Stolen Stories: Why the Fascination?, by Georgina Wilson
Take Jane Eyre, turn it upside down, shake well and you get Wide Sargasso Sea. Take The Aspern Papers, have a bash at it with a forging iron, and you could end up with Felony. Take Great Expectations, view it through a concave looking-glass, and the distorted result might end up something like Mister Pip. Why this fascination with famous Victorian authors? We’ve all heard of Charlotte Bronte, Henry James and Charles Dickens, so clearly they were doing something right. But is this prolific rehashing of Victorian novels an energising spring-clean of those dusty shelves of ‘books-I-really-should-read’? Or is it a desperate attempt to cling onto some established names in an attempt to sell something new in an overcrowded and increasingly cheapened book market?
Jean Rhys’ success with Wide Sargasso Sea came after twenty years of publishing silence. Already “discovered” (sexually as well as literarily) by the established authority of Ford Maddox Ford, her novel Good Morning Midnight published in 1939 was to be the last until 1960 and They Day They Burnt the Books. Widespread critical interest came hand in hand with Wide Sargasso Sea, that famously radical re-write of a classic which leaves Jane Eyre looking like a limp rag-doll who dances for imperialism and the patriarchy. But the majority of Rhys’ writing, including Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning Midnight (1939) circles around the displacement and cultural isolation of a female protagonist. The ideas behind Wide Sargasso Sea are nothing new, but this time around we’re invited to peep voyeuristically at a behind-the-scenes Mr Rochester, and a Bertha Mason who does more for herself than “grovel” and “growl”. It is just possible that Wide Sargasso Sea owes its success to an authoress who created a readership among whom “the mad woman in the attic” is as widely-known a figure as Scrooge himself.
Jean Rhys’ success with Wide Sargasso Sea came after twenty years of publishing silence. Already “discovered” (sexually as well as literarily) by the established authority of Ford Maddox Ford, her novel Good Morning Midnight published in 1939 was to be the last until 1960 and They Day They Burnt the Books. Widespread critical interest came hand in hand with Wide Sargasso Sea, that famously radical re-write of a classic which leaves Jane Eyre looking like a limp rag-doll who dances for imperialism and the patriarchy. But the majority of Rhys’ writing, including Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning Midnight (1939) circles around the displacement and cultural isolation of a female protagonist. The ideas behind Wide Sargasso Sea are nothing new, but this time around we’re invited to peep voyeuristically at a behind-the-scenes Mr Rochester, and a Bertha Mason who does more for herself than “grovel” and “growl”. It is just possible that Wide Sargasso Sea owes its success to an authoress who created a readership among whom “the mad woman in the attic” is as widely-known a figure as Scrooge himself.
It’s this power for a later author to come along and challenge what went before that leads to the layers of literary and inter-generational intrigue of Emma Tennant’s Felony
And if Dickens succeeded in entrenching Scrooge in the legendary figures of fiction, hot on the miser’s heels comes one of Dickens’ favourite wide-eyed orphans: Pip. “My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip”. In his novel Mister Pip, a migration of Great Expectations to Papua New Guinea, Lloyd Jones makes it clear that we’ll be in for a shock if we want to continue to take Dickens’ stories as gospel. The first line of Mister Pip, “everyone called him Pop Eye”, points out the Eden-esque power invested in everyone to name things, to re-write with words that might jar for another individual. It turns out that Pop-Eye is actually called Mr Watts – although whose to say that this name is the more accurate when the story is told from the point of view of a child who knows her self-appointed school teacher as Pop-Eye? And again, when the children to whom Mr Watts relates Great Expectations rebuild the story from their own memories after the book is burned in a fire, we are forced to ask if this co-operative version of the story is any less valid. Right at the end of the novel, it transpires that Dickens never even had a look-in: Mr Watts has been feeding his pupils an abridged, “child-friendly” version of the fifty-nine chapter classic all along.
It’s this power for a later author to come along and challenge what went before that leads to the layers of literary and inter-generational intrigue of Emma Tennant’s Felony. Tennant tells the story of journalist Edward Silsbee’s attempts to get his hands on the letters of Percy and Mary Shelley. The letters lie in the house of Byron’s one-time lover Clair Clairmont in Italy (cue numerous images of fresh pasta which vie with James’ most elongated and multi-stranded sentences for their ability to appear and re-appear in ever more elaborate form). The only way Silsbee can gain access to these letters is to marry their jealous protector and Clairmont’s niece, Paula Hanghegyi: such a horrific idea sends him packing. Tennant draws an acute parallel between these events, and Henry James’ own life. The famous author becomes the man that jilts his supposed friend and would-be female author Constance Fenimore after creating a fictional likeness of her in Miss Tina (the pseudonym for Paula Henghegyi), who is described in James’ The Aspern Papers as that “ridiculous, pathetic old woman”.
It’s this power for a later author to come along and challenge what went before that leads to the layers of literary and inter-generational intrigue of Emma Tennant’s Felony. Tennant tells the story of journalist Edward Silsbee’s attempts to get his hands on the letters of Percy and Mary Shelley. The letters lie in the house of Byron’s one-time lover Clair Clairmont in Italy (cue numerous images of fresh pasta which vie with James’ most elongated and multi-stranded sentences for their ability to appear and re-appear in ever more elaborate form). The only way Silsbee can gain access to these letters is to marry their jealous protector and Clairmont’s niece, Paula Hanghegyi: such a horrific idea sends him packing. Tennant draws an acute parallel between these events, and Henry James’ own life. The famous author becomes the man that jilts his supposed friend and would-be female author Constance Fenimore after creating a fictional likeness of her in Miss Tina (the pseudonym for Paula Henghegyi), who is described in James’ The Aspern Papers as that “ridiculous, pathetic old woman”.
This well established genre of the anti-classic challenges the views and stereotypes entrenched in the literary canon
Unsurprisingly, when James makes a present of The Aspern Papers to Constance Fenimore she is less than impressed with this portrait of herself, and ends up wandering around a lake hallucinating with an intensity of intertexuality that brings Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein swooping bizarrely into the picture. As the mother of Mister Pip’s narrator tells a house full of school children: “Stories have a job to do. They can’t just lie around like lazybone dogs. They have to teach you something.” But it’s unclear what we’re being taught here. Apparently James was a terrible man who thought women could only write “very badly”. But, like Dickens, he also wrote a novel with enough literary worth and character-interest to inspire later authors, and to generate books, whose premise springs from a celeb-culture fascination with the Victorian author in his/her own right.
This well established genre of the anti-classic challenges the views and stereotypes entrenched in the literary canon: “Rochester’s wife” becomes a protagonist in her own right, Henry James is positioned as a potentially villainous character with no more control over his tale than his other characters, Charles Dickens becomes one of many voices in the cacophony that makes up Great Expectations. Yet at the same time, the writing of Charlotte Bronte, Henry James and Charles Dickens remains perpetually symbolic, charged up with new meaning which demands yet more study, and further re-readings...whilst the original words become ever more hallowed. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, people started writing fan-fiction.
This well established genre of the anti-classic challenges the views and stereotypes entrenched in the literary canon: “Rochester’s wife” becomes a protagonist in her own right, Henry James is positioned as a potentially villainous character with no more control over his tale than his other characters, Charles Dickens becomes one of many voices in the cacophony that makes up Great Expectations. Yet at the same time, the writing of Charlotte Bronte, Henry James and Charles Dickens remains perpetually symbolic, charged up with new meaning which demands yet more study, and further re-readings...whilst the original words become ever more hallowed. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, people started writing fan-fiction.