Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Victorian farmhouse is a wreck. It is bare wood now, so you can hardly tell it was ever painted. The yard is all high weeds, covered with dog droppings, buzzing with flies. A radio plays through the broken screen door. I can't raise anybody so I go around back, where I find Bill McCorry and Bill McCorry Jr., the owners. The old man wears a cowboy hat and boots, the son has a flattop and cowboy boots, but a city shirt. I ask the son how he's making...
...ready-made 1860s plot and tell it from a 1960s point of view. It is like a reincarnated Thomas Hardy revising one of his tales from the vantage point of films, Freud, space shots and Alain Robbe-Grillet. On one level, this yields an engaging parody of the Victorian novel-with chatty narrator, digressions, subplots involving cockney servants and narrative juggling. The technique also enables Fowles to compensate for some of the Victorian novel's omissions and evasions, particularly that dark side of the Victorian moon, the bedroom...
Less Conclusive Conclusions. Like all parody, his is ultimately a critique of the conventions he is parodying. In one disarming aside to the reader, Fowles argues that the Victorian novelist, aided by his assumed omniscience, patted life into artificial patterns and robbed characters of reality. While the Victorians believed that "the novelist stands next to God," Fowles takes his stand next to Godot. He proclaims that the novelist's first principle is the "freedom that allows other freedoms to exist," namely those of his characters. To illustrate the point, he twice ties up his narrative strands in tidy traditional...
...real object of Fowles' bifocal vision, though, is not so much the Victorian novel as the life it reflected. His story unfolds amid quotations from the prophets of the age (Marx, Darwin, Tennyson), factual footnotes (married farm laborers at that time, he reports, got twice the wages given bachelors), and provocative sociological speculations (the Victorians, he suggests, may have enjoyed sex even more than our own oversexed century, because they practiced it less frequently). The purpose of all this is to place his characters, as no Victorian novelist could have, in a long perspective as exemplars of the historical...
...conveys the right sense of disaster with long speeches which try to "sort out what's happening" and are logically and grammatically correct, if wholly incomprehensible. The other three-Marilyn Pitzele, Sally Fisher, and Senclick-also do beautifully with rather difficult dialogue. Senelick and Miss Fisher are so Victorian they are a little bit scary...