Mr. Skimpole (center)

Ah, back to Bleak House. Chapter V contains the delicious description of Krook’s rag-and-bone shop.  It’s so vivid that it makes you see and even smell the place, with its towers of junk always threatening to topple over, like an entire Goodwill store crammed into one tiny room. It’s testament to how the Victorians recycled before the word was even invented. Very little had to be thrown away in Victorian times: if you had leftover junk like bones, grease, clothing, or scraps of fabric, paper, or metal, there was always someone lower down on the social ladder who’d buy it and use it up.

After that scene, it’s a mixed bag. In Chapter VI, we meet the worthless freeloader Skimpole, whom Dickens wisely lets implicate himself through his dialogue. My dissertation director hated Skimpole with a passion, and I can see why: the guy’s the Hipster Grifter of the Victorian era, getting by on his charm until others wise up to him. Skimpole claims he has the “soul of a child,” and therefore such concepts as time and money have no meaning for him. Consequently, he’s always in debt and needing to be bailed out. If he was around today, he’d be a reality show participant.

Skimpole reminds me of those people who go around acting like jerks and insulting others to their faces, and then, when called out on it, say, “Hey, I’m just being myself. This is who I am. If you don’t like it, don’t hang out with me. You don’t want me to be fake, do you?” Ah, the last dregs of the great Romantic movement. Authenticity is overrated.

Chapter VII of BH is of less interest: it’s  full of mainly dull exposition about the Dedlocks and their circle. Then chapter VIII comes along to renew my irritation with both Dickens and Esther.

Visiting the poor with Mrs. Pardiggle (seated). I love her expression.

In chapter 8, we are introduced to Mrs. Pardiggle, another iteration of Mrs. Jellyby. Unlike Mrs. Jellyby, though, Mrs. Pardiggle is allowed to speak for, and thus damn, herself. She does some kind of nebulous “improving” work among the poor of London, who neither want her help nor profit from it; she gives her (miserable) children allowances merely so she can brag about the kids “willingly” donate them to charity (reminding me an awful lot of this Slate column.) Dickens skillfully likens Mrs. Pardiggle’s “charity work” to the empty work-for-work’s sake that goes on in Chancery; she’s a human bureaucracy, endlessly preaching, hectoring, lecturing, and asking for contributions, to no end other than to prop up her own self-image as a “busy” person (“I am incapable of fatigue, my good friend, I am never tired, and I mean to go on until I have done.”)

Where Dickens loses me, though, is when he once again contrasts Pardiggle with the sainted Esther Summerson. Esther says:

I thought it best to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind services I could to those immediately about me, and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself

and I think we’re meant to take it as the right and “natural” approach to charity. The other non-satirized characters in the book—the Bleak House coterie of Mr. Jarndyce, Ada, and Richard – certainly have no end of praising Esther for her “kind services” to them.

But Esther’s position is a very conservative one, and one very much in keeping with a constrained vision of woman’s proper role. It’s classic angel-in-the-house: the good that Esther does for her family and friends is supposed to somehow seep out into greater society. If Pardiggle is ineffectual through lack of substance, Esther is ineffectual through narrowness.

And we’re inadvertently shown just how ineffectual Esther is in the final scene of the chapter, in which she witnesses one poor woman comforting another after the death of her baby, and can only make the episode into a sentimental tableau:

I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten [by their husbands; emphasis mine], so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another, how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God.

In her way, Esther’s as bad as Pardiggle: using the poor for a melancholy thrill,  a pretty mental engraving instead of using them as badges of her moral worth, but using them all the same.

Re-reading books after a few years have passed is always interesting: you’re a little older, you’ve had some new experiences, all the cells in your body have regenerated—you are, in effect, a different person. And so the book seems different. You notice things that weren’t on your mental radar screen before. Different themes take on new resonance. Characters you once disliked now appeal to you because now you understand their motivations—or maybe you now can’t stand them, because you finally see what they’re all about.

So how’s Bleak House? To be honest, it’s getting on my nerves.  There’s a smugness to the novel, a moral surety to its narrators that I find off-putting. Dickens assumes that we readers are standing with him, loftily above his characters looking down on their foibles with bemusement and dismay. Sometimes, it seems a little unfair, even catty, as when the narrator says of Lady Dedlock:

She supposes herself to be an inscrutable Being, quite out of the reach and ken of ordinary mortals . . . Yet every dim little star revolving about her, from her maid to the manager of the Italian Opera, knows her weaknesses, prejudices, follies, haughtinesses, and caprices and . . . can tell you how to manage her as if she were a baby, who do nothing but nurse her all their lives, who, humbly affecting to follow with profound subservience, lead her and her whole troop [of fashionable people] after them . . .

If you agree that Lady Dedlock (who you’ve barely even met when this passage appears in the novel) is a pompous fool, than this description is apt. But if you’d like to know more about her, then this passage has a Mean Girls ring to it. I can’t just sit back and complacently poke fun at the rich, at least not in this vein. It’s discomfiting.

Esther, self-effacing as ever.

Then there’s English literature’s greatest Mary Sue, Esther Summerson. Esther is given to utterances like the following:

My simple darling! She was quite unconscious that she only praised herself and that it was in the goodness of her own heart that she made so much of me!

As the Valley girls used to say, gag me with a spoon. If this woman were any more full of sweetness and light, she’d evaporate. But the thing is, we’re supposed to look past Esther’s self-effacing why-lil’-ol’-me? truckery and see her as the very soul of caring goodness. Maybe it’s a product of living in the Silicon Age, or maybe I’m just a crabby old sourpuss, but I can’t do it. I want to give her a few margaritas, intravenously, if needs be, and then hear what she really thinks about Lady Dedlock. (“You abandoned me, you — mildly irriating person, you! But I’m sure you had a good reason for doing so. And I forgive you. Not that you need forgiveness from me. Oh, I’m being so presumptuous!” See, I can’t even imagine her drunk.)

Then there’s Mrs. Jellyby. I harbor a certain sympathy for Mrs. Jellyby, perhaps because, were I not married to a very organized man, my house would resemble the cluttered nest in which she lives. Dickens means us to “tsk-tsk” over the fact that Mrs. Jellyby’s house is going to rot and ruin because she spends all her time canvassing on behalf of African natives—a pretty damned obvious “irony,” if you ask me, that Dickens sees fit to underscore with Esther’s observation that her eyes “had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if . . . they could see nothing nearer than Africa!”

Obviously, Mrs. Jellyby is that worst of creatures, one still condemned today—the bad mother. She can’t find anything in her house, her stays are showing out the back of her dress, and her astoundingly stupid children are too uncoordinated to prevent themselves from falling down the stairs or getting their heads stuck between the railings. (One of these kids is named Peepy, which always makes me think of Peepers from Sam and Max. Really, the chapter’s  a lot funnier if you imagine Mrs. Jellyby’s kids as the Soda Poppers.)

Sure, Mrs. Jellyby is a nincompoop, but I dislike the thinly veiled implication that if a woman has any interest outside house and home her domestic life will fall apart. And, yes, Dickens does make a valid point about do-gooders who ignore the problems close at hand in favor of the more romantic ones abroad—but he does pay a lot more attention to Mrs. Jellyby’s shortcomings as a mother and housekeeper than he does to her dubious moral stance. In fact, I think he missed an opportunity to show in greater depth how Mrs. Jellyby looks down on anyone not so devoted to a “cause” as she is. That’s something that would really strike a nerve among today’s “telescopic philanthropists.”

Still I prefer kooky Jellyby, with her hairpins askew and her curtains propped open with a fork (I once propped up a shaky table with a copy of The Closing of the American Mind, so, heh) to saccharine Esther. Will I be able to put up with Esther for the remainder of the book? I’ll give it a try.

Pan Jinlian

Outlaws of the Marsh, awesome as it may be, is basically a man’s book. The primary relationships it describes are brotherly (its alternate title is All Men Are Brothers), and women, when they’re not relegated to the sidelines, are portrayed as lustful, catty deceivers who betray the men who rescue them. Twice in twenty episodes the same storyline is repeated: good man marries poor beauty, only to have her cheat on him. He forgives her and even offers her a no-strings divorce so she can be with her lover, but she continues to make demands, and, eventually, meets a violent end. Her killer is vindicated as a moral man who was simply pushed to the brink by this conniving she-demon. One starts to suspect the author, Shi Naian, must have been drawing on memories of a nasty breakup when writing Outlaws!

But Shi Naian’s plan to vilify women seems to have backfired with his creation of Pan Jinlian, the “Golden Lotus,” who remains an enigmatic and influential  figure in Chinese culture to this day. Pan Jinlian “enjoys” a status like that of Helen of Troy’s in Western culture – her name has become a byword for an untrustworthy seductress.

Wu Da reunites with his brother Wu Song.

Her story: A beautiful woman married to an ugly dwarf named Wu Da (or Wu Dalang), Pan Jinlian attempts to seduce the dwarf’s brother, the warrior Wu Song. Being an upright guy, Wu Song rebuffs her. A crafty neighbor woman, Mrs. Wang, arranges for her to meet a wealthy playboy named Ximen Xing, and the two soon embark on a torrid love affair. Eventually, they’re caught in the act by Wu Da, who generously offers not to tell Wu Song – a Tarantino-esque killing machine who would certainly avenge him – about their treachery on the condition that Pan Jinlian remain faithful to him in the future.

But soon enough Pan Jinlian and Ximen Xing are back to their lustful ways, and, fearing that Wu Song will kill them if he finds out, team up with Mrs. Wang to poison Wu Da with cyanide. In the Outlaws of the Marsh version of the tale, when Wu Song discovers the truth about his brother’s murder, he beheads both Pan Jinlian and Ximen Xing, while Mrs. Wang is arrested and executed – by the “death of one thousand cuts” — for her part in the crime.

Wanton hussy: Pan Jinlian cavorts with Ximen Xing in a teahouse while Mrs. Wang stands guard.

In the erotic classic The Golden Lotus, however, Pan Jinlian marries Ximen Xing after Wu Da’s death, becoming just one of his many concubines. This book, so racy it was banned in China for centuries, features Ximen Xing in hundreds of bedroom escapades. And its version of Pan Jinlian as lascivious seductress is the one that’s persisted in the public imagination. Google her name and you’ll find that she pops up as a character in several NSFW videos. These illustrations (not explicit) represent her as a conniving slut with a heavily painted face, utterly ungrateful to her good-natured husband.

In 1986, the playwright Wei Minglun revisited the story in his opera Pan Jinlian. There, he portrayed Pan Jinlian as a victim of her culture who would have simply divorced Wu Da had she been able to. Other characters in this avant-garde opera include Anna Karenina (!), who advises Pan Jinlian to run away, and a modern-day female judge who excoriates Wu Song for his cruelty.

Bound feet of an elderly Chinese woman.

The CCTV adaptation also presents a revisionist version of Pan Jinlian, though it’s not quite as feminist as Wei Minglun’s opera. It portrays her actions as understandable, though never excusable: she’s less a shameless hussy and more of a bored housewife. Mrs. Wang observes that she never leaves the house, and one can see why she might seek out a romance with Wu Song: she has bound feet and Wu Da is almost her only connection with the outside world, and she probably had little choice as to her husband was. In the T.V. version, she’s also initially reluctant to take up with Ximen Xing and is conflicted about whether to get back together with him after Wu Da forgives her. Ximen Xing and Mrs. Wang are portrayed more as the aggressors and Pan Jinlian as the confused, emotional, and somewhat stupid girl who can be easily led astray by those with stronger personalities. She’s not very moral, but she’s not out-and-out evil, either.

Shi Naian seemed to have a problem with women who revealed a strong sexuality or who were independent and meddled in the affairs of men (Mrs. Wang). One of the few “good” women in Outlaws, Lin Chong’s wife, was a model of constancy who refused to divorce her husband when he was sent to prison, and who hung herself out of grief at his absence. She even told her husband not to take revenge on a man who tried to rape her, as the man was the son of a powerful official who could cause trouble for their family if anything happened to his son. So, in this narrative, a woman can either be utterly self-effacing and good, and wind up dead, or crafty and lustful and wicked, and . . . wind up dead. CCTV, to its credit, portrays Mrs. Lin with much the same nuance as it did Pan Jinlian: she’s not held up as a model wife but as a good, albeit hurting, woman, whose suicide appears as the logical extension of her self-effacing nature. It’s a subtle testament to a changed China.

Pride and Prejudice

In this odd mashup, the Austen genes prove dominant. It’s definitely more of an illustrated P&P than an action-packed spectacle. Writer Nancy Butler faithfully adapts Austen’s words, and takes most of her dialogue verbatim from the novel. Readers looking for something more along the lines of the X-men may find it stodgy, but Austen fans will heartily approve.

The character design follows the 2005 version of the film: Lizzie bears a distinct resemblance to Keira Knightley, Jane to Rosamund Pike, and Darcy to Matthew Macfadyen (yawn), not Colin Firth. Wickham even sports a long blonde ponytail like he does in that movie. I would have liked to have seen more originality in the look of the characters.

The artist, Hugo Petrus, is skilled at capturing subtle facial expressions: anger, contempt, regret, and awakening love shine in his Lizzie and Darcy’s eyes. He’s also good at drapery, delicately hinting at the forms beneath those flowing Empire-waisted gowns. Parts of his characters are sometimes out of proportion, though: their arms can look distractingly emaciated and their hands too small.

The palette of the comic is lovely, all faded Venetian golds and yellow-greens and burgundies.

The covers are also fun: the first three of them are parodies of fashion magazines bearing such headlines as “Bingleys Bring Bling to Britain,” “Army Boys: 34 Reasons We Love Them (Other Than the Uniform),” and “Spring’s Randiest Ribbons.”

Also amusing are advertisers’ attempts to reach the P&P-goes-Marvel audience. Somehow I doubt that Janeites are going to become potheads or join the Navy (though we do like our cute cars, and the single gals will be glad the comic’s Got Hugh). But the worst ads have to be the ones that will convince women to stay far, far away from any comic book that doesn’t feature Mr. Bingley and the Bennet clan: I’m talking about the ones featuring “heroines” with boobs the size of their heads. Most offensive are the Marvel Divas, whose skintight uniforms suggest they were designed for (and possibly by) hormonal 13-year-old boys. The description on the Marvel site for this series reads:

The Marvel Divas. They'd fight crime, if they weren't so busy posing.

“What happens when you take four of the Marvel Universe’s most fabulous single girls and throw them together, adding liberal amounts of suds and drama? You get the sassiest, sexiest, soapiest series to come out of the House of Ideas since Millie the Model! Romance, action, ex-boyfriends, and a last page that changes everything! Let your inner divas out with this one, fellas, you won’t regret it! Parental Advisory.” Suds and drama? Oooh, maybe they’ll get into a pillow fight!

Blech. I’ll stick with P&P, where “sexy” means a romance between a smart, witty woman and a tormented lord in tight breeches, and not four pouting minxes in latex.