertextual than she had previously imagined.  Whether intentional or not, Conrad includes some references that heightens his own brilliant writing.  His famous novella - seriously, he packs the punch in just 77 pages - is a frame narrative, with the life of one central character relayed by a sailor named Marlowe to a group, including an unnamed narrator who is relaying it all to the audience.  This layered narrative creates a powerful sense of uncertainty and ambiguity that is as central to this book as its plot - perhaps even more so.
Anyway, that's not what she learned, what she discovered today is the book's possible connection to another famed, framed-narrative.  The first line, the first two words of the novella, indicate the ship on which the story is being relayed is called "[t]he Nellie."  Nelly just happens to be the name of one of the main narrators in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and, infamously, one of the most unreliable narrators in pre-1900 English literature.  Coincidence? She likes to think in literature, there is no such thing.*


* See "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by TS Eliot.  [I think, to an extant, the literary tradition bleeds into each new generation of authors.]

Quotes on Austen [part 1]

I am loving the research process on my Austen-Shakespeare paper. I've come across several quotes that don't fit in my paper, but they're just too good not to share, so I'm gonna just post them here. Some are reverent, others ridiculously effusive, and most are just plain hilarious! Critics on Austen:

"Jane Austen... is perhaps the only English example of that spirit of classical comedy that is more natural to the Latin people than to ours and that Moliere represents for the French. That this spirit should have embodied itself in England in the mind of a well-bred spinster, the daughter of a country clergyman, who never saw any more of the world than was made possible by short visits to London and a residence of a few years in Bath and who found her subjects mainly in the problems of young provincial girls looking for husbands, seems one of the most freakish of the many anomalies of English literary history." - Edmund Wilson, "A Long Talk about Jane Austen" [1945]

"One of those fairies who perch upon cradles must have taken her a flight through the world directly she was born. When she was laid in the cradle again she knew not only what the world looked like, but had already chosen her kingdom. She had agreed that if she might rule over that territory, she would covet no other. Thus at fifteen she had few illusions about other pople and none about herself... Jane Austen kept to her compact; she never trespassed beyond her boundaries... Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to have said, pointing with her stick, end there; and the boundary line is perfectly distinct. But she does not deny that moons and mountains and castles exist--on the other side." - Virginia Woolf, "Jane Austen" [1925]

"As Lionel Trilling points out, Jane Austen 'was committed to the ideal of "intelligent love," according to which the deepest and truest relationship that can exist between human beings is pedagogic. This relationship consists in the giving and receiving of knowledge about right conduct, in the formation of one person's character by another, the acceptance of another's guidance in one's own growth.' ...For her the pedagogic relationship is not parasitic but symbiotic, a relationship that is mutual and joyful... The happy resolutions of her novels celebrate the achieved integration of head and heart that is represented by the pupil and teacher coming to loving accord." - Juliet McMaster, "Love and Pedagogy"

"A serious interest in structure...ought naturally to lead us from Pride and Prejudice to a study of the comic form it exemplifies, the conventions which have presented much the same features from Plautus to our own day. The conventions in turn take us back into myth. When we compare the conventional plot of a play of Plautus with the Christian myth of a son appeasing the wrath of a father and redeeming his bride, we can see that the latter is quite accurately described, from a literary point of view, as a divine comedy." - Northop Frye, quoted by Joseph Wiesenfarth in "Austen and Apollo" [new favorite article on Austen]

Today I read an article by Q. D. Leavis about Jane Austen, and I discovered that I had a little envy.

Let me explain.

Queenie [I just love that name!] Dorothy Leavis was a literary critic and wife to renowned F.R. Leavis (he had actually been an instructor of hers at Cambridge ;). They collaborated on multiple works of criticism and left a lasting mark on the study of English literature. But Queenie was also a mom and one who enjoyed her investment in her home. 

[F.R and Q.D. Leavis shortly after their wedding in 1929]

So why the envy? Because she had the life I want.
My goal is to be professor and literary critic, but also, and more importantly, to be wife to a man with similar passions and a loving mom to our children. She did it all--and excelled!
I guess more than "envy," I'm just inspired by her.
So thank you, Queenie, for living life well and inspiring others to not settle.




Leave you with this awesome quote of hers:


"Unless men and women are capable of relationships which include loyalty, confidence, mutual interests, and there are people of integrity who can act disinterestedly sometimes, which of course requires courage and faith - people, in short, capable of respect for themselves and each other, I don't see how one can expect that novels worth consideration could be written."


- QDL 'The Italian Novel'

Doing research for my honors thesis when I came across this lovely =)

Seriously? Austen's Juvenilia was first published with a preface from Gilbert the Keith Chesterton?

Haha... favorite authors and happiness upon happiness!

A few goodies:

"It might seem a very wild use of the wrong word to say that Jane Austen was elemental. It might even seem even a little wanton to insist that she was original. Yet this objection would come from the critic not really considering what is meant by an element or an origin...

If it seemed odd to call her elemental, it may seem equally odd to call her exuberant. These pages betray her secret; which is that she was naturally exuberant. And her power came, as all power comes, from the control and direction of exuberance...

Jane Austen was not inflamed or inspired or even moved to be a genius; she simply was a genius."

I don't know who made me respect who more... but I adore them both tonight more than ever!

So excited to be reading Marilyn Butler's Jane Austen and the War of Ideas.

I have been wanting to read her literary criticism for almost two years. But I finally get to read it for a paper I'm doing.

I had this amazing God-moment this afternoon. I was sitting doing homework and my mind was going through all the things I needed to get done. All of this was while I was reading this book. Then all of a sudden I realized I was in one of those moments... one of those moments when you are startled with the realization that you are fulfilling your destiny. I mean, obviously, we are always living in our destiny. But there are times when we find ourselves in the midst of doing what we have dreamed of. For me that's Austen literary critique--but it doesn't matter what the specifics are. I am just amazed that I get to live this dream with my Father :)

The Lord is so good to me! The other day, as I was finishing Mansfield Park, Jesus told me to read some literary criticism of Jane Austen. I wanted to cry, "Really? You think so too?" =)
Well, duh, He's the one who crafted us around a dream of His heart. He's the one who knows the exact avenue to tap to infuse our hearts with a holy passion for His dreams. But when He opens up those doors into wider spaces of dreaming, I'm still taken aback! He is just so good!
He said I didn't need to read anything terribly heavy--just some materials to supplement my own readings, studies, and musings about Jane Austen. He said simply that if this is what I want to study, I need to accumulate as much foundational knowledge as possible. I'm sooo excited to dive into it. Last year, I wrote a paper on musical and non-musical characters in Jane Austen. I picked up a book called The Innocent Diversion: A Study of Music in Jane Austen's Life and Writing. It was so fun, but I intentionally skipped over the portions that related to novels I had not yet read. So, I'm going back and reading that.
Another topic that I find so intriguing is the role of the clergy in Jane Austen's novels. She was the daughter of a clergyman, yet her representations of clergy in her novels range from Mr. Collins to Mr. Henry Tilney and Dr. Grant to Mr. Edward Ferrars. Anyways... there are a lot of positive and negative representations, I'm excited to look at them. So I got a book from the library called Jane Austen and the Clergy. That one is going to be especially good =)
I also am getting a book that compiles her personal letters. From the quotes I've seen in my little Jane Austen journal, they should be very fun. I love her letters to her sister Cassandra.
And as if those aren't enough, one of my bestest friends got me a great birthday present. It's Jane's satirical History of England which she penned at only 16 years old. Oh goodie!

If you couldn't tell... I'm a little excited about this!
You can look forward to quotes, anecdotes, and morsels of things about "Jane."
This is going to be grand... I'm so glad He knows what's best for us =)

Ok. The library just informed me that my books are ready, so, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go read =)