Esther Goes to High School
The Little Professor has been watching the dramatization of Bleak House.
I battered my head against the wall when Esther described Ada’s and Richard’s lodgings as a “damn poky little place.”
Oh, ya. I know that battering. It happens when it becomes suddenly abruptly clear that the people doing the dramatization simply don’t realize that people a century ago didn’t do everything exactly the way we do. That things were, you know, different then? Not the same? Otherwise? Dissimilar? Not identical?
I can think of a few examples that made me want to batter. The tv dramatization of Middlemarch, when disagreement first started to surface between Dorothea and Casaubon – and the way it surfaced was that Casaubon said something unpleasant and Dorothea immediately shouted at him at the top of her voice. That’s not quite how it was written, and not quite how a person like Dorothea would have behaved in 1830. The movie (originally tv) dramatization of Persuasion, when Anne shouted at her father at the dinner table. Not how written; not how a person like Anne. The movie dramatization of The Wings of the Dove, when Kate and Milly wander up to the roof of the country house at dawn in their nightgowns – their thin, limp, transparent nightgowns – and are joined by a man and all three stand around chatting idly for quite a long time. Err – no. Later in the same movie, when Milly says irritably, ‘Do I look like I could climb up the stairs of a church?’ and we’re suddenly violently shunted from Henry James world to a high school lunchroom circa 1999. The perky way Elizabeth 1 hops into bed with Dudley and Viola de Lesseps hops into bed with Shakespeare. The way Marguerite de Valois in the movie dramatization of Dumas’ novel ran down the stairs of the palace and into the street, grabbed the first man she found, and humped with him against a wall – a scene not found in the novel. That kind of thing. Just, a weird deafness for the difference of the past.
I watched Bleak House, and enjoyed it. I find it hard to believe that Esther would have said, “damn poky little place”, or that I wouldn’t have noticed. In fact I’d put it stronger than that – I’m damn sure she didn’t say that. What she’ll have said, I imagine, is “damp poky little place”.
Oh! I wonder if that was it. It does seem awfully odd. I bet you’re right. How funny. Oh, Miriam…
(By the way, Mick, I still use one of your pics for my desktop. The six cockleshell things in front of the doors of the Temperate House. Best desktop ever.)
Not exactly apropos of TV dramatisations, but as I shall be discussing with my students this morning, French aristocrats in the C17 and C18 used to rut like polecats. King Louis XV, for example, who got through four daughters of the same marquis in a couple of years, and later fathered a couple of dozen bastards on compliant daughters of the gentry procured for him by Madame de Pompadour… It sounds like it ought to be made up, but it isn’t…
I’d have to listen again, but “damp” makes sense.
Nevertheless, I’m still mighty exasperated about Ada being out of mourning during the wedding sequence. No, no, no.
Yes. I find modernizations of that kind highly exasperating.
Dave, I know, about the polecats thing. But I still don’t think a woman (a princess at that) would go into the street and grab a stranger and rut with him in an alley. (A duke, in the pantry, possibly.) And I still don’t think Elizabeth I would (or did) blithely ignore the danger of pregnancy. Ya think?
Dorothea immediately shouted at him at the top of her voice. That’s not quite how it was written, and not quite how a person like Dorothea would have behaved in 1830.
Not quite? It’s totally ludicrous — but no doubt some marketing experts checked it out with the punters and discovered that the ‘bunny boiler’ approach would be more profitable and less ‘boring’ for the marasmatic viewers.
‘Middlemarch’? — 99% of the English-speaking world probably don’t know the book exists (or if they do, think it’s the ‘book on the film’)
Yes, I think Eliz. I was probably more careful — but we can’t seem to have a dramatization lately that accepts it… I’d like to see one that makes more of the fact that she was one of the cleverest people in the country, and that her borderline genius qualities might have had something to do with her not wanting to be anchored to some passing prince as a brood-mare for the future… But instead it all has to be unrequited love, or something Freudian about her mother… ;-)
Of course it’s totally ludicrous. ‘Not quite’ was my usual sarky understatement.
It could be marketing and bunny boiling, but it seems to me it could also be just the idea that the more muted, restrained, polite, rule-bound reaction would be less satisfying. Which is true, in a way – I do want to shout at Casaubon and Sir Walter and Mrs Bennet and Mr Woodhouse and all the rest of them, elbowing the characters aside to give their tormenters the proper sort of talking-to. But even more than I want to do that, I want to see more plausible renditions if I see any.
Sad about Middlemarch if you’re right. It’s one of the best.
“I’d like to see one that makes more of the fact that she was one of the cleverest people in the country, and that her borderline genius qualities might have had something to do with her not wanting to be anchored to some passing prince as a brood-mare for the future”
Exactly! Same here! (Not to mention her not wanting to die in childbirth thanks.) But noooooooooo. Gotta be all healthy lusty hey ho let’s roll around stuff. As if.
Sad about Middlemarch if you’re right. It’s one of the best.
One of the best?
It’s the most brilliant novel ever written — the only improvement on the text itself being the cover-to-cover audio version read by Maureen O’Brien.