Home james….
Oh henry james, I just want to go home.. The Wings of The Dove is tortuous.. I’m still going but came across some really well put literature quotes I thought I’d share.
― Jane Yolen, Touch Magic
― Charles Dickens
Oh henry james, I just want to go home.. The Wings of The Dove is tortuous.. I’m still going but came across some really well put literature quotes I thought I’d share.
So earlier in the week I went to visit friends in the city and forgot my trusty classic book at home.
Temptation was everywhere. At every petrol station. Every newsagent. Every book store. Fifty Shades of Grey was calling my name, so were many others. But I stayed strong.
I figured a couple of days off wouldn’t do me any harm. But it turns out there is no escape from the classics. Even when your head isn’t burrowed in the pages and immersed in the dramas of another time, another era, another place, it can still get you.
I didn’t realise I wasn’t being stalked until the morning of my departure. I was in blissful ignorance after staying the night at a friend’s house who had just moved in with her boyfriend.
It was only after spending a night with them out to dinner and in front of the tv did I realise, while we might be in a different era, I was looking at a couple of characters straight out of the classics.
One of my all time Jane Austen favourites in fact. How I never saw it before I still don’t know. But now looking back at descriptions of the characters from the book itself, it’s impossible not to draw similarities between them.
Who did I stay with that night? Well none other than Jane Bennet and Mr Charles Bingley.
Anyone who knows who I am talking about, will know just how much this description of Jane (aka Kate) fits her in every way – Austen describes her “as the eldest and most beautifully natured of the Bennets. She is an amiable, naïve, and extremely optimistic young lady whom sees no evil or illness in others.”
Jane is extraordinarily kind-hearted, loves and is loved by young children and thinks no harm of anyone in the world. In Elizabeth’s words, Jane is the kind of person who “likes people in general and people who equally like and love back”
“You never see a fault in any body. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in my life,” cried Elizabeth, when her elder sister was praising Mr. Bingley’s amiable and good-humored personality, even though she has just met him once. However, Jane’s excessive optimism blinds her from seeing those obvious illnesses in people: “Jane united with great strength of feeling, a composure of temper and a uniform cheerfulness of manner, which would guard her from the suspicions of the impertinent.” This overly positive attitude towards general human beings made Jane innocent, but at the same time a bit naïve.
In Charles Bingley, Jane finds an equally matched partner who prides himself on being light, carefree and good-humoured in every situation that life throws at him. He is sunny and friendly to all and rarely meets someone who ruffles his feathers. Unlike Darcy who takes an instant dislike to most. Bingley is his polar opposite, genuinely social by nature and most happiest when those around him are happy and smiling. And the best part, the most ironic part? Both Charles and Jane meet on the dance floor.
If this doesn’t sum up Kate and her beau then I will eat the very pages from the book I’m currently reading. Sorry for outing the pair of you, but the similarities were just too noticeable to ignore!
This has now left me wondering what other classic characters are here right under my nose.
So as I sip my coffee and read The Wings of the Dove, I’ll make sure to keep my eyes up and open for any another characters who happen to walk through the door…
x
J
So ‘To the Lighthouse’ will sit on the bedside table for a while. I feel I need to lock myself up in a quiet room to read it. Virginia’s prose requires complete and utter concentration. I just don’t have that right now. It’s timing. I promise to come back to it.
So with Virginia on hold indefinitely I decided to give Henry James another attempt to woo me. He did so did so badly with Portrait of a Lady, I thought I’d give him a chance for redemption. I’m a sucker like that.
I’ ve tried to read Cold Mountain by Charles Fraizer 15 times. Every time I would get stuck just a third of the way in. I simply lose the will to the turn the page. I’m a bit like that with men. Every cad has his chance with me and sadly Henry is turning into one of them with his offering Wings of the Dove.
Look at those eyes, they feel as though they could look right inside your soul. Almost creepy. Shame his writing isn’t doing that. In fact I’m finding I’m Just Not Into Him.
Sorry Henry. I tried. I’ll keep reading because it’s only fair but rest assured this time it’s definitely you, not me.
x
J
To be honest, I am.
I’m trying to appreciate, understand and read To The Lighthouse and instead I find myself getting so annoyed by her. I find myself intimidated by her style. Her prose. Her tendency to jump from one topic to another.
I’m dazed and confused.
I’m not quite ready to concede defeat but fear it may be around the corner. So in a bid to improve my enthusiasm I’ve added some of her quotes that I have always liked. I so would like to come across them soon buried in her prose to inspire me to keep on reading..
The first below is one of my absolute favourites – namely because it is so very true. So much of me and what I’ve seen, felt and known are in my work:
J
Every book is relevant. Say what you will about the author, the character or even the topic but you can’t deny it has its place. But every now and again you pick up one which is like reading a diary. Either your own or someone you know’s, their words, thoughts and expressions in print for everyone to read.
Something so relevant you would swear it had been written for your time, right then and there. Most people feel this way about 1983 or Animal Farm. I discovered I felt this way when I first picked up A Clockwork Orange late last week.
I read it in three days. I felt I was there walking with Alex most of the way. That was my friend who was on the train that he and his gang messed with and took her money, my flatmate was the guy who had his face and library book ruined and destroyed by their gang on the way home. I was the girl who was so terrified of them robbing the house that she didn’t even open her door to them when they asked for help.
For anyone who hasn’t read it, all I can say is read it. Once read, it stays with you for days. Perhaps because I lived in London for three years and saw and heard these gangs every day on the tube and in the street, perhaps because I saw and experienced gang violence once or twice in that time or perhaps because I knew some of these kids in school, or for whatever reason I became hooked on this book.
Written in a hybrid of english teen/Russian slang it’s almost impossible to decipher when you read the first few lines. But before long you’re swimming in their gutter language and relishing this unforgiving, brutal glimpse into their lives.
It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion and there is nothing you can do to stop it. I couldn’t tear myself away from reading when Alex and his droogs ruled the streets with their brutality, or when Alex was being transformed and shaped into a model citizen by the government and or even when the final result caused more chaos then good. I. just. could. not. put. it. down.
It’s a read which is heartbreakingly real, almost tender in some parts and in others, downright stomach turning. It is about lives on the precipice and the big question is if they’ll jump or if someone else will be the ones to push them over. How the author came up with the title is a bit of a mystery to me but what is clear to me is, firstly, orange is the new black and secondly its a book for every generation.
X
J
It’s been far too long between posts and I hang my head in shame. However, excuses aside,I have still been working my way through the classics.
The latest to come my way is E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View, the tale of Lucy Honeychurch, a young english woman’s travels through Italy. It marks her passage from an awkward girl, to a woman with a mind of her own.
But even in her most expressive thoughts and words as she meets two men who represent two very different things to her, there is an overwhelming feeling of repression throughout the book. Restraint of heart, restraint of sentiment and above all repressed sexuality. There is so little done between Lucy and these men that it almost drives you mad. It is about all that is unsaid and left hanging in the air.
Her Italian trip is was meant to be about her coming of age, but instead she is whisked to and fro by her chaperone and barely able to consider her own mind, leading her to an engagement with an insufferable man.
It took me a long time to finish this book, mainly because it makes you feel so very sad. Sad that this girl’s escape and growth, must only be achieved through engagement and marriage. Not through her own personal journey.
It is Edwardian england after all, but a modern girl can still hope that even a character in that time would have the gumption to stay true to her own happiness instead of what she envisions is expected of her.
The book finally blossoms when she returns home and is sent a curve ball by fate. It rewards the reader with why such a book is on the top 100 list. Lucy’s decisions, dreams and thoughts are all turned on its head as she considers her future with a man she once thought would be ideal.
Her alternative paramour, George Emerson puts it perfectly when he declares this about her fiance:
“He’s the sort who can’t know anyone intimately, least of all a woman. He doesn’t know what a woman is. He wants you for a possession, something to look at, like a painting or an ivory box. Something to own and to display. He doesn’t want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn’t love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms. “
George’s declaration in A Room With a View is enough to make any girl blush and weak at the knees in fact, he makes Darcy from Pride and Prejudice look like a bit of a buffoon.
I swooned and was swept up by the novel as it galloped to its climax which even to the very last pages leaves you unsure as to how this girl will ever get her happiness or her man for that fact.
I was glad I preserved with it, as some of the prose was among the most romantic and poetic I have read in a long time. The yearning and repression such added fuel to the fire and is enough to catch any reader’s imagination.
With a title like ‘A Room With a View’ most can be forgiven for thinking it’s all about the outside and how it counts. But really it’s about the view from within.
As George says so eloquently:
“I don’t care what I see outside. My vision is within! Here is where the birds sing! Here is where the sky is blue!”