A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis, which picks up considerably once Avis embarks on her courtship and eventual marriage, which are a slow-motion trainwreck. They both go into it genuinely intending that Avis should continue her work as a painter, and yet housekeeping and then childcare tie her up so entirely that she can’t.

Women understand — only women altogether — what a dreary will-o-the-wisp is this old, common, I had almost said common place, experience, “When the fall sewing is done,” “When the baby can walk,” “When house-cleaning is over,” “When the company has gone,” “ When we have got through with the whooping-cough,” “When I am a little stronger,” then I will write the poem, or learn the language, or study the great charity, or master the symphony; then I will act, dare, dream, become. Merciful is the fate that hides from any soul the prophecy of its still-born aspirations. (187)

And then - does anyone care about spoilers for a book that’s 150 years old? - ( Cut just in case )

There’s a definite theme in the book about the importance of heritage - of women being able to place themselves in history, as part of a lineage of women artists (Phelps is writing about artists but this could be applicable to scientists or judges or what have you), rather than having the bushwack their way entire on their own. Avis’s Road to Damascus moment, when she knows she must be an artist, comes when she reads Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, and Phelps references Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot as well.

This is something I’ve been thinking about somewhat inchoately, especially with regard to my women film director’s project, because I’ve been continually surprised by just how many women film directors there are, in so many different countries, and stretching back almost to the dawn of movies.

Now, the overall numbers are pretty abysmal: women make up about 15% of the directors in Hollywood (and that’s an improvement over the years when Dorothy Arzner was the only female director in Hollywood - a torch she then passed to Ida Lupino). And female directors tend to get smaller budgets and less prestigious projects. But nonetheless if I had decided that I wanted to watch movies only by women directors this year, there are enough movies available that I could have done it and ended the year with movies left that I wanted to see.

What I’m Reading Now

The Story of Avis occupied most of my reading time at the library this week, but I have made a little progress on Savrola too. Winston Churchill Savrola is writing a speech in the most heroic manner imaginable. “His ideas began to take the form of words, to group themselves into sentences; he murmured to himself ; the rhythm of his own language swayed him; instinctively he alliterated” (89); and of the end result, Churchill notes, “Antonio Molara, President of the Republic of Laurania, would have feared a bombshell less.”

E. M. Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady, which started slowly but is becoming more and more enjoyable as I go along. There’s a running gag about an exhibit of Italian pictures that the heroine (who remains unnamed) really must go see (of course she misses it) and the modern novels she simply has to read - and I realized that I recognized exactly that hunted feeling. Only nowadays it’s about big event movie releases like Star Wars & Marvel rather than Italian art exhibitions - they fill the same role of giving people something agreeable to talk about in light conversation.

I had not previously contemplated the heroine’s occasional tactic of flat-out pretending to have ingested cultural objects that she hasn’t. Must consider the possibilities of social subterfuge.

What I Plan to Read Next

It’s a new month! And therefore a new reading challenge! May’s challenge is “a book of poetry, or play, or an essay collection,” and I have decided that it is at last time to tackle the Iliad. Does anyone have thoughts about the translation I should use?