Great Books Archives - Page 19 of 26

Humorists

Imagine you were going to write a book entitled Humorists. There will be 14 chapters, each profiling a Humorist. Nobody from before the 17^th century; nobody from the last 50 years.

What are the first three names which come to mind?

Paul Johnson wrote that book. Here is my prediction: None of the three names you just imagined are on the list of people he profiles in this book. Indeed, it might take you some time to come up with one of the names on his list. To come up with half the names on the list…well, that might take infinite time.

Who made Johnson’s list? We can lump them into categories, starting with the ones who are most recognizably humorists.

1. The Comedians:
In this category we can put W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, The Marx Brothers.

There is nothing particularly off about that set of four. You see their names and you think, “Yeah, they are funny.”

Or, at least you acknowledge that many people thought they were funny in their time. It certainly tells us something about humor that not all of those comedians have aged well. W. C. Fields? Hardly hear about him anymore. Indeed, I am not sure I would have heard of him if not for the fact that I had a W. C. Fritos poster in my room when I was a small child; it must have been a free poster from mailing in Fritos bags or something. Charlie Chaplin? Everyone has heard of him, but he was best in the silent movies and who watches those anymore? Laurel and Hardy? Not sure how well they are known these days; I loved them when I was a kid. The Marx Brothers? Still legitimately funny.

But, thinking through that list of four, you instantly notice that there are a lot of other mid-20^th century comedians who are missing. Off the top of my head: Lucille Ball. Abbot and Costello. The Three Stooges. Bob Hope. Jackie Gleason. It isn’t clear why Johnson picked the four he picked.

But this is at least a category in which you can imagine choosing among people who are truly comedians.

2. Writers with Wit

In this category, we can put Benjamin Franklin, G.K Chesterton, James Thurber, Noel Coward/Nancy Mitford (they share a chapter), and, well, let’s add Damon Runyon here.

This is where it gets a bit strange. Start with Runyon. I don’t think I have ever even seen his name before; his biggest claim to fame is that Guys and Dolls is based on some of his stories. After reading the chapter about him, I think he is probably worth reading, but it is safe to say that it would be a very rare person who would put him in the top 14 humorists. Thurber, Coward, and Mitford all have their charms to be sure. Franklin is a humorist, but that is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about him. Or the second. Or the third. Chesterton? He is incredibly witty, but a Humorist? Interesting way to think about him, but I can see it.

Again, why this set of names? Consider the question at the outset—name three humorists. I would have named: P.G. Wodehouse, Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken. I think it is safe to say that all three of those writers are more obviously Humorists than anyone in Paul Johnson’s list. Indeed, if you had a list of all the witty writers, it isn’t obvious any of Johnson’s names would be anywhere near the top.

3. The Artists

Here we have Hogarth, Rowlandson, and Toulouse-Lautrec. This set is really a very big stretch. Yes, there is some humor in their work, but to call them Humorists is really straining the definition of the word. In the last case, even Johnson can’t sustain the argument that he is a humorist. If you look long enough at some of the work by the first two, you will see some humorous characters, but the first thought in looking at their paintings, even the ones Johnson wants to highlight, is not, “This is humorous.”

4. The…You Must Be Joking

Two names here. First Charles Dickens. Charming, wonderful, excellent novelist. But a Humorist? Yes, Sam Weller is funny. Mr. Micawber…charming, amusing, and yes, I suppose we could say he is humorous. Indeed, if the criterion becomes, “He wrote a book in which there is at least one character who makes me smile,” then I suppose we can call Dickens a Humorist. But that just seems such a strange definition.

And then: Dr. Johnson. (Why is he called Dr. Johnson and not Samuel Johnson? I have no idea.) This is just absurd. Sure, some of the sayings are witty, but Samuel Johnson is anything but a humorist. The first sentence in Paul Johnson’ biography of him, “It stretches credulity to cite of Dr. Samuel Johnson as a comic.” Yes it does.

So, what is going on here?

I suspect this is the case of the Great Writer who no longer has anyone willing to say, “Uh, you should think about this a bit more and maybe rewrite a bit here and there.” The problem is quite common—the most obvious recent example is J.K. Rowling—does anyone dispute the fact that the books written after she became Famous would have been better if someone had edited them a bit? Victor Hugo had the same problem.

Paul Johnson is a fabulous historian and a writer. One of his earlier books was Intellectuals which is a set of biographies of people who value ideas more than actual people. It is marvelous fun if you have an iconoclastic streak and like to read about the failings of a bunch of people who are unduly idolized. Johnson has tried, unsuccessfully, three times to replicate that book: Creators, Leaders, and Humorists.

Humorists would be a fine book if the title was switched to Well-written, Breezy Biographies of Some Interesting People. (Hard to figure out why they didn’t use that title.)

The problem here is that there is no real working definition of “Humorist.” Johnson makes a few stabs here and there in the book to categorize the humor, but the theory of humor doesn’t even approach the point where it can be evaluated. Yes, some humorists create chaos and some create order and some note how strange people are. That doesn’t really define anything.

I think this explains the selections. If you were really writing a book about Humorists, you would choose carefully, and work out a theory. But, if you are really just looking for an excuse to write up some biographies of people you think are interesting, then you’ll have a book like this one.

All that being said, it was a pleasant book to read. After all, if you are writing a book called Humorists, you do get to throw in a bunch of jokes.

And Humor is important. Very Important. It is even important enough that spending a bit of time reading a bunch of biographies about people on the fringes of being Humorists is a marvelous way to remind yourself just how important it is to fill your life with humor. The world can use more humor.

The Way or The Great Game?

At one level, Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, is a rollicking adventure story of an Irish orphan growing up on the streets of India during the British Raj.

At another level, it is a deep refection on choosing the purpose of your life. It is this second level that makes this book worth reading (and rereading).

One of those Big Questions which I have spent innumerable pleasurable hours talking about with students is: “What should I do with my life?” College is the first time most students have ever really been faced with that question. Through high school, the next step was always obvious for the college-bound student. Get good grades so you can get into college. But, suddenly, the next step isn’t so obvious.

My students often start the conversation imagining that what is puzzling them is which career they should choose. It turns out that everyone has advice for them on the “right” career path.

It is actually quite surprising how many people give advice to others on which career is the right one. For example, these days just about every student has been told by someone, usually multiple someones, that a major in Computer Science is the right choice. Now, knowing many of these students, I can safely say that such advice is beyond awful for most of them. A successful career programming computers requires a very particular (dare I say peculiar?) type of person. Most people would hate such a job.

But, the fact that everyone is perfectly willing to tell a 20 year old what would be a good career path is exactly why the student is so confused. Who is right? Which is the right career?

That is how the conversation starts. That conversation usually lasts under five minutes before I ask some variant of, “What do you want out of life? What is your goal?” And then begins the fascinating conversation.

This is exactly the central question in Kim. Our Hero, nicknamed “Little Friend of All the World,” is a social chameleon; he can blend in anywhere. His parents were Irish, but Kim has been so tanned by spending his days outdoors, he can easily pass as Indian. He is a very clever street urchin.

There are two threads to the plot. First, Kim meets a Tibetan monk, who is looking for the place where Buddha’s arrow landed to create the River in which one bathes to wash away all sin. The quest to find this river is The Way. It is the way to enlightenment, to spiritual fulfillment, to peace and happiness. Kim becomes a disciple of this charming and holy man and joins him on his journey in following The Way.

Meanwhile, Mahbub Ali, an Afghan horse-trader who works with the British secret service in spying on the enemies of the land, recruits Kim into The Great Game of espionage. Kim is a natural spy, blending in well with whomever he meets. Kim could become a great spy, indeed, without a doubt, the greatest spy of all. The Great Game is exciting and daring and requires all of Kim’s intelligence and charm and wiles.

And right there is the choice facing my students. Is the goal of life The Way of spiritual fulfillment or The Great Game of an exciting and lucrative career? Kim is exactly like my students:

“Sahibs get little pleasure of travel,” he reflected. “Hai mai! I go from one place to another as it might be a kick-ball. It is my Kismet. No man can escape his Kismet. But I am to pray to Bibi Miriam, and I am a Sahib”—he looked at his boots ruefully. “No; I am Kim. This is the great world, and I am only Kim. Who is Kim?” He considered his own identity, a thing he had never done before, till his head swam. He was one insignificant person in all this roaring whirl of India, going southward to he knew not what fate.

Who is Kim? The disciple of a Tibetan monk who will find joy at the discovery of the sacred river? The student of The Great Game who will blaze a career of such success that people will write books about him?

And, like all Great Books, Kim is really asking: Who are You?

It is no wonder that my students are so tortured with this question of what they want to do with their lives. It is a universal question.

Colleges don’t help students with this question, however. They are also deeply conflicted. The whole idea of an American liberal arts college is that The Way is the object of study. The liberal arts are distinguished from the practical arts, and the colleges and universities were created to help students delve into the mysteries of life and thereby discover their complete selves.

But, in a Faustian bargain, American liberal arts colleges have raised the price tag to $70,000 a year by promising training in The Great Game. They will help the student get that lucrative job.

So, we have a historical curriculum structure grounded in teaching The Way, yet the rhetoric of both the colleges and the instructors is the promise of teaching how to play The Great Game. No wonder college students are confused. If you study literature and history and philosophy and economics and science purely for the career benefits such study will bring, it does not take long to realize that you aren’t getting a lot of career benefits from most of your classes.

Break the pattern. Pick up Kim and read it because it is a fun book wrestling with a deep question and let it take you wherever it will.

Skipper Worse

Raise your hand if you have ever heard of Skipper Worse by Alexander Lange Kielland.

Anyone?  Anyone?

This novel was included in Charles Eliot’s series, Harvard Classics. That series was intended to show that you could get a basic liberal education in a library which fits on a five foot shelf.

So, imagine the challenge—you have a mere five feet of bookshelf space and you want to put in all the classics. So, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Plato, Aristotle. And so on. Oh, and Kielland’s Skipper Worse.

A curious choice to put it mildly. I had never heard of this book until a friend of mine, Chris Fauske, published a translation of the book. Chris kept telling me the book was really good. He was right; it is very well worth reading.

That is what got me puzzling—why hadn’t I ever heard of Kielland or this novel in any other context? And you can imagine my shock when I found it listed as one of the books in Charles Eliot’s (yes, Charles Eliot, President of Harvard, proponent of Great Books!) Harvard Classics. Hard to get a bigger stamp of Great Book than that.

But, then it gets really odd: Skipper Worse does not have its own page in Wikipedia. Now we have a Great Book without a Wikipedia page! I suspect this is a set of one.

And then, I discover that Harold Bloom didn’t list Kielland’s novel in the appendix of The Western Canon, which pretty much lists every work of high fiction ever written.

So, what do Charles Eliot and Chris Fauske know that the rest of the universe doesn’t?

Kielland is Norwegian and is part of the generation of writers who helped create Norway as a distinct country and people. Publishing this work in 1882, he is doing for Norway much what Dickens was doing for England or Tolstoy was doing for Russia—trying to capture society as a whole in a novel.

Using this novel as the reference point (I have no other independent knowledge of Norway in the late 19^th century (yeah, clearly I have a critical failing in my education—how did 1880s Norway get skipped in every class I ever took?)), Norway was caught in a real cultural crossroads as an older maritime culture met a burgeoning commercial class met an intensely devout religious class. Poor Skipper Worse.

(Can I note how hard it was to get over the fact that “Worse” is just his last name and not the English word “worse”?)

Skipper Worse likes to sail boats. At the start of the novel he has just completed the first-ever round-trip voyage from Norway to Rio. (Almost, but not quite, as important a voyage as Dias rounding the Cape of Good Hope, to be sure.)

The Skipper’s ship is named The Hope of the Family (insert “Symbolism Alert”). By the end of the first chapter, you know this is going to be one of those nice novels where a maritime hero settles back into the life of his beloved homeland. Except it isn’t. While he was away, Norway changed.

Skipper Worse’s old life no longer exists, and he is suddenly faced with a problem. What world should he join? There is the grand new commercial world where Skipper Worse can become a shipping magnate running a large-scale commercial enterprise. There is the intense new religious community where Skipper Worse can thwart the devil and all his works through a life of simplicity and intense devotion. And there is his tavern and his old friends with whom he can while away the years getting merrily drunk and telling tall tales.

Oh, and there is a girl. A young girl, much younger that the Skipper. Maybe Worse can regain his lost youth with this younger bride; all the more important because Worse’s son is, well, not a good fellow (nothing to look forward to there).

Throw in some interesting characters from the commercial and religious worlds, and you have an intriguing portrait of Norway at a slice in time when Norway has to decide what it means to be Norway.

For the scope of the novel, it is surprisingly short; just 164 pages in the Fauske translation. Yet despite being under 200 pages, I feel like I know this town, these people. And it breaks my heart to see them so divided, so poised on the cusp of great societal upheaval, so unprepared for what the future will bring. These are people who are simply not prepared for the 20^th century.

Another curious note, Skipper Worse is a prequel to Kielland’s earlier novel Garman & Worse. But, for as much as I enjoyed Skipper Worse, I am not eager to read the sequel. This is partly because I have such a quaint little picture of this town that I am not sure I want to know what happens next.

On prequels: what is the first literary prequel ever published? To qualify: an author needs to have written both the original and the prequel. Retelling old myths doesn’t count—it has to be an original story followed by another original story that precedes the one already published.

I have not exhaustively thought about this, and I may be missing something really obvious, but it is just possible that Skipper Worse is the first one that would qualify. I’d be happy to hear that this is wrong, by the way—I suddenly am quite interested in this matter. (Don’t ask why I am interested. I have no idea why I get interested in anything.)

On Wikipedia: the lack of a Wikipedia entry on this book is more than just puzzling. It also makes me wonder if I should take up a project about which I feel twinges of guilt all the time. Should I be spending time each week improving Wikipedia? I love Wikipedia—I use it all the time. But, I often note small errors or omissions or things that it would be good to include. I certainly know enough random, but kinda interesting things. I could do this. But, I never have. Why not? Surely working on a free, global encyclopedia is not a bad use of a half-hour a week. Yet, I have been tortured with the idea that I should do this for over a decade, and never once done so. I have no idea why not. But, I can say—creating at least a rudimentary Wikipedia page for Skipper Worse is certainly worth doing.

In the meantime, I’ll simply recommend Skipper Worse to you. (The Fauske translation is the one in the Amazon link above.) The novel is a very pleasant way to spend an evening or two.

Our Socialist Moment

Is what divides us greater than what unites us? If you pay attention to the popular narrative of the day, then the answer sure seems to be an unqualified “Yes.”

If that is your answer, then Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a book just for you.

North and South. Originally published in the 1850s.

Some things really don’t ever change

The 1850s were, to put it mildly, a tempestuous time in Europe. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. The complaints were loud: the rich capitalists were appropriating more and more wealth for themselves while the poor working class was getting less and less, living in misery. Democracy was a sham, as the government was simply a tool for the rich to impose their will on the majority.

Sound familiar?

The next time someone tells you how bad things are in modern society, ask if they were better or worse in 1850. And, remember: the rhetoric of the 1850s frequently tipped into bloodshed.

Gaskell walked into the middle of that battlefield, held her head erect, and tried to stare down the warring sides. She did this by writing a novel. A Victorian novel.

It has the frame of a love story. (Obviously—this is a Victorian novel, after all.) Woman from the rural South meets man from industrial North. You instantly know they will get married in the end. They, of course, do not know this until the end.

You have read that plot a million times, so the joy in a novel like this is not the shock of the ending, but the artistry of the story telling.

How does Gaskell’s artistry rate? Well, this isn’t Pride and Prejudice. But then nothing else is Pride and Prejudice. Setting that comparison aside, North and South is really good. If you want to slip into the cozy world of a Victorian novel, and you aren’t in the mood for the charming nature of Dickens, then this novel is perfect.

But, it is not the romance that sets this novel so far apart from its obvious relations. It is the statement on the relationship between the capitalists and the proletariat.

Margaret Hale, our heroine, moves with her parents from a pleasant little rural town in the south to the burgeoning industrial town of Milton in the North. There she meets two people who will frame the story.

Thornton (our hero) is the factory owner, who rose up from humble origins to wealth and position. Higgins, the poor working man, is a widower struggling to earn enough to keep body and soul together. He has an incredibly charming but very sick daughter who, of course you know this instantly, is destined to die in the middle of the novel.

If you imagine reading this novel in 1850, the question the novel must solve is obvious. Will Margaret side with the capitalists or the proletariat? Obviously, she has to pick a side.

The novel was originally published in serial form in Dickens’ own journal, Household Words, so there really was no doubt which side would win out. After all, Dickens is always on Team Proletariat.

The moment of crisis comes. A strike. The union flexes its muscle to protest the capitalists cutting the wages of the working men. Behind closed doors, the capitalists are being hurt by a fall in the prices of the goods they sell, so they no longer can afford the wages they had been paying. (The economic details on all this are a bit, shall we say, sketchy, but we are left with no doubt that the owners really do have to cut the wages.) Of course the capitalists don’t feel any need to explain these market forces to the workers, so they just come across as cold-hearted.

The strike turns violent. Well, a little bit violent. A few rocks are thrown. The capitalists hold out. Irish scabs are brought in. The union breaks. Higgins’ neighbor, who was quite active in the strike, ends up killing himself in despair. Higgins’ neighbor’s wife soon follows. The orphaned kids are farmed out to neighbors. Strike over. Workers beg to get their jobs back.

Victory for the capitalists? Nope. The strike amplified Thornton’s financial problems and so he goes broke.

Who wins? Nobody.

But, along the way, Thornton and Higgins discover something really important. They detest each other, but they both admire our Heroine. And they both realize that if Margaret likes the other one, then maybe, they can, you know, talk with each other. And when they start talking to one another, they realize that they actually have a lot in common. Maybe they should, you know, work together instead of being constantly opposed to one another.

Next thing you know, Thornton has built a dining hall for his workers and occasionally has lunch with them. His business fails anyway.

But, Thornton has a new plan; why not try out new ways of organizing a factory in which the employees and the employers work together? We never learn the details of these possible future “experiments,” but we are left with every expectation that the trial and error of this new way of manufacturing will prove every bit as blissful as the marriage of Margaret and Thornton.

Elizabeth Gaskell thus did something amazing. In Dickens’ very own publication, she argued that in the great class conflict of the day, in the face of the division between the rich employer and the poor workers, conflict hurts everybody.

Just like the conflict between Thornton and Margaret masked the fact that they really did belong together, the conflict between the factory owners and the workers masked the fact that they too need each other. What unites them is vastly bigger than what divides them.

I almost closed by saying: We need a new North and South for today.

But, then I realized, we already have it. Elizabeth Gaskell already wrote the North and South for today. So, the next time you start thinking there are unrepairable divisions and conflicts in society, read it.

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Finding Joy in Great Books

Let’s start by getting this out of the way: The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky is a Great Book (you also knew that).

Not only is it Great, it is perhaps the Greatest Novel Ever Written. I think its only competitors for that status are Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch. Maybe War and Peace.

After reading it 4 or 5 times, I still find it brilliant from beginning to end, gripping, thoughtful, and amazingly fun to read. Everything you could possibly want in a novel. If you have never read it, do so. You won’t regret it. Get the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. (Unless you can read Russian, in which case get the original.)

So, what does one write about the Greatest Novel Ever Written? The problem here is not a paucity of things to say, but a surfeit of topics. Pick a page and start your mind wandering—it will go interesting places.

So, let’s take the very end:

“Well, and now let’s end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner. Don’t be disturbed that we will be eating pancakes. It’s an ancient, eternal thing, and there is good in that, too,” laughed Alyosha. “Well, let’s go! And we go like this now, hand in hand.”
“And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya cried once more ecstatically, and once more all the boys joined in his exclamation.

Eating pancakes. At the end of a novel exploring the deepest philosophical matters which have occupied the mind of man, the eternal, ancient questions, they head off to eat pancakes at a memorial dinner. Pancakes. Simple, basic pancakes.

I was thinking about those pancakes when I read an essay by C.S. Lewis: “Christianity and Literature” (reprinted in The Seeing Eye). The essay itself is a bit of a mess—Lewis is trying to figure out how Christianity and Literature connect, and his answers are tentative and terribly unsatisfying. But he made the following observation toward the end which startled me with its relationship to those pancakes I had been pondering.

The Christian will take literature a little less seriously than the cultured Pagan: he will feel less uneasy with a purely hedonistic standard for at least many kinds of works.

Lewis’ reasoning leading to this conclusion is a bit wobbly. (“The unbeliever is always apt to make a kind of religion of his aesthetic experience” while the Christian knows his aesthetic experiences are not as important as the salvation of mankind, so things like literature are smaller and thus easier to simply enjoy. Like I said, wobbly.)

But, set Lewis’ reasoning aside and just think about the premise: how seriously should we take literature?

An aside before getting back to Dostoevsky. I teach courses using Great Books at Mount Holyoke whenever I can figure out a way to sneak one into the curriculum. To say these courses are not popular with my colleagues in the Humanities would be an understatement. Their (my colleagues) principal complaint: here is an economist (insert tone of disgust) talking about…Literature or History or Philosophy. What could I possibly know about…Literature? Surely I don’t know enough Theory (said in hushed reverent tones) to be competent in discussing Literature.

To which complaints, I invariably laugh and point out that Shakespeare was Great long before Derrida showed up to tell us how to take apart Shakespeare and find a nothing but a mirror for the obsession of the day of the 21^stcentury academic. Surely, we can all just read Shakespeare and, you know, enjoy him. Surely enjoyment is part of the point of Great Books. My colleagues in the Humanities find me utterly incomprehensible when I say things like this.

Lewis again: “It thus may come about that Christian views on literature will strike the world as shallow and flippant.” There is no doubt that “shallow and flippant” is exactly how my colleagues in the Humanities see my views on teaching Great Books.

The serendipitous shock I had on reading Lewis’ essay: this was exactly why I thought that pancake passage is so fascinating.

Fyodor! You just wrote The Greatest Novel Ever and you end by having your hero wander off to have pancakes with some kids?? After all the talk of Life and God and Meaning, you end your novel with pancakes?

Which is, of course, exactly how I read Great Books—they are Great, Amazing, Worth Reading, Deep, Profound, Insightful, Etc., Etc., Etc.—but after setting them down, I go on with my life. I don’t read Great Books Seriously; I read them for pleasure, including the pleasure of thinking thoughts I have never before thought and ruminating on unanswerable questions and learning new things. And all that Learning is Important, Very Important, not because it is Serious, but because it is Joyful.

That is exactly what I try to teach whenever I am teaching a course or giving a lecture (or, come to think of it, writing a blog post): this book is Awesome because reading it will bring you Joy.

It is a message far too few teachers seem to understand. I cannot think of anything more dreary that taking a positively amazing novel like The Brothers Karamazov and dissecting it according to the Dictates of Theory. Give me the genuine human reaction to a book every time, give me the sense of rapturous joy or utter disgust with the argument, the parts that make you weep or cry, the shocks and twists, the parts that caused you to stop and just stare into space for half an hour—tell me about these things.

And as we talk about those things we will learn something worth learning. And then we will go eat pancakes and enjoy a pleasant conversation over a meal. An ancient and eternal practice there. To remember the dead, the past, and simultaneously take joy in the present.

Hurrah for Karamazov! If this book has ever been taught and the students did not scream that at the end, then the teacher should be immediately removed from the classroom as a positive danger to mankind. Hurrah for Karamazov! Read The Brothers Karamazov and eat pancakes. That is about as good a recipe for the Good Life, the Life Worth Living, as I can imagine. Hurrah for Karamazov!

Jane Eyre is an Awful Book

Jane Eyre is absolutely the worst book which ever, for reasons I cannot fathom, ended up on anyone’s list of Great Books.

It is awful. Just awful.

Now that we have established that fact, perhaps you can help me solve a mystery.

I have talked about this book many times with students. I always have exactly the same experience. To take an example:

I once read the book with five amazing students (all women) in a tutorial. I told the students they should each pick a Great Book and we would read them and discuss them. Much to my horror, and I do mean horror, one of them picked Jane Eyre.

So, I read it again. (Yes, I merit a Great Professor Badge for subjecting myself to this book (again!) for the benefit of a set of students.)

Just to be clear: When I reread it, I hated it. All of it. Every single page of it.

Then we gathered to talk about it in the tutorial. Everyone else in the tutorial…loved…the book.

We start every tutorial with the simple question “What did you think about the book?” Such paroxysms of joy have ne’er been heard by mortal ears.

“Jane Eyre is a role model, a stunningly great example of womanhood and a daring, brave, courageous, independent woman.”

I would have thought that Jane Eyre was the woman being described in the brochures for Mount Holyoke from listening to the students in the tutorial. And all of them loved her. Loved her.

So, here I have a problem. Jane Eyre is often listed as a Great Book. Presumably, lots of people have read it for pleasure and profit for many years. Five bright, intelligent women in my tutorial loved the book. And I hate it. Something is wrong here.

Jane has got to be the most whiny protagonist ever.

I mentioned this in the tutorial. Everyone there told me I was wrong, that she isn’t whiny at all. I opened the book at random, read the first sentence—Jane was whining. I thought, “Aha!”

I was told she wasn’t whining in that sentence. I was stunned. How could nobody else in the room notice that this sentence I choose at random was an example of being whiny? Something is wrong here.

I then tried on Rochester—the guy is the least lovely romantic love interest ever. Oddly, they all agreed. I thought “Aha!”

I was then told it didn’t matter that Jane was in love with an Absolute Loser. The guy has his wife locked in an attic and Jane loves this guy? Yet, somehow, “Jane is still amazing.” How can this be? Something is wrong here.

And so on. For two hours, I made the case this book is terrible and for two hours I was told that I was wrong. Every inane, silly thing about the book simply didn’t matter.

Yes, the plot is contrived. But “Jane is still amazing.”

Yes, in the end she ends up playing the servant anyway. But “Jane is still amazingly independent.”

Yes, she didn’t really have that hard of a life. “But her cousins were really mean to her, and Jane is really amazing.”

On and on and on.

I have no idea what to make of this. Either I am wrong and this book does have merit or the rest of humanity is wrong and it is a really idiotic book, a half-penny romance novel masquerading as literature.

Just to be clear: I really hate this book.

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