Well there's no question that we are seeing the effects of both parents upon our main characters, and the amalgamation as Gissing sees it. It's particularly sad then to see "... Yule's dread lest Marian should be infected with her mother's faults of speech and behavior. He would scarcely permit his wife to talk to the child."
Also, "... Marian's natural reserve had been strengthened by her mother's respectful aloofness." Which was apparently caused by Mrs.Yule having "... never exercised maternal authority..."
I can't help but be amused by Gissing's use of a character's facial expressions to launch expositions of their personality - we meet Mr. Quarmby - "... his eyes, grey/orbed in a yellow setting, glared with good-humored inquisitiveness, and his mouth was that of the confirmed gossip."
Yes, the facial emotion economy! There is a very good article by Raffi Khatchadourian about this in New Yorker within the last few years. Good to be reminded there are shades of meaning that the mouth can make!
I am also tantalized by the ways in which hands (and their digits) have a voice all their own: To emphasize the extremely confidential nature of his remarks … one of [Marian’s] thin delicate hands was covered with his red, podgy fingers.” / [He] pressed Marian’s hand with paternal fervour, and waddled off to chatter …”
And, “[Alfred’s] fingers itched to have hold of the editorial pen. Ha, ha!” (87).
Lots of internal dialogue in this lengthy chapter. The relationship between Marion and her mother was so delicately drawn, education and class distinction between the two generations. I thought Gissing set the interaction up perfectly. I thought her mother was a servant at first. I found it heartbreaking that, after her mother has just put in a word for her to her father, Marian is thinking how unpresentable it would be to have Milvain meet her mother.
The glance at the publishing world was also compelling. Fadge, Yule, and the young Milvain all court power, ambition, and money, but have a sincere literary/artistic desire. Yule, like Reardon, can’t help being sincere and this brings him down.
Yes, my heart wept for Mrs. Yule and her humble attempts to be "good enough": “Mrs. Yule’s … intonation was not flagrantly vulgar, but the accent of London’s poor, which brands as with hereditary baseness, still clung to her words, rendering futile such propriety of phrase as she owed to her years of association with educated people.” / “Mrs. Yule read … with that look of slow appreciation which is so pathetic when it signifies the heart’s good-will thwarted by the mind’s defect.”
But, the most poignant moment of all (for me) followed Mrs. Yule's musings about her "unpresentable" being. The simple essence of her solitary act: "She shed a few tears," made me shed a few tears of my own.
I so agree with you both, my heart broke for her. The slow chipping away at any bit of her self-confidence is painful to read and the thought she'd feel she is an embarrassment to her own child made me angry and wanted to fight for her. If she exercised any self-confidence, she'd get smacked down for sure by her "educated" blowhard (and yet still broke) husband. I'd hope for some justice for her later in the story but given this is autobiographical and realistic I'm afraid real life ate women like that up and spit them out.
It’s good to be reminded that even imaginary people are embodied. I’m also thinking of the real Henry James (perhaps it’s the failed novelist/dramatist Mr Yule, and perhaps it’s the mention of Marian being his amanuensis, which also suggests the limits of the body). Reminded again of a Jamesian quote, “ I call men rich who can meet the requirements of their imagination.” This is a middle class family (certainly not rich, perhaps verging on poverty - they can afford meat!) is so conflicted, so dynamic, imagining themselves to the point of fracture (poor Mrs. Yule, indeed can’t keep it together, she needs to sew!), makes you wonder whether a breadwinner who subsists on literary fare can survive in this world.
What a voice (Gissing and Mr. Quarmby]: "He ... talked in thick, rather pompous tones, with a pant at the end of a sentence.” Chuckle-worthy, indeed.
And, perhaps my own "pompous" response, but the notion that Mr. Quarmby's "linen made distinct appeal to the laundress" also made me laugh aloud; a novel vision of the down-and-dirty literary man?
Another John. This time John Holloway, Mrs Yule’s brother. I remember discussing that Jane Austen in Persuasion used the name Mary as a fill in and meant to go back and change them. At least it’s not a third John Yule.
The men in Gissing’s world are as trapped as the women. Usually Victorian novels have some comfortable male characters. Here, men are constrained mostly by money which determines whether they can create art, marry, conform to family’s expectations, and even eat. Men can’t socialize and make contacts without the right clothes. Temperament is also an issue--many family squabbles are causing rifts which hinder support.
This is the saddest chapter that I have read so far. Giving this context to Marion, her demanding, patronizing father, her poor, unappreciated mother, brings more shades and tones to her character. I went back and reread her time in the library.
Mrs Yule, despite and with her perceived limitations is such a richly imagined being. The social class snobbery is pretty devastating, and still so timely. I got a little confused about the house : parlor, dining, his study on the first floor. Does that mean the maid and kitchen are in the cellar? Or out back?
In a novel full of insights about class and poverty impact people:
“her intonation was not flagrantly vulgar, but the accent of the London poor, which brands as with hereditary baseness, still clung to her words, rendering futile such propriety of phrase as she owed to years of association with educated people.” - So much for the self made man.
Yes, and Reardon seems like a young Casaubon, with his monkish self denial and devotion to the classics. Marriage and a family life could help draw these men out of themselves, but the marriage would have to be a partnership, not tyranny (in Yule's case) or subjection (in Reardon's). Alfred does, however, seem to have real fatherly affection for Marian.
This chapter resembles the ugly world of the media. The comedic insults that end up destroying reputations... overblown self-righteous egos and revenge seeking. The tit-for-tat of Fadge and Alfred could be portrayed on late night television or the twitterverse!
Fadge "struck out a special line of work by the free exercise of a malicious flippancy which was then without rival in periodical press." then he blasts Alfred in a review that was "a masterpiece; its exquisite virulence set the literary circles chuckling."
Was Fadge review a revenge piece? One way to chip away at someone's superiority complex is to get his peers to laugh at him and in this case it worked. These are the things that end careers and sometimes lives. But for now, Alfred wants revenge.
Loved the line about dinner delays, too! Another great one: "Mr. Quarmby laughed in a peculiar way, which was the result of long years of mirth-subdual in the Reading-room."
What to make of Alfred's callousness toward his wife? It must eat him up being that way inside his own home. At 50, 20 years after his debut novel did not sell, he thinks himself a failure. What must he think of his wife's lack of accomplishments then? This brings me back to an old theory of mine: too many people get married.
Yule has the power to make a happier home, but it would require some degree of acceptance and humility, such as his wife displays. He inadvertently chose a partner with a sound nature. I'm not sure lifelong bachelorhood would have been any better for him; he wouldn't have Marian, whom he's made his intellectual companion at the sad expense of his wife, and he might be ill or dead without his wife's ministrations. I do feel for him in his assessment of his life; it's crushing to think oneself a failure, whether constantly or intermittently.
of all the marriage litmus tests, being too embarrassed to bring your spouse out in public seems to be the bare minimum. alfred drops a lot in my esteem for the way he talks to his wife (or the lack of talk), esp. at the dinner table in front of their daughter. I hate men like Alfred and wish them ill!
Gissing certainly creates pathos, as many people have shown in their responses. My sadness and pity were invoked early in this chapter at his description of Hinks, whose manner is a self apology and whose chin and neck show the signs of "conscientious shaving with an unsteady hand." And then Mrs. Yule, watching her daughter in a "curiously furtive way" and acting more the servant than the mother. She has clearly been a long suffering, patient companion to Yule, only to be treated with daily curtness, or worse. But Yule is pathetic too; "grace had been denied to him." What a line. Gissing is talking about his prose, but grace in a larger sense has been denied him. He has no grace with his family, no healthy humility that could help him make things better for himself. He has become embittered--understandably, due to the "malicious flippancy" of the likes of Fadge and his own failures (awful to feel that about oneself)--but no less insidiously. I do think he has affection for Marian, not just as his assistant, and his assessment of Jasper seems right to me--"a doubtful sort of customer," living off his mother, and "just the kind of man to make himself agreeable to a girl for the fun of it." I don't like it any more than Alfred does that Marian seems attracted to him.
Yes, Yule has no grace with his family (but isn't that what family is for?). He can't help but interject some bitterness....
I'm curious how you square that a man without humility would marry beneath him? What prompted the marriage in the first place? Does the novel tell us? Like Henry James, Gissing doesn't explain people's motivations and desires. Perhaps it's British reticence, perhaps it's the author's prerogative to let the actions speak for themselves (and for readers to interpret), or perhaps novels (and people) must maintain some privacy, or.....
It sounds like Yule is more than occasionally bitter with his family and makes his wife feel her inferiority daily. It's not a recipe for domestic happiness.
Gissing doesn't give much information about why Yule married, but implies, I think, loneliness. I think he wanted/needed a companion and someone to tend to him. They came close to parting in the early years, but "her tendance had become indispensable" to him already, and they had a child. He's a creature of habit and wants a certain stability. I think marrying was part of that.
LOL! Me too! I'll join you!
Well there's no question that we are seeing the effects of both parents upon our main characters, and the amalgamation as Gissing sees it. It's particularly sad then to see "... Yule's dread lest Marian should be infected with her mother's faults of speech and behavior. He would scarcely permit his wife to talk to the child."
Also, "... Marian's natural reserve had been strengthened by her mother's respectful aloofness." Which was apparently caused by Mrs.Yule having "... never exercised maternal authority..."
I can't help but be amused by Gissing's use of a character's facial expressions to launch expositions of their personality - we meet Mr. Quarmby - "... his eyes, grey/orbed in a yellow setting, glared with good-humored inquisitiveness, and his mouth was that of the confirmed gossip."
Yes, the facial emotion economy! There is a very good article by Raffi Khatchadourian about this in New Yorker within the last few years. Good to be reminded there are shades of meaning that the mouth can make!
What is this article?
“We Know How You Feel” in January 19, 2015. It’s one of Khatchadourian’s longer profiles
Will read!
I am also tantalized by the ways in which hands (and their digits) have a voice all their own: To emphasize the extremely confidential nature of his remarks … one of [Marian’s] thin delicate hands was covered with his red, podgy fingers.” / [He] pressed Marian’s hand with paternal fervour, and waddled off to chatter …”
And, “[Alfred’s] fingers itched to have hold of the editorial pen. Ha, ha!” (87).
Mr Quarmby, “tonsured by the hand of time ...” such a gentle description. Then: “a broad, flabby face, the colour of an ancient turnip, ...”
The author giveth, then the author taketh away.
...”tonsured by the hand of time...” I loved that too! Sensitive....and observant.
Lots of internal dialogue in this lengthy chapter. The relationship between Marion and her mother was so delicately drawn, education and class distinction between the two generations. I thought Gissing set the interaction up perfectly. I thought her mother was a servant at first. I found it heartbreaking that, after her mother has just put in a word for her to her father, Marian is thinking how unpresentable it would be to have Milvain meet her mother.
The glance at the publishing world was also compelling. Fadge, Yule, and the young Milvain all court power, ambition, and money, but have a sincere literary/artistic desire. Yule, like Reardon, can’t help being sincere and this brings him down.
Yes, my heart wept for Mrs. Yule and her humble attempts to be "good enough": “Mrs. Yule’s … intonation was not flagrantly vulgar, but the accent of London’s poor, which brands as with hereditary baseness, still clung to her words, rendering futile such propriety of phrase as she owed to her years of association with educated people.” / “Mrs. Yule read … with that look of slow appreciation which is so pathetic when it signifies the heart’s good-will thwarted by the mind’s defect.”
But, the most poignant moment of all (for me) followed Mrs. Yule's musings about her "unpresentable" being. The simple essence of her solitary act: "She shed a few tears," made me shed a few tears of my own.
Devastating. Mothers sacrifice themselves. So consistently. They don’t even realize they are doing it. Did Gissing see this? Maybe.
I so agree with you both, my heart broke for her. The slow chipping away at any bit of her self-confidence is painful to read and the thought she'd feel she is an embarrassment to her own child made me angry and wanted to fight for her. If she exercised any self-confidence, she'd get smacked down for sure by her "educated" blowhard (and yet still broke) husband. I'd hope for some justice for her later in the story but given this is autobiographical and realistic I'm afraid real life ate women like that up and spit them out.
Completely agree. The chapter closing with her husband correcting her grammar yet again just broke my heart.
It’s good to be reminded that even imaginary people are embodied. I’m also thinking of the real Henry James (perhaps it’s the failed novelist/dramatist Mr Yule, and perhaps it’s the mention of Marian being his amanuensis, which also suggests the limits of the body). Reminded again of a Jamesian quote, “ I call men rich who can meet the requirements of their imagination.” This is a middle class family (certainly not rich, perhaps verging on poverty - they can afford meat!) is so conflicted, so dynamic, imagining themselves to the point of fracture (poor Mrs. Yule, indeed can’t keep it together, she needs to sew!), makes you wonder whether a breadwinner who subsists on literary fare can survive in this world.
There are many references to dramatists....
What a voice (Gissing and Mr. Quarmby]: "He ... talked in thick, rather pompous tones, with a pant at the end of a sentence.” Chuckle-worthy, indeed.
And, perhaps my own "pompous" response, but the notion that Mr. Quarmby's "linen made distinct appeal to the laundress" also made me laugh aloud; a novel vision of the down-and-dirty literary man?
Another John. This time John Holloway, Mrs Yule’s brother. I remember discussing that Jane Austen in Persuasion used the name Mary as a fill in and meant to go back and change them. At least it’s not a third John Yule.
The men in Gissing’s world are as trapped as the women. Usually Victorian novels have some comfortable male characters. Here, men are constrained mostly by money which determines whether they can create art, marry, conform to family’s expectations, and even eat. Men can’t socialize and make contacts without the right clothes. Temperament is also an issue--many family squabbles are causing rifts which hinder support.
This is the saddest chapter that I have read so far. Giving this context to Marion, her demanding, patronizing father, her poor, unappreciated mother, brings more shades and tones to her character. I went back and reread her time in the library.
Mrs Yule, despite and with her perceived limitations is such a richly imagined being. The social class snobbery is pretty devastating, and still so timely. I got a little confused about the house : parlor, dining, his study on the first floor. Does that mean the maid and kitchen are in the cellar? Or out back?
In a novel full of insights about class and poverty impact people:
“her intonation was not flagrantly vulgar, but the accent of the London poor, which brands as with hereditary baseness, still clung to her words, rendering futile such propriety of phrase as she owed to years of association with educated people.” - So much for the self made man.
Another damning portrait of one its main characters, Alfred Yule. Did anyone else think of Mr. Casaubon from Middlemarch?
“Practically he was living in a past age; his literary ideals were formed on the study of Boswell.”
Perhaps Casaubon would have been happier poor, married to Mrs Yule.
Thank you for that laugh, Janice!
Yes, and Reardon seems like a young Casaubon, with his monkish self denial and devotion to the classics. Marriage and a family life could help draw these men out of themselves, but the marriage would have to be a partnership, not tyranny (in Yule's case) or subjection (in Reardon's). Alfred does, however, seem to have real fatherly affection for Marian.
This chapter resembles the ugly world of the media. The comedic insults that end up destroying reputations... overblown self-righteous egos and revenge seeking. The tit-for-tat of Fadge and Alfred could be portrayed on late night television or the twitterverse!
Fadge "struck out a special line of work by the free exercise of a malicious flippancy which was then without rival in periodical press." then he blasts Alfred in a review that was "a masterpiece; its exquisite virulence set the literary circles chuckling."
Was Fadge review a revenge piece? One way to chip away at someone's superiority complex is to get his peers to laugh at him and in this case it worked. These are the things that end careers and sometimes lives. But for now, Alfred wants revenge.
Loved the line about dinner delays, too! Another great one: "Mr. Quarmby laughed in a peculiar way, which was the result of long years of mirth-subdual in the Reading-room."
"Mirth subdual" made me grin; an excellent turn of phrase!
That line is fantastic--and the peculiar laugh ends with the "Reading-room cough."
What to make of Alfred's callousness toward his wife? It must eat him up being that way inside his own home. At 50, 20 years after his debut novel did not sell, he thinks himself a failure. What must he think of his wife's lack of accomplishments then? This brings me back to an old theory of mine: too many people get married.
Yule has the power to make a happier home, but it would require some degree of acceptance and humility, such as his wife displays. He inadvertently chose a partner with a sound nature. I'm not sure lifelong bachelorhood would have been any better for him; he wouldn't have Marian, whom he's made his intellectual companion at the sad expense of his wife, and he might be ill or dead without his wife's ministrations. I do feel for him in his assessment of his life; it's crushing to think oneself a failure, whether constantly or intermittently.
of all the marriage litmus tests, being too embarrassed to bring your spouse out in public seems to be the bare minimum. alfred drops a lot in my esteem for the way he talks to his wife (or the lack of talk), esp. at the dinner table in front of their daughter. I hate men like Alfred and wish them ill!
Gissing certainly creates pathos, as many people have shown in their responses. My sadness and pity were invoked early in this chapter at his description of Hinks, whose manner is a self apology and whose chin and neck show the signs of "conscientious shaving with an unsteady hand." And then Mrs. Yule, watching her daughter in a "curiously furtive way" and acting more the servant than the mother. She has clearly been a long suffering, patient companion to Yule, only to be treated with daily curtness, or worse. But Yule is pathetic too; "grace had been denied to him." What a line. Gissing is talking about his prose, but grace in a larger sense has been denied him. He has no grace with his family, no healthy humility that could help him make things better for himself. He has become embittered--understandably, due to the "malicious flippancy" of the likes of Fadge and his own failures (awful to feel that about oneself)--but no less insidiously. I do think he has affection for Marian, not just as his assistant, and his assessment of Jasper seems right to me--"a doubtful sort of customer," living off his mother, and "just the kind of man to make himself agreeable to a girl for the fun of it." I don't like it any more than Alfred does that Marian seems attracted to him.
Yes, Yule has no grace with his family (but isn't that what family is for?). He can't help but interject some bitterness....
I'm curious how you square that a man without humility would marry beneath him? What prompted the marriage in the first place? Does the novel tell us? Like Henry James, Gissing doesn't explain people's motivations and desires. Perhaps it's British reticence, perhaps it's the author's prerogative to let the actions speak for themselves (and for readers to interpret), or perhaps novels (and people) must maintain some privacy, or.....
It sounds like Yule is more than occasionally bitter with his family and makes his wife feel her inferiority daily. It's not a recipe for domestic happiness.
Gissing doesn't give much information about why Yule married, but implies, I think, loneliness. I think he wanted/needed a companion and someone to tend to him. They came close to parting in the early years, but "her tendance had become indispensable" to him already, and they had a child. He's a creature of habit and wants a certain stability. I think marrying was part of that.