Lawrence and Louisiana

Tell me what you think about my sense of an underlying connection we have with D.H. Lawrence -- due not just to his age (that he was in his mid-twenties when he wrote Sons and Lovers -- my sense the same age of some of you) but, more importantly, his rough-and-tumble working class upbringing, including a hard-drinking father contemptuous of anything "girlie" and his immersion in a dirty, dangerous work of extracting fuel from the earth (coal-mining versus oil). There is also the connection between the pastoral surroundings that lie in close proximity to the heavy industry, our bayous and remote wetlands and Lawrence's Willey Farm.

Eastwood was (and is) a small, undistinguished town, not too far from regional center of Nottingham; pictured to the left is two-room apartment where Lawrence was born (now a small museum). For me, it's all like having a world-class writer or artist growing up in Berwick, which may well have happened, or is happening right now, and (Why not?) right here at Nicholls. (While all the well-bred attended Oxford and Cambridge Universities -- the British version of our Harvard and Yale) Lawrence attended a basically a teacher-training institute in Nottingham.

More on "Death in Venice"

While the class as a whole seem to have gravitated towards The Sorrow of Young Werther as most similar to Mann's "Death in Venice" -- they are both focused on confused males, one young and one middle-aged -- it is Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" that strikes me as Mann's real precursor, down to its semi-tropical setting. It is not coincidence that both writers were northern European males yearning fro the freedom of the Mediterranean. Werther, meanwhile, strikes me as wanting to remain at home with, or at least become part of Lotte's family -- a sister-like figure or, who could argue, possibly even a maternal one. Werther is attracted to children throughout the story, albeit without the slightest hint of sexual interest.

Rather it is Andersen's mermaid who is utterly transfixed by young male beauty. Here we see his mermaid gazing, Aschenbach-like, at her handsome young prince, captivated exclusively, not by his courage, intellect, or power (all traditional markers of male supremacy) but solely by his physical beauty:

Near the coast were beautiful green forests, and close by stood a large building, whether a church or a convent she could not tell. Orange and citron trees grew in the garden, and before the door stood lofty palms. The sea here formed a little bay, in which the water was quite still, but very deep; so she swam with the handsome prince to the beach, which was covered with fine, white sand, and there she laid him in the warm sunshine, taking care to raise his head higher than his body. Then bells sounded in the large white building, and a number of young girls came into the garden. The little mermaid swam out farther from the shore and placed herself between some high rocks that rose out of the water; then she covered her head and neck with the foam of the sea so that her little face might not be seen, and watched to see what would become of the poor prince.

One needs to go to art history and Donatello's "Bronze David," to find a comparable instance of unabashedly homoerotic desire and in a form -- that of the beautiful adolescent -- that even in 2012 still represents an illicit desire.

Compare the Donatello with the mermaid's prince an Visconti's final image of Tadzio as seen below:

The idea of the beautiful young male (an Adonis) is largely absent from contemporary political discussion of gay rights -- where so much of the emphasis is rightly on marriage equality; the image of the beautiful male, however, remains a mainstay of male fashion photography. As proof, see this collection of random photos of male fashion models at Google images.

A Thought on James's Beast

I wonder if anyone saw a similarity between James's Marcher and Chekhov's Ryabovich -- two sensitive men both largely unable to go on with their lives, almost traumatized as it were, by either a mysterious encounter (Ryabovich) or an imminent one (Marcher), or at least that in Marcher's case, one that he feels is or may be imminent. In both cases, the encounter is, like coming across a beast in a jungle, something totally unexpected and, although frightening (and in that sense, perjorative) also totally exhilirating and hence largely positive. It is no accident, I believe, that Oscar Wilde describes his most provocative homosexual exploits as "sleeping with panthers."

Here in the conclusion of the last essay written by the great American essayist and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, "On Walking" (published posthumously in 1862) is a wonderful paean to wildness, with just a hint of its deep connection to sexuality: 

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice — take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance, — which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

Daisy Miller

Just trying to get some clarity on Daisy Miller, especially before we tackle the much more challenging novella, The Beast in the Jungle. There are perhaps two contrasting ways to explain Winterbourne's failure as a lover. The basic way is is within the esthetics of the story: As his name suggests, he is laden with obstacles, a lack of warmth in particular. He has spent too much time under the influence of corrupting, cynical European suspicions, represented by his aunt, Mrs. Costello as well as his older friend, Mrs. Walker -- a cold, judgmental quality so well captured in this still photograph from the film version. Basically Winterbourne is dead to all the beauty, charm, liveliness that is Daisy. Despite what many classmates feel, I have no doubt whatsoever that James was wholly supportive of his heroine's innocence: She loved Winterbourne "as Mrs. Costello tells him, in classic James understatement, "would have appreciated one's [his] affection"), but as in a fairy tale essentially chose to test Winterbourne's worthiness, namely, the extent of his freedom from European prejudice, by forcing him to act on his heart -- a test he fails miserably (although obviously some classmates see her as being manipulative here, playing mind-games, and so forth). He is a man who, alas, has lived "too long in foreign parts."

Yet there is another explanation -- one that lies a bit outside the story and in James's life, and as such perhaps even more relevant for this course. There is an element of homosexual fright in many of James's male characters -- a great fear of heterosexual intimacy, most manifest (not surprisingly) as the chances of intimacy near. One suspects this is a key part of James's own personality that was never entirely resolved as many of his closest friendships were with women, yet not only were none consummated, two, in particular, seemed to have haunted him: one with a charming cousin, Minnie Temple (long considered the prototype of Daisy Miller), who died in 1870, at age twenty-three (some eight years before the novella); the other was Constance Fenimore Woolston, a close friend of James's middle years who eventually took her own life in 1894 (some nine years before John Marcher's problems with Mary Bartram in The Beast in the Jungle).

Unlike Werther and Turgenev's Vladimir from First Love, Winterbourne seems to shun all physical intimacy with Daisy, happiest judging her from afar. Perhaps the character he is most like is D.H. Lawrence's Paul Morel, the protagonist on our lone long novel, Sons and Lovers.