In one of the pages of Mrs. Oliphant’s long and incredibly boring novel, Miss Marjoribanks, the unlikeable heroine consoles herself. She is astonished that she has not received many offers for engagement. As a result, she dwells on the stupidity of men and their lack of discernment. It is a commonplace of the singleton to console themselves in such a manner. There is the narcissistic contempt of members of the preferred sex which validates one’s own existence. Can these people not see that I, too, am worthy of love? They are blind and ignorant.
I want to update the narcissistic contempt of the singleton for our own times in my own words as a singleton. It has been many years since that rambling Victorian novel has been written. How do singletons console themselves now? Here is a little list of arguments.
1. I’m happy that I didn’t settle.
As I watch the couples around me, I am often amazed at how they can be attracted to one another. Not only do I find the females unattractive, but I also can’t understand what the women see in the men. To my mind, these people have settled. Clearly, my assessments are based on physical beauty, and so what? I don’t believe this is superficial. The same people that prefer shared interests in a partner are more superficial with their blind conformism. Those who talk about “personality” and the cult of the individual also avoid the reality that most people in our society are fundamentally the same underneath everything. I, the singleton, can still pursue beauty and the dream of beauty. Although I have forgiven women in the past for not being what I have dreamed of them, I can, as a singleton, worship the goddess without any guilt or pangs of conscience.
2. I’m happy that I didn’t have to change myself for somebody and I don’t have to do what I don’t want to do.
One watches the slow tussle for control in the relationships around oneself. The woman has to change herself for the man and the man has to change himself for the woman. This is despite the fact that the change that is being asked for is completely unreasonable. In putting themselves into the shackles of a monogamous relationship, the people in a relationship have to become different people. Thus they have to do what they don’t want to do almost all of the time. An obvious example yesterday was in the shopping centre and seeing the bored look on the faces of the men while the women looked through handbags and shoes. In a relationship, you have to talk about things that you don’t want to talk about and feign interest in them. You have to go places you don’t want to go and eat food that you don’t want to eat. You have to spend money on things that you don’t want. The singleton has something which someone doesn’t have in a relationship: independence and freedom. No relationship responsibilities outside of the family. You don’t have to pretend to be someone else.
3. I don’t have to put up with the family (and friends) of the woman.
When one has been in a family one’s whole life and has never had a break from being in a family, the one thing that one doesn’t want is another larger family. Especially one composed of older people telling one what to do all the time. One also doesn’t have to make friends with a bunch of strangers that one’s partner knows, even if one secretly dislikes them.
4. I don’t have the burden of keeping secrets from the other person.
In life, one learns very early on that you cannot tell other people everything that you think. It can be very destructive to say what one’s honest opinion is in our society as people hate the truth. Being out of a relationship, one doesn’t have to incessantly lie all the time to the other person. The stress of lying is therefore avoided, as is the responsibility to be always cheerful.
5. I keep my personal space.
I don’t have to share activities with someone all the time and can pursue my activities in solitude without any disturbance.
6. I don’t have to feel the hurt in a relationship.
The less said about how painful a relationship can be with arguments and suchlike, the better. It is a horrible experience.
There are possibly other arguments. The general drift of my arguments obeys the rules of narcissistic contempt for others that do not give me love. Only so much has changed from the days of the Victorians.
Abstract: Women are seen as bodies, not minds. As such, they are seen as suitable for bodily performance in a patriarchal society rather than for composing music which is perceived as a non-bodily and abstract form of representation. This division between body and mind underpins the division between the private and the public sphere. Keywords: Music, Feminism, Patriarchy, Body, Mind, Secret Superstar, Public, Private
Knowledge of the history of women’s musical practices is aided by a concept which I call ‘musical patriarchy’. The division of musical work into a largely male public sphere and a largely female private sphere is a trait of Western music history and also of many musical cultures from all around the world. Lucy Green, Music, Gender, Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15.
I was listening to some songs by Vidya Vox, the famous YouTuber recently. I had downloaded them for free off of her website. Vidya sings in a combination of Hindi and English, as well as other languages. She does cover versions of songs and mash-ups. I grew curious about the singer and her music, so I put her name into a search engine. It turned out that the music behind Vidya’s songs comes from her white husband. Here was yet another female singer that didn’t produce her own music and that traded on her Indian ethnicity and sex to entice audiences while relying on a masculine, Western sound and mind.
Racial dimensions aside for the time being, the question was, why were there so few famous female music producers both in India and the West? Personal experience, as usual, prompted the question. One of my amateur pursuits is singing and song-writing. I also compose the music for my songs and make the music myself. Although my musical education in England was peculiarly lamentable, I went ahead and learned how to do everything myself. Is my music perfect? Of course not. It doesn’t have a professional sound and even my singing is just recorded on the computer using the free and in-built software. However, the point is, that I can sit down and compose my own music and, if I had enough free time and money, I could produce my own tracks to a good standard. I could even lay down tracks for the melodies and sounds that I can invent in my head but am currently unable to represent in concrete musical form due to my lack of ability and skill in playing music. Why can’t more women do the same thing successfully?
One could gather various ideas to answer the question. I have put the quote at the top of this piece to show one possible interpretation. The argument is that women’s music is regarded as private, rather than public. It is men’s music that is regarded as public. However, what I want to argue in this short piece is that women are not admitted to the masculine sphere of music because it is a form of representation that is regarded as abstract, invisible and bodiless, qualities associated with men and not women. It is my contention that in a patriarchal society, women are regarded as incapable of mastering the abstract discipline of music and of transcending their bodily form to enter into the realms of thought and meaning. This is why there are so few famous female musical composers and why the ones that do exist are not rewarded and recognized for their efforts. https://www.billboard.com/…/female-music-producers-industry…
I want to start, as I often do, with a Hindi film which I watched. I am talking about the huge international success which was recently released, Secret Superstar (2017). I will not go into the story too much, nor criticise the type of feminism which was portrayed in the film. Instead, I will concentrate on the relationship between femininity, the body and music in the film. There is a young girl in the film that becomes famous on YouTube for singing in burqa which covers her whole body, including her face. The burqa makes her “bodiless” and as invisible as it is possible to be without advanced technology. At this stage of her career, the girl is capable of composing her own music and songs. She doesn’t need any man to guide her voice. She is both singer and songwriter, player and composer. However, the girl doesn’t want to be bodiless and invisible, because that would mean that she remains anonymous. She wants to be known. This desire to be recognised as a person, as a singer, to enter the public stage and leave behind the private sphere of the domestic, leads the girl to a famous male composer. It also leads her to abandon the role of music composer, a being that is invisible and bodiless because he, and it is usually a he, usually stays behind the scenes. She then becomes the voice for the male music composer’s music and finds success. The girl is therefore led into the patriarchal music establishment and away from composing her own music because of her desire to become a body with a recognisable face, to be seen as a woman with a woman’s body. She leaves the realm of abstraction, invisibility and thought to become a performing body, the face of music rather than its “soul”. Such is the brand of “feminism” in Secret Superstar: a female’s desire can only be to perform as a body, to become a voice. She cannot become one with abstract thought, invisibility and the abstract and non-bodily representation of music.
In fact, if you watch Secret Superstar closely enough, you will find that the girl rebels against all forms of abstract thought. Her rebellion is chiefly conducted against her father, who is an engineer and relies on the abstract disciplines of maths. She also rebels against her education in maths and science. The young girl supports her uneducated mother over her educated father and leaves education to do so, running away from school secretly. She even effects a separation between her uneducated mother and her educated father (in the film’s defence, he is depicted as an abusive father and husband). Clearly, the girl does not wish to remain within the realm of thought. She wants blissful ignorance and to be seen as nothing more than a body, to be accepted in the realm of the body.
My speculation is that Secret Superstar reflects the existing reality of music in a patriarchal society; that there is a gendered play between the bodily performance of voice and the abstract and non-bodily performance of music. To enter onto the public stage in musical performance, the rules dictate that women have to be seen as bodies, not as minds. It is men that are celebrated as being of the mind and having rational “souls”. It is men that can give birth to music, which is, of course, related to maths (look up Pythagoras and his ideas about maths and music if you don’t believe me). Thus we have an explanation of why there are so few successful music composers in both India and the West. I have argued at length about the relationship between the body and non-bodily abstraction and their relationship to the private and public spheres throughout my writing and I believe it informs most aspects of the society that we live in. The body is therefore supremely important as a site from which to make the resistance against the forms that constrain us and the female body is, I think, the supreme form which can fight against the forces of concealment, invisibility, pretended abstraction and universality. There is a further speculation: that the music that we all listen to and enjoy is founded in a masculine mind set and worldview. The very nature of our listening and auditory enjoyment is founded in patriarchy and its conditions. Films like Secret Superstar can reveal exactly what the nature of that patriarchal sound is and how it operates, if only we watch carefully and learn. One thing is clear: such a sound hates synaesthesia since it separates listening and sight, music and the body.
On this International Woman’s Day, I, a bad person, will talk about a woman that has inspired me. To me, she is a fictional woman, although Hindus revere her as a real person. I want to contrast her with the masked superhero. I want to show how she is both more valiant and powerful than the masked superhero. I will first set out my ideas about the mask of the superhero. I will then talk about Kali and her wonderful nakedness. I want to contrast two forms of power. The first power is masculine. In this power, identity is concealed. That is the strength of this power. The second power, that of Kali, is feminine. In this power, identity and the body are apparent. That is the strength of this power.
Let us start with the superhero. The superhero is typically male and typically masked. One notes the pattern not just in comics, but also in the recent superhero films which have been made and which have been popular. Why is the superhero masked? The mask conceals the identity of a man and the concealment of identity protects the superhero. The mask allows the superhero to live a “normal” life outside of the battlefield in incognito. The mask of the superhero is also said to protect his loved ones. The mask is therefore related to the making of the normal and normalcy. The mask is said to protect love and loved ones. It is presented as social rather than anti-social. The mask as seen as necessary in the make-up of society and social organisation. The mask separates the field of action from the field of normalcy.
The mask is also associated with law and the separation of the public sphere and the private sphere. The mask allows the superhero to move out of the identity of a single man and fight for a supposedly abstract and universal justice. The mask and the concealment of identity is the way that the individual man can move out of his own limited perspective and life into a field of battle which is much bigger than himself. The mask allows a man to fight as the champion of justice against injustice and evil.
The mask is therefore crucial to the concealment of identity and the fight for justice. It enables the fight for justice as it conceals identity and only as it conceals identity. It is only then that the hero can become an abstract and supposedly universal figure outside the limitations of what is human. If the mask is a symbol of power, it is of a power which attempts to divest itself of identity. If the power of the mask is associated with anything, it is associated with the justice of the West.
The mask of the superhero can be contrasted with the nakedness of Kali. Kali is the supreme Woman and the supreme Warrior. She is the Mother of the whole Universe and the supreme form of power. She is also the destroyer of evil. She is the protector and the liberator. Kali stands for a justice envisioned as female, not male. Her female body is emphasised, as is her nakedness. As Wikipedia states, Kali “is often shown naked or just wearing a skirt made of human arms and a garland of human heads”. Kali wears no disguise when she steps into battle, nor any armour. She is fearless. She assumes no other identity than her own. Indeed, it is not even possible for Kali to be clothed. As Wikipedia states, “[s]he is often depicted naked which symbolizes her being beyond the covering of Maya since she is pure (nirguna) being-consciousness-bliss and far above prakriti.” The explanation of a Hindu is more telling: “She is shown nude because no finite clothes can cover the infinite” (http://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/3412/why-is-goddess-kali-shown-topless).
If the bloodthirsty and invincible Kali is a fighter for justice, then she never stoops to conceal her identity. She betrays no weakness. She does not fear that others will know her or her loved ones. She does not need a mask to give her power. She is power herself. Her power is naked. Her power derives from her femininity and her association with nature. For where the male superhero needs clothes which are produced by humans, Kali stands at one with nature in her nakedness. She is nature herself and the mother of all. She is the supreme power of femininity and the female form. She is the beauty of the body.
These are the two opposed forms of the fighters for justice. The masked superhero and the naked Kali. The mask of the superhero hides his face, his features, his human expressions and his eyes. He stays in a state of calm repose, as no one can see or feel his emotions. He acts outside of vision and the limits of vision. The nakedness of Kali is an assault on the senses. She is a vision herself. One sees emotion and anger in her face. One feels her through sight as total fury and devastation. As Wikipedia states, “[h]er eyes are described as red with intoxication, and in absolute rage, her hair is shown disheveled, small fangs sometimes protrude out of her mouth, and her tongue is lolling.” Emotion, femininity, animalism, nature. These are all attributes of the vision of Kali. Her body highlights the bodily senses which are attuned to the material world: her eyes which see are red and more evidently visible and her tongue also to be seen, that tongue which tastes food and which is out to taste blood. Kali is beautiful because she is aggression and anger itself. Her hair is disordered and she is outside of any conventional depictions of beauty. Her power is her beauty, the power of fury unleashed.
Such is the mask of the superhero and the nakedness of Kali. This is the character of two fighters for justice. The masked superhero is Western and male. The naked Kali is from an ancient India and she is the supreme embodiment of Woman as the Mother of us all. The masked superhero hides his face and his emotions and expressions. He wears what is really a uniform for one person. Kali wears nothing. She is without shame and supremely confident in herself and her body. The masked superhero has a split personality: the unlimited fighter for a seemingly abstract and universal justice and the limited man. The masked superhero is a recent invention. Kali is beyond splitting. Kali is beyond the contemporary. Kali is beyond the limits of all: she is infinite. She is supreme form. She never dies. She comes in every age. She fights for justice in every historical period. This is why Kali is inspiration and the masked superhero is contemptible.
Gleaming images of beautiful families assail us everywhere around December time. Positive messages and good cheer seemingly abound. Beneath the surface, however, there are grimmer realities. Consider the food wastage. In 2014, 4.2 million Christmas dinners were wasted across the United Kingdom according to Unilever. The most startling popular statistic, and the most worrying, is that of the “Christmas Suicide”. This statistic, that there are increased rates of suicide attempts in the holiday season, is a popular myth and has been debunked by several authorities. However, it is pervasive. Why is this so?
Through one perspective, the “Christmas Suicide” myth could be interpreted as reflecting a deep unease and anxiety about the holiday season. Beneath apparent happiness, we are told, there lurk tragedy and depths of despair. Happiness is a bubble, reality is sadness. We are only separated from suffering by a hair’s breadth, for we too could be contemplating demise by our own hand. Is it human nature to be unable to keep away thoughts of suffering during our most special and happiest moments? Or is the experience of suffering that we have gone through to build family relationships an unavoidable and irrepressible memory?
Such questions deserve more thought. However, my opinion is that the Christmas suicide myth rests on a cultural idea of loneliness that is used to depict the anti-social elements in society as dangerous. It is the lack of friends and family, we are told, that leads an individual to murder him or herself. This lack leads to a deep and hopeless despair. This singling out of the lonely betrays a complacency which the social individual possesses and an unflinching and unwarranted trust and belief in social arrangements. He or she is surrounded by people in the holiday season and anything else appears both perverse and dangerous, a threat to life, society and the individual. But what of the loneliness of the crowd? Of never being able to express to others what is inside, or to feel a true companionship? Such feelings are buried and displaced onto the Christmas suicide in a convenient fashion.
By all means, think of those that are not as lucky as you in Christmas time. Empathise with the less fortunate and the lonely. However, do pay attention to the differences between cultural myths and prosaic realities. When you are enjoying time with the family and friends, pause to think how much you are the real, happy you and how much you are simply a character in a story about Christmas and its insiders and outsiders.
They slink away. They ignore you. They seem thoroughly unimpressed with your presence. This is the typical cat on the street in England.
Although I’ve never really been permitted to have a pet, I have done a bit of light reading on the subject of cat psychology, part of my general interest in our animal sisters and brothers and their minds. I used to try and blink at them on the streets as I understood this was a form of greeting with them. However, I never got much of a response. The English cat is highly anti-social.
However, compare the stray cat in Abu Dhabi with our native species. Once beloved pets, these animals had been callously left behind in the country when the ex-pats found their visas or their appetite for the country had run out.
These cats would follow me around, meowing pathetically for my attention. One would find them wandering around by themselves or in packs of five or six. They looked visibly malnourished, although kind people would leave out food for them. They would stare at me, with a deep longing in their eyes.
On one occasion, I found that one of these stray cats had ambushed a small family gathering in the park in front of the apartment I was at. It was actively performing for the delight of two young children. This black and white creature was playing dead, lying on its back with its paws up in the air, listening to the children’s squeals of delight.
These stray cats, once used to receiving human love and an audience, now craved an audience of humans. They would actively seek out an opportunity to perform and to receive some kind of acknowledgement from human beings. Those that had once given them food, shelter, nourishment, care, love.
The cat, seemingly so aloof in England, seems to be a slave of love, just as we are. This sheds light on a mammalian need for affection as well as the dynamics of inter-species connection. To me, the observation also suggests the roots of the need to perform for an audience. Perhaps, the performer is a being that has been starved of affection, or who has the greatest hunger for it. When the cat has companionship and the treasures that go with it, they don’t feel a need to perform for strangers. However, when this sense of society is gone, then an evolutionary instinct seems to kick in and drives the behaviour of the mammalian mind to seek out strangers, and with them, sympathy and the formation of potential relationships. Really, I think, our mind is controlled by our circumstances, especially our circumstances of love. And could this be what is foundational for all our cultural endeavours which seek to find affection from strangers, such as acting, painting, making music and writing?
The Failure of Diversity: The First Indian Superhero Out of Love in Marvel’s ‘Eternals’
I was standing in a noisy, barely contained line of schoolboys outside a classroom, indulging in my usual habit of stand up comedy. It was the mid-90s. My routine consisted of an imaginary scenario where the top heroines of the time pestered me with phone calls and visits at my house. Suddenly, a teacher, a bespectacled white woman with a nasal voice, figuratively pulled me by the collar into a classroom where the sixth form girls – the only female students – were vegetating. The teacher asked the several white girls if they would ever go out with me on a date. Politely, looking down at the short ethnic minority man wearing his older brother’s cast off blazer, the girls declined.
The point of this bizarre ritual was to humiliate me, the ethnic minority man, to show that we were unworthy of romantic love. It was meant to destroy my confidence in myself. But the performance did not work. It failed. Even at the time, I knew that I had got the reaction from the girls because they were white. Everyone knew that white women thought we were undesirable. What do I mean by ‘we’? We call ourselves British Asians in England if we hail ethnically from the subcontinent. A brief quote about a male, British Asian character from Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth in 2000 shows that the Western presumption is that we are not attractive:
Pulchritude – beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection. Beauty in a tall brown young man who should have been indistinguishable to Joyce from those she regularly bought milk and bread from, gave her accounts to for inspection, or passed her chequebook to from behind the thick glass of a bank till. (1)
British films like Bend it Like Beckham extend these conceptions when they represent sexual freedom and desire for British Asian woman as a release from coupling with British Asian men. America is hardly innocent of these characterisations. In The Big Bang Theory, the Indian Raj is the only one that cannot get a girlfriend, much to the amusement of the audience it would appear, who could not get enough of this running joke. In light of such racist, unspoken assumptions, the bizarre ritual that I was subjected to should not be seen as an isolated incident. As I will argue, it informs the representation of us on the screen. Ethnic minorities that have historically come from the subcontinent. Even when lip service is being paid to ideals of ‘diversity’, used as a tactic of selling movie tickets.
Kingo: The First Indian Superhero and Western ‘Diversity’
The Indian character in the Marvel Eternals team is Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani). This is a historical role, the first superhero from South Asia on a Western screen. In an interview, Nanjiani spoke of the grave responsibility of portraying Kingo in a representative way that accorded with ideals of diversity:
The responsibility is a real thing, because there haven’t been other South Asian superheroes in the MCU, or any other Hollywood mainstream movie for that matter… I can’t represent every South Asian person in the world, because we’re all completely different, right? So while there is that responsibility, I want to do a good job. (2)
Eternals itself has been marketed as a positive ‘diversity’ film. Salma Hayek (Ajak) says, “the Eternals film is a “huge” step forward for diversity and inclusivity in the film industry”, sentiments echoed by Gemma Chan (Sersi). (3) This marketing tactic has indeed influenced audience reactions. Oliver Jones of the Observersays that “one of the most impressive aspects of the Eternals is how the culturally representative team’s identities play into the theme and story in powerful and essential ways”. (4)
However, for all the talk, Kingo carries the racist, Western association of undesirability and failure at love. That is, Kingo is a failure in Western diversity, a continuous failure which is always represented, tragically enough, as a success. A short reflection on how Kingo is related to the other Eternals reveals that Kingo loves no one. Kingo is loved by no one. He is an Indian man completely out of love in all its variants, romantic and non-romantic.
Everyone else in the team of Eternals either loves a team mate, is loved by a team mate, or has a partner, as in the famous gay pairing between Phastos and his partner that showcases homosexual couples for the first time in a Marvel movie. Except, that is, for Kingo. Sersi and Ikaris love each other and have even been married at one point. Makkari and Druig are falling in love. Sprite secretly loves Ikaris. Thena (Angelina Jolie) is in a relationship of love and protection with Gilgamesh. Even Ajak, who appears to be solitary and celibate, has been described as a beacon of love by writer Chloé Zao, who comments, that the role called for “a woman with the heart the size of the ocean” and represents a powerful, maternal love. (5)
So this is Western ‘diversity’. Even when we are portrayed as superheroes, we are unattractive, out of society, unable to form not only romantic relationships, but other loving relationships. In fact, as we see when his film posters are shown, Kingo conceals his immortality by reproducing asexually in his Hindi film avatars where he is his own grandfather, father and self. He is like some virus outside of normal sexual reproduction. Ironically, one poster is for a Hindi film (‘Bollywood’) entitled ‘Yuva Prem’ (Young Love), where Kingo plays a romantic lead. It is only in another non-Western cinema and space of imagination that he can be recognised as a lover.
In contrast to Kingo (and the other ethnic minority men in the movie), the white man is constantly loved romantically by women. The main character, Sersi, only falls in love with white men. There is not only a love triangle between Sersi and two white men, but also a love triangle between Sersi, Sprite and Ikaris for the white man. The white man is repetitively, irresistibly desirable, the Indian man is supposedly not. Not only this, but in the ending of the movie, the white man’s love is the ultimate saviour of all humanity, in a reworking of the trope of the white saviour. Ikaris fails to stop Sersi’s plan to rescue humans which he believes is counter to the mission of the Eternals because he still has feelings for her. To add insult to the negative and racist depiction of an Indian man and white love supremacy, Sersi and Ikaris have an Indian wedding, attired in Indian costume. Emphasising the point that, even on the Indian’s own terrain, the white man is the victor in love.
Kingo is not absolutely, entirely excluded from the domain of love. In fact, he is the only one that can see the secret love that Sprite has for the white man, Ikaris. He is relegated to just looking at the field of love and not being a part of it. Like a sexually frustrated viewer who seeks solace in pornography, Kingo can only look at the love of others as an outsider. Also, Kingo dreams of being in the position of the desirable white man. While Ikaris steals Kingo’s sexual and romantic identity by having an Indian wedding, Kingo can only unsuccessfully play at being the desirable Ikaris on film. Thus, Kingo is introduced via the ‘Bollywood’ song sequence, for a film called “Shandaar Daastan-e-Ikarus” (The Splendid Story of Ikaris). Predictably enough, the dance performance is strained and comical.
Conclusion
The bizarre ritual that was played out in my youth, ‘proving’ my undesirability as a South Asian is a mainstay in British and American media, although it has received little critical attention. Because it is such a solidified set of implicit assumptions. When we were finally able to be seen as superheroes on a Western screen, all the old prejudices were added to our representation. The worst thing is that all of the female directors, authors and screenwriters that I have cited above all have something in common. Those that cast us as undesirable are mixed race or ethnic minority women themselves. Perhaps showing that racism against the self by such women is tactfully exploited by the Western system of representation.
Yet, Marvel has taken over the world and is celebrated for being ‘diverse’. So this is what diversity means in the modern world? In fact, Western ‘diversity’ is a continual and embarrassing failure of real representation and real inclusion. The on-screen portrayals of us in the West and their bizarre, racist rituals have always and will always fail in my eyes. Because I do not hate myself. I have been given love and status as a loving being in this world. At home, my nickname is ‘Sonu’ (‘handsome’).
1 Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000), 273
Agnes Grey is about the trials and tribulations of a governess in the Victorian period. Agnes sets out to become a governess and despite setbacks, finally becomes valuable to a family and her charges. Eventually, she opens up her own school with her mother. The novel deals with such things as insubordinate children, the grievances of trying to teach incapable and ignorant students, rank materialism in society, issues of animal cruelty and animal welfare, etc. Other big themes include religion, love and marriage, constant preoccupations of the Victorian novel.
What struck me most about this novel is that Anne was regarded as the shyest and most timid of the sisters and that Agnes seemed to have a similar character. It is therefore interesting to see how such a character who is at the whim and mercy of those that dominate tries to stamp her own authority on the world. Can such wallflowers really make it in the wider world and make any difference to the dominant and their way of life, their education? The novel is ambiguous in its message about this. Some of Agnes’s rich and powerful young charges clearly repudiate her authority and her lessons. However, even when her charges fly in the face of her teaching, some of them still think enough of her to invite her into their homes and judge of their lives. The work is based on autobiography so one wonders if it is not wishful thinking on Anne’s part that she has her authority acknowledged by others and is valued.
Because the theme is about the establishment of authority it naturally involves questions of power in Victorian society. Agnes constantly comes up against the structures of power which she longs to be a small part of but is turned away. She is frequently humiliated and made to feel her own insignificance as a person. The novel is therefore quite interesting as a meditation on what power feels like to an outsider to the system of privilege and status, the centre of authority.
The most striking face of power and its corruption was when a beauty in the novel used her personal appearance to flirt with men and then turn them down when their intentions became serious. There is some meditation on beauty in the novel but it is indicative that power of any sort is seen to destroy and injure others – is this the basis of power as it operates? Does it always need a victim?
One disappointment of the novel – again a symptom of wishful thinking – was the happy ending of the novel. The heroine endures misery throughout but finally gets her reward. The problem with this was that it was completely unrealistic and went against the main message of the novel which is that the governess in Victorian society had to suffer unnecessarily, that occupations for women were degrading and insufficient. The ending just panders to the public which always wants a happy ending.
diary of a lone man 