A Bit of Obssession

Beyond the future of the project, Roland was worried about his own future. He would have been in a panic if he had allowed himself to think, but the dreamy days, the pearly light alternating with the hot blue, and something else, made it possible to leave thinking in abeyance. Things did not look good. He had simply walked out on Blackadder. He had done the same to Val, who was, he considered, unforgiving and dependent in equal proportion—he would have to go back to be berated, and then how could he leave, where would he go, how should he live?


Things had changed between them nevertheless. They were children of a time and culture that mistrusted love, ‘in love,’ romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about polymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors for these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared.
They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed.
One night they fell asleep, side by side, on Maud’s bed, where they had been sharing a glass of Calvados. He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
They did not speak of this, but silently negotiated another such night. It was important to both of them that the touching should not proceed to any kind of fierceness or deliberate embrace. They felt that in some way this stately peacefulness of unacknowledged contact gave back their sense of their separate lives inside their separate skins. Speech, the kind of speech they knew, would have undone it. On days when the sea-mist closed them in a sudden milk-white cocoon with no perspectives they lay lazily together all day behind heavy white lace curtains on the white bed, not stirring, not speaking.
Neither was quite sure how much, or what, all this meant to the other.
Neither dared ask.


Roland has learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his ‘self’ as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had no desire for any strenuous Romantic self-assertion. Nor did he desire to know who Maud essentially was. But he wondered, much of the time, what their mute pleasure in each other might lead to, anything or nothing, would it just go, as it had just come, or would it change, could it change?

Byatt, A. S. Possession. New York: Vintage, 1990. 458-459. [American Edition]

A Bit from Barnes

She also knew that it had been this very gentleness, this lack of ego – which had been one of his attractions. She had thought … what, exactly? She thought (now) that she had thought (then) that here was someone who wouldn’t seek to impose himself on her (well, true), who would let her be herself. Had she indeed thought that, or was this a later version? Either way, it was false. ‘Be herself’ – that’s what people said, but they didn’t mean it. They meant – she mean – ‘become herself,’ whatever that was, and however that might be attained. The truth was, Martha – wasn’t it – that you were expecting Paul’s mere presence to act as a growth hormone to the heart? Just sit over there on the sofa, Paul, and beam your love at me; then I’ll turn into the mature, ripened person I’ve always wanted to be. Could you get more egotistical, and more naïve? Or, for that matter, more passive? Who said human beings became ripe anyway? Maybe they just became old.

Barnes, Julian. England, England. New York: Vintage, 1998. 210-211.

Victim (an old film, a real life)

If you have ever wondered how fastidious I am on following through on recommendations people have made to me, rest assured it is uncannily abnormal. I just watched a film, Victim, that my Victorian lit professor recommended to our class almost two years ago. Released in 1961, this film was willing to talk about homosexuality at a time where it often went unspoken. (Can you imagine that a married man might actually be gay? Duh! If these people had it figured out in 1961, why can’t we seem to remember that today?)

I’ve watched several documentaries about gays in early cinema and Hollywood, but I can’t consciously recall if Victim was ever one referenced in the documentaries. Of course, the documentaries mention about how there may have been an occasional gay man as a waiter or dancer in a film, but it wasn’t until the later part of the century that movies began to feature gays and lesbians as actually subject members – and its wasn’t until a decade or so after this that gay films weren’t about fear, disease, or self-hatred.

This movie opens up with one of the “victims” being chased throughout London. He attempts to reach out to his former lovers and his current one, only to no avail. The film starts with his suicide. He was stealing money to help protect his current lover in order to pay off blackmailers. The other “victim” is a barrister played by Dirk Bogarde who does an awesome job in this film. The scene when his wife confronts him about his homosexuality and he admits his love for his murdered lover is AMAZING! This film really needs to be shown to contemporary society.

It is just so interesting to see a historical portrait of what it may have been like to be gay in the 1950s or 1960s. I can just barely imagine what it must have been like to hide who you truly were because if anyone found out you could go to jail. It's horrifying. And in light of today's national debate on marriage, I think this film might be an interesting way to discuss topics like equality, homosexuality, and bigotry.

According to E. M. Forster

I have been researching character for my paper on E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, and I came across this awesome quote. Please enjoy all of my dear friends whom I talk about relationships with all the time.

"All history, all out experience, teaches us that no human relationship is constant, it is as unstable as the living beings who compose it, and they must balance like jugglers if it is to remain; if it is constant it is no longer a human relationship but a social habit, the emphasis in it has passed from love to marriage. All this we know, yet we cannot bear to apply our bitter knowledge to the future; the future is to be so different; the perfect person is to come along, or the person we know already is to become perfect. There are to be no changes, no necessity for alertness. We are to be happy or even miserable for ever and ever" (pg. 55, Aspects of the Novel).

TV Show of the Month: Upstairs, Downstairs

For my British-Irish Modernism class, I have to create an annotated bibliography for the historical contexts of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View. I came across this really interesting article by Carl Freedman, about the connection between the Merchant Ivory production and a 1970s TV show called, Upstairs, Downstairs. Thus, in the course of research and in honor of feeding my habit, I decided to put the first season on my Netflix, and I finished it just now. While the show covers quite a long time period, the first season focuses on 1903-1909, which works really well with researching the Edwardian period. The show actually starts the same year that Queen Victoria died and features an episode in October 1908, which is the same month that A Room with a View was published. [This episode was a little lame, "The Swedish Tiger." It didn't really fit into recreating history the way a number of the other episodes have.]

This TV version of Altman's Gosford Park has a number of interesting plot lines and twists that makes Altman's attempt to capture the intrigues of early twentieth-century British life as a feeble attempt at best. While their plots are not the same, the documentation of classed and gendered life in Upstairs, Downstairs is amazing! I would say the stand out episodes from the first season would be the first one, "On Trial," episode two, "The Mistress and the Maids," and episode eight, "I Dies from Love." The show does a great job of showing what life for the upper and lowers classes was like and how gender relations were conducted between the classes. Of course, you see the men cheating on women, the servants fighting and dying for the chances of love, and surprisingly, the mother, Mistress Belamy, having her own affair.

This video is from the episode where the maid, Sarah, and the Mistress Marjorie Bellamy are both being painted by this artist only for their paintings to be displayed in public, which goes on to create quite a scandal in the Royal Academy.

Along with the really interesting episodes/writing, the show has some first-class acting. The show went one to win BAFTA and Emmy awards. One of the anchors of the show is Jean Marsh, who plays the main housemaid, Rose, and in fact she helped to create the show with fellow actor, Eileen Atkins. [You might recognize Marsh as Mombi from Return to OZ or Queen Bavmorda from Willow.] I would also note that Pauline Collins, who plays Sarah, is another very interesting actress whose role on the show is great. I've never laughed so hard in my life.

Anyways, I just thought I would share this rather interesting "Bits and Bobs" (as one of my favorite EW blogger says) from Britain would be something cool to share.