"A Respectable Woman" by Kate Chopin

"A Respectable Woman" by Kate Chopin (6 pages, 1894, read  via Dailylit.com)

About two weeks ago I decided I needed to overcome my aversion to short stories.   I know why I am not really into the form (I like to move into the world of the novels I read and I cannot do this in short stories or so I thought) but as I read some wonderful stories by classic writers like Melville and Gogol as well as contemporary writers like Jhumpa Lahiri  I have decided I can find great short stories to read.   As an added benefit, a short story gives you the chance to sort of "try a writer out" to see if you like their style and subject matter.   

I have seen a number of blog posts in the last year on Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1889).   Everyone seems to really like her and she is often called a writer ahead of her time and place  (1850 to 1904-from Louisiana).  "A Respectable Woman" is very short, six pages.   It is told from the point of view of a seemingly happily married woman living on a plantation in rural Louisiana in the 1890s.   In just six pages Chopin is able to really portray the atmosphere of the plantation (you can see well the giant 100 year old live oak trees draped in Spanish moss and you can taste the mint julips).   The plot line is simple.   The narrator's husband invites a friend to visit, one of his best friends from prior to their marriage.   The wife has never met him before but the husband tells her she will really enjoy his visit and his personality.   At first the wife is disappointed in the man and finds him dull.   Then she sits outside on a bench under one of the oak trees with him.    She is shocked to feel drawn to the visitor:

Mrs. Baroda was greatly tempted that night to tell her husband--who was also her friend--of this folly that had seized her. But she did not yield to the temptation. Beside being a respectable woman she was a very sensible one; and she knew there are some battles in life which a human being must fight alone.

I love the style of this passage.   I loved the reference in passing to the fact that her husband was also her friend.    There is a lot of insight and wisdom in these three  simple lines.

I can now, thanks to this really beautiful short story, place The Awakening on my TBR list.   In most editions of that work there are also included a few short stories.

Mel u

"No More Parades" by Ford Madox Ford

No More Parades by Ford Madox Ford (1926, 212 pages-part II of Parade's End)

I am now a bit past the half way point in Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy set in   the WWI era in England, Parade's End.  No More Parades takes us a few years ahead in time.   We now see Christoper Tietjens in his role as a British Army officer serving in France.   His primary job is to prepare draftees for front line assignments.   He has normally about 2800 men under his command.   he tries to be a good compassionate commander but he also is a bit offended by having to deal directly with men whose class level is way below his.   Parade's End is very much a story of class distinctions.    Tietjens is under the command of a General to whom both he and his wife are very close personally.   There is a lot happening in this part of Parade's End.   A lot of the plot action and narrative line is carried through conversations.     Some time I had to read the conversations two or three times just to figure out who is speaking.   I know that pretty much that only those very interested in FMF or Parade's End will ever read  my blogs on the work so I will not try to convey too much of the plot action-the fun is in part in trying to figure it out.

I have some sort of random observations on the work so far.   Previously I had said that I thought Parade's End could be seen as a kind of Encyclopedic Narrative (in the meaning of the term coined by Prof. Mendelson).   I now no longer think this as it does lack some of the meta-qualities of such narratives, its scope is too narrow, Tietjens'  mathematical knowledge does not really provide us the outlines of the sciences of the times (as found in both Gravity's Rainbow and Moby Dick).   I think part of the deeper theme of Parade's End is that encyclopedic narratives are of necessity wrong  (remember the hobby of Tietjens in finding errors in the dominant encyclopedic of his time, The Britannica) and that truth is as much subjective as objective.   If you read Parade's End and come away seeing it as a straight forward work than you for sure understood you missed the point!   Perception is created by cultural and culture by perception deepened by reading and art.   History is a set of stories to make what happens seems morally right.    

The book is for sure very political and harshly judgmental in its treatment of the causes of war and the concern of leaders for the millions who will be killed.   (FMF went to war at age 41 and had what seems to be a nervous breakdown).    It is a very interesting study of the nature of marriages particularized through the marriage of Sylvia and Christopher Tietjens-they are at perpetually loggerheads and always on the brink of divorce but each one satisfies the needs of the other in some very deep and hard to quite fathom ways.   Parade's End finds Tietjens under arrest for striking a fellow officer who behaved in an improper way toward Sylvia.   I love the conversations in Parade's End, I know whenever Tietjens speaks there is a good chance it will be something  which I can learn from or marvel at at least.   Not all of his statements  in the conversations  about art and literature  are correct  and some are said mostly as the thought of the moment  and we need to catch his errors if we can.    This is one great way the internet has helped readers-any reference to something you have not heard of can be tracked down at once.   I am also starting to see the effects of the war on our characters.    

I will admit sometimes in reading this book I am reminded of The Monty Python Skit in which there was a contest for "Upper Class Twit of the Year" .   I do not say this as a reflection on the book but it did come to mind more than once.    

I will, I think, attempt a more grandiose summery of themes and methods and such in Parade's End when I have completed the work.   FMF famously said of Flaubert's A Sentimental Education that one should  not consider themselves well educated until they had read it 14 times.    Parade's End  does remind me a lot of A Sentimental Education.   Parade's End is a very edifying book as well as superb entertainment, what more can I ask from a novel?   

I strongly urge those interested in Parade's End or FMF to read the posts on the novel at  A Common Reader

There is really so much in this novel that I do find it hard to decide what to post on it.   I have noticed that FMF has a thing for magpies!    This is a very rich book.    I will not say that it is an easy read or that one could lollipop their way through its 830 pages with much profit.   I am willing to say it is a great work of art and all who seriously try to read it will be way over paid for their time.   It also really is a lot of fun.   Most would probably tell you to read his The Good Soldier first and I guess I would also.

"A Doctor's Visit" by Anton Chekhov

"A Doctor's Visit" By Anton Chekhov (15 pages)-read on line at Dailylit.com

I have recently begun to overcome my life time aversion to short stories.    My first answer as to why I do not like short stories is that they are  "too short".   By this I mean I want my reading to take me to another world sometimes and short stories did not seem able to do that by the very nature of the form.  I have found what is for me a great way to read short stories by a number of authors.   That is through Dailylit.com.   This is a very well known and highly regarded web page that provides, for free (you will need to register so they can have an E mail address) a great many literary works as well as a large number of non-fiction selections.  They will E mail you every day about 3 to 5 minutes of the work you have subscribed to (if you ask they will send the next section at once and you can also get the story in your Google Reader).   I do not really think I am inclined to read a very long work this way but it is great for short stories.   They have as one of their new selection in the short story category "Classic Shorts:  Eight Stories for the Summer".   Here are the selections

A Doctor's Visit by Anton Chekhov 

A Respectable Woman by Kate Chopin 

The Jelly-Bean by F. Scott Fitzgerald 

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman 

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville 

The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe 

Ivan the Fool by Leo Tolstoy 

Author! by P. G. Wodehouse

Of these stories, I have recently posted on Bartleby the Scrivener.   I have so far never read anything by Kate Chopin, Charlotte Gilman, or P. G. Wodehouse .   I will be rereading and probably posting on all these stories in the near future.


"A Doctor's Visit" by Anton Chekhov (1860 to 1904) seems for sure to be a Constant Garnett Translation.   (All of her translations are now in the public domain and her translation of Chekhov -considered her best work-can all be found on line) is the story of the visit of a Doctor who lives near Moscow to see the daughter of a very well of widow who owns a huge factory employing 1000s.   The daughter has an general complaint of not feeling well.   She cannot articulate exactly what is wrong.   The Doctor finds nothing physically wrong with her.      He finds out the factory doctor is treating her and he tells the Widow there is nothing seriously wrong with her daughter and the factory doctor can handle it.    He prepares to leave and the Widow insists that he stay for the night.  (Remember this is Russia late 19th century so the request is normal).   The power in this story is in the stream of consciousness of Doctor.   


The Widow and her daughter have become very wealthy and live a life of luxury through the labors of the factory workers.   The Widow thinks the factory workers (near serfs in many cases) are quite happy as they have festivals and such for them periodically.   She can in no sense identify with the workers,  this is a marvelous bit of pure Chekhov in which the Doctor reflects on the relationship of the Widow to the factory workers

"There is something baffling in it, of course . . ." he thought, looking at the crimson windows. 

Fifteen hundred or two thousand workpeople are working without rest in unhealthy surroundings, making bad cotton goods, living on the verge of starvation, and only waking from this nightmare at rare intervals in the tavern; a hundred people act as overseers, and the whole life of that hundred is spent in imposing fines, in abuse, in injustice, and only two or three so-called owners enjoy the profits, though they don't work at all, and despise the wretched cotton. But what are the profits, and how do they enjoy them? Madame Lyalikov and her daughter are unhappy--it makes one wretched to look at them; the only one who enjoys her life is Christina Dmitryevna, a stupid, middle-aged maiden lady in pince-nez."

He comes to see the complaint  of the daughter, of marriageable age and the Doctor feels the lack of a husband may be part of her problem, as caused by her guilt over the slavery of the factory workers with the end only of enriching her and her mother.   The Doctor sees her as new generation  of rich Russian beginning to see the injustices in their society.    Chekhov is the master of the small detail and this short story does really create a world we can enter.

The theoretical focus of my blog is the literary treatment of people whose lives are at least partially centered on reading.   The daughter in this story read all the time.    The daughter tells us this about her Reading Life:

"I am lonely. I have a mother; I love her, but, all the same, I am lonely. That's how it happens to be. . . . Lonely people read a great deal, but say little and hear little. Life for them is mysterious; they are mystics and often see the devil where he is not. Lermontov's Tamara was lonely and she saw the devil."

This is something to think about.    Maybe we will agree in part at least.

Chekhov is considered one of the great master of the short story.   He also wrote some plays and novellas.  I read last year his novella My Life.   Chekhov was a medical doctor and a  number of his stories center on doctors.   He was known for giving a great deal of free medical care to the poor.

"The Dance of Death" by Gustave Flaubert

"The Dance of Death" by Gustave Flaubert (1838, 12 pages)

Recently I decided I wanted to read more short stories.   For me Dailylit.com is a great way to do this.  They have maybe 200 classic short stories on line to select from (all free).   They will send you in e mail or RSS about 2 to 5 minutes (by their estimates most will read faster) worth of a work.   You will get the next installment next day or you can request it be sent at once.  If you do not like the work once you get into it you just cancel.    As a perhaps negative, the translated works are in older now in the public domain editions.   You can also read  lots of books here but personally I do not really want to read longer works in my PC but the short story versions work fine.  (Dailylit.com -there are many read on line type web pages, of course-is especially valuable for readers in places where there basically are no public libraries).     

Gustave Flaubert (1821 to 1880)   published his most famous work, Madame Bovary  in 1857 at age 37.   When I saw I could read a work of Flaubert's at age 17 I was intrigued.   "Dance of Death"  (translator not given) is almost a prose poem.  It is in part the lament of death over the cruel task God has given him.   Death engages in a dialog with Satan.    Death suggested Satan has the more enviable lot as his work will one day be done and he will have rest.    Nero then joins the conversation as one of the finest minions of Satan.      "Dance of Death" does read like the work of a very bookish young man in love with his own intelligence and beginning to feel his creative powers.   You can feel that he no doubt enjoyed the possible shocking effect of this story in Catholic France in the 1830s.  (As I read the laments of Death over his role in the world I was brought to mind that Death is the narrator of The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, one of the very first books I blogged on when I began The Reading Life in July of last year)

The tone of the work and the topics seem to most resemble Salammbô, (1862-  set in Carthage in the 3rd century BC.)   In "The Dance of Death" you can also begin to see the erotic elements that will emerge in Flaubert's work.  Here is an interesting section of the conversation between Death and Satan

I must be everywhere. The precious metals flow, the diamonds glitter, and men's names resound at my command. I whisper in the ears of women, of poets, and of statesmen, words of love, of glory, of ambition. With Messalina and Nero, at Paris and at Babylon, within the self-same moment do I dwell. Let a new island be discovered, I fly to it ere man can set foot there; though it be but a rock encircled by the sea, I am there in advance of men who will dispute for its possession. I lounge, at the same instant, on a courtesan's couch and on the perfumed beds of emperors. Hatred and envy, pride and wrath, pour from my lips in simultaneous utterance. By night and day I work. While men ate burning Christians, I luxuriate voluptuously in baths perfumed with roses; I race in chariots; yield to deep despair; or boast aloud in pride.

In this we can see the perhaps overly florid prose of a young writer and of a young man imaging an exotic world of women, places, and sins he can only see, so far in his life, in his mind.    "Dance of Death"  is worth the 10 or 20 minutes of your time to read it.   It will let you see a great artist trying to feel his power.   It is in part a curiosity read just to see what the author of Madame Bovary  (a lead contender for best novel ever and a very strong bid for best French novel) could write at 17, 20 years before Madame Bovary.   Dailylit.com also has Flaubert's Three Tales on line.   The three short stories in this work are mature masterpieces and should be your second Flaubert.

Mel U

"Parade's End" by Ford Madox Ford -Tietjens in the Trenches

Tietjens in the Trenches -Observations on Parts I and II of No More Parades (Part II of Parade's End)

No More Parades finds our man Christopher Tietjens in the trenches in France in the opening months of  WWI (1914).   He is charge of preparing a large group of Canadian Draftees to go into battle.   He is living in the trenches.   The trenches in WWI were often quite elaborate and included officers quarters and such.   They were not simply places to stand up and fire from.   Tietjens's commanding General is his late father's best friend.   At first impression Tietjens seems like a man who would not do well in the trenches as he has had a totally pampered life and he is not at all physical fit.    Tietjens is in command of a group of Canadian draftees (colonials in his mind), 2994 men for two months time during which they will be readied for combat, trained and fitted out.   Tietjens is of several  minds on these draftees.   He is, we must acknowledge, offended to have to listen to the opinions of some of the soldiers (he feels the lower classes should not have political opinions).    He also meets a Canadian draftee who seems nearly as erudite as he is.   Tietjens has a kind of near break down shortly into his command due to his compassion for the men under him.   One of the draftees asked for a day off, Tietjens thinking he was doing the man a favor for another reason, denied the request and this ends up putting the draftee in the way of enemy fire and he is killed.  Tietjens  cannot get over blaming himself.   Tietjens is very patriotic and as British as they come but he is no fool.   Here is how he sees the origins of war:

Intense dejection, endless muddles, endless frolics, endless villainies.   All these men given into the hands of the most cynically care-free intriguers in long corridors who made plots that harrowed the hearts of the world.   All these men toys, all these agonies mere occasions for picturesque phrases to put into politicians' speeches without heart or even intelligence.   Hundreds of thousands of men tossed here and there in that sordid and gigantic mud-brownness of winter...by God, exactly as if they were nuts willfully picked up and thrown over the shoulder by magpies...But men.   Not just populations.  Men you worried over there.   Each man with a backbone, knees..a home, passions..schemes of the universe, a milk walk, a slut of a wife, a brat..The Men:  The Other ranks.  And the poor--little officers.

Note on the reference to "Slut of a wife"-Sylvia Tietjens,  his own wife is never far from the action or his mind.   In fact Sylvia even shows up at the trenches.  (It was not unusual for officers wives (for those with some money) to show up in France at the front.   Sylvia begins to try to stage manage Christopher's military career via her family connections to his commanding general.   She feels he should have a more important job.  We learn more about the complicated dynamics of the marriage of the Tietjens and get more insight into the characters of our parties.  

As I read   the  parts of No More Parades dealing with trench war fare and Tietjens thoughts on the origins of war I could not help but think of General Pudding, a minor but thematically important character in Gravity's Rainbow, and his memories of trench warfare in France in WWI.   I know devotees of Gravity's Rainbow and Parade's End may each find this remark very odd,  but I see a lot of commonality in the two books.   I might post on this upon completion of Parade's End if I still believe it after I have finished the book.

There are a number of interesting references to the 18th century in this section.   Tietjens also makes another one of his wonderful literary epigrams in declaring that there  no English literature of value written subsequent to the 17th century.   Here is how his wife Sylvia described the head of her pet dog (which for her amusement and stress relief she just beaten for no reason with a rhinoceros whip after remarking that the white dog she was whipping remind her of her husband):

A great head, room for a whole British encyclopedia of misinformation.

There are a lot of good conversations between Christopher, his wife, her priest, the  general, Christopher's brother Michael and the men under Christopher.    We may be seeing the awaking of Tietjens to the many absurdities that unpin the Empire.   (the use of the bold characters above is my idea!)

There is a really a lot in Parade's End.   Great conversations, wicked epigrams that can take their place among the best in literature.   Many wonderful cultural references, some of them brilliant some more than passing strange.    The sentences are crafted beautifully and there are themes enough for 100s of posts.  

In a prior post I pondered the question as to whether or not Parade's End should be seen as an encyclopedic narrative summing up the culture and knowledge of England in the 1910s.  Maybe it is a kind of anti-encyclopedic work suggesting the building of encyclopedias is a fools errand.   I think this is  part of the reason for the great number of cultural references in Parade's End.   


As I said when I began my Reading Notes on Parade's End the very nature of the work means that our early perceptions could be all wrong and I accept that as central to the experience of the work.  

Parade's End Reading Notes and links to posts by others in the read along.

"Heaven and Hell" by Jhumpa Lahiri

"Heaven and Hell" by Jhumpa Lahiri is from her second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (2008).   She won the Pulitzer Prize for her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies.    Dailylit.com has this story available in ten installments and it can be read there for free.    I read the first installment yesterday and was so taken into the world of the story that I read the other nine today.    The story seems like it would be about twenty pages long in book format.   I am grateful to Dailylit.com and Jhumpa Lahiri for making this story available for free.  ( It was a suggestion of Christina T of Reading Extensively that alerted me to look for work by Jhumpa Lahiri and I thank her for her great suggestion)

I voiced the "complaint" some time ago that I feel the reason I have not read more short stories in the past is that when reading I like to enter the world of the characters and the story.   It seems to me the vehicle of the short story was not suitable for this purpose so I over the years have not really read many short stories at all.   I now see that the vehicle of the short story can be used to to develop a complete world, in the hands of a master.   

Most of her stories are about Bengali immigrants adjusting to live in America while struggling to maintain their cultural identity as Indians.   There are five main characters in "Heaven and Hell".   Pranab Chakrobarty is a graduate student at M I T, a super prestigious technical college in Boston.   He is very homesick for India, especially the food.   One day he sees a Bengali woman and her little girl on the street.  He speaks to them and explains to the mother how home sick he has become.   The woman,  Usha, is homesick herself and invites him to join her and her husband for a meal.   Usha's husband is a research scientist, emotionally detached and interested in little more than his research.   Pranab becomes a regular visitor to the house and the little girl comes to see him as her uncle.   The mother falls in love with him  (her marriage to husband was arranged as is the custom among her social class).   Her husband is too involved in his research to see what is going on.   Lahiri does a great job of bringing  these people to life.   The use of food to convey a sense of culture is masterful.  (I read somewhere that an immigrant to a new country will give us his religion, his language, his culture, and other things but not his food!)   

The story covers about 25 years in the lives of the characters and we really do feel we know what is going on in their lives.   A lot of very interesting things happen and I do not want to give away any more of the in fact exciting plot.    Reading this story on line for free at Dailylit.com was a great way for me to sample her work.   I will for sure now buy her two collections of short stories and perhaps her novel, The Namesake (2003) also.  

Lahiri (Nilanjana Sudeshna is her real name) was born in London in 1967.   Her parents were Bengali immigrants and they moved to the United States when she was three.  Her father was a librarian in Rhode Island.   She has stated that she considers herself an American.    She had a PH.D from Boston University in Renaissance Studies.

"Some Do Not"-Part One of "Parade's End" by Ford Madox Ford

Some Do Not by Ford Madox Ford (Part One of the Parade's End, 1924, 288 pages

Some Do Not is the opening novel in Ford Madox Ford's four part work set in the 1910s, Parade's End.   I am treating the entire tetralogy as it were artistically one work.    The four parts of the work were published in rapid succession (FMF must have been a very fast writer given his huge output)   and the limited research I have done (as well as the introduction to my edition on the work by Max Saunders, leading authority on FMF) indicated the four works were meant to be taken as a whole.   Given the nature of the work,  I have to accept that what I think I understand about Some Do Not (I completed it yesterday and have not yet begun part II) may be quite undercut by what  I will read later on.    I think that this is in fact reflective of the themes of the work that deal with the nature of knowledge, culture, literature, and relationships that our understanding of the novel is always on shaky ground.   

Some Do Not centers on the lives of the landed gentry in England in the period right before WWI begins.   We first meet two of the central characters on a train.   FMF is very careful to describe an upper class train compartment so it matches the class of our characters.   The lead character of Some Do Not (and I think the work as a whole) is Christopher Tietjens.   He comes from a wealthy family (how wealthy is up for debate as book one closes), he is quite brilliant.   He works as a statistician for the British government.   He is so well read and cultured that as a hobby he is doing a report on errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica .   Physically he is quite large and out of shape.   He is married to Sylvia Tietjens.     I have quoted previously her description.    She is the very epitome of an upper class beauty.   She seems to require a lot of stimulation and is easily bored indicating perhaps a lack of internal resources.   She does not admire Tietjens as much as I do.   Maybe she knows something or maybe Tietjens is a bit of a bluff.   She sees him as terrible "know it all" and openly mocks him with her adultery which may have produced a child born in wedlock but whose father is not her husband.     We also meet a seemingly good friend of Tietjens', MacMaster.    In the relationships of the characters there do not seem to be too many relationships of equality as befitting this very class conscious work.   

In writing about the work I am tempted to simply do a lot of quotes and say the whole 800 pages is full of one marvelous turn of phrase or epigram of wonder after another.   Tietjens does like to make "pronouncements" on all sorts of topics.   Some of what he says is for sure wrong.   He attributes to an unspecified Russian writer a quote from a short story by Henry James.   There are constant cultural references in the work.   I had to think that maybe some of them are wrong also but the Henry James error is the one I could catch where as the references to Rossetti are not something I can judge.   

Here are what I think are some of the themes of  Parade's End as shown in Some Do Not:   marriage, class structure, the nature of art and literature (Tietjens has some very interesting off the wall things to say about literature), the construction of history (history does not just happen it is a novel), the use of conversation to create bonds and to keep yourself isolated.    As the work proceeds we will, I think, see much of the world of the gentry depicted in Some Do Not destroyed by events beyond their control.    We will also see these same people win a war and we may learn in part why.   Events are not always, for me at least, easy to follow in the narrative and that is for sure on purpose I think.   ( I was I confess confused a bit by the bank overdraft that comes into play toward the end of Some Do Not).    I am very much looking forward to seeing how The Great War will affect the people in Some Do Not.   How will the marriage of the Tietjens hold up?   Will we learn a lot about life in France during the war.   There are period drama type plot threads between the characters.   Not only are the perceptions of the characters not fully reliable, I think the narration of the story is itself subject to differing understandings.   

Dwight of A Common Reader has done  a wonderful job in sorting out the action and themes of Some Do Not-

Parade's End is a pure delight just for the turns of phrases and the conversations alone.   The references to art and literature are wonderful.   I am taking the trouble to track down the references I do not fully follow (imagine how hard this was to do in pre-internet days!) and am finding it very edifying.   

 Junichiro Tanizaki and Ryunosuke Akutagawa have have some close thematic and narrative similarities to those shown by FMF.    I might go more into this latter as I read an additional work by Akutagawa to explain   the very similar way both writers use artifacts to create class divides.   

I will start part two, No More Parades today.  I am very excited to see what will happen next.   I will probably do a couple of  reading note posts on it as I proceed through the work then attempt a closing post on it.   

Reading Notes on Parade's End