Clarissa Dalloway
First Appearance: The Voyage Out
Date of First Appearance: 1915
Author: Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” This is the opening line of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, and in itself the sentence and the situation are unremarkable. Purchasing flowers isn’t a life-altering bucket list activity or one worthy to inspire a book’s actions and the thousands of words that will describe them. Yet here it is, in some ways signaling a new literary era of ordinary experience as a fiction-worthy topic. As Woolf struggled intellectually with women’s place in literature, she felt that what male history had left obscure and unrecorded deserved its due. Though she might rail against women seen as mere domestic objects, she also valued their role and paid tribute to them in her focus on the female experience. In doing so, Woolf certainly claimed her place as a pillar of modern feminism, and her character Clarissa Dalloway is worthy to be remembered in that oeuvre. By tracing Mrs. Dalloway through the course of only one day, we get enough detail to imply the scope of her life in full, and that’s a pretty remarkable feat for a few waking hours on a not-particularly-extraordinary day.
The novel was actually called The Hours in an early draft and divided into twelve sections representing blocks of waking activity and thought. The first of these two is easy to follow. Woolf traces her protagonist’s movement as she first prepares for and then hosts a party, thus the reason for purchasing flowers at the novel’s opening. That simple sentence provides a second detail later understood as well. Mrs. Dalloway is of the privileged class who has household servants to manage the peremptory chores, so her taking on this task, and noting it, has significance in her sense of worth and also has an important function for Woolf’s authorial purpose. As Clarissa walks home from the flower shop, she will begin a stream-of-consciousness memory recall triggered by what happens around her. The flowers remind her of an important episode when she was eighteen and kissed a girl and met the man she would marry, the backfiring of a car triggers feelings about the war, hearing an old beau is in town causes her to wonder how her life might have been different if she had married him, and the many random memories that flood through her mind unbeknownst to others as she goes about the surface tasks of the day will elucidate what makes Clarissa tick, what troubles her, and what brings her joy. By the end of this one day’s passage symbolically noted by Big Ben’s chiming the passing hours, we will know Clarissa much more thoroughly from those memories floating through her internal musings.
Making so much of a twenty-four-hour calendar marking, even if it is one that has a party attended by Britain’s prime minister, seems “much ado about nothing,” but for Clarissa, “she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.” On the surface, this seems just hyperbole, but when looked at introspectively as Clarissa does, any day has the possibility to experience or to recall life-altering moments. At her party she will hear of a young ex-soldier Septimus Warren Smith who earlier that afternoon had taken his own life. As readers, we have been following that story when we’re not peeking in on Clarissa’s thoughts, so we already know this, but what we become privy to is how Clarissa feels about it. Initially angry that such unsavory news intrudes upon her party, she begins to internalize the preciousness of holding on to or letting go of life, and having the ability to make that choice provides a comforting sense of power.
Several times in the course of her day Clarissa repeats a line taken from a song in Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays. “Fear no more, the heat o’ the sun” references the peace found in the grave, the idea that in death one will be finished with life’s toils and sorrows. But she also celebrates the joyous moments that are triggered too. The fresh morning air brings back a day in young adulthood when she cried out, “What a lark! What a plunge!” as she opened the doors and the country air came flooding in. She quotes Othello’s Desdemona at another point of ecstasy when she feels “if it were now to die ’twere now to be most happy.” Clarissa notes the composite nature life exudes every day and on this particular day, which ends triumphantly with the line, “For there she was,” reappearing at her party after contemplating whether to continue to be or not only a short time earlier. She represents in a significant way Woolf’s own musing about suicide. In Mrs. Dalloway, she fashions Clarissa as a positive foil to Smith’s suicide, one who chooses not to commit the act, but she also celebrates his brave victory, the self-possession of embracing death on his own terms as Woolf eventually does by drowning herself on March 28, 1941.
Death with a capital “D” is the overarching quandary Clarissa struggles with at the end of her day in June, but she also ponders the essential components that make up living—what it means to be a lover, a wife, a mother, a woman, an unextraordinary human being who leaves no remarkable stamp on the world, but “there she was” nonetheless, and through it all “doing good for the sake of goodness.” This existential philosophy simplistically stated provides the core value Clarissa will cling to through this one day and the days that repeat themselves until they don’t. In doing so, she is simultaneously stoic and heroic in the quiet way representing the internal world that we inhabit, the one that more fully reveals the self than its external manifestations have done.
Woolf was influenced by James Joyce’s earlier novel Ulysses with the focus on a single day for its protagonist Leopold Bloom, and in turn Mrs. Dalloway’s single day directly inspired Michael Cunningham’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Hours, made into a highly acclaimed film by the same name (2002). Cunningham brilliantly creates three additional single days—a day in the life of Virginia Woolf, the one in which she kills herself; a day in the 1950s where a housewife is reading Mrs. Dalloway, baking a birthday cake for her husband, and contemplating her own sphere as a wife and mother; and a day in the late twentieth century with another Clarissa who is hosting a party that evening for her friend, who kills himself earlier in the afternoon. Like Woolf’s protagonist, this Clarissa’s day begins as she “carries her armload of flowers out into Spring Street.”
Mrs. Dalloway is on both a grand and a small scale an examination of life and death, and Clarissa becomes a quiet emissary of that contemplation as she realizes there is “something, after all, priceless.” She is memorable for the struggle and for the realization that paradoxically, both life and death are gems of inestimable value.
Bibliography
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Work Cited
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Picador, 1998.
—GS
Mr. Darcy
First Appearance: Pride and Prejudice
Date of First Appearance: 1813
Author: Jane Austen (1775–1817)
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
And we might add a quote of our own:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, will have no dearth of interested prospects.
Jane Austen set the stage of idealized romance for all time when she wrote Pride and Prejudice. And if keeping in step with the book’s male protagonist isn’t enough, there is the BBC’s 1995 television miniseries spin on the wet T-shirt look with Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy sporting a drenched and clinging shirt as he emerges from an impromptu swim in an idyllic country pond. The popularity of this image, and the larger-than-life statue replicating it that now resides in an English lake, speaks to the flip side of the male gaze, the sexual aura surrounding the female worship of Austen’s überdesirable male and the fact that interest in hot romance is alive and well. Austen’s Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy unknowingly sets the bar for all would-be husband prospects to follow. The scores of books too numerous to mention, literally hundreds of Facebook groups with names like “I Refuse to Settle for Anything Less Than Mr. Darcy,” and every romantic comedy male lead since then—Mark Darcy in the Bridget Jones’s Diary series (incidentally played by Colin Firth as the modern Mr. Darcy as well as the Austen version), Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Sex and the City’s Mr. Big, and just about every Hallmark movie and Sandra Bullock film male lead—are all Mr. Darcys in updated clothing.
So, what are the qualities women find irresistible in this preeminent bachelor with an attitude of privilege and superiority? A few points are obvious. Mr. Darcy is tall, handsome, rich, presents a “noble mien,” has a beautiful English estate, and is exceedingly eligible. Who wouldn’t be interested in those qualifications? But that’s too easy for Austen’s carefully constructed plots and complicated characters. To throw more pepper into the pot, early in the novel he’s also arrogant, an elitist, and a bit of a surly gent. In first seeing Elizabeth “Lizzy” Bennet, he says, “She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.” One makes excuses, however, because “one cannot wonder that so very fine a young man, with family, fortune, everything in his favour, should think highly of himself.” Indeed, he does.
Mr. Darcy presents a challenge for the young ladies hoping to land a highly desirable match, and this makes the chase all the more interesting even if women of that period aren’t supposed to be the prowler, they are supposed to be the prey. The man who is hard to catch is all the more alluring because of the huntress’s quest to bag her big game trophy. But Austen doesn’t stop there because, again, such a scenario would be too easy. She adds the brilliant second tier that moves her romance from an interesting tête-à-tête to an epic drama whose pattern is endlessly duplicated in stories women love to love and men love to mock and ridicule (at least if other men are watching them). Elizabeth Bennet isn’t interested in Mr. Darcy, and this literary tension is the perfect setup to make the story such a romantic tease.
To Mr. Darcy’s credit and added to what we come to adore about him, in spite of an initial failure to see Lizzy as physically attractive, he finds her intellectually engaging and an equal conversational sparring partner. At some point Mr. Darcy realizes he doesn’t want an empty-headed trophy wife who looks beautiful at his side but otherwise bores him, and he opens up to the belief that Miss Bennet might be a good match. In the slow burn that is first a mental courtship before a physical one, the readers follow with eager anticipation as Mr. Darcy eventually comes around to valuing the qualities for which women want to be appreciated—their wit, wisdom, and charm rather than a perfect face and figure.
For all his gentleman’s training, however, Mr. Darcy fails miserably in applying romantic persuasion, and in taking on the pomposity the “Fitzwilliam” name projects, he lays out his case for marriage to Elizabeth by saying, “Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections?—to congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?” It is hard to imagine she didn’t jump at the chance to marry him on the spot. Instead, Lizzy jabs back by saying he did not behave in a “gentlemanlike manner,” which of course turns the tables. She has suddenly become the conquest that has eluded him and is now all the more valuable because of it.
Mr. Darcy moves from being an insensitive jerk to a romantic dreamboat largely because he wakes up, feels ashamed of his insensitive behavior, and changes. Marriage proposal number two shows marked improvement when he humbly confesses, “The recollection of what I then said, of my conduct, my manners, my expressions during the whole of it, is now, and has been many months, inexpressibly painful to me.” As one critic puts it, “He is a bad boy who changes for the heroine of the story,” or because of her. Either way, we love it that a good woman can rescue a man who needs help discovering the qualities that make him worthy to be saved. This is a win-win—the female lover’s ego is pumped up because she alone has the power to inspire the transformation; plus she wins the guy who is still tall, handsome, and rich, but now he’s also charming and head over heels in love with only her.
Mr. Darcy as romantic role model is so ingrained in our culture that he has now ventured into the pop and countercultural realms. A pseudopsychological description of something called “The Mr. Darcy Effect” has become a thing. Just Google it and see how many articles come up discussing what a prominent force this is at least in our imaginary longings. And for women wishing to polish up on their desirable wife qualities, the “Marrying Mr. Darcy” board game is available. The Courtship phase helps them with their skills so that in the Proposal stage they can win the most desirable man. Really, we wouldn’t make this up! And along those lines of merging into the ridiculous, Mr. Darcy has even found his way into a Mr. Darcy, Vampyre novel and as the great protector against a zombie apocalypse in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. A Dark Jane Austen Book Club exists as well and proudly boasts of being avid Austen readers who also enjoy “the occasional bloody mayhem thrown in for good measure.” The possibilities are boundless.
First Impressions was an early title for Pride and Prejudice, and Lasting Impressions could become its subtitle. Mr. Darcy, exemplar of all that is desirable in the perfect man, has taken his place in history as the object of female desire and the swoon-worthy catch at the end of the marriage fishing pole.
Bibliography
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Work Cited
Church, Clare. “Let’s Stop Romanticizing Mr. Darcy When There Are Way Better Options in Literature.” Mary Sue, April 16, 2018.
—GS
Pilate Dead
First Appearance: Song of Solomon
Date of First Appearance: 1977
Author: Toni Morrison (1931–)
I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ’em all.
“Sometimes a writer imagines characters who threaten, who are able to take the book over,” Toni Morrison once told an interviewer. “To prevent that, the writer has to exercise some kind of control. Pilate in Song of Solomon was that kind of character. She was a very large character and loomed very large in the book. So I wouldn’t let her say too much.”
Yet Pilate Dead (the family surname a result of a clerical mistake by a drunken Yankee in the Union Army) looms larger than life in this Depression-era novel, Morrison’s third. Pilate isn’t just a survivor—she thrives, despite being motherless since birth, orphaned at age 12, estranged from her only brother and his family for most of her life, and abandoned, shunned, even feared everywhere she’s forced to wander because she was born without a navel. The ultimate outsider, Pilate willfully helps others who are marginalized or on the cusp.
When the Swedish Academy awarded Morrison the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, they cited three novels, among them Song of Solomon, Morrison’s 1977 story of a young black man trying to find his place in the world. The main character, Macon Dead III, called “Milkman,” has three would-be guides and indoctrinators: his father, Macon II, a well-heeled property owner who wants to teach him how to prosper as he did in a white world; Guitar, an angry young black man who joins a homegrown terrorist group and tries to radicalize Milkman; and Pilate, the aunt his father forbids him from seeing.
“Solomon seemed to be very much a male story about the rites of passage, and that required a feeling of lore,” Morrison told another interviewer. Pilate is the “carrier” of family lore and cultural myth. When she sings “O Sugarman done fly away” on the sidewalk as a crowd gathers, it has generational weight—though readers later discover that when her dead father came to her and said, “Sing, Sing,” he was actually speaking the name of the mother she never knew. Yet, singing, “which she did beautifully, relieved her gloom immediately,” and everyone else’s, one suspects. It certainly had that effect on Milkman.
In announcing Song of Solomon as an Oprah’s Book Club selection twenty years after its initial publication, Oprah Winfrey called Pilate “the one person in the family who is open, unfettered, whole: the exiled one,” the “unkempt, mystical, bootlegging Aunt Pilate.” When readers first meet her, Pilate is wearing a raggedy old knit cap and unlaced men’s shoes, using an old quilt for a cloak. At the same time a crowd assembles to watch a black insurance agent fly off the roof of Mercy Hospital, as promised, inside that hospital Pilate’s nephew is being born. As birth and death conflate, she sings a song that feels connected to the very beginning of the African and African American experience, a song about flying, about going home—one of the novel’s main themes. In a young Milkman’s eyes, Pilate was “ugly, dirty, poor, and drunk, the queer aunt whom his sixth-grade schoolmates teased him about.” But though she made her living as a bootlegger, Pilate never drank the wine she sold, and as Milkman approaches manhood his views of her change—especially as she becomes his “pilot,” directing him to seek a rich family history rather than the gold he and Macon II and Guitar pursue.
Like all mythic characters, Pilate has a mystical beginning. Her mother died during childbirth and the midwife thought the baby dead inside. Then Pilate emerged “struggling out of the womb without help . . . dragging her own cord and afterbirth.” As a character, Pilate is colorful without seeming quirky or contrived. She wears a single earring—a brass snuffbox containing a piece of paper on which her father wrote her name—and she keeps her “inheritance” in a green sack that hangs from the ceiling of her narrow one-story house with no gas or electricity, water drawn from a well, and a basement that seemed to be “rising rather than settling.” Pilate, whose name was chosen randomly from the Bible—a family tradition—can quote the Bible “chapter and verse,” and she does not fear death because she “spoke often to the dead”—especially her father, whom she and brother Macon saw blown to pieces because he refused to leave the land he was cheated out of. Wherever she moves she carries with her the bones she believes are from an old man that her six-year-old brother—Milkman’s father—murdered in half fear, half revenge within months of watching their father killed.
During her brief and only period of schooling, Pilate’s favorite subject was geography, which she found useful during “twenty-some-odd years” of wandering. Just as she eventually decides to openly embrace and display her smooth belly, she becomes determined that the lack of a navel will no longer define and isolate her. Pilate cuts her hair and asks herself, “When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?” After giving birth to a daughter, Reba, she moves to Michigan to be near her brother and his family, and eventually Reba will have a daughter and Pilate will be the matriarch of their little family.
Readers are told that palm oil flows through Pilate’s veins, and she laughs but never smiles. A natural healer, she also has a darker mystical side, creating a love potion to make her brother attracted to the wife he no longer wants to touch because he thinks she was too “friendly” with her father, the only black doctor in their Michigan town. And when Macon finds out about the baby and wants to get rid of it, Pilate uses a voodoo doll to restrain him. In this way, she was responsible for saving Milkman’s life, just as she would do so later in the novel when Milkman is fully grown.
According to her daughter, Reba, Pilate can go months without food, “like a lizard.” Pilate “never bothered anybody, was helpful to everybody,” but also believed to “have the power to step out of her skin, set a bush afire from fifty yards, and turn a man into a ripe rutabaga.” Though a “tall black tree” and gentle by nature, Pilate was capable of fierceness. She could hold her own among “quarreling drunks and fighting women.” She uses a knife to threaten a man who was abusing her daughter, and later breaks a bottle over Milkman’s head because his leaving for so long caused her granddaughter, who was in love with Milkman, to wither away and die.
In reviewing the novel for the New York Times, Reynolds Price called Pilate “bizarre and anarchic.” Literature is full of Christ and anti-Christ figures, but Pilate stands alone as a strong female character ironically named for the biblical governor of Judea best known for his weakness: washing his hands of the decision to crucify Christ and leaving it up to the crowd. Morrison’s “Pilate-figure” saves someone’s life not once, but twice.
Bibliography
Song of Solomon (1977)
Works Cited
McKay, Nellie. “An Interview with Toni Morrison.” In Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie, 138–55. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
Price, Reynolds. “The Adventures of Macon Dead.” New York Times, September 11, 1977. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/toni-morrison/song-of-solomon/.
“Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.” Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 1977. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/toni-morrison/song-of-solomon/.
“Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.” Oprah.com. October 18, 1996. https://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/about-toni-morrisons-book-song-of-solomon/all.
—JP
Rebecca de Winter
First Appearance: Rebecca
Date of First Appearance: 1938
Author: Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989)
I am very different from that self who drove to Manderley for the first time, hopeful and eager, handicapped by a rather desperate gaucherie and filled with an intense desire to please. . . . What must I have seemed like after Rebecca?
It’s a charismatic character indeed who can dominate a novel without ever appearing in a single scene. Yet that’s exactly what the titular heroine of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic romance Rebecca does. Dead before the story begins, Rebecca haunts this modern-day rewrite of Jane Eyre even more than Bertha Mason, the original madwoman in the attic, does Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 classic. Like the first Mrs. Rochester, the first Mrs. Maxim de Winter holds the secret to mysteries that a naïve young successor must unravel from behind the locked doors of an eerie British manor. But while Bertha suffers from inherited insanity, Rebecca exemplifies a distinctly modern condition: She was an emasculating bitch. Or so her husband would have us believe.
The idea for Rebecca arose from insecurities the prolific du Maurier, barely thirty but already the author of three novels, suffered in the mid-1930s. Her husband, Frederick “Boy” Brown, known as Tommy, had once been engaged to a mercurial woman named Jan Ricardo, and du Maurier found herself haunted by the possibility that he still held a torch for her. The author also grew up feeling neglected by her actor father, Sir Gerald du Maurier. Famous as the first man to play Captain Hook onstage, he preferred showering his attention on young actresses rather than his daughter. Suffering an inferiority complex, du Maurier fixated on the theme of jealousy and produced a narrative that allowed her to vicariously vanquish rivals for both men. In doing so, she single-handedly revitalized the genre of gothic romance that had died out after the one-two punch of Jane Eye and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in the late 1840s. Setting the novel, like most of her works, in her native Cornwall, du Maurier infused the landscape of southwest England with a foggy ominousness while exposing the manors of the rich as hotbeds of sexual domination, bribery, and murder.
The novel begins with one of the most famous lines in literature: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” As the unnamed narrator reveals, she and her husband have been displaced by the loss of their estate to the impersonal Hotel Cote d’Azur in Monte Carlo, though she reveals the circumstances only gradually, creating intense suspense. In her early twenties, she explains, she met a grieving widower twice her age named George Fortescue Maximilian “Maxim” de Winter who convinced her to quit her job as the secretary to a stuffy American, Mrs. Van Hopper, to marry him. The couple no sooner arrives at Manderley than the woman discovers she can’t compete with the memory of Maxim’s first wife. The housekeeper, the dour Mrs. Danvers, reminds her constantly than she’s no substitute for Rebecca.
Even worse, Maxim seems obsessed with his loss. Brooding at cliff edges, staring into the sea where his first wife drowned, he’s a contemporary version of the Byronic hero. Although emotionally aloof, he insists on his second wife’s total obedience, to the point the narrator compares herself to the family dog at their feet. “These things are not discussed,” Maxim insists when she pries into his anguish. “They are forbidden.”
Much of the novel’s suspense arises from the narrator’s struggle to assimilate into life at Manderley, which is still stocked full of Rebecca’s possessions. The second Mrs. de Winter can’t put on a raincoat without finding a handkerchief monogramed with a taunting “R. de W.” in its pocket. A nightgown left on a closet nail is also monogrammed, and books inscribed with her signature fill the manor. The new Mrs. de W. feels pressured in two simultaneous ways. Maxim infantilizes her, treating her like a daughter until she fears Mrs. Danvers; when she accidentally breaks a china cup of Rebecca’s, for example, she hides the pieces. Yet the narrator also feels her identity melding with Rebecca’s, as if the setting itself coerced her to assume her predecessor’s personality. Mrs. Danvers is the main villain of this effort, engineering humiliation after humiliation for the new wife. She even tricks the narrator into unknowingly wearing a dress of Rebecca’s to a ball, embarrassing Maxim. At another point the old housekeeper nearly pushes her out of a window telling her she’s not fit. As Mrs. Danvers insists, Rebecca had a lion’s courage and a man’s aggression. She lived for no one but herself.
Just when the narrator appears most defeated, however, du Maurier stages a remarkable twist. Thanks to the chance discovery of a sunken boat carrying Rebecca’s body, Maxim confesses that he never loved his first wife. Rebecca was cruel and unfaithful, driving him to madness. When she boasted of being pregnant with another man’s child, de Winter shot her and sunk the vessel with her corpse aboard.
Far from horrifying the narrator, the news empowers her: Realizing that Maxim hated Rebecca, she can now trust that he only feels passion for her. Together, the pair endure an inquest that rules Rebecca’s death a suicide, then a subsequent blackmail attempt by Jack Favell, the dead woman’s cousin, who claims the child Rebecca carried when killed was his. Du Maurier drops a deus ex machina to free the couple: Rebecca’s London doctor appears to report that she had cancer and only six months to live anyway, making the murder a mercy killing. Moreover, thanks to a uterine deformity, she couldn’t conceive children, foiling Favell’s plot. The news drives Mrs. Danvers to madness, and she burns Manderley to the ground.
The lingering question of the novel is who the real Rebecca de Winter was. Was she the conniving, malignant seductress who tricked Maxim into murdering her as a final deceit? Or was she a woman who defied patriarchal expectations until her husband, like the folkloric Bluebeard, dispatched her through the ultimate act of control? The novel never provides a clear picture of Rebecca, leaving readers poring over clues and offering conflicting interpretations as they debate the degree to which the narrator’s account is reliable. As du Maurier’s own son once pointed out, “Everybody else [in the story] thought the sun shone out of her ass. . . . There’s never a bad word about Rebecca except from Max.” What isn’t ambiguous is that the new Mrs. de Winter gains power in her marriage through her role in covering up her husband’s crime. By the end of the novel, she has accomplished exactly what Rebecca never could, making Maxim subservient to her.
Rebecca was a massive best seller on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1930s, selling 40,000 copies in one month in the UK and 400,000 in the U.S. The novel remains a cultural touchstone, and not just because of the classic Alfred Hitchcock adaptation in 1940 (though Hitchcock had to water down the moral ambiguity, dispatching Rebecca with an accidental fall instead of a bullet from her husband). Du Maurier herself wrote a stage version (her short story “The Birds” also inspired a later Hitchcock classic), and an opera was staged in 1983. A musical version of Rebecca played in Europe and Asia to great acclaim in 2006–2009 and was scheduled to premiere on Broadway in 2012 before financing fell through.
Perhaps the greatest sign of the novel’s enduring appeal is that since the 1990s no fewer than four novels have retold the story to explore its gender dynamics for contemporary readers: Susan Hill’s Mrs. de Winter (1993), Maureen Freely’s The Other Rebecca (1996), Sally Beauman’s Rebecca’s Tale (2001), and Cassandra King’s Moonrise (2013). As these homages reveal, du Maurier’s classic raises endlessly debatable questions about marriage and women’s freedom that send us back to Manderley and to Rebecca time and time again.
Bibliography
Rebecca (1938)
—KC
Dracula
First Appearance: Dracula
Date of First Appearance: 1897
Author: Bram Stoker (1847–1912)
I never drink . . . wine.
Your friend,
Dracula
Seriously? It’s hard not to smile a few pages into Bram Stoker’s novel when you read the count’s signature on a note left at a Transylvania hotel for a lawyer he had hired. Dracula is so infamous now that it seems nothing short of crazy someone could see that name and not run the opposite direction—especially after the hotel proprietor and his wife looked at each other “in a frightened sort of way” and, when asked what they know about Count Dracula and his castle, “both crossed themselves and refused to speak further.”
Dracula himself may as well have swooped in and said, “I vant to suck your blood”—a line that never appears in the book, incidentally. But Count Dracula has become such a campy part of pop culture that everyone thinks he said it. Since debuting in Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula the Un-dead (a term Stoker popularized) has appeared in close to twenty stage adaptations, almost as many musicals, a dozen radio shows, a handful of ballets and operas, and more than 200 films. It’s the films, of course, that have made him most famous—some of them action oriented (Van Helsing), some dramatic (Bram Stoker’s Dracula), some tongue in cheek (Love at First Bite, Dracula: Dead and Loving It), some revisionist (Blacula), and some just plain ridiculous (Batman Fights Dracula, Billy the Kid vs. Dracula). Bela Lugosi established the titular role in Universal’s 1931 classic monster movie, then reprised it for the popular Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and several other films and TV productions. Christopher Lee brought the character to life with longer fangs for another generation in ten releases from Hammer Films, and the public’s fascination with vampires has grown, like those teeth, ever since—all because of Dracula, who has become fun scary and nonthreatening enough that he even inspired a children’s breakfast cereal (“Count Chocula”) and a Sesame Street character (the Count) who teaches preschoolers how to count. Meanwhile, Bran Castle, the only fortress in Transylvania that matches Stoker’s description, has claimed the title of “Dracula’s Castle” (though Stoker never visited), and his character’s popularity is confirmed by the nearly half million tourists that visit the site each year.
John Polidori was the first to incorporate the vampire of superstition and folklore into fiction with his 1819 publication The Vampyre, but it was Stoker’s novel that provided an expanded description and solidified characteristics that would be copied over the next century and a quarter: the transformation into a bat, the mind control, the inability to see his reflection in a mirror, the all-black attire, the sleeping in coffins, the turning of victims into vampires, and the repulsion by garlic or crucifix. All the vampire books and entertainments to follow—including Interview with the Vampire, the Twilight and Vampire Diaries series, and cult TV classics like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, and Dark Shadows—owe Stoker a debt of gratitude. It was Stoker who got the public to see vampires not as vague one-dimensional objects of folklore, but as fascinating almost-humans with qualities and emotional capabilities that made Dracula and other vampires seem more real and plausible. Stoker further reinforced the possibility of their existence by using a storytelling structure using “journal entries” and letters from lawyer Jonathan Harker, his fiancée Mina, and their friend Dr. Seward—along with newspaper clippings and a “sound recording” by Seward’s colleague, Dr. Van Helsing. Together they function as eyewitness accounts, which in 1897 would have made Dracula incredibly chilling.
What’s most fascinating about Dracula for modern readers is that things don’t always come easily for him. For a member of the nobility he really works for it, a lunch-pail kind of guy. Lacking a staff (they’re either dead or fellow vampires hidden away) he has to do everything himself. After Harker catches him making up his room and setting the dinner table himself, he realizes that Dracula was also probably the carriage driver. And when Dracula holds Harker a “veritable prisoner”—all doors are locked, the windows overlook a 1,000-foot drop, and outside are wolves Dracula seems to control—he gets Harker to write postdated letters he dictates, then crawls out of his window face-first down the side of the castle and into town to mail them, so as not to arouse suspicion over Harker’s absence. It’s all pretty tiring, apparently—as is trying to find a new minion in London, which he does by flying into the room of a serial killer being held in a mental hospital. It takes repeated trips and a bit of stealth and tiring mind control to pull off the killer’s escape, and it can’t be effortless transforming himself out of mist to stand alongside Mina and Harker, who had finally escaped. After putting Harker into a deep coma, Dracula warns, “If you make a sound I shall take him and dash his brains out before your very eyes,” and with a “mocking smile” he adds, “First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions. You may as well be quiet; it is not the first time, or the second, that your veins have appeased my thirst!”
What the Count says is often worthy of an exclamation mark. “Patience!” he shouts at his three vampire brides when he catches them licking their lips over a fresh blood supply. He’s a dramatic fellow whom Mina describes as “a tall, thin man, all in black,” with “waxen face; the high Aquiline nose” and red eyes and “parted red lips, with the sharp white teeth showing between.” And when he is sated, his face is “bloated” and “blood-stained and fixed with a grin of malice.”
A calculating schemer, Dracula enlists a string of lawyers to help him purchase properties in London so he can presumably seek victims outside of Transylvania, where it’s becoming harder to lure people to his castle. A guest must enter of his or her own free will. That’s one of the conditions of being a vampire, and another more famous condition is that the vampire must be killed with a wooden stake to the heart—though ultimately that’s not how Harker and the others bring him down before he can turn poor Mina into one of his vampire brides. With a band of gypsies also armed and wanting to attack Dracula, Harker finally delivers a fatal blow with a “great bowie knife”—an oversized American blade named for Jim Bowie of Alamo fame. One suspects that future accounts went with the wooden stake because they’re easier to come by.
What made Dracula originally unique are now such clichés that what seems fresher are the mundane details of his life—like the all-night conversations he has about myriad subjects in his extensive library with intended victim Harker—or elements of Stoker’s vampire legend that Hollywood didn’t pick up, like a sacred wafer of Communion as a defense against the vampire. Then again, a cross is more instantly recognizable as a protection than an envelope. What ultimately haunts more than Dracula himself are the stinging words that one of the vampire brides levels—“You yourself never loved; you never love!”—and the Count’s response, “Yes, I too can love.”
Bibliography
Dracula (1897)
Dracula the Un-dead (“the official sequel” written by Stoker’s great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker with Ian Holt, 2009)
Work Cited
Insider, Ro. “Nearly Half a Million Foreign Tourists Come to Central Romania to Visit Dracula’s Castle.” Romania Insider, January 21, 2017. https://www.romania-insider.com/nearly-half-a-million-foreign-tourists-visit-draculas-castle-in-romania/.
—JP
Tess Durbeyfield
First Appearance: Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Date of First Appearance: 1891
Author: Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“It was to be.” There lay the pity of it.
Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel comes along several decades after publication of the Grimm brothers’ fairy-tale collection and is a sort of Victorian antithesis to the happily-ever-after stories of women finding love and economic protection in a well-placed marriage. Tess of the D’Urbervilles is not destined to be one of those tales. Hardy’s maiden is not rescued by a handsome prince; she is instead destroyed first by a fake one and then by another man who in failing to be her savior intensifies her death spiral. Tess Durbeyfield is indeed a memorable character who, as noted critic Irving Howe writes, “lives beyond the final pages of the book as a permanent citizen of the imagination,” largely because her innocence, which, instead of commending her to good fortune, condemns her to a tragic end. She is doomed in spite of our hope to the contrary, and we can only watch helplessly as the cruel twists of her destiny send Tess down the path to one of the most heartbreaking endings in fiction.
As the novel opens, Tess is a fresh-faced sixteen-year-old participating in the annual rite of spring festival and wearing the traditional white dress meant to symbolize virginity. She seems unaware of her budding womanhood on full display, what Hardy later describes as her “pouted-up deep red mouth,” and “a luxuriance of aspect, a fullness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was.” Tess’s parents are not so naïve, however, and conspire to use their daughter’s sexual appeal to an advantage after discovering that the surname Durbeyfield descends from an ancient noble line, and a family not too distant from them bears the ancestral pedigree. They send Tess to the D’Urbervilles in the hope of gaining some financial benefit, but in lieu of honest gentility and familial generosity, Tess finds a nouveau riche family who had usurped the name to generate the appearance of status, and the man who undoes her, or at least the first one who does.
As we might expect in a novel emphasizing the imbalance of gender and economic power, Tess becomes the sexual target of Alec Stoke-D’Urberville, the heir to the family fortune and a self-proclaimed “damn bad fellow.” She is unaccustomed to anyone as slick as this mustachioed Mephistopheles, so Tess misjudges his sexual overture and only acknowledges afterward, “I didn’t understand your meaning until it was too late.” Her failure to understand will be Tess’s Achilles heel over the course of the novel. Alec’s seduction/rape—left somewhat ambiguous by Hardy—results in Tess’s shift from the pure woman identified in the novel’s subtitle to a fallen woman, never mind that she didn’t tumble of her own accord but was pushed. Her shame is accentuated by the tangible proof she cannot hide from the world after returning to her parents’ dairy farm to bear a child, name him Sorrow, and then when the baby dies shortly thereafter, bury him. Tess implores her mother to explain, “Why didn’t you tell me there was danger in men-folk? Why didn’t you warn me?”
Why indeed, though Tess’s painful enlightenment does not seem to cure her vulnerability; it only serves to accentuate it. Her failure to properly assess situations and appropriately calculate her response occurs time and again, misstep after misstep, as she chooses badly or fails to proactively protect herself in spite of experiences that might have taught her to be cautious. If we fault Tess for anything, it is this failure to learn and to act in self-preservation. We secretly yearn to step into the pages of the novel and say, “Have you learned nothing, baby girl?” The reality is she still fails to understand that society demands chastity of women but excuses its lack in males—the age-old idea that boys are going sow their seed, but the garden is to blame for the planting. Tess will find no solace in such a world as Hardy has placed her. He well knows it is a novelist’s cruel trick to make us love best those made to suffer most, and he intends for both Tess and his readers to feel this pain.
Ironically, Tess’s greatest woe comes in the form of a harp-playing angel, but not the heaven-sent type dispatched to her rescue. The person Tess sees as her redeemer is the second man to undo her and this time in an even more devastating way. Alec D’Urberville had made her an object of sexual pleasure. Angel Clare makes her an object of feminine virtue. He puts her on a pedestal and projects his own perception of the divine female on her. In Angel’s imagination Tess is “no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman—a whole sex condensed into one typical form.” He requires nothing less of Tess than to be a paragon of virtue, and his failure to love her for better or for worse as the marriage vow promises is the knife that cuts deepest. Angel’s self-flagellating, self-pitying wedding night confession about losing his virginity to a prostitute shows he is no saint, but he fails to see that his sin of choice bears more stain than Tess’s forced loss of purity. In passing judgment, he proves he is a hypocrite as well as a louse, and after her own disclosure, followed by Angel’s declaration that she is “dead” to him, his immediate abandonment leaves her to be buffeted once again by fate’s unremitting fury.
Hardy’s ending will achieve three things—retribution for Tess’s sins for those who insist on justice for her crimes, a tragic ending for those who expect one from a good Victorian novel, and immortality for his character whose passions and innocence play against her in every turn and in every heartrending way. Tess’s effort to obtain Angel’s forgiveness by killing the man who had first taken her innocence sets the stage for the ending’s high drama, and her apprehension at the famed English site of Stonehenge provides the striking visual that filmmaker Roman Polanski capitalizes on in his 1979 movie simply called Tess. The site of ancient ritual markedly underscores society’s adherence to the past and its rigid mores. Tess must be hanged because she has sinned against them. Happily, Polanski saves us the trauma of seeing her lifeless body dangling at the end of the rope, and instead simply imposes a few sentences over the backdrop of the dramatic stones to let us know she has paid for her sins.
No matter how many times we revisit this book, with each new reading Tess Durbeyfield’s tragic story is as fresh and painful as the first time we experienced it. She is a victim of economy, the patriarchy, and the bad luck of meeting a bad man and another bad man posing as a good man. All the forces, including the parents who should have protected instead of exploited her, her husband who should have banished his double standard instead of his wife, and society who should have first punished the abuser and not the abused, are all complicit in the tragedy that was Tess’s life and her death.
Bibliography
Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman (1891)
Works Cited
Hardy, Thomas. Introduction by James Wood. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. New York: Modern Library Classics, 2001.
———. Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman. Introduction by Marcelle Clements. Signet Classics, 2006.
—GS
Tyler Durden
First Appearance: Fight Club
Date of First Appearance: 1996
Author: Chuck Palahniuk (1962–)
Remember this. The people you’re trying to step on, we’re everyone you depend on. We’re the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. . . . We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. . . . We control every part of your life.
Even before a shirtless, abdominally ripped, and bloody Brad Pitt made him iconic in the 1999 movie, Tyler Durden was unforgettable. The swaggering antihero of Chuck Palahniuk’s debut novel, Fight Club, he strutted into literature as a model of anarchic masculinity, an antidote to the emasculation of men in the white-collar wage-earning world, a force of pure aggression unavailable to a post–baby boomer generation raised on sensitive feelings and support groups. As the founder of a club where his followers reconnect with their innate brutality by taking turns beating each other senseless, Tyler insists that only through pain can a man know he’s truly alive. He’s the id unleashed, a terrorist rebelling against consumerism’s false wants, and a cult leader preaching a bare-knuckled philosophy of primitivism that’s fascistic in all but name.
He also doesn’t exist—a fact many readers tempted to buy into his revolutionary agenda tend to forget.
Fight Club is narrated by Tyler’s foil, an unnamed young professional who feels defeated by the numbness of his job and the antiseptic conditions of modern life. The narrator spends much of his time catching flights to endless business meetings, causing him perpetual insomnia. During a vacation to a nude beach he meets Tyler, who asks for his address. Sometime later, when he returns home, the narrator discovers his hermetically sealed, climate-controlled apartment has been blown to smithereens. As the police investigate the explosion, he receives a mysterious summons from Tyler. The stranger offers the narrator a place to stay, but on one condition: “I want you to hit me as hard as you can,” he insists.
Throughout the novel, Palahniuk cuts back and forth in time, creating a dislocating sense of disorder that nicely conveys the chaos Tyler wants to ignite. Initially, the saboteur is content to perform quiet acts of subversion. At the theater where he works as a part-time film projectionist he splices single frames of genitalia into the movie reels so penises and vaginas flash before customers’ eyes for one-sixtieth of a second. At his other job as a waiter he urinates in soup tureens and farts on serving carts of Boccone Dolce served to Junior Leaguers who never know better because the meringue absorbs the odor. He steals fat from liposuction treatments and renders it into soap. More ominously, he dabbles in explosives.
Tyler’s real coup comes when he and the narrator establish their fight club and discover how many disillusioned men long to get their limp masculinity hard. The narrator himself is electrified: before, his only outlet for his anger was to clean his apartment, but now he can wiggle loose teeth in his jaw. The clubs quickly evolve into the next stage of Tyler’s plan, a quasi-terrorist group called Project Mayhem. Foot soldiers dubbed “space monkeys” revel in destruction, paintballing statues and defacing corporate towers. The narrator is so enthralled he dreams of wiping his ass with the Mona Lisa.
At the core of Durden’s anger is his insistence that modern men have been abandoned by their fathers. If we can’t win the love of God, the ultimate father figure, he insists, at least we can get his attention and earn his hate. His ultimate aim is to bring about a cultural ice age, taking humanity back to survivalist mode so men can stalk elks outside of department stores and rappel up the kudzu that will grow over the Sears Tower. The space monkeys are mostly happy to worship him and spread his cult of personality.
Project Mayhem taps into such a deep reservoir of pent-up anger that no matter where the narrator goes young men ask him if he knows the name Tyler Durden. The twist of Fight Club, of course, is that the narrator is Tyler—or rather Tyler is the narrator’s alter ego. When he discovers his split personality, the narrator decides he must stop Project Mayhem, leading to an epic confrontation on the roof of a skyscraper Tyler is set to detonate. The movie version departs significantly from Palahniuk’s original plot: On film the narrator (played by Edward Norton) shoots himself to kill off Tyler, but he’s too late, and Project Mayhem’s bombs destroy the financial district the narrator peers down upon—a tableau that even two years before 9/11 many reviewers found objectionably immoral. In the novel, the suicide attempt fails miserably, and the narrator wakes up in a hospital, his face permanently disfigured. To his horror he discovers that the anarchy he’s loosed upon the world still roils. Orderlies with bruised and stitched faces address him as “Mr. Durden” in subversive whispers, promising they’re still hard at work on Project Mayhem. “We look forward to getting you back,” one says in the book’s final line.
Fight Club isn’t a subtle novel. To make his point about feminized men, Palahniuk includes a tragic character named Big Bob, a former bodybuilder whose testicular cancer has cost him his balls (any other word seems to violate the spirit of the book) and who grows male breasts, or “bitch tits.” Tyler’s philosophy itself is a fairly paint-by-numbers mixture of Marx’s critique of capitalism and Nietzschean nihilism. And symbolism doesn’t get much more basic when the space monkeys don black shirts à la Mussolini’s goons as their uniform.
Yet there’s no denying that in the mid-1990s Fight Club tapped into Generation X disgruntlement, both its resentment of its absentee fathers and the service economy it seemed doomed to toil in. The novel and movie’s cult cred has kept Tyler Durden politically relevant throughout the decades since. Allusions to Fight Club have popped up in an unsettlingly diverse range of political movements: in the 1999 Seattle riots protesting globalization during the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference, at protests against both the Democrat and Republican Conventions in 2000, and at the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, to name a few.
Its most enduring influence, however—much to Palahniuk’s chagrin—has been in the alt-right movement, the loose coalition of predominantly male far-right fringe groups railing against identity politics and gender equality, usually in unapologetically racist and sexist language. Google “Fight Club and politics” and one discovers an array of websites that adapt Tyler’s most memorable lines to legitimate their belligerent grievances. The alt-right even found its favorite insult to politically correct sensibilities in Tyler’s message to his followers: “You are not special. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake.”
Not surprisingly, few Tyler Durden fans acknowledge that Palahniuk’s narrator wants to kill off his alter ego, or that Fight Club satirizes brute masculinity as much as it celebrates it. Pointing out those inconvenient facts would probably get us labeled snowflakes, though—or maybe a punch in the face.
Bibliography
Fight Club (1996)
—KC