Fiction and Arts With a CAMHS Focus.
 

Fiction

"If you want to learn about people's personalities and intentions, you would probably do better reading novels than reading psychology books. Maybe that's the best way to come to an understanding of human beings and the way they act and feel, but that's not science. Science isn't the only thing in the world, it is what it is....science is not the only way to come to an understanding of things." "If I am interested in learning about people, I'll read novels rather than psychology." "I think the Victorian novel tells us more about people than science ever will...and we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology." "We learn from literature as we learn from life; no one knows how, but it surely happens. In fact, most of what we know about things that matter comes from such sources, surely not from considered rational inquiry (science), which sometimes reaches unparalleled depths of profundity, but has a rather narrow scope." "It is almost certain that literature will forever give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called 'the full human person' than any modes of scientific inquiry may hope to do”. Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader.

“The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings. Where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world”. John Cheever

The Family

Margaret Atwood. The Blind Assasin.

Atwood relates the compelling, intriguing and thought-provoking story of Iris and her younger sister Laura growing up isolated in small town, war-torn Canada in the early part of the 20th century. Intertwined is a story of unnamed lovers whose experiences and emotions alternatively match and juxtaposition the story of the sisters. And further intertwined is a third story, set on a planet far, far way of a mute girl destined to be sacrificed for the glory of nothing and a blind assassin set to kill her.

Iris, the eldest, is the dominant character and for the most part the novel is told through her voice. Unsophisticated and humanly flawed, Iris struggles to make sense of the world around her while Laura remains vaguely drawn and a little ethereal. Their mother dies giving birth leaving the children to the care of their distant and disturbed father, Norval. Iris agrees to marry nouveau-riche Richard Chase in an attempt to save her father's business and to protect her sister but Richard betrays Iris and Norval dies. Leaving Iris, ill-prepared and unsupported, to look after her wayward sister. Thus is the scene is set for an intriguing mystery and a touching, devastating account of young - and lifelong - love. You're just never sure whose love, until the very end.

It is hard not to feel sorry for Iris in this story (though she herself admits that she is anything but perfect) - from a young age she was tasked to look after Laura, who was `not quite with it'. She enters into a disastrous marriage to save the family fortune, and to the end of her life must suffer misunderstanding of her accomplishments by all those around her.

Balzac. Cousin Bette.

Cousin Bette tells the story of the fall of the house of Hulot, plotted and precipitated by Lisbeth Fischer, a poor relative, the "Cousin Bette" of the novel's title. The Hulot family owes its standing in the fictional society of Balzac's novel not to aristocratic ancestry but to the careers of two brothers. In the reign of Napoleon I, between 1805 and 1815, Hector Hulot had risen to a senior post in the military administration of Alsace, and his brother had fought with distinction in Napoleons armies. The two survive the fall of France but are under-employed for fifteen years; they can only re-establish themselves fully after the July Revolution of 1830. The colonisation of Algeria provides them with the opportunity to accumulate wealth to add to the prestige with which the Napoleonic past now endows them. But there is a worm in the apple. As he grows into middle age, Hector Hulot becomes increasingly obsessed with sexual conquest. By playing on that passion, Lisbeth, called Bette like a child or a servant, a poor and powerless spinster, a mere hanger-on in the outwardly splendid Hulot household, brings the family almost to its ruin. Cousin Bette is both a vast fresco of Parisian life in the first half of the nineteenth century, and a sharply-focused study of two contradictory human impulses: sexual desire, and the desire for destruction. Sigmund Freud, in his later works, presented eros, the drive towards life, and sex, and thanatos, the drive towards death, and destruction, as the two sides of the same coin. Almost a century earlier, Balzac had imagined them as two members of the same family.

This is Balzac's great opus about envy and greed played out within the family in nineteenth century Paris. Balzac wished to portray good in a contemporary and real setting. In Cousin Bette, the vehicle of that portrayal is Hector Hulot's wife Adeline, Bette's cousin and childhood companion. Adeline is beautiful, with a nobility that comes from her soul, not from her ancestry. She is intelligent, but not an educated intellectual. She is faithful to her husband, and intensely loyal to him, despite the liberties he takes with his marriage vows; and she is motivated in all her actions by Christian faith.

Samuel Butler. The Way of All Flesh.

The story follows several generations of the Pontifex family but eventually settles on the young Ernest Pontifex. Ernest is dominated by parents we would today call "passive aggressive", using a pious and seemingly loving demeanor to bend the young man to their will, which seems to be a determination to ensure their first-born son never knows a moment of happiness in his life. He is manipulated into becoming an Anglican priest, like his father, and much of the novel follows his struggles to adapt himself to the Church or adapt the Church to himself. The disasters that befall his rebellions provide Butler much opportunity to express dissent about both the Church and religious beliefs in general.

There has never been more vehement indictment of parental stupidity than that of Samuel Butler in his novel The Way of All Flesh. That much of the material is drawn from Butler's own life, especially his relationship with his father, we know from his statement about his father to his biographer, Henry Festing Jones:

He never liked me, nor I him; from my earliest recollection I can call to mind no time when I did not fear him and dislike him . . . the fact remains that for years and years I have never passed a day without thinking of him many times over as the man who was sure to be against me, and who would be sure to see the bad side rather than the good of everything I said and did.

The Way of All Flesh is perhaps the most devastating and relentless literary assault by a son upon a father ever written. The father, Thomas Butler in life and Theobald Pontifex in the book, stands accused (and of course convicted) of many odious sins. A vicar, he is a complete sententious humbug, utterly selfish, snobbish, mean, and avaricious, unfeeling about anyone except himself, a philistine who delights in cruelty to his own children in the name of supposedly necessary character-formation. He is an unctuous, sadistic, bullying hypocrite, all of whose learning is mere pedantry, and all of whose opinions are handed down to him by his ancestors and predecessors, which he was too lazy and self-interested ever to examine for their truth or otherwise. The slightest opposition or disagreement over anything is insupportable to him, and interpreted by him much as a general interprets a failure of soldiers to obey his orders.

Theobald’s wife, Christina—modeled on Butler’s mother—is a much weaker character, not without natural kindness, who nevertheless becomes cruel and hypocritical because of her subordination to her husband. Ernest’s two siblings, his brother and sister, are odious sycophants of Theobald, pure toadies, though they hate him just as much as Ernest does. Ernest so comes to dislike his sister that he finds it physically nauseating even to give her a peck on the cheek when he meets her again after a long interval. Theobald’s vile character poisons and embitters the atmosphere of the whole household and all who have ever lived in it.

This book is an encyclopedia of virtually all the social pathology that is to be seen in a clinical setting.

Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov.

A study in generational conflict. At the heart of The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery surrounding the homicide of a family patriarch, Fyodor Karamazov, and the role of his sons in the crime. The book is also a novel of ideas: Fyodor Dostoevsky debates the existence of God, the role of religion in modern societies, and the consequences of class differences on the individual. The Brothers Karamazov has had a deep influence on some of the greatest writers and philosophers. Sigmund Freud called it "The most magnificent novel ever written" and was fascinated with the book for its Oedipal themes. In 1928 Freud published a paper titled "Dostoevsky and Patricide" in which he investigated Dostoevsky's own neuroses and how they contributed to the novel. Freud claimed that Dostoevsky's epilepsy was not a natural condition but instead a physical manifestation of the author's hidden guilt over his father's death. According to Freud, Dostoevsky (and all sons for that matter) wished for the death of his father because of latent desire for his mother; and as evidence Freud cites the fact that Dostoevsky's epileptic fits did not begin until he turned 18, the year his father died. The themes of patricide and guilt, especially in the form of moral guilt illustrated by Ivan Karamazov, would then obviously follow for Freud as literary evidence of this theory. This is just one view of the themes of the novel. This is a deeply psychological novel that deals with family conflict, sibling rivalry, generational fissures, and psychopathology. If there is one book that CAMHS clinicians should read, this is it.

George Eliot. Adam Bede.

As a novel which centres on an infanticide by a mother, Adam Bede is necessarily preoccupied with motherhood. The most obvious example of a strong mother figure is Lisbeth Bede, who loves her son, Adam, almost too much. She is constantly worried about where he is, what he is doing, and whether he has had enough to eat. Her constant nagging, which irritates Adam, also ashames him. Lisbeth's relationship with Seth is a much easier one, perhaps because she loves him just a little less, and therefore nags him just a little less. It is important to note that neither Hetty nor Dinah has a mother anymore. Both of them were orphaned and live with their uncle or aunt, respectively. The lack of a mother figure affects each of them profoundly. Dinah quickly grows into a mother figure herself, looking after and waiting on others before herself. Seth describes a young boy even climbing into her lap to be held during one of her preaching sessions. Hetty, in contrast, lacking strong guidance, grows up vain and petty. When she has a child of her own, admittedly under extremely tough circumstances, she kills it by burying it. She does have some motherly feelings, however, noting that she could not bear to look at its "little hands or little face" before she buried it. She imagines that she continues to hear it crying. This is why she returns to the spot where she buried it, and this is why she is apprehended as a criminal. A powerful novel that illuminates the psychology of child abuse as few psychology/psychiatry books will do.

George Eliot. Middlemarch.

The finest English novel of any period, without any doubt. Middlemarch established Eliot's place as the foremost literary figure of her age. It is about everyday life in a rural community around the time of the first Reform Bill of 1832. Set in a period some 40 years before it was written, its characters fall into established groups. There are the entrenched rich: the silly but enthusiastic Mr. Brooke; the solid if unimaginative Sir James Chettam; and the morally energetic but naive Dorothea Brooke. There are those in the industrious middle class: the honest workman Caleb Garth; the sanctimonious banker Nicholas Bulstrode; and the potential recruit to committed work Fred Vincy. And there are the creative (or allegedly creative) spirits: the scientific Lydgate; the scholarly Casaubon; and the poetic Ladislaw. These are only a sampling of the vast and variegated cast of Middlemarch.

While many of these characters are simple sketches meant to exemplify a singular trait or moral attribute, the most interesting ones: Lydgate, Fred Vincy, Dorothea, Ladislaw, Bulstrode, have mixed natures. Eliot seems to have conceived of human character as resembling a chemical reaction in which a large number of potentially important variables are present but only some are activated. The direction a life takes becomes a matter of which variables are activated and which are not, something that lies, at least partially, within the individual's power to control. Eliot shows how a character's resolve can be weakened and aspects of human nature, endearing or harmless in youth, can become toxic later in life. By the same token, she also demonstrates the reverse, expressed in Dorothea's rejoinder to Farebrother: "Then [character] may be rescued and healed." The novels acknowledge the possibility of change for the better. An important theme is a critique of power dynamics in relationships.

Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of Middlemarch, is a young woman poised on the verge of possibly achieving a greater life for herself, given the intelligence and talents with which she begins her adult life. Like Gwendolen Harleth, she makes a disastrous marriage, marrying a middle-aged scholar thinking she will share with him a richly rewarding intellectual existence. Instead she finds he is a desiccated stick of a man and a pedant. By the novel's close Dorothea has received an education of sorts, ending not as a great social reformer or inspiring religious figure but simply as the wife of a progressive young member of Parliament. Her marriage to scholar Edward Casaubon, on whom she claimed her ticket to a great future, has only resulted in pain and disillusion.

Virginia Woolf asserted that George Eliot wrote novels for grown up people. Kathryn Hughes in her biography of Eliot wrote, "Middlemarch represents George Eliot's most comprehensive and finely rendered view of human experience. It is a vast, inclusive 'Study of Provincial Life', setting out her beliefs about how society works, how it supports and thwarts the individuals who compose it, and how an accommodation can be made between the two. It is, in effect, an answer to all those correspondents and callers who entreated Marian Lewes: 'how must I live now?'"

This is a book that makes us understand in depth the nature of family and intimate relationships and the conflicts and difficulties that may arise within them. It is certainly the greatest novel of the nineteenth century, after Dostoyevsky.

Elizabeth Gaskell. Ruth.

The story of a young woman who is both ruined and fulfilled when she becomes an unmarried mother. Several of Mrs Gaskell’s earlier works had made reference to the sexual vulnerability of young girls. Ruth is a plea for the single standard of morality for men and women. In the characterisation of Henry Bellingham--his escapade, his relief at being allowed to escape from its consequences, and his final actions--Mrs. Gaskell showed the attitude of society towards such conduct in men, and the book becomes a powerful argument for a change in this attitude. There is, moreover, a constant contrast of Thurstan Benson, the author's ideal Christian, with Mr. Bradshaw, the pharisaical upholder of a narrow creed; and no one can doubt for a moment which of the two she considered the more righteous. This book never loses its sense of the way in which human beings behave, of their limitations and frailties, and of the potential that lies within them.

Charles Gounod. Romeo and Juliet.

The five-act opera by Charles Gounod is an 1867 adaptation of William Shakespeare's play about the fatal consequences of Romeo's and Juliet's true love pitted against bitter family conflict -- the Montagues and Capulets in 14th-century Verona, Italy. The young lovers, Romeo and Juliet, are thwarted by the long-time hatred between their families and must keep their love affair a secret. Their duets are sublime - full of love, poetry, tenderness and passion. Gounod's ending briefly reunites the lovers before their death, creating one of those heart-breaking moments that define great theatre. There are family feuds and secrets galore in this opera in which the music dramatically underlines the message of the text.

While on a surface level the opera is about love, the underlying theme of Romeo and Juliet is the fight for power, which results in the death of all the young members of Montagues (except for Benvolio), Capulets and the Prince's House. The opera shows a system which imposes its beliefs on the individual, preventing him or her from reaching happiness and leaving death as the only escape. This effectively illustrates the power of the family and the cultural context to constrict and inhibit rather than to expand individuality and creativity.

Kafka. Metamorphosis.

Gregor Samsa awakens one morning to discover he has changed into a giant insect, the narrator distractedly ponders a picture on the wall of a pretty lady in a fur cap and muff. Like Samsa, the narrator is ready to let the transformation pass as if it were a dream, although stating just previously, "It was no dream." Were we to awaken changed into an insect, we should devoutly hope for a narrator of our plight more engaged than to be infatuated by a pretty picture on the wall.

This short story from the Prague of 1915 - Sigmund Freud's hometown - explores the darkest corners of our modern, commercial, 20th-century psychological mind. It has become a central metaphor for contemporary angst, a touchstone for what's wrong with civilisation.

Gregor is alienated from himself, his family, and the wider social world. It is a world of disconnestion and dissociation, where nobody cares, nobody sees, nobody feels, where the abnormal and mad becomes accepted as just another thing and where relationships are based on unthinking and unrecognised sadism. It is a nightmare world. If we know something about Kafka's family and his childhood we can understand why he wrote this story.

D H Lawrence. Sons and Lovers.

This is a classic 1913 novel about a Welsh family in a mining town. The mother, Mrs. Morel, finds herself locked into a loveless marriage with a man she does not respect, and lives her life through her children. When the oldest dies a young man, her dreams and aspirations find their outlet in Paul Morel, a sensitive and artistic young man, so in thrall to his mother it is almost Oedipal, and hence unable to commit himself to a full relationship with either of the two quite different women he becomes involved with. The novel is filled with beautiful passages. It tells of Paul's ultimate inability to unleash his bonds to his mother, even after her death, and truly love any one thing or being in the world other than her.

The heroine of this story, Gertrude Morel, was based upon Lawrence’s own mother, Lydia. Mrs. Lawrence was also the prototype for Mrs. Beardsall in her son's first novel, The White Peacock, and elements of her life and personality appear in several short stories, notably 'Odour of Chrysanthemums'.

“He could not bear it. On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct. Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains went spinning around for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing.

"Mother!" he whispered—"Mother!"

She was the only thing that held him up, himself, amid all this. And she was gone, intermingled herself”.

A true description of the schizoid state of being.

This novel outlines very powerfully the impact of family relationships on the growing child. In this case it is the effect of a powerful, engulfing mother on the masculinity of the males around her and her power to castrate, denigrate, and render impotent the masculinity of her partner and children. This is shown to have lasting effects on the ability of her children to have whole, real, and intimate relationships as far ahead as adulthood.

Doris Lessing. The Fifth Child.

Harriet and David create their version of happiness: a big home, a big family. After the births of the first four children in rapid succession, the perfect picture is marred by the arrival of their fifth child, Ben, who wreaks havoc on the family. He is a beast and a brute. The other children can't play with him. David can't look at him. Harriet can't love him.

Ben, the title character of The Fifth Child, is a selfish monster who sucks the life out of a long-suffering, oppressed mother. The novel itself suggests that Ben's monstrosity is inexplicable or at least that it is not susceptible to any obvious psychological, sociological, or historical modes of analysis. His kicking in the womb cannot be the result of bad parenting, and the ravenous appetite and unchecked aggression that distinguish him from the other children are similarly unmediated by prior experience. Rather, he is a living embodiment of the common enough anxiety that our children are monsters who will suck the life out of us. Such a focus might lead us to the conclusion, for example, that Ben “has” adhd or some other psychiatric “illness” pointing to the fact, and in agreement with family dynamics, that Ben is the problem, something is, indeed, wrong with Ben. This type of interpretation can only be made with confidence if other issues (see below) are ignored, neglected, or are unavailable in the clinical situation. If unavailable, the medical model often fills the void.

The fifth child, Nature's child, has robbed Harriet of everything she assumed was her birthright, her self, her home, her husband, her fantasies of perfection.

An alternative interpretation might well run as follows: Ben is an attachment-disordered child who shows all the behavioural and emotional symptoms of an attachment disorder. The clues as to why this has occurred are clearly present in the text: family relationship issues before the birth, the parental solution of addiction to childbirth as a way of dealing with their internal difficulties (everyone around them knows this and is disturbed by it), a connected closing of minds to reality and consequences, Harriet's conviction that the baby inside her is a monster that is consuming her life force, the failure of bonding and attachment to the baby, the fact that Ben becomes a family scapegoat and takes up an excluded position in the family, etc., etc. etc. In this way, even normal children become seen to be monsters in families that need to scapegoat. Seen in this way, Ben is a symptom of family dysfunction.

Thus, Harriet has a distorted view of the Ben even before he is born, perceiving normal kicking as harmful attacks on her internal space. He becomes a monster even in the womb, doing damage, taking away her independance, causing distress. She cannot wait to eject him, remove him from proximity to a distance at which he will cause no harm.

The distancing continues after birth - Ben is shut away in his room, there are bars on the windows, he is treated as if he were an alien invader. His parents seem unaware of the emotional impact of what they do (it might be said to be unconscious). Because of their lack of empathy and their view of their son as alien, aggressive, wilful, damaging, they defend themselves in a way that makes the problem worse and eventually turns their fear into reality. Because of the unwitting treatment he receives Ben becomes a monster.

In scapegoating families the member selected to become the family scapegoat is usually a child. When a child does become a scapegoat then that child is often presented as being emotionally disturbed so that the clinical picture is that of a family with a disturbed child. This simple picture actually conceals the fact that the emotional disturbance presented by the child is due in no small measure to being the focus for the conflicts and tensions of the other family members. Indeed, the reason that such a family is able to tolerate those conflicts and tensions lies solely with the selected child, who is actually absorbing them, who not only becomes disturbed as a consequence but is also the lynch pin in an equilibrium which allows the family to continue to function. The fantasy is that, if one member could only be expelled from the family, the family would be ideal. Sadly, clinical experience does not bear this out: another scapegoat is then discovered. Bell and Vogel wrote a paper, entitled, ‘The emotionally disturbed child as the family scapegoat’, saying it ‘is concerned with how a child in the family, the emotionally disturbed child, was used as a scapegoat for the conflicts between parents, and what the functions and dysfunctions of this scapegoating are for the family’

Thus do families create monsters without recognition or insight into how this comes about...... Unfortunately, this lack of insight is frequently replicated in professional systems.

Sinclair Lewis. Babbitt.

The first hundred pages of Babbitt describe, almost in mock-heroic fashion, a day in the life of the Average Business Man. The Substantial Citizen is taken at his own valuation; each event of his day is of world-shaking importance, and must be captured in photographic detail: Business Man shaving, Business Man changing suits, Business Man starting car, Business Man completing deal, and so on. The effect would be highly ironic if the author maintained his detachment. But instead of allowing us to infer the limitations of his hero, Lewis himself points them out: he stresses that in a city which seems built for giants George F. Babbitt is really a pygmy.

Babbitt is portrayed as the archetype of the Booster, loudmouthed, unthinking, and insensitive. His speech, compounded of the clichés and prejudices of his group, is not the expression of a sentient, rational human being. His symbols of truth and beauty are the mechanical devices which surround him, even though he understands nothing of their workings. Success for him means conformity to the pattern of living delineated by the one true American art, advertising. He often shows Babbitt as a caricature of a real person, ironically prevented from becoming fully human by the restrictions which all the people of his class impose upon their society. However, Babbitt does possess an inner life, a yearning for the exotic and a native decency which separate him from his back-slapping associates-the Vergil Gunches and Chum Frinks--and link him with a misfit, Paul Riesling.

When the novel opens, Babbitt has begun to regularly indulge in fantasies about a fairy girl who makes him feel like a gallant youth. Babbitt's family consists of his three children, Verona, Ted, and Tinka, and his dowdy, devoted wife, Myra. Babbitt's closest friend Paul Riesling is even more dissatisfied with his life. He is also more vocal about it. Although he dreamed of becoming a professional violinist in his youth, Riesling became mired in the life of the average middle-class businessman of his generation. His wife, Zilla, is equally unsatisfied with the monotonous, conventional routine of Zenith, but she vents her frustrations by constantly nagging Paul.Both men experience a growing impulse to rebel against social conventions. When Babbitt discovers that Riesling is having an affair, he preaches the value of maintaining one's good social standing in the community. Riesling retorts that his life is miserable, so he doesn't feel guilty for seeking a little comfort in the arms of another woman. Soon thereafter, Riesling and Zilla have another argument; Riesling snaps, shoots his wife, and subsequently receives a sentence of three years in the state penitentiary.

Babbitt is devastated by the loss of Riesling's steadying presence in his life. His own desire for rebellion comes to the surface when he realizes that he wants his fairy girl in the flesh. When the attractive widow, Tanis Judique, enters his life, Babbitt thinks he has found his fairy girl and begins an affair. At the same time, Babbitt becomes more critical of the conservative opinions of his friends. When the threat of a general strike hangs over Zenith, Babbitt ventures to support some of the claims of the strikers, shocking and alienating his social set. While Myra is away nursing her sick sister, Babbitt stays out late, drinking and partying with Tanis' bohemian friends.

Upon her return to Zenith, Myra becomes suspicious of Babbitt's activities. When he finally admits to her that he is having an affair, he convinces her that it is her fault. However, Babbitt becomes disillusioned with Tanis when he realizes that in many ways, her life is just as conventional as his. Meanwhile, Babbitt's friends try to bully him into returning to his old ways. When Babbitt refuses to conform, they shun him, and his business begins to suffer. When Myra falls seriously ill with appendicitis, Babbitt realizes that it is too late to become a rebel. He once again becomes a devoted husband and deeply regrets the pain he has caused his wife. Babbitt's friends offer their support during the crisis. Babbitt gratefully accepts the chance to resume his old life and quickly regains his respectable social status.

This novel exposes the hollowness of the attempt to escape feelings of emptiness by turning to excitement and apparent change. It pillories the illusions of materialism and the comfortable complacency that is the result. This is a story of a troubled family, troubled by the illusions that may be sustained and created by consumer capitalism and the meaninglessness that is at the heart of an enterprise driven by purely materialist values.

Toni Morrison. Beloved.

Morrison's critically acclaimed novel Beloved probes the most painful part of the African American heritage, slavery, by way of what she has called "rememory" -- deliberately reconstructing what has been forgotten. The novel is set after the Civil War and emancipation, during the period of national history known as Reconstruction ( 1870-90). Much of the characters' pain occurs as they reconstruct themselves, their families, and their communities after the devastation of slavery. They cannot put slavery behind them by a simple act of will. As the novel opens, the past literally haunts the present. Visible only as red light, a spiteful ghost harasses the main female character, Sethe, and her daughter Denver. When the main male character, Paul D, expels the ghost, it returns in human form as the character Beloved. The past cannot be exorcized; it demands recognition in the present. The recognition involved in rememory requires more than the work of individuals; it is a continual, communal process.

Before the war, Sethe, pregnant, sent her children away to their grandmother in Ohio, whose freedom had been paid for by their father. Sethe runs too, but when her "owners" come to recapture her, she attempts to murder the children, succeeding with one, named Beloved. This murder will (literally) haunt Sethe for the rest of her life and affect everyone around her.

Beloved continues her earlier novels' exploration of themes such as the black community, motherhood, child abuse, and the relationship between a man and a woman.

Mozart. The Marriage of Figaro.

The story in outline: randy husband with roving eye chases reluctant young woman while neglected wife schemes to re-win husband’s affections. Meanwhile, woman’s fiancé struggles with issues of trust as youthful neighbour comes to terms with coming of age.

Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" embodied the spirit of the French Revolution when it premiered in 1786, portraying the comic triumph of skilled and quick-witted middle-class servants over their pompous and decadent royal masters. The Beaumarchais play from which this opera drew inspiration had been banned in Paris for its volatile political content: finding dark humour in class power struggles was dangerous business in pre-Revolutionary France. For the many fans of the effervescent masterpiece today, its revolutionary overtones are all but lost. Yet it endures because Mozart went beyond the class struggles of his day to weave many of life's timeless themes into the opera: love and betrothal, betrayal and justice, greed and vengence, innocent youth and jaded old age. Characters who Beaumarchais sketched as ideologically shaded silhouettes gain through Mozart’s music the hearts and souls of persons one might embrace. A youth trembling with new passions. A young man confident of his cleverness. A loving wife, forlorn, her husband estranged. Couples that, like real couples, can both quarrel and forgive.

If the couples here had had children would they have sought the help of CAMHS?

Shakespeare. King Lear.

This opening Scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear deals with love and devotion given to those who can’t appreciate it. Both Cordelia and Kent, the two people in the play most devoted to Lear, are banished from his presence. Lear, in a flush, imperils his kingdom, family, safety, and sanity in one fell swoop. The stage is set for a deterioration of King Lear in mind, body, and soul. Due to his narcissism, Lear sets in motion the circumstances that will cost him dearly. The narcissistic excesses of the King lead to narcissistic imbalance in other characters. Consistent with the self-psychology of Heinz Kohut and the object relations theory of D. W. Winnicott, narcissistic disorder rips through the boundaries between the characters; self-regard becomes a matter of exchange in an interpersonal economy just as money or property is. The absent mothers is also significant, and we get a vivid sense of the importance of good enough mothering as grown children sacrifice themselves to become their fathers' mothers. While Shakespeare's play shows the tragic effects of the king's narcissistic arrest, it offers an interlude of hope for the transformation of his narcissism and ends in the loss of the good-enough mother figure who could facilitate that transformation.

The very idea of staging a love contest should make us stop to think. Lear invites his three daughters to declare publicly and unreservedly (before his courtiers, vil razza dannata, and following a fanfare) feelings that mature, sensitive people usually prefer to express in private, probably through attitudes or gestures rather than words. As a rule, true love tends to be declared in whispers; if we find ourselves shouting it from the rooftops, we usually sense that something is basically wrong. Lear shows himself to be unaware of these simple truths. By staging a public competition (prizes and all) between his daughters, he gives the impression of being a person who has probably never experienced the delicacy of genuine feelings of love. And even if he has, he was unable to recognize it for what it was. Anyone who needs emphasis or "fulsome excess" reveals an inability to appreciate the fundamental value of spontaneous demonstrations of affection.

There is therefore a fundamental problem of attachment in all of Lear’s relationship that infects others and leads to affection and its substitutes being demanded and coerced rather than evoked and expected in the context of a mutually giving relationship. This absence we see in many families.

Tolstoy. Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina in part as his personal statement on the family debate occurring in Russian literature at that time. The first sentence of the novel, concerning the happiness and unhappiness of families, underscores the centrality of this idea. Tolstoy takes a pro-family position in the novel, but he is candid about the difficulties of family life. The notion that a family limits the freedom of the individual is evident in Stiva’s dazed realisation in the first pages of the novel that he cannot do whatever he pleases. This limitation of freedom is also evident in Levin’s surprise at the fact that he cannot go off to visit his dying brother on a whim but must confer with his wife first and respond to her insistence that she accompany him. Yet despite these restrictions on personal liberty, and despite the quarrels that plague every family represented in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy portrays family life as a source of comfort, happiness, and philosophical transcendence. Anna destroys a family and dies in misery, whereas Levin creates a family and concludes the novel happily. Anna’s life ultimately loses meaning, whereas Levin’s attains it, as the last paragraph of the novel announces. Ultimately, Tolstoy leaves us with the conclusion that faith, happiness, and family life go hand in hand.

Anna Karenina is best known as a novel about adultery: Anna’s betrayal of her husband is the central event of its main plot. It is also a study of marital relationships and, it goes without saying, a powerful study of narcissism in intimate relationships. Why should CAMHS clinicians read this novel? Because it is the landscape we meet each and every day.

Turgenyev. Fathers and Children

Turgenev's masterpiece about the conflict between generations. The portrait of Bazarov, the energetic, cynical, and self-assured `nihilist' who repudiates the romanticism of his elders, shook Russian society.

On the surface it is a very simple story of two college youths on summer vacation. They visit each other's home, they embarrass their families by their radical ideas, they fall in love, and they separate, one to die accidentally of blood poisoning, the other to marry and live tamely ever after. Bazarov, as I have said, is a Nihilist: "a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in." Nihilism may be a misleading term, since Bazarov does not deny everything; he has a positive, absolute faith in intellect, or more specifically in science. But he does deny all the values of the "fathers," seeing nothing but sentimental foolery or falsehood in their social graces, their romantic ideals, their fine arts, their patriotism, their religion. And the whole system has to be smashed -- Russia is too rotten for mere reform. As for reconstruction, there is no point in talking about it until the ground has been cleared by a thorough job of destruction. In this ruthless, uncompromising spirit Bazarov lives and dies, conceding nothing to love, fear, joy, or sorrow. Although he fails to smash anything, he succeeds in retaining his unconquerable will even in death.

This is a novel about the teenage state, the conflict between generations, and the destructiveness, risk taking, fear of intimacy and denial of vulnerability that may appear at adolescence.

Giuseppe Verdi. La Traviata.

This story of true love and family conflict is set to magnificent melodies and waltzes by Verdi. The story is a quintessential romantic attack on conventional bourgeois morality, arguing that a good heart is more important than propriety, that the social distinctions which split the beau monde (high society) from the demimonde (the world of illicit sex) are cruel and hypocritical, and that true love must triumph over all.  La Traviata's intent scrutiny of a woman whose sexual employment and cultural identity have been conflated, focusses on the prostitute as a means to interrogate contemporary society's fraught treatment of the commercial. It is also a story of parental control and possessiveness that results in tragedy for the younger generation, a portrait of family enmeshment, and it’s final resolution, through disaster, in some understanding , reconciliation, and repentance.

Virginia Woolf. To The Lighthouse.

The harmful effect of love that hinges on the interdependence of self and other is a central focus in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, as suggested by a key phrase on which Lily Briscoe meditates and which defines the main concern of Mr Ramsay's work: "Subject and object and the nature of reality"  Her characters are disturbed by realisations that no form of love is exempt from destructiveness. As Mrs. Ramsa broods on the dishonesty of her marriage, she is "reminded of the inadequacy of human relations, that the most perfect was flawed"; and a little later she thinks "of human relations, how flawed they are, how despicable, how self seeking at their best". Although Mrs. Ramsay defensively overestimates her marriage, Woolf means it to be an exceptionally good bond in order to delineate the problems inherent in love no matter how "perfect" it is. By exploring the injury done by even the "best" love, Woolf provides a dimension usually ignored by those who criticise the structures of gender and family for the ways they limit and channel relationships. Woolf emphasises the need to readjust such structures radically, but she does not hope to abolish them totally, for she realises that love cannot exist without difference and otherness. Her solution lies rather in the need to recognise that male and female, parent and child, are contained within each person, and that therefore human relations do not involve polarised unities, but oscillating dyads.

The work is one of her most successful and accessible experiments in the stream-of-consciousness style. The three sections of the book take place between 1910 and 1920 and revolve around various members of the Ramsay family during visits to their summer residence on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. A central motif of the novel is the conflict between the feminine and masculine principles at work in the universe. With her emotional, poetical frame of mind, Mrs. Ramsay represents the female principle, while Mr. Ramsay, a self-centred philosopher, expresses the male principle in his rational point of view. Both are flawed by their limited perspectives. A painter and friend of the family, Lily Briscoe, is Woolf's vision of the androgynous artist who personifies the ideal blending of male and female qualities. Her successful completion of a painting that she has been working on since the beginning of the novel is symbolic of this unification.

As Lily Briscoe suffers through Charles Tansley’s boorish opinions about women and art, she reflects that human relations are worst between men and women. Indeed, given the extremely opposite ways in which men and women behave throughout the novel, this difficulty is no wonder. The dynamic between the sexes is best understood by considering the behaviour of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. Their constant conflict has less to do with divergent philosophies—indeed, they both acknowledge and are motivated by the same fear of mortality—than with the way they process that fear. Men, Mrs. Ramsay reflects in the opening pages of the novel, bow to it. Given her traditional notions of gender roles, she excuses her husband’s behaviour as inevitable, asking how men can be expected to settle the political and economic business of nations and not suffer doubts. This understanding attitude places on women the responsibility for soothing men’s damaged egos and achieving some kind of harmony (even if temporary) with them. Lily Briscoe, who as a -single woman represents a social order more radial and lenient than Mrs. Ramsay’s, resists this duty but ultimately caves in to it.

Woolf's point is that being good to someone--a basic definition of love--has a destructive effect on oneself and the other. She grants the creative power of love, and her ultimate aim in focusing on the damage in love is to provide a sound basis for promoting its benefits; yet she insists that love always does some harm, and this harm grows more terrible as the strength of love increases, even in the most idealised form of love, motherhood. In view of this, the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are destroying each other does not keep their marriage from being outstanding. As Woolf sees it, if they were not destroying each other, they would have no chance of loving.

The themes of this novel are: marriage, the family, the relation of the masculine and feminine worlds, and the recurrent theme of values.

Childhood

Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory is arguably the finest autobiography of the twentieth century, even taking Henry Adams's Education into consideration. Speak, Memory is a highly nuanced evocation of a life lived in Russia, France, Germany, England, and America. He was perpetually in exile, a follower of Proust and Gogol, an accomplished lepidopterist, a challenging teacher, and a brilliant stylist who loved words, contradictions, and the shape of stories told and then retold.

The opening lines of his autobiography: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a small crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five heartbeats per minute)."

The memoir begins with the author's birth in St. Petersburg in 1899, though its real beginning is in 1903, when Nabokov's consciousness fully awakened and his prodigious memory clicked into place. It covers his blissful childhood as the eldest son of an almost unimaginably privileged Russian family and that family's escape from the Bolsheviks in 1918. It touches lightly on his years at Cambridge, his European exile during the 1920s and 1930s, and ends with his departure for the United States in 1940. Though it does tell a story, in structure it is episodic rather than linear, and Nabokov backs and fills as the inclination strikes him. Narrative line is almost nonexistent, so the reader is pulled along by Nabokov's effort to find the connections within his own past -- "The following of such thematic designs through one's life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography" -- and by the endless surprises of his prose.

Speak, Memory explores the way memory and reminiscence provide the author with the artistic power to defy time through his writing. He reconsiders and re-imagines episodes and sequences in his life, reflecting upon certain points in time from different points of time later in his life in a way that challenges the notion of linear chronological passages.

Nabokov celebrates family life, particularly in the years when he lived with his parents in St. Petersburg province before World War I. Speak, Memory ends with another celebration of family life, when he is a husband and father. Childhood memories are the Pandora's box from which so much good and true writing emerges, in fiction as well as memoir. Tastes, colours, sensations, fears, dreams, visions, fantasies, above all a capturing of time and place in childhood, seem to bring an urgency and clarity and believability to the difficult business of capturing the reader's mind. The following passage from Speak, Memory illustrates this. The little Vladimir has just been presented a box of colored pencils.

The green one, by a mere whirl of the wrist, could be made to produce a ruffled tree, or the eddy left by a submerged crocodile. The blue one drew a simple line across the page -- and the horizon of all seas was there. The brown one was always broken, and so was the red, but sometimes, just after it had snapped, one could still make it serve by holding it so that the loose tip was propped, none too securely, by a jutting splinter. . . . The white one alone, that lanky albino among pencils, kept its original length, or at least did so until I discovered that, far from being a fraud leaving no mark on the page, it was the ideal implement since I could imagine whatever I wished while I scrawled.

Goethe/Schubert. Erlkönig Erl King)

In April 1779 Goethe made a terrifying night ride on horseback from Weimar to Tiefurt with the seven-year-old Fritz von Stein in the saddle before him. The son of Goethe's close friend, Charlotte von Stein, Fritz was educated by Goethe for three years, from 1783 to 1786, and in Goethe's house, which led to many prurient rumours in Weimar. The frightening memory of that ride, along with the mis-translation by his friend Herder of a Danish folktale Ellerkonge (King of the Elves) as Erlkönig (King of the Alders), contributed to this poem written before August 1781 and published in 1782. It has been called "the most terrifyingly erotic poem" of Goethe's life, since he was in the midst of a quarrel with Charlotte, which was exacerbated by the attentions that he had paid to a very attractive visitor to Weimar, the Marchioness Branconi.

This was one of Goethe's best-known poems, and several composers had set it to music, including Goethe's associates Reichardt and Zelter. Goethe took an old German legend about an evil goblin that abducts children, and wrote it in the style of a Scottish ballad. Ballads were one of the forms of folk poetry that Goethe's mentor, Gottfried Herder, helped to make popular in Germany.

Schubert set the song to music in 1815 and there are few musicians who do not marvel at Schubert's ingenuity. The poem's built-in dramatic qualities -- the terror of the child, the calming voice of the father, the three inveiglements of the Erl-King, and the factual tones of the narrator -- were all combined in an onrushing 4/4 rondo form to make a musical masterpiece.

The poem depicts a father riding through a forest bearing in his arms his young son, who cries out to his father that the Erl King, the spirit of wind and forest, is tempting him to follow him. "Father can't you see the Erl King? . . . My son, it's the swirling of the mist." The father ignores his son's cries, pressing him closer to his chest and riding faster and faster. When he arrives home, his son is dead in his arms.

Schubert changes the focus of the poem from the pretty promises of the Erl King to the terror of the child, added to by the father’s refusal or inability to hear him, using musical means to do this.

The Erl-King

Who rides at a gallop through night so wild? It is the father with his dear child. He grips the boy firmly in his arms, He holds him safe, he keeps him warm.

‘Son, why do you cower so fearfully?’ ‘Father, the Erl-king! Can you not see? The dreadful Erl-king with crown and tail?’ ‘My son, it is mist blown by the gale.’

‘You lovely child, come away with me, We’ll play together down by the sea; Such pretty flowers grow on the shore, My mother has golden robes in store.’

‘My father, my father, oh do you not hear What the Erl-king whispers into my ear?’ ‘Be calm, stay calm, it’s nothing my child But dry leaves blown by the wind so wild.’

‘My fine young lad, won’t you come away? My daughters are waiting for you to play; My daughters will lead the dance through the night, And sing and rock you until you sleep tight.’

‘My father, my father, can you still not see The Erl-king’s daughters waiting for me?’ ‘My son, my son, I can see quite clear The moon on the willows, there’s nothing else there.’

‘I love you my boy, you are such a delight; And I’ll take you by force if you put up a fight.’ ‘My father, my father, he’s gripping me fast! The Erl-king is hurting! Help me, I’m lost!’

The father shudders, and speeds through the night, In his arms he holds the moaning boy tight; At last he arrives, to home and bed: In the father’s arms the child was dead.

This poem may be taken to be a description of the normal fears of childhood, populated as it is by visions of monsters. witches, and opposed forces of good and bad. These forces appear to be so powerful and frightening that, as a child, one is not sure if parents will be able to withstand them.

Alternatively, and additionally, the song can be read as an allegory. There is no “safe base”, in the John Bowlby sense of the phrase. The horse gallops wildly and, at first, the father seems to hold the boy in his enfolding arms in an embrace of safety. Yet this is not enough to keep the frightning world at bay. It calls seductively and the father has no apparent understanding to the depth of the boy’s terror and therefore is unable to contain his fears.

Adolescence

Colette. Ripening Seed.

This novel, translated from French, is set during summertime in Brittany. Vinca and Philippe are childhood friends who are awakening to their sexuality and desire. The theme centres around their development from childhood to adulthood and how each becomes torn by their two selves. At times they want to remain as children, and in other situations they want to be treated as adults.

The story concerns the affair of Philippe, aged 16, with an older woman, and how the consequences of this affair affect the balance of his other relationships, particularly with his childhood sweetheart, Vinca. Mme Dalleray who is lonely and her life empty, seduces him initially. Towards the end of the novel, when knowledge of his affair comes to light, Vinca herself seduces Philippe. Both seductions make clear the sordid nature of the sex, though this is portrayed in the novel without vulgarity. Throughout the novel, the connections between sex, desire and power are strongly intertwined.

Colette's theory of personality, a tendency to reduce all thought to desire, all spirit to sensation and effectively illuminates the heightened sensuality of adolescence.

William Golding. Lord of the Flies.

This book centres on a group of boys who, following a plane crash, are stranded on a desert island. At first they work together, building shelters and gathering food. But soon group tensions split the group as Ralph tries to maintain reason, order and structured discipline, opposed by Jack and his band of painted savages. Primal instincts take over and civilisation crumbles into animal savagery and violence. Golding uses the playing field of adolescence to explore the roots of evil, tracing the defects of society back to the defects of human nature.

Published in 1954, this book rapidly gained popularity in England, then in America, then in translation throughout Europe, Russia, and Asia, until it became one of the most familiar and studied tales of the century. In the 1960s it was rated an instant classic in the literature of disillusionment that grew out of the latest great war, and it seemed certain that it was the perfect fable that spelled out what had gone wrong in that dark and stormy time and what might devastate our future.

Golding, who had been a naval officer during the war and had seen, indeed volunteered for, quite a lot of action, wrote the book because of the puzzle of evil. Where did it come from? The post-war generation knew perfectly well--it came from them, the enemy, the Germans, those who bombed London--but this was an answer that did not satisfy Golding. He had not only been a naval officer, he had been a schoolmaster, and knew boys. In the book, it is precisely Jack, the boy who leads the rest of the marooned children into the paths of unthinking evil, who says near the beginning of the book, "We're English; and the English are best at everything. So we've got to do the right things." He ends up as a tiny Hitler. So it could happen here after all. A party of English schoolchildren are marooned without adults on a coral island. The aircraft in which they were being evacuated from a nuclear war (the proof that evil is well-established or ineradicable among adults) either crashed or was shot down. Ralph, an attractive boy with fair hair and physical grace, is elected leader, in part because he has found the conch that calls the children to order and that becomes a symbol of democracy among them: whoever is holding it has the right to speak. Piggy is first his acolyte and then his guide: fat, shortsighted, suffering from asthma, he is also his social inferior, as demonstrated by his grammatical solecisms (he says "them" for "those"). But unlike Ralph, he is capable of independent thought. Jack is the leader of the choirboys, who at the beginning of the book still have a distinctive uniform; he never accepts Ralph's leadership, rejects the symbolism of the conch, and in the end wrests the leadership away from Ralph, leading the choir and "the littluns" (the children too young to have individual characters) to the utmost savagery. Were it not for the intervention of a British naval officer, landing from a warship, at the very end of the book, Ralph would have been killed by Jack and his tribe of followers, who set fire to the entire island in order to flush Ralph out. This is a perfect replay of the German Gotterdamerrung ordered by Hitler: but the rescue by the naval officer is no solution to the problem of evil, since he himself represents the very forces that are making the nuclear war from which the children had to be evacuated in the first place. Ralph and Piggy, though temperamentally very different and of two social classes, represent rationality and the rule of law. They want to act sensibly and responsibly; to build shelters against the rain, to light a fire and keep it going so that the smoke might attract rescuers. But Jack wants to hunt, and turns his choirboys into hunters; and in the end the dionysiac excitement of the hunters' life, with its bloody rituals and savage dances, comes to dominate, both by means of its intrinsic attractions and its ruthless imposition of conformity, leaving Ralph and Piggy isolated. Jack and his hunters also offer the littluns protection against the "beastie," the imaginary creature they believe inhabits the island's jungle, that will come to destroy them in the night, in whose existence the older boys half-believe themselves. But there is no beastie, though an attempt to ward it off by erecting the head of a hunted pig on a pole acts to reinforce the belief in its reality. Thus a band of British boys, when left to their own devices on an isolated tropical island (which, as Ralph points out at the beginning of the book, is a perfectly good island, because it has everything the children need to live comfortably--a Garden of Eden in fact) create a polity not very different from the Nazi one: obsessed with imaginary enemies, they invest a leader with total power, they suppress freedom, persecute dissenters and ruthlessly impose barbaric rituals. The last two to join Jack's savage tribe, the twins, Samneric (Sam and Eric), explain why they deserted the liberal-democratic Ralph and Piggy: "--they made us--" "--we couldn't help it--" Precisely the argument of millions of ordinary Germans.

Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a coming-of-age story of Scout Finch and her brother, Jem, in 1930's Alabama. Through their locality meanderings and the example of their father, they grow to understand that the world is not always fair and that prejudice is a very real aspect of their world no matter how subtle it seems. One central theme of this book is that valuable lessons are learned in confronting those who are unlike ourselves and unlike those we know best. In the story, the children must grow up, learn civilising truths, and rise above the narrowness of the place and time in which private codes and even some legal practices contradict the idealistic principles that the community professes: "Equal rights for all, special privileges for none," as Scout says. During the course of the novel, the children pass from innocence to knowledge. They begin to realise their own connection with the community's outsiders, and they observe one man's heroism in the face of community prejudice. One overarching theme of the novel is that the mark of virtue, not to mention maturity and civilisation, involves having the insight and courage to value human differences: people unlike ourselves and people we might label as outsiders. In developing this understanding these children move from the world of childhood into a mature adolescence in which they begin to appreciate the structure of society and human relationships and to develop an understanding of human beings from the inside as motivated and feeling beings.

A poignant and nostalgic story, of childhood innocence and ideal parenthood, of silent beneficiary and subtle fight for justice, of relationships with and understanding people.

J D Salinger. Catcher In the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye has been labelled a classic "coming of age" story, complete with teenage angst, alienation, and loss of innocence. It is narrated by 16-year-old Holden Caulfield. At the start of the story, Holden has just been expelled from school and stands poised on the cliff separating childhood and adulthood. It captures the complexity of adolescence. Holden feels deeply cynical about the adult world; like the 'catcher in the rye' he wishes to wipe out corruption from the world and protect children from becoming a 'phonie' - an adult. Yet, at times, he behaves like a 'phonie' himself and is frustrated by his desire to fit into the adult world and be taken seriously by adults. Holden Caulfield is a spoilt teenager of the east coast elite; he keeps getting thrown out of expensive boarding schools for doing no work. He is an unattractive character; he learns nothing in the course of the book (a narrative of a couple of days hiding from his family in New York); it's rather difficult to see why his mentors waste much time on him.

Turning against what Holden calls the "David Copperfield crap," Salinger made his book antiliterary in a new way, filling it with babbling and impressions that are overtaken by afterthoughts, comic contradictions, half-recognitions, and canceled insights. The familiar subject of lonely youth is conveyed with a managed incoherence, an attractive breakdown of logic that appeals to the confused adolescent in all of us. Sweeping denunciations are followed by abject apologies--only to be followed by other ridiculous pronouncements. Among the many Holdenisms: "I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot," and "I hate the movies like poison, but I get a bang imitating them." These pronouncements mirror the ethos of the profoundly anti-culture and anti-intellectual age in which we live which is perhaps why this fairly mediocre book, from a literary perspective, has come to be so over-rated. Sadly, we are living in an adolescent culture.

Sexuality

Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist.

Essentially the book was intended as a social criticism of the "Poor Law" of 1835 which forced the working or non-working poor who needed public assistance into "workhouses". Dickens began writing it as a series of short stories in a weekly paper, thus it has cliff hangers, and midway he endeavoured to make it a novel. Plot wise, the story is at times overly complicated, but it is an easy page turner. The plot is unbelievable, it relies heavily on extraordinary circumstances and coincidences. The characters and descriptions of London are the strong points.

Dickens believed that everyone was born either good or evil and could not change their nature--because Oliver is born good, he is incorruptible--the plot revolves around Olivers attempted corruption by a bevy of dastardly characters. Thus, Oliver is essentially a flat uninteresting character, while all the interesting fully fleshed out characters are the evil ones who have free reign to do whatever they wished. Who can forget the Artful Dodger? Fagin the Jew?

England during this time was undergoing the early phases of the Industrial Revolution as well as the effects of the Enclosure Acts which meant London was being flooded with poor peasants from the countryside ("greens") who had no way to earn a living from the land anymore which had been "closed off" to them. This excess rural population was essentially exterminated through the severe laws, such as the Poor Law, and living conditions of London (many die in the book of "sickness"), and the novel portrays the history at a grassroots personal level. Many of these folks naturally turned to crime and Dickens shows how it was sometimes (not always) a result of circumstances and not innate moral defect.

Most of the book takes place in the black holes of London's seedy side of thieves, prostitutes and murderers. The dialogue and cockney accents are priceless. The descriptions of places are so good clearly Dickens went there himself which makes the book historical fiction and worthy of study on the account of time travel and feel for a place and time.

For more than a half century, students of Dickens have emphasised the crucial importance of the traumatic period in his life when his parents suddenly removed him from school and their middle-class, more-or-less genteel environment, made him live apart from the family, and forced him to work at Warren's Shoeblacking factory and warehouse. As Walter Allen points out, this experience had crucial influence on (1) the writer's emphasis upon orphans and abandoned children, (2) the self-pity that permeates many of his works, and (3) their fairy-tale plots. It explains why we so often find at the centre of his novels the figure of the lost, persecuted, or helpless child: Oliver Twist, Little Nell, David, Paul Dombey, Pip, and their near relations, Smirke and Jo, in Bleak House. It explains, too, why their rescue, when there is a rescue, so often has the appearance of a fairy-story ending, the result of what is sometimes called wishful thinking, just as the deaths of Little Nell, Paul Dombey, and Jo are dramatisations of his own self-pity. And it explains the dominant mood in which his world is created. It was not at all one of good- humoured acceptance of things, but a mood of nightmare compounded of lurid melodrama and savage comedy, relieved from time to time by unreflecting joy in the absurd and the comic for their own sakes'.

Almost everyone who has written about Oliver Twist has realised that much the most interesting parts of it are those about the criminal underworld. It is not simply that Fagin and Sikes are more exciting than Dr. Losberne and Mr. Brownlow, but that they are described more intelligently. More than this, even, Fagin and his gang are not merely more vigorous and amusing, but they are treated with greater sympathy. Dickens's purpose was undoubtedly to show that criminals were made not born, and that they took to crime because they knew nothing better. Yet Oliver, himself, brought up on a baby-farm and in a workhouse, is naturally good; he takes no harm from his associates, and he succeeds in spite of the absence of opportunity. He is not even used as a bridge between the underworld and the comfortable surroundings at Chertsey. He is a pawn, who never takes a full part, who is sometimes on the black squares and sometimes on the white. Dickens clearly identifies with Oliver.

This is a novel that deals with the reality of child abuse and the social arrangements that might support these phenomena, not least of which is the organisation of society into gradations of class. However, Dickens ultimately sidesteps a focuses stare at these issues because of the permeating sentimentality that oozes through his works. We might conjecture why this is the case and muse upon the connection between the life and work of a writer.

Flaubert. Madame Bovary.

Madame Bovary is the story of Emma Bovary, an unhappily married woman who seeks escape through forbidden relationships with other men.  The book could be viewed as an expose of the situation of women in the 19th century; women who had not yet been emancipated and were expected to obey their husbands, to stay in their homes while the men went to work, or left for months on end to fight in wars.  Emma Bovary also serves as a voice for Flaubert, who patterned the character's personality after his own.  Emma Bovary's "rebellious" attitude against the accepted ideas of the day, reflects Flaubert's views of the bourgeoisie.  Ultimately, Madame Bovary's indiscretions and her obsession with Romance lead to her downfall, which not only appeases the guardians of morality, but shows us Flaubert's view of the world wasn't one of naive optimism.

Emma Bovary, the wife of a provincial doctor who is devoted to her, turns to extra-marital affairs in an attempt to escape the suffocating boredom of her middle-class existence. Flaubert skilfully explores the motives behind these relationships for both partners concerned, refusing to paint Emma as an innocent romantic or a harlot, but rather attempts to place her in a shifting grey area in the middle.

When Emma first marries Charles, she does not have a clear sense of identity. However, she knows that she does not want to be stuck on the farm for the rest of her life. Initially, she assumes that what she feels for Charles will develop into love and that she will become content to be a doctor’s wife. However, when she discovers her husband's sober simplicity–that he wants little more than to live quietly in Tostes and heal common folk–she is crestfallen. Bovary does try to please her, though. He outfits her in the latest Paris fashions and even takes her to a grand ball in Rouen at the estate of a marquis. Mingling with bejeweled nobles and aristocrats in sumptuous surroundings–and waltzing with a viscount–whets her appetite for more of the same. Soon, though, when her feelings for Charles fail to materialise, she enters into a severe depression, feeling herself to be displaced and unable to endure the monotony of her life and marriage. In an effort to alleviate her emptiness, she turns to sentimental novels, imagining herself as the heroine who falls passionately in love with a dashing man who rescues her from a life of poverty and desperation. Her imagination re-creates these fictional figures into two men, with whom she enters into passionate affairs. Her sexual relations with these men give her a sense of aliveness and intoxication. However, this leads her on a self-destructive path.

This is ultimately a picture of narcissism in marriage. What characterises Madame Bovary is that Emma is not aware of the borrowed nature of her desire. Her inability to see repetition, to recognise clichés as clichés, her blindness to the fact that her desire is the desire of the other, manifest her narcissism. Emma's imaginary existence in novels and in the romance of relationships in which she evokes desire, and is the centre of desire (her narcissism), prevents her growth and development. In her narcissism, then, Emma can neither see herself as different from herself nor give life to something that is independent of and different from herself. When she looks at keepsakes, what she sees are not different "possible lives," but different settings ("behind the balustrade of a balcony," "in carriages, gliding through parks," etc.) for an activity that is always the same: dreaming, looking, desiring. In her dream of a honeymoon with a dream lover, the only activity she can imagine is that of going toward another place ("to fly to those lands with sonorous names"); and after one arrives (but where?) the only activity possible remains that of desiring: "One looks at the stars, making plans for the future." Even when, just before she is to go away with Rodolphe, this dream of a perfect honeymoon seems about to come true, the situation is no different: she dreams about going away, and when, in the dream, they do arrive, nothing actually happens: "They would row in gondolas, swing in hammocks, and their existence would be easy and free as their wide silk gowns, warm and star-spangled as the nights they would contemplate. However, in the immensity of this future that she conjured up, nothing specific stood out; the days, all magnificent, resembled each other like waves; and the vision swayed in the horizon, infinite, harmonized, azure, and bathed in sunshine." Emma's failure and frustration are the result of her narcissism, of her imaginary existence, which does not allow any real difference. The only difference Emma can permit is that of scenery, of setting, so that although she retains her sameness and holds the projected image in specular subordination to herself, she can still create the illusion of difference.

Richard Strauss. Salome.

Strauss's musical essay in depravity and necrophilia is based on Oscar Wilde's dramatisation of the story of the fate of John the Baptist at the whim of a neurotic child-woman. Salome is a study in obsession. Gabriel Fauré described it in 1907 as 'a symphonic poem with vocal parts added', an accurate assessment when one contemplates the immense and immensely inventive details of the orchestral score. It has a nightmare intensity, the relentless build-up of horror as Salome's insane sexual desire for Jokanaan's death blots out all other feelings.

The legend of "Salome" derives from a sparse Biblical account of the decadent stepdaughter of Herod, Tetrach of Judea, and her shocking insistence upon the beheading of St. John the Baptist. In the original Gospel story, Salome was depicted very briefly as an amoral adolescent who demands the Prophet's head on a charger, essentially to fulfill a request of her affronted and vengeful mother.

In the operatic version, taken from a much-expanded concept developed by playwright, Oscar Wilde, a more or less psychopathic Salome demands the decapitation of the holy man, both as revenge against one who has spurned her shamelessly immoral propositions, and as an ultimate test of the limits of her stepfather's lascivious desires, a direct trade-off for her acquiescence to his continuing, perverted sexual advances. The entire opera takes place in one Act, set at the palace of Herod in approximately 30 A.D.

This is an essay on the destructiveness of sexuality driven by a sense of wounded narcissism. Salome is self-assured, some might say arrogant, body-flaunting and driven by heat, narcissism, and sexuality.

Janacek. Jenufa.

Jenůfa was the work that launched Janáček’s operatic career. Leos Janacek wrote his opera Jenufa between 1896 and 1903. It wasn't until the 1970s that it began to dawn on the British consciousness that the Czech composer - previously known for a handful of orchestral pieces like the Sinfonietta - was one of the 20th century's greatest operatic composers.

Jenufa can seem melodramatic. It's a classic love triangle, complicated by the interjection of a religious fanatic, the Kostelnicka. Jenufa marked the beginning of Janacek's quest for what he called "speech melody". Although he moved further way from the format of conventional opera, with arias and duets, he developed one of the most personal and subtle melodic signatures in all music. He studied the speech patterns of mental patients, the noises of animals and birds, and he listened as carefully to traditional folk music as he did to the emerging contemporary school from western Europe. He wrote: "The spirit that infuses all life can be found near at hand, in ourselves, among people perfectly familiar to us, enchanti ng and piquant, arresting melodies and amazing scenes." That's why his music speaks more directly to modern audiences than any composer of his time.

This is a story of wild passion and fatal pride, in which love and forgiveness triumph only after great suffering--Janácek deals with compassion and redemption, rather than directly with religion. However, in portraying the life of a small Moravian village in the second half of the 19th century, he does tell us something about the religion and the way in which it permeated everyday life.

Thus the Kostelnicka (or Sextoness) has earned her title on account of looking after the small local church. She is also a trusted adviser, and enjoys a high social status in the community. But her desperate wish to save her stepdaughter's honor and future prospects leads to terrible heresy: "I will deliver the boy to God," she tells herself at the end of Act II, before setting off to drown the illegitimate child. Her reasoning has been twisted by her fear of the inevitable humiliation of both Jenufa and herself, and her pride has proved stronger than her faith.

Yet the Kostelnicka's fear of disgrace was genuine: in the rural communities of 19th-century Moravia, "fallen" girls had to endure horrific public humiliation, and they frequently remained social and economic outcasts for the rest of their lives. The contemporary village mores are tellingly described by Janácek's onetime colleague and fellow folklorist Frantisek Bartos in the preface to their 1899 book, Moravian Folk-songs Newly Collected: "The sensual, sexual love, ennobled by Christianity, has acquired the character of a moral idea, and in this idealized form it is the origin of the most beautiful love songs." But, writes Bartos, the necessary condition of the longing for the beloved which inspired such folk songs was "morality, strict discipline, and chastity. And, among our people, one minded and observed these most strictly."

Thus all transgressors against the stern social order and local customs invited harsh judgment. In one region of Moravia, according to Bartos, a pregnant girl would have her long hair cut off in public by the married women of the village; around the capital of Brno, when a pregnant girl was getting married, the village youths would mockingly carry a cradle behind the wedding procession. Elsewhere in southern Moravia the local shepherd would run the "fallen" girl through the village and crack the whip above her as the local community was returning from Mass.

Life in rural Moravia was far from joyless at the time. Dances and festivals abounded and the young would make merry. Yet young men, too, would invite criticism if they played the field too often, and seducers would rarely escape punishment. In the finale of Jenufa it is the vox populi, in the person of the Shepherdess, which pronounces the judgment on the handsome, feckless Steva: "No girl would marry him now, not even an honest Gypsy."

Only Laca's love overcomes all obstacles. To him, Jenufa--her beauty spoiled and her reputation tarnished--is still the girl he has always loved, and he doesn't even care about her forthcoming trial and the inevitable public scorn. "What is the world to us," he tells her, "if we can comfort one another?" At long last he wins Jenufa's heart: "This is that greater love, the love that pleases God," she responds.

In Jenufa, Janácek draws our attention to some of humanity's highest moral ideals. Laca's love for Jenufa helps him overcome his destructive jealousy; Jenufa's compassion makes the Kostelnicka realise the extent of her pernicious pride, and her subsequent humility redeems her in Jenufa's eyes. At the time of writing his first operatic masterpiece, Janácek was no longer a believer. But compassion and redemption--essential parts of the Christian doctrine--are the cornerstones of Jenufa, and indeed of many of Janácek's subsequent stage works. It is also a story that emphasises the importance of the social background and group pressures and influences on family life and the development of intrapsychic and interpersonal conflict.

Abuse

Anne Bronte. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the second of Anne Brontes novels (after Agnes Grey) and was published a year before her death, in 1848. Anne was by nature and (Wesleyan) influence a girl of religious melancholy and something of this temperament surfaces in this novel's morbid bleakness. Wildfell Hall is narrated by a young farmer, Gilbert Markham, and the story initially focuses upon his love for Helen Graham. Helen is a widow, though still young, and has only recently arrived in the vicinity with her son Arthur. Gilbert discredits local gossip that begins about Helen, the new tenant, and her landlord Lawrence due to their friendship but subsequently hears the two talking intimately and beats Lawrence uncompromisingly. Only then does the truth emerge of Helen's past and her relationship with the landlord. An inspiration for Huntingdon, a wasted talent and drunkard, is said to have been Anne's brother Branwell. The novel was, like Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, criticised for its dark perspective when published.

The novel unfolds as a framed narrative: the outer panels related by Gilbert Markham, the inner panel related by Helen Huntingdon. Markham tells the story of the arrival of a mysterious young widow, Helen Graham, and the subsequent growth of his affection for her, ending with their marriage in the final panel. In the form of her journal, Helen Huntingdon tells the story of her previous existence, the story of a young woman whose artistic abilities provide her an escape from an abusive first marriage. In the interaction of these two narratives, Bronte examines the nature of the woman artist. Her examination begins with what Germaine Greer identifies as the essential problem facing any artist, the problem of "finding one's authenticity, of speaking in a language or imagery that is essentially one's own." In addressing this issue, Bronte also recognises the interference created by Victorian societal mores.

Helen Huntingdon was indeed a courageous and determined woman for her times, who fought the evils of abuse in an impossible, dead-end marriage. She had the strength to walk away from it's clutches, especially when her dignity and her child were threatened. Considering that those were Victorian times to break away from such a marriage and support herself the way she did, fighting the prejudices and malice of her neighbours makes her a strong and admirable character.

Siblings

Joseph Conrad. The Secret Agent.

Conrad's only spy novel is set in the filthy and depraved city of London of the 1880s. Adolf Verloc, a bumbling police informer and the undercover agent for an unnamed European embassy, is recruited to bomb the Greenwich Observatory. Horrified and afraid, he fools his wife (who married him only so he would support her) into letting her half-witted brother, Stevie, help him; Stevie explodes the bomb prematurely and blows himself to bits. When she discovers the truth, Verloc's wife goes mad with rage and grief. This bleakly ironic tale of isolation, despair, and lack of love is perhaps Conrad's most powerful novel, and is a dark satire of English life, with amoral characters on both sides of the law.

Set in late 19th-century London, the story tells of how shopkeeper Mr Verloc is first paid by the Russian authorities to spy on a group of radicals before he becomes embroiled in a plot to blow up Greenwich Observatory. Fed up with paying Verloc money for little more than titbits of useless information on the conspirators, his new Russian boss Mr Vladimir demands results. In an effort to force the tolerant British authorities to stamp out the radicals in their midst, Verloc's paymaster decides the shopkeeper must plan and execute a senseless act of terror against the new religion of the times - science. The total mindlessness of a bomb attack on Greenwich will be blamed on the anarchists and the British will be duped into decisive action. Verloc decides to use his wife's disabled brother Stevie to carry out the attack on Greenwich. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the plan goes horribly wrong and the police end up scraping up Stevie's dismembered limbs from around the observatory. Mrs Verloc dotes on her vulnerable brother and takes her revenge on her husband by murdering him.

The Secret Agent is often treated as if it were primarily a political novel, concerned with 'Diplomatic Intrigue and Anarchist Treachery' or the corruptions of British society, or capitalism, or urbanisation, but if one gives due weight to what Edward Garnett in a contemporary review of the book called 'the hidden weakness in the springs of impulse', the way in which Conrad both bends the psychology of his players, and loads the dice against them, it suggests that, as sometimes with Hardy, the ultimate object of his critique is not so much the social order as the universe: it is a cry of protest at the tragic accident that we cannot even smash, an indictment of the Invisible that guides inanimate things to bring about our destruction. It is a text that deals with human motivations and intended and unintended consequences as well as what might be termed “the unconscious” motivations of action and behaviour. In a review published in 1912, Mencken claimed that Conrad's work "penetrates to the central fact of human existence - the fact, to wit, that life is meaningless, that it has no purpose, that its so-called lessons are balderdash." Conrad indeed had doubts about the purpose of life but his fiction grapples with the great moral questions that are at the heart of all great literature.

Stepfamilies

Thomas Hardy. The Major of Casterbridge.

At a country fair near Casterbridge, Wessex, a young hay–trusser named Michael Henchard overindulges in rum–laced furmity and quarrels with his wife, Susan. Spurred by alcohol, he decides to auction off his wife and baby daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, to a sailor, Mr. Newson, for five guineas. Once sober the next day, he is too late to recover his family, but swears not to touch liquor again for as many years as he has lived so far (twenty–one).

Eighteen years later, Henchard, now a successful grain merchant, is the Mayor of Casterbridge (and known for his staunch sobriety). He is reunited with Susan who brings a grown Elizabeth-Jane with her. Both Henchard and Elizabeth-Jane's mother keep their past history from the daughter.

The return of his wife and daughter sets in motion a decline in his fortunes. Elizabeth-Jane soon falls in love with Donald Farfrae, whom Henchard has employed as his business manager, and whose fortunes are on the rise in direct contrast to his. Unknown to Henchard, Elizabeth-Jane is not his biological child (she died months after they parted), but that of Newson. He learns this secret, however, after Susan's death when he prematurely reads a letter which Susan, on her deathbed, marked only to be opened upon Elizabeth-Jane's matrimony. Henchard conceals the secret from Elizabeth-Jane, but grows cold and cruel towards her. Henchard's growing resentment of Donald Farfrae (as Farfrae's fortunes rise) leads to his standing in the way of a marriage between Donald and Elizabeth-Jane.

In the meantime, Henchard's former mistress, Lucetta, arrives from Jersey and attracts Donald, who soon marries her. Her relationship with Michael Henchard is revealed and both are disgraced. Lucetta - pregnant - dies of an epileptic seizure.

When Newson, Elizabeth-Jane's biological father, returns, Henchard is afraid of losing her companionship and tells Newson she is dead. Henchard is once again impoverished, and, as soon as his oath is up, resorts to drink. By the time Elizabeth-Jane, months later married to Donald Farfrae and reunited with Newson, goes looking for Henchard to forgive him, he has died and left a will requesting no funeral or fanfare

The family group presented at the beginning of the novel, trudging across a generalised and timeless landscape, represent the age-old story of marital discontent and economic vulnerability. This narrative is dramatically refocussed and given tragic impetus at Weydon Fair. Henchard’s decision to ‘sell’ his wife and rid himself of the wearisome responsibility of a family is the novel’s crucial determining act. This choice is made believable, even understandable, by its context of physical exhaustion, alcohol, and the Babylonian fair, where buying and selling involves a degree of corruption, symbolised by the faintly sinister woman selling her adulterated furmity which was made from wheat boiled in spiced milk. However, it is a fundamental act of inhumanity and it proceeds from Henchard’s complex, volatile nature, in which generosity, love, frustration and brutality are compounded.  Throughout the novel Henchard blames fate for his declining fortune, but signally fails to recognise that it is his character that contains the seeds of its own destruction. A crucial instance is his feeling that he is the subject of malevolent forces, when immediately after his confession to Elizabeth-Jane that he is her father, he opens a letter left for him by his dead wife. Its revelation that her father is in fact the sailor Newson destroys Henchard’s happiness at the moment of its birth. This is a story about complex family relationships in which secure attachment is a continuing problem, leading to rifts, conflict, and serial attachments in which old issues are repeatedly played out to the detriment of the children. CAMHS clinicians will be familiar with such stories.

Sisters

E M Forster. Howards End.

This novel deals with personal relationships and conflicting values. On the one hand are the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and their brother Tibby, who care about civilised living, music, literature, and conversation with their friends; on the other, the Wilcoxes, Henry and his children Charles, Paul, and Evie, who are concerned with the business side of life and distrust emotions and imagination. Helen Schlegel is drawn to the Wilcox family, falls briefly in and out of love with Paul Wilcox, and thereafter reacts away from them.

Margaret becomes more deeply involved. She is stimulated by the very differences of their way of life and acknowledges the debt of intellectuals to the men of affairs who guarantee stability, whose virtues of 'neatness, decision and obedience ... keep the soul from becoming sloppy'. She marries Henry Wilcox, to the consternation of both families, and her love and steadiness of purpose are tested by the ensuing strains and misunderstandings. Her marriage cracks but does not break. In the end, torn between her sister and her husband, she succeeds in bridging the mistrust that divides them. Howards End, where the story begins and ends, is the house that belonged to Henry Wilcox's first wife, and is a symbol of human dignity and endurance.

Gay points out that few men, and even fewer women, aspired in the nineteenth century to "unforced, unmercenary, wholly equal mutual love, of love without power."6Forster was one of those yearning for such family relationships; in Howards End, through Margaret, he gives passionate voice to his dreams of a new kind of functional family, which he considered fundamental to all the other unspoken social contracts of life. In the last chapter of Howards End, Forster, a prophet far ahead of his time, projects an impressionistic vision of a radically different, more elastic middleclass family structure that presaged, in 1910, many of the characteristics now common to middle-class families at the end of the twentieth century.

Forster is wonderfully accurate in his perception of the failures in human relationships and he accurately names causes. Howards End is a work of full responsibility. Its theme is "Only connect the prose and the passion," and it shows how almost hopelessly difficult it is to make this connection. Howards End is a novel about England's fate. It is a story of the class war. The symbol for England is the house whose name gives the title to the book and the plot of Howards End is about the rights of property, about a destroyed will-and-testament and rightful and wrongful heirs. It asks the question, "Who shall inherit England?"

Sibling Rivalry

R L Stevenson. The Master of Ballantrae.

The Master of Ballantrae opens in the old Scottish house of Durrrisdeer, ancestral home of the Duries, a family divided by the Jacobite rising of 1745.  Its adventure draws in sea voyages, piracy, buried treasure, magic and nightmare, and centres on the fatal rivalry between two brothers, James and Henry, and the wealthy and beautiful kinswoman who loves one brother but marries the other.  "The Master is all I know of the devil," Stevenson confessed, and the satanic, virile, seductive figure of James Durie dominates the novel.

The Master of Ballantrae has the same essential theme as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Again the decent man and the bad man are linked together, this time not as two souls in one body, but as sons of the same father. Again good is overpowered by evil until the kindly, honourable Henry Durie draws his sword upon his brother, and is finally so swamped by hatred that he becomes insane and stoops to plot his death. The story, narrated by Ephraim Mackellar, the loyal, priggish, selfless servant of the house of Durrisdeer, is always sober and often sombre in tone. There is little colour and no relief; Alison's beauty, the old Lord's courteous dignity, are the stimulus to rivalry between the two brothers. The young children of the house are objects of contention. Spirit and charm belong only to the devil, to the Master of Ballantrae, who uses them to shatter the happiness of his father's house, and whose very existence threatens his brother's peace, even from the other side of the world.

Family Secrets

Trollope. Castle Richmond.

Set in Ireland in the 1840s, Trollope developed a passionate and disturbing tale of the fortunes of the Desmonds and the Fitzgeralds, two upper-class Irish families in the south of the island. The twists and turnings of two love stories and a vast inheritance hanging in the balance are set against the great potato famine of the 1840s devastating the country. Starvation is rampant. The workhouses are full, and all the soup kitchens have to dole out is thin, barely digestible corn meal gruel. Trollope, having worked for the British postal service, living in various areas of Ireland from 1841 to 1857, writes with the immediacy and observation of a man experiencing the events himself.

As the story opens, we soon learn that Sir Thomas Fitzgerald, the owner of Castle Richmond in County Cork, has descended into a long-lasting depression. The cause, one can guess, is a guilty secret. It is embodied in the persons of a pair of blackmailers, the Molletts: a drunken father and an unscrupulous son. They are trying to extort money from Sir Thomas in return for their silence on the subject of the revelations they threaten: about his wife, specifically, which if published will disinherit his children in favour of his relative, Owen Fitzgerald. Meanwhile, in nearby Desmond Court lives the proud, cold, Lady Desmond with her two children Patrick and Lady Clara. Owen Fitzgerald loves Lady Clara, and considers himself engaged to her, a situation which Lady Desmond refuses to acknowledge, ostensibly because she disapproves of Owen's wayward bachelor lifestyle: in actuality she is herself in love with Owen, and jealous of her own daughter.

Thus Castle Richmond turns on the central question of whether Sir Thomas Fitzgerald's wife Mary was legitimately married before she met Sir Thomas; the outcome of the plot hangs on a typical Trollopian irony. If Mary Fitzgerald's first husband was already married when he 'married' her, then her own marriage to Sir Thomas is legal, therefore legitimising his children, though this in turn makes Lady Mary the victim of a gross deception. Trollope increases the tragedy by killing off Sir Thomas before the debate over legitimacy has been resolved. And in Lady Desmond, he paints a marvellous picture of a cold, loveless woman who has married young for position in Society, yet is saddled with a huge estate without money to maintain it.

Trollope sums up his plot thus: "The heroine has two lovers, of whom one is a scamp and the other a prig. As regards the scamp, the girl's mother is her own rival. The girl herself has no character; and the mother, who is strong enough, is almost revolting."

Cultural Differences

The Europeans. Henry James.

In his novel The Europeans, Henry James tells the story of an American family that is visited by their European cousins. James uses these circumstances to depict the differences between Europeans and Americans. The Americans tend to be frightened of the Europeans, since they seem quite foreign within the puritanical American community. On the other hand, the Europeans are surprised by the Americans' provincial ways. Reaction to the unfamiliar is a central element of the novel. Each character's reaction to the unfamiliar reveals his or her personality and also determines whom that character is capable of tolerating and of loving.

Artistic, likeable Felix Young and his attractive but devious sister Baroness Eugenia Münster, Prince Adolph's morganatic wife, come from Germany to Boston to visit their well-to-do Wentworth cousins in the country. Felix soon meets William Wentworth, the stiff, half-brother of his deceased mother, and the Wentworth children--Gertrude, loved by the Rev. Mr. Brand; Charlotte; and Clifford, youthfully gauche and a little alcoholic. Soon both Felix and Eugenia call on the hospitable Wentworths. They loan Eugenia a cottage nearby, and they introduce her to their cool cousin, Robert Acton, who is attracted to Eugenia, and to Acton's gentle old mother. Eugenia hints that she might soon legally dissolve her German marriage. Felix learns from Gertrude that she will not wed Brand and thereupon suggests matching up Brand and Charlotte. Eugenia makes Clifford more suave but also embarrasses him. Acton might propose to Eugenia but for catching her in a fib. Charlotte asks her dour daddy, who sees life as duty not opportunity, to let Gertrude and Felix marry. Eugenia is soon to depart again. At the end, Felix marries Gertrude; Brand, Charlotte; Clifford, Lizzie ( Acton's sister); and Acton (after his mother's death), a nice young woman. In a letter to William Dean Howells, James touches on the "evaporated marriage" which ends The American; he says that although "the tragedies in life . . . arrest my attention," he will write a happy short novel for a change; he then briefly discusses the plot of what became The Europeans. This novel is a small companion piece to The American, since in it we have Europeanised Americans returning from the Old World to the New World, specifically well-delineated New England. The best features of this charming work are probity-stiffened old Wentworth, who looks as if he were enduring "martyrdom, not by fire, but by freezing," and Felix Young, whose European sophistication cannot dampen the latent, up-bubbling New World freshness.