Embracing 19'th-Century Propriety Today

Of the ill-tempered children on the online discussion forum, a correspondent expresses the natural sentiment:

DISGUSTING !!! I can't believe that Cambridge was filled with such crude little dimwits !!!

I wouldn't necessarily endorse "filled," but "crude little dimwits" seems pretty undeniable.

As I suggested above, however, it's also true that under-30's in general are victims of the pollution they've had pumped into their culture throughout their lives -- the source of the foulness being what is frankly the dominant driver of their culture: the electronic media. They are victims of too much money hunger, too little altruism, too much hypocrisy, and too little critical thinking, on the part of the adults.

Cambridge bears its part of the blame -- for using Sarah Ormrod's marketing surveys as its guiding "light," and pandering to youngsters' immature desires instead of making adult decisions about what they need.

Regarding the media, I've long been a proponent of a simple proposition. Few agree with it, and you'll virtually never hear this kind of proposal treated with anything but contempt in the media itself -- which is where debate of public issues generally takes place -- because it's bad for the media industry's financial interests:

Just as physical pollution emissions are restricted by government regulation, so should mental pollution be.

I refer to entertainment -- TV and the like; not political speech. So concerns about suppression of political dissent and ensuing totalitarianism would be overblown. Given not too unreasonable implementation of restrictions, we'd at worst lose some legitimate art -- not a big loss compared to the ugliness that'd be prevented.

As for advertising to youngsters, it should be banned. Regulation cannot tame it. The American Academy of Pediatrics considers it "inherently deceptive" when directed to young children, but deploying the latest manipulation techniques against older children or young adults is hardly an exercise in forthright communication either. (Unlike Cambridge's plenary lectures, however, there is an intended message, and it does get effectively delivered to the audience.)

The ugliness I refer to is not merely exposure to sex-related material, but the corrosion of real human relationships, the transmission of a global monoculture, the inculcation of passivity, banality, standard attitudes, clichéd thinking, homogeneity, and obnoxious values. Bill McKibben's The Age of Living Vicariously is an eloquent essay on the subject.

But we are in the realm of utopian fantasy. The global childhood obesity epidemic demonstrates that corporations can trample the public interest even when harm to children is flagrant and palpable.

On the upside, the carping by grianne & co. sheds light on the problem of student passivity. It was a problem I faced when I was a teacher myself, trying to elicit student participation, at China's Tsinghua University a few years ago. An essay I wrote for my students at the time, What to do with your life, noted their fear that classmates would be "displeased or contemptuous" if they spoke up in class, and urged them to overcome it. I can now better appreciate their perspective.

It's noteworthy that in China, university students are familiar with the monologue style of education -- which they consider traditional, old-fashioned, and an aspect of their nation's past backwardness -- and wish to progress to the "modern," interactive style -- which they assume is prevalent in the more advanced West. Until Cambridge, I thought the assumption more or less correct.

Some have suggested that the interactive style is normal in the U.S. but not in the U.K. Somebody told me that American teachers who'd visited Cambridge had been critical of the teaching there for that reason. But I don't know to what degree the Cambridge I saw reflects U.K. norms.

Bianka Reinhardt declined to respond to my emailed request for an example after berating me (c.c. a dozen fellow students) for my "impertinent [and] irrelevant questions in classes." So the next morning, as we sat at breakfast with other students in the St. Catherine's College dining hall, I pleasantly renewed my request. The ensuing discussion went something like this:

Bianka: I don't want to discuss it with you. I don't want to have anything to do with you. [With a glassy smile.]

Uriel: But you publicly stated that my questions are impertinent and irrelevant.

Bianka: I am asking you not to talk to me.

Uriel: At least tell me what course we share! I don't even know, since I've never heard a peep from you.

Bianka: [Her smile unfreezes, her face becomes furious, she begins angrily gathering her things onto her breakfast tray.] If you weren't such a selfish bastard, you would know -- we sit right in the back of the same class as you every day....

And you will not go on interrupting. No, you will not!

Uriel: I will not? How is that? Have you been elected leader?

Bianka: No, you will not, because I am going to complain!

[Getting up.] You selfish bastard....

[As she turns to march off.] Fuck off!

[She storms away. Her friend Sarah Wray, sitting nearby, applauds.]

That was the morning of Monday, August 15 -- Day 3 of the summer program's second session. As it turned out, the class Bianka and I shared was Alex Lindsay's course on the novels of Jane Austen. So Bianka's ire was apparently based on the first two classes of that course (days #1 and #2).

I'd also taken a previous course with Lindsay (on the poet John Donne), in the summer program's first session. (I'd guess that was the course referred to by grianne's initial forum posting, though as mentioned I wouldn't discover grianne until after the summer program was over and I'd left Cambridge.) I was friendly with Lindsay and, as it happened, had just gone out for a drink with him the night before my breakfast conference with Bianka.

But there was a marked change in Lindsay's afternoon class later on the day of that breakfast. It was almost sheer monologue for the first 60 minutes of the 90-minute class (after which he opened a question period). My upraised hand was ignored. He even stood as remote as could be from me, next to the wall on the other side of the room, throughout the class.

Lindsay had a habit of pronouncing views and interpretations of Austen's work as if they were definitive, even when they had every appearance of being open to question. The monologue format made this authoritative presentation of dubious theories considerably more provoking.

Lindsay was discussing Jane Austen's Emma that day. We saw above (# 5, Arguments) the argument between Emma and Knightley concerning Emma's friend Harriet, in which Emma makes a persuasive point about Harriet's bright prospects in the marriage market:

Till it appears that men are much more philosophic on the subject of beauty than they are generally supposed, till they do fall in love with well-informed minds instead of handsome faces, a girl with such loveliness as Harriet has a certainty of being admired and sought after, of having the power of choosing from among many, and consequently a claim to be discriminating.

Granting that the high-spirited Emma may be slightly exaggerating the quantity of suitors, granting that her times were different and that men faced social hurdles when marrying a spouse who was, like Harriet, illegitimate, it nonetheless seems Austen was conveying a truth about her world and ours: A pretty girl's marriage options usually aren't terribly constrained.

However, Austen generally wasn't intent on confronting the social order through her novels. Despite any validity Emma's slightly heretical argument may have had, it is not borne out by the novel's later developments. Emma's conviction that she is successfully contriving to bring about a love for Harriet in the heart of a desirable match turns out to have been a delusion. (Embarrassingly, the man turns out to have been ambitiously striving towards Emma herself all along.) Harriet ends up marrying at a relatively modest social rank.

Unlike the case with Barlow, I never doubted that Lindsay had carefully studied the works he was teaching. But he had a curious fondness for the established social order and its conventional proprieties, and this was again manifest in his view of the Harriet situation. His monologue declared it a fact that gentlemen in general -- not just the one Emma had unsuccessfully targeted for Harriet -- would be unable to accept an illegitimate girl as a spouse. He added that the end of the novel confirmed that the man Harriet eventually married was "the upper limit" for Harriet.

Let's look at the relevant portion of the ending, in which Emma is thoroughly reconciled to Knightley's outlook, and every loose end is happily and conventionally resolved:

Harriet's parentage became known. She proved to be the daughter of a tradesman, rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been hers, and decent enough to have always wished for concealment. Such was the blood of gentility which Emma had formerly been so ready to vouch for! It was likely to be as untainted, perhaps, as the blood of many a gentleman: but what a connection had she been preparing for [various gentlemen who'd been considered Harriet's marriage prospects]! The stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed.

Is it impossible that the author intends irony in this talk of stains, given her earlier argument (through Emma) that Harriet, though illegitimate, "is not to pay for the offence of others, by being held below the level of those with whom she is brought up"?

And how does the passage "confirm" that the gentleman class was beyond Harriet's possibilities? Did the same keen-eyed author who wrote the words scorning the notion that men would be "philosophic on the subject of beauty" really believe such a thing?

My point isn't that Lindsay's view was wrong, but that it wasn't the only defensible view, as his presentation implied. At least, it wasn't so unarguable that alternative views could not even be considered. A literature class should not be a matter of preaching correct doctrine for acceptance on faith by grateful students.

The heroine in Jane Austen's Persuasion also spouts some platitudinous but quite questionable sentiments at the end of the novel where, again, everything is conventionally resolved in a way I imagine gave comfort to contemporary readers who could stand no more than temporary breaches of orthodoxy. With those platitudes too, strikingly, Lindsay ruled out the possibility of irony.

Briefly: When Anne is 19 years old, a new neighbor moves into town,

a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit and brilliancy; and Anne an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling. Half the sum of attraction, on either side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly anybody to love; but the encounter of such lavish recommendations could not fail. They were gradually acquainted, and when acquainted, rapidly and deeply in love. It would be difficult to say which had seen highest perfection in the other, or which had been the happiest; she, in receiving his declarations and proposals, or he in having them accepted.

Anne's mother is dead; her father cold and remote. Her mentor and close friend is a woman who had been a dear friend of her mother's -- Lady Russell.

Unfortunately, Lady Russell doesn't like the guy. Number one, he has no money. Number two, his confidence that he'll make his fortune in future leaves Lady Russell unimpressed:

Such confidence, powerful in its own warmth, and bewitching in the wit which often expressed it, must have been enough for Anne; but Lady Russell saw it very differently. His sanguine temper, and fearlessness of mind, operated very differently on her. She saw in it but an aggravation of the evil. It only added a dangerous character to himself. He was brilliant, he was headstrong. Lady Russell had little taste for wit, and of anything approaching to imprudence a horror.

So Lady Russell persuades Anne to cancel her engagement.

The perfect guy, rejected and dejected, goes away; does indeed make his fortune; and poor Anne is left to endure eight years of misery ... until the guy returns to fulfill the happy ending.

After everything's settled, the upcoming marriage is a sure thing, their happiness is secure, Anne conducts what we'd call a postmortem -- regarding her engagement cancellation 8 years prior:

I have been thinking over the past, and trying impartially to judge of the right and wrong, I mean with regard to myself; and I must believe that I was right, much as I suffered from it, that I was perfectly right in being guided by the friend whom you will love better than you do now. To me, she was in place of a parent. Do not mistake me, however. I am not saying that she did not err in her advice. It was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides; and for myself, I certainly never should, in any circumstance of tolerable similarity, give such advice. But I mean that I was right in submitting to her, and that if I had done otherwise, I should have suffered more in continuing the engagement than I did even in giving it up, because I should have suffered in my conscience. I have now, as far as such a sentiment is allowable in human nature, nothing to reproach myself with; and, if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman's portion.

Can the brilliant Jane Austen, writing in an era when women were second-class citizens, and referring to the pursuance of a grievously bad piece of relationship advice, have been in earnest in presenting the thought that "a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman's portion"?

Definitely, in Lindsay's mind. He had no doubt on the matter.

Back in the August 15 monologue on Emma: My raised hand ignored, I interposed a question during a pause: If it was indeed unthinkable for any gentleman to marry the illegitimate Harriet, then Emma had not only misjudged the particular gentleman she'd intended for Harriet. Had this clever girl somehow misjudged her own society?

This appears to have been exactly what Lindsay believed. But also, it seemed, he did not want to favor me with a "yes":

"No," he answered. "She was living in a fantasy."

I also interposed another question (I don't remember what it was and didn't note it, but it wasn't terribly unreasonable). Lindsay responded by remarking that to answer it he'd need to repeat something he'd said earlier. He also volunteered that my question had made him lose his train of thought.

This was bordering on an open rebuke.

It was bad enough that the wild Bianka was present at Cambridge at all, sending abusive emails and flinging expletives under the solemn regards of the Masters' portraits in the college dining room. Was she also intimidating teachers and dictating the conduct of classes?

The certitude of her "you will not go on interrupting" that morning had carried a whiff of fanaticism. Had it actually been well founded?

I spoke to Lindsay at the end of class. He wasn't free to talk then, but agreed to meet later that afternoon....

(Continued....)