At the 35th annual Connecticut Storytelling Festival, Valerie Tutson taught us how to clip and cluck in a South African dialect just right for our storytelling welcome.
She then shared the African story of how the stars came to be in the sky. I do love a good origin story.
Her dress, by the way, is made up of pieces of worker uniforms patched together. Each bright color represents a different trade, and the patchwork quilt style has been worn by men for ages. Tutson was delighted to find the style for women, while she lived in South Africa, gathering stories and fighting apartheid.
Judith Heineman told the story of her grandfather Oscar Markowitz and his turn in the Yiddish production of “King Lear” on 2nd Avenue in New York around 1900. Dan Marcotte accompanied her story, using music from that very production.
Tim Lowry, from that period of the unpleasantness with King George, showed us what any Southern gentleman wore in his day. The tricorn hat started out as a broad brimmed hat to protect from the sum. But as soldiers, the barrel of their guns would keep hitting the brim. A clever American innovated the pragmatic style of cocking the brim, and the tricorn was born.
Painting the town red. You’ve heard the expression. I didn’t know it came from the fashion of men painting the heels of their shoes. In South Carolina anyway. Think about it and party hardy.
Social grace of the South at time of American Revolution came in the language, too. Dinner was served at 3 pm and was monstrous. You would insult your host if you said you were full. Instead you would say, “I fear I have suffered a sufficiency.” Remember that when you’re at your next dinner party!
Lowry also advises avoiding religion and politics as polite conversation at any gathering. No one has said anything to our current day politicians about this, for sure…
We got to sing a bit, too. Songs from the period.
Who said learning has to be dull? Incorporate storytelling as provocation, not instruction, Jo Radner told us. Provoke the desire to know. Engage the imagination. Sounds like good teacherly advice to me!
I took Radner’s historical storytelling workshop and worked on a story about this provocative goody from my mother. Ask me sometime and I may tell you the story.
It’s 1887, and Lizzie Wills has offered to take us through the house. Miss Lizzie is a maid in the Mark Twain House, and boy, does she have stories to tell! She always seem to have been conveniently hiding in a closet or cleaning in the next room…well, you get the idea.
Nobody is allowed to touch the piano, except the five family members. But when the family’s away, Lizzie has no qualms about running her fingers along its keys. She’s happy to take a break from her work and dream of romance when one of the girls plays “The Sweet By and By,” the song Sam Clemens (Twain was his alias) and his wife Livy sparked to. Lizzie read to us from a letter that just happened to fall to the floor while she was dusting. It tells us just how romantic Sam and Livy are.
Three to five formal dinners are held in the house every week. Dinners with many more courses than our largest meals today. And the cook has to start at 5 a.m. making the servant’s breakfasts. The long days, plus Clemens’ was notoriously crotchety about food. No wonder the average tenure for a cook is only a month.
But Lizzie sticks around, listening in on the jokes told by Twain at these dinner parties and equally happy to gossip away with us. Believe me, she’s less than happy that the china cost $150, as much as she makes in a year!
So she feels more than justified in telling tales.
Twain travels a lot, and once staying with the cartoonist Thomas Nast, a Twain quirk came out. He hates a ticking clock, and as Nast’s guest, he went around the house and carried all the ticking clocks to the front lawn. When he missed his train the next day because his own alarm clock was on the lawn, Nast made this cartoon.
Miss Lizzie is proud of her employer though. She shows off his inventions in this very modern house. The annunciator is the call-system for servants, working off push buttons. Annunciator, as in annunciate. Lizzie had us touch the pages of the self-pasting scrapbook, Twain’s most successful invention, which earned him $50,000. Clever, right? (He later would bankrupt the family by investing all their money in a failure that also cost them this house.)
The burglar alarm of his invention was the source of many a story. Controlled from the master bedroom, once Sam and Livy were awakened by the cellar’s alarm. Livy was worried a burglar had broken in. Sam replied, “Well, I don’t think it was the Sunday School Superintendent!” Funny, even in the middle of the night.
Lizzie has Clemens to thank for that burglar alarm doing its job. Her gentleman caller Willy Taylor was supposed to leave the house before 10 p.m., when the alarm was set. When he triggered it, Sam forced him to marry Lizzy that very night.
The house and the Clemens family’s Hartford years were happy times, and Miss Lizzie tells us many stories of the 3 daughters and their adventures in the house. Clemens had the girls home schooled. Their German governess Rosa Hay taught them in her native language. Although Rosa was beloved, Suzy complained she didn’t understand anything the teacher said. Lilly Foote, neighbor Harriet Beecher Stowe’s cousin, soon took Rosa’s place.
The girls would study in the morning, but then the afternoon, they teamed up with neighbor children, playing piano and singing and putting on plays. Miss Lizzie’s favorite was the Shakespeare Club, particularly the Balcony Scene (side note: Happy 400th-death-day, Shakespeare!). At one point, the girls tried public school, but Clara racked up 13 detentions. They were spoiled for conventionality.
Girls will be girls, and these daughters fought so continually, that a reward system was devised. For every day they didn’t argue, they earned a piece of candy. A piece for peace, I say. Lizzie tried it for the quarreling servants, with a shot of whisky. That idea didn’t fly.
Yes, the servants squabbled a lot. Clemens commented that the staff had “all the makings for warfare,” with their different countries of origin, languages, backgrounds, and religions. They could insult each other in Russian, Polish, Irish, and Southern English.
Only George, the butler, seemed to get on with all the girls. Get handsy with all the girls, we could say. Sam said he’d have to hire girls “who were strong enough and wide enough to withstand his affections.”
Lizzie seemed much more interested in telling stories than complaining about her tiny room off the servants’ stairwell, the four flights she regularly had to run up and down, the 12 fireplaces she had to stoke, or the 7 bathrooms that needed cleaning.
She was also happy to show us something most people don’t get to see–the basement, her own private, if grim, workspace. Since the house had no electricity, the space is woefully dark, she says. But Miss Lizzie? She’s anything but woebegone. She even taught us a little dance she favors. And if you’re willing to listen, she has a story to tell!
Faces–ancient, privileged, unfinished. That was the theme of my day in the galleries.
Satyr and Maenad, Egypt, 4th century; note the halos
If you haven’t seen the ancient textiles exhibit at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, rush quickly. It’s a small show, focused on a narrow window in time. You can linger over each object.
These are primarily tapestries and tunics, surviving because they were used in funerary rites, created during that chaotic period when the Middle East and Europe were shifting from polytheism to Christianity. Polytheistic traditions were observed in secret during the 300s and 400s, still at home as was traditional. Temples became churches, but carried the ancient aesthetics forward to new subject matter.
Dionysus and Pan, c.4th century, Egypt
Most of the textiles were from Egypt, where Greco-Roman traditions had already been merged with ancient Egyptian sensibilities. I just loved Dionysus, god of wine, with Pan, both encircled in halos, a Christian allusion, used to warm an Egyptian home and then entombed.
Dionysus was the right god to depict, as the Romans inherited the tomb party concept, celebrating the life of the dead, from the Etruscans. Tunics were worn to such parties and banquets where Dionysus ruled!
Bust of Spring, see her halo?
You will marvel at the colors–lustrous greens and corals, probably faded from red, that have remarkably survived for 1500-1800 years. My clothes only last a few months before falling apart.
The figures show such delicacy along with the Egyptian love of patterning. Animals and birds and intricate geometric patterns, which may reference Islamic influences.
You can click on the photo to enlarge it. People take magnifying glasses to these works to see how they are constructed. Remarkable.
Gorgeous, intriguing, each is a story.
The Comtesse Du Barry in a Straw Hat, c.1781
The portraits of Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun each tell a story, too, mostly subservient in interest to her own. She was a favorite of Marie Antoinette as a young artist, making grand, official family depictions. She also was the master of the intimate, bust length portrait, making all the aristocrats look fresh, young, and lively.
Marie Antoinette with a Rose, 1783, a breathtakingly beautiful painting
That is until they started losing their heads.
Vigee-Lebrun hit the road, before settling for several years at the Russian court of Catherine the Great. She seemed to do well with powerful women.
Eventually, she returned to France where a new generation of artists kept her from regaining her popularity. She kept painting and lived a long life until the mid-19th century.
Thank you to the Met for hosting an exhibit of an historic woman artist. That’s a rarity. Perhaps it was no accident, though, that a light bulb was burned out, with its sole job to illuminate the one self-portrait in the show. I guess we still have a way to go to get these women out of the dark.
Self-portrait, 1790
The exhibit did play on the surface, with few new ah ha’s. Yes, there was the light reference to the turbulent relationship with her daughter, who fled France as a girl with her resourceful mother. (The self-portrait with Julia, alas, is not in this show.) Few other insights came out of the dark.
Although very uneven, the Unfinished show at the Met’s new Breuer building is more interesting. For the life of me, this building, for all the hoopla, still like just like the Whitney did. There’s even the same overly humid HVAC system. You’ll have to tell me the differences you see.
Meantime, the opening exhibit works a little too hard to make its point and would have been served by some culling. Still many of the unfinished works tell good stories.
James Hunter Black Draftee, by Alice Neel, 1965 What’s he thinking about?
Alice Neel. A powerhouse. She taps into the poignant so seemingly effortlessly. Look at this portrait of James Hunter from 1965. It’s unfinished because after the first sitting, James didn’t return for the second. Why? He was off to Vietnam.
Gustav Klimt wasn’t the only artist in the exhibit to have trouble finishing a portrait out of frustration. Manet gave up on a painting of his wife after three failed attempts. He scraped the paint off her face each time, dissatisfied. Hmmm. Knowing Manet, this may say something about that marriage.
Madame Édouard Manet, c.1873
Manet gave up; Klimt died. But not before his sitter died, and her family rejected two other portraits. Sheesh! Still this painting shows something joyous, even as the object label describes the placement of color as tentative. After two rejections, you might be a little leery, too! Klimt seemed to die to get out of finishing it!
Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III, by Gustav Klimt, 1917-8
I was captivated by this hauntingly modern, surreal portrait of Mariana da Silva by Mengs. He couldn’t get the placement of the little lapdog quit right and apparently was unhappy with the face. So he painted a gauzy veil over it.
Portrait of Mariana de Silva y Sarmiento, by Anton Raphael Mengs, 1775
Not all the painting in the show were portraits, but those were the ones I was attracted to, I think for the way they blurred identity. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, and this day shows in pictures how identity is mutable in the moment and in reflection later, even centuries later.
We first met in the art history building where refreshments were in a room that resembled a little, red schoolhouse, only really the little, red-chair school room.
But the lectures that kicked the day off were in a very comfortable, modern auditorium. We would have to travel into history in our minds.
Marilyn Francus, a Professor of English from West Virginia University, regaled us with her work from Chawton House, a research center on early women’s writings. She admitted to geeking-out on manuscripts and books that Jane Austen wrote in, sussing out from that her mentoring relationship with young writers, particularly her nieces. She investigated the family’s charades and riddles and shared how the love of language was reinforced in everyday life in the Austen home. More about that below.
Francus wrapped by deciphering the advice Jane Austen would give to new writers. Essentially, know the canon (read, read, read), write what is real, and practice your craft. Good advice indeed.
And that got put into action with our next set of presenters. Susan Zlotnick, a Professor of English at Vassar, is currently teaching a course on The Gothic Novel (including Austen’s parody Northanger Abbey). She gave us an introductory talk, then invited seven of her students to read us their “3-Minute Gothic Projects,” reflecting their learning on the tropes of the genre.
What you need to know is that Gothic novels draw upon the philosophical underpinnings of the Romantic Sublime, by Edmund Burke–the awe of God, nature, and our emotional selves that fuels literature, music, and art of the period; Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ centering on re-surfacing unconscious desires, the return of the repressed, and the Self confronting itself; and the female Gothic, which penetrates patriarchal power by using male villains to threaten the heroines.
The latter is an intriguing take on the genre. Zlotnick suggests that when men labeled strong women, with challenging and uncomfortable ideas, as ‘mad’, the woman would be imperiled in a number of thematic, violent ways. The woman reader could become aware of how women lacked personal power and rights, when male domination is threatened.
There was much more to these ideas, beyond the scope of a blog, but clearly offering very fresh ways to understand detective fiction, thrillers, and Gothic romances.
The students were tasked with writing Gothic stories that take place on the Vassar campus, not necessarily today. The results ranged from exceedingly clever to outright hilarious.
I loved Christian Lewis’ story about the mysterious disappearance of Meryl Streep (an esteemed Vassar grad) from a production of “The Cherry Orchard” that is repeated by a contemporary in the current production, literally on campus now. He is playing with early detective fiction with his funny, funny “The Mysteries of the Martel” and its sly references to Streep films that show up as ghostly Meryl hauntings.
Jennifer Ognibene, an English major who is pre-med, read her “Demolition of Mudd Chemistry,” referring to the current tear-down of the chemistry building. Her fantastical story of a woman student who is a chemist murderer would even make Edgar Allen Poe laugh. The trouble starts when the student runs an experiment, injecting herself with black widow spider venom, and it all does downhill from there. Seriously, it’s ready to be filmed.
Lexi Karas’ clever “A Strong Girl Displaced” was more serious, delving into notions of the Self and doubling from Freud’s theories. The plot twists and taut writing would make Austen proud.
None of these students is a creative writer per se. They put into action Austen’s code–know the canon first. They have read a lot of Gothic novels. Candidly, better them than me! I can leave the Bronte’s and Bram Stoker on the shelf.
Concert in the chapel
After lunch, we were serenaded by the Vassar College Women’s Chorus, with madrigals and other traditional British songs. But noteworthy were the two sets of Austen writings put to song.
The Three Prayers by Jane Austen have been put to music by Amanda Jacobs, who wrote a wonderful Pride and Prejudice musical I saw in 2011. Today, Jacobs directed the chorus in the US premiere of these works. Here’s a tiny sliver.
What tickled me were the parlor game songs, commissioned by Vassar College Music Department for the Women’s Chorus and put to music by Eleanor Daley. The three poems survived when Austen copied them into a letter in 1807.
Jane, her sister Cassandra, and their mother played a game where they devised poems where every line ended in a rhyme with the word rose, in “Verses to rhyme with ‘Rose’.” Jane’s was clever, Cassandra’s romantic, their mother’s so funny. Here’s her poem:
This morning I woke from a quiet repose,
I first rubb’d my eyes, and I next blew my nose;
With my stockings and shoes I then covered my toes,
And proceeded to put on the rest of my clothes.
This was finished in less than an hour, I suppose.
I employ’d myself next in repairing my hose.
‘Twas a work of necessity not what I chose;
Of my sock I’d much rather have knit twenty rows.
My work being done, I look’d through the windows,
And with pleasure beheld all the bucks and the does,
The cows and the bullocks, the wethers and ewes.
To the library each morning the family goes,
So I went with the rest though I felt rather froze.
My flesh is much warmer, my blood freer flows,
When I work in the garden with rakes and with hoes.
And now I believe I must come to a close,
For I find I grow stupid e’en while I compose.
If I write any longer my verse will be prose.
She seems destined to be a model for the Twitter-verse!
We wrapped the day with a visit to the campus art museum. Much too short. Lots of great works. I’ll share just one, in honor of the day. A woman artist, of course. Adele Romany, a French artist, and her 1804 “A young person hesitating to play piano in front of her family.” Shame on her! No Austen heroine every would!
Disapproval!
What is Papa thinking? Paintings like this could be used to put a young lady’s advantages forward. Hung in a pre-modern version of match.com
Special thanks to Cornelia Seckel, the publisher of Art Times Journal, for her ongoing and enthusiastic support of “Finding Her Way”–a seven-part essay series on American women artists working from about 1850 to 1950.
Now the essays have been compiled into one booklet. Please feel free to share “Finding Her Way” with friends and colleagues:
Riffs on the Bronte novels seem to be everywhere at the moment. What’s a reader to do? Get reading!
Madwoman Upstairs by an impossibly young, talented writer Catherine Lowell reads like a book by an impossibly young, talented writer. It’s raw, over-the-top, and Romantic-ally intellectual. That last phrase makes no sense, of course.
What I mean is that the author can’t resist giving us some heady stuff she probably first discussed in a college lit course. Here, intellectual. literary discussions between her two protagonists forges the path for falling in love. That’s what our author knows at this point in her life.
Better though is the literary mystery that allows Samantha, the last living Bronte, to learn about herself, her relationship with her father, and the nature of reality. Yes, the book goes to these heady places by the end, as Sam understands that “The fiction is more real than the reality.”
Telling you how she comes to this conclusion would spoil the mystery, and the fun. Let’s just say it has something to do with living in an unheated tower at Oxford, a haunting painting, a long-lost diary, reading Bronte novels, and falling in love. To take any of it too seriously would be just too postmodern.
Gothic and witty? Not two words that usually go together. Unless you’re thinking of Jane Steeleby Lyndsay Faye.
Instead of Jane Eyre’s “Reader, I married him,” a line repeated in The Madwoman Upstairs, here, it’s “Reader, I murdered him.”
And so, we get the story of this Jane that parallels the fictional Jane Eyre (another postmodern riff). How she loses her mother and goes to live with Aunt Patience, who is anything but. How she’s told to control her passions and becomes surrounded by death. The loathsome cousin and loathsome boarding school. You remember it all, I’m sure.
The recalling of the plot structure is less interesting, until…the plot takes a big turn onto its own adventure. That first murder–the loathsome cousin–was justified, the Feminist would say, and we’re off to the races. No, no, I won’t tell you more!
This book does quite a bit of nodding to Charles Dickens, as well as Charlotte Bronte. I also think it owes something to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for its adherence to plot while simultaneously borrowing contemporary sensibilities. And the fun (even moreso the better you know the source material) comes just watching it all happen. What if Jane’s ‘true nature’ were…to murder with good intention? That’s certainly one way to deal with life’s problems!
Another big part of the fun here is the writing, approrpriating the Romantic style. With exuberance. When’s the last time you read a book that included the word ‘delinquitorious”?
Nelly Dean by Alison Case is my least favorite of the three, perhaps because Wuthering Heights is my least favorite Bronte novel.
Still looking at a well-worn plot, as over-the-top ridiculous as it is, can be fun from the perspective of another character. Here, it’s the miserable, but loyal, servant Ellen Dean. If you like the below-stairs perspective and jive on “Downton Abbey,” this book might just be for you.
Yes, Nelly basically narrates the original. Now, you can get more of her first-hand account and the story of her life, including her devotion to Hareton. The role of Heathcliff? His arrival ended Nelly’s childhood.
Her account, as imagined by the most mature author of the three and an English professor inspired by her students’ inquiring minds, will win you to Nelly’s side. Was that a convoluted enough sentence to be worthy of the Bronte’s?
The book I haven’t gotten from the library yet is Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre. After years of Jane Austen-alia, it’s been fun to immerse in some Bronte-mersion. Now back to the 21st century…
Tim Lowry, from that period of the unpleasantness with King George, showed us what any Southern gentleman wore in his day. The tricorn hat started out as a broad brimmed hat to protect from the sum. But as soldiers, the barrel of their guns would keep hitting the brim. A clever American innovated the pragmatic style of cocking the brim, and the tricorn was born.
It’s 1887, and Lizzie Wills has offered to take us through the house. Miss Lizzie is a maid in the 
Lizzie seemed much more interested in telling stories than complaining about her tiny room off the servants’ stairwell, the four flights she regularly had to run up and down, the 12 fireplaces she had to stoke, or the 7 bathrooms that needed cleaning.
te geometric patterns, which may reference Islamic influences.
We first met in the art history building where refreshments were in a room that resembled a little, red schoolhouse, only really the little, red-chair school room.
Special thanks to 
Gothic and witty? Not two words that usually go together. Unless you’re thinking of 
Nelly Dean by Alison Case is my least favorite of the three, perhaps because Wuthering Heights is my least favorite Bronte novel.