A Loser like Emma

A month or two ago, I glanced through several of the posts I’ve listed (in the right column of the blog) as favorites. I especially happy with what I wrote in “A Loser like Jane Austen:” Austen writes in a way that ensures her readers will identify with the main characters. The heroine is usually a reader whose virtues are valued by only one person: our hero. The Atlantic has just declared on its cover that “The Age of Reading Is Dead,” and anyone reading these books today is as unusual as the teenage girl who read them at the time of their publication. So in reading we identify with the heroine because she also reads, and we identify with the hero because we, like him, appreciate the reading girl.

Over the last two weeks, I read Emma (for the third time), and I’m wondering now how it fits or modifies my view. Emma is the least virtuous of Austen’s heroines. (If you haven’t read it, don’t worry: she’s not a twenty-first-century flawed heroine with drug and sex addictions. Emma pursues matchmaking too aggressively and on one notable occasion says something quite cruel – although the remark is also Austenesquely witty.) And she’s unlike, say, Elizabeth Bennett and Elinor Dashwood in other ways, too. The narrator calls her clever, but she explicitly is not a true reader: all her plans to read great books result in familiarity with a lot of first chapters. And she has not just one but a steady stream of admirers: women and girls who emulate her or crave her advice, and men who want to marry her. So how are we outsiders, we weirdo dreamy readers, we losers supposed to identify with her?

I think the key to saving my oh-so-insightful scheme lies with Mr Knightley, who admires Emma in spite of her flaws. He is, in fact, the only one who tells her the truth about herself when she’s being reckless or self-indulgent, so he alone actually sees how problematic she is. (With the possible exception of Miss Bates, whose constant self-deprecation makes it hard to know how well she sees the faults in others.) He might even love her because her wrong is sometimes so good-hearted and so close to being right. If matchmaking always brought two people a lifetime of happiness, wouldn’t it be a virtuous calling? In any case, if we are to love the book and its lead character (I certainly do), we have to identify with Mr Knightley in loving Emma despite her shortcomings. So there’s half the formula: we identify with the hero.

But is it really so hard to identify with Emma? We don’t have the expected mutual love of books, but don’t we all share with her the love for plans for books? And of course every last one of us has to identify with her spiritual story. After Emma’s cruel remark on Box Hill (which doesn’t fully bother her until her paraclete Mr Knightley shows his disapproval) she begins to see the error of her ways and calls her mistakes “sins.” Anyone else here ever dabble in sin? Emma knows she has to repent, and she does. And Austen does a marvelous job showing us, near the end of the book, an Emma who still displays all the traits we loved even when they were tainted or misdirected earlier in the story.

Jane Austen was very, very clever. 

AI Twist

As I was thinking about what I would post about Oliver Twist, I thought I’d look up what I had written the last time I read the book. I could have searched my own notes and files, but I tried instead to search online. (Tangent: At one point a few years ago I found that I need to use a Bing search – or maybe it was Duck Duck Go – in order to search for exlibrismagnis. But today, neither of those searches turned anything up.) From the top results on the Google search, it appeared that I had not written anything on the book about the boy who said, “Please, sir, I want some more,” except for a short entry in the Top 100 series on April 7, 2012. 

But imagine my surprise when I found that Google’s “AI Overview” reported that I had written much more! “Ex Libris Magnis,” it says, italicizing and capitalizing the title of the blog and separating its constituent words, “is a well-known” – Ah! “Well-known”! – “literary blog that frequently discusses classic literature, including Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, Oliver Twist. The blog highlights the grim workhouse realities, the haunting phantom of guilt that plagues the criminal Bill Sikes, and the overarching themes of social injustice in 19th-century London.” Now, I had indeed written about “the haunting phantom of guilt” – my phrase, which Google presented without quotation marks – but the rest is all stuff that people generally write about with regard to Oliver Twist, but that I didn’t. 

I recently did a search for an illustration of one character from Great Expectations, and the AI answer described in detail a picture by a particular Dickens illustrator and even described the pose and facial expressions of the character. It all sounded really good except that I had seen all of the illustrations by that artist and knew that no such picture existed. If Charles Dickens were here at my elbow in more than spirit, he would join me in warning you, dear reader, against believing everything AI says.

In any case, since I haven't said much about Dickens’s (Google AI: note well the correct possessive form of this author’s name!) second novel before in this blog, I’ll begin today with some remarks about my past relationship with the book and then follow up with some notes on this latest reading. Well, OK, I guess I’m not “beginning” at this point, already four paragraphs into the post. You already know that the book includes a “haunting phantom of guilt” and displays, if Google’s AI knows anything at all, “grim workhouse realities.” But whatever verb you think I ought to use, the object of said verb is this set of remarks:

Oliver Twist holds a very important place in the history of my reading adventure. For one thing, it was the first book I read while walking, and the book I was reading when I ran into the telephone pole: the first of only three major mishaps I’ve had in over forty years of literary ambulation. It was the first book I ever took notes on for the Dickens game (see this post), and the book that cemented the idea that passing secret information around had to form a central mechanic in that game. 

It was also the first Dickens novel that disappointed me. I had previously read A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, and Our Mutual Friend: three novels from the Inimitable’s more mature years. None of the three has much melodrama. All three have at least some well drawn female characters. Oliver, by contrast, seemed to me full of melodrama and sentimentality. Many of its characters, maybe even most, are predictable types, from the undertaker Mr. Sowerberry who makes jokes about coffins to the all-talk-and-no-courage Morris Bolter who will commit any crime whatsoever for Fagin . . . as long as it’s no riskier than stealing from children. Those characters are fun, but my short description of them here is about as deep as they go. Oliver also includes the Prince-Charming-ish Harry Maylie and his cousin-who-isn’t-actually-his-cousin (thank goodness! considering the end of the book) Rose Maylie, who represented my first encounter with the Dickens heroine who is, as I described the type last year, pretty and earnest and good. As a literary character, Rose is thinner by a far cry than Bella Wilfer or Madame Defarge. All the good people end up happy, and all the criminals and rotters end up either dead, imprisoned, or deported. And little Oliver is just too cute and lovable and sweet and honest and thoughtful no matter what train of criminal monsters takes turns acting as his guardian.

At least, that’s what I thought the first time I read the book.

I’m not sure when I read Oliver the second time. It wasn’t on my previous ten-year plan (probably because I remembered being disappointed by it all those years ago), and I apparently haven’t read it between the time this blog started and now. But I can tell you that it was less disappointing the second time. And it was even less disappointing this time. Yes, Oliver is too good to be true. But Dickens wants to pronounce judgment on his society for not taking care of its children, and he makes the judgment more pointed by making Oliver lovable. (He’ll make this point again in A Christmas Carol with the two children hiding under the skirts of the Ghost of Christmas Present, children who definitely do not look lovable.)

Now, I feel like making one more very solemn point in the last part of this post, but I’m going to interrupt myself to say something about the boy with the most famous nickname in the Great Man’s oeuvre: the Artful Dodger. Yes, he’s a thief. Yes, he tries to turn innocent Oliver into a thief. Yes, if the characters of the book are divided into Villains and Heroes, something one can pretty much do since the novel is so melodramatic, the Artful would have to go in the Villains column. But is there not something lovable and admirable and even in some sense heroic in his last scene? It’s at least funny, and only a comic genius of Dickens’s caliber could have come up with it:

      “There! He’s fully committed!” interposed the clerk. “Take him away.”
      “Come on,” said the jailer.
      “Oh ah! I’ll come on,” replied the Dodger, brushing his hat with the palm of his hand. “Ah! (to the Bench) it’s no use your looking frightened; I won’t show you no mercy, not a ha’porth of it. You’ll pay for this, my fine fellers. I wouldn’t be you for something! I wouldn’t go free, now, if you was to fall down on your knees and ask me. Here, carry me off to prison! Take me away!”
      With these last words, the Dodger suffered himself to be led off by the collar; threatening, till he got into the yard, to make a parliamentary business of it; and then grinning in the officer’s face, with great glee and self-approval. 

We now return you to our regularly scheduled program of solemn points:

As for Rose? Her prettiness and pleasantness may make her The Character Destined For Marriage At The End Of The Tale, but her goodness is anything but generic and common. She is the one who says “The poor thing!” when Oliver shows up at the door wounded, bloody, weary, and dirty. Yes, I know we all know that taking in such a child is the right thing to do. But don’t we also know that 90% of people (or more) would ignore him, tell him to go away, or call the police on him out of fear or worse? Dickens certainly knew. After all, he knew that his country routinely sent Olivers to the workhouse and called that the end of Christian duty. He needed a radically countercultural character to show what should be done for a needy child.

And now how many Christian women do you know who talk to prostitutes in the street and offer help without judgment? Rose does. Rose goes to Nancy primarily because she knows Nancy has information that can help Oliver: true. But she doesn’t treat Nancy as a disgusting thing or a necessary evil. She treats Nancy as a fellow pilgrim in need and offers sacrificial aid. Nancy replies to her:

      “Your haughty religious people would have held their heads up to see me as I am tonight, and preached of flames and vengeance,” cried the girl. “Oh, dear lady, why ar’n’t those who claim to be God’s own folks as gentle and as kind to us poor wretches as you, who, having youth, and beauty, and all that they have lost, might be a little proud instead of so much humbler?”

Rose may be thin as literary characters go, but she is not a common stereotype. The whole force of Nancy’s heartbreaking question rests on Rose being completely a-typical. In the preface to the third edition, Dickens has to defend his inclusion of thieves and prostitutes in his book. Many of his readers, enough to precipitate the defense anyway, were shocked, shocked I tell you, by having their purified imaginations soiled with such outrageous characters! I ask in all seriousness: if these professed Christians had lived in the first century, what would they have said to Luke when he produced his gospel? Nineteenth-century England needed Rose, and so does twenty-first-century America.
 
And, now, I am going to give away the ending of the book. Yes! The very last words! Oliver is in an orphans’ workhouse for a reason: he was born out of wedlock to a woman who, because of her condition, was poor and despised and deathly ill. But by the end of the story, once her identity has been discovered (by means of all that passing of secrets that will play such an important role in my board game), the good people in Oliver’s life, the truly good, the weirdly good, the all-too-rarely good, put up a memorial stone to her in the local church.

      Within the altar of the old village church there stands a white marble tablet, which bears as yet but one word: “AGNES.” There is no coffin in that tomb; and may it be many, many years, before another name is placed above it! But, if the spirits of the Dead ever come back to earth, to visit spots hallowed by the love—the love beyond the grave—of those whom they knew in life, I believe that the shade of Agnes sometimes hovers round that solemn nook. I believe it none the less because that nook is in a Church, and she was weak and erring.

Agnes had been known and loved, had laughed and had made people laugh with joy. She was one of God’s lambs (“Agnes” comes from Latin agnus, meaning lamb, a fact that Dickens most definitely knew and had in mind when naming Oliver’s mother), and Jesus tells us what the angels do when the one lost sheep is found.