The Disgracing of Mrs. Robinson

I enjoy a good look at social history. Part of that is because in my fiction writing, I want to be as close to "correct" as possible in the details of daily life. Part of it also is because social history gives us a window into how we got to where we are in the world today and where we might be going. I picked up Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale for the first reason (I had written a novel in which a 19th-century character struggles to get a divorce, and this book is about a famous divorce case of the Victorian era), but I ended up taking away some thoughts about women, marriage, the media and the public.

Quick summary - Isabella Robinson is a widow whose second marriage to Henry Robinson is not a happy one--probably emotionally, if not physically, abusive. Isabella is a woman with strong "Romantic" passions, and she is attracted to a doctor (also married) who is 10 years younger and a family friend. Over several years, Isabella records her infatuation with Dr. Edward Lane (and a couple of other younger men) in her diary. At one point, her desire for Lane seems to be reciprocated; there are several entries in the diary that, although they are written in flowery, euphemistic Victorian language, seem to indicate that Isabella and Edward may have had a brief sexual affair. While Isabella is delirious with fever, Henry goes snooping through her things and finds the diary. He immediately began trying to get a divorce under Britian's new Divorce Act (this is in 1858) on the grounds of adultery, based on her diary entries.

The book details the progress of the trial, the strategy the defense attorneys for both Isabella and Edward used, and the public reaction to the salacious (to the Victorians) diary entries (which were read aloud in court and published in newspapers). The law specified that when a woman was accused of adultery, her lover had to be named as part of the divorce suit (oddly enough, that was not the case when a man was accused - hmmmm), and Edward Lane was desperate to preserve his reputation, since his business (a medical spa that many women used) would be ruined if he were found to have committed adultery with Isabella. The strategy was to portray Isabella as essentially insane and her diary entries as overly-imaginative fiction from a sexually-obsessed woman suffering from "uterine disease." 

I felt a little sorry for Isabella as I read the account of the trial, although how stupid was she to write all this down??? No one seemed at all concerned with her reputation or her humiliation; I felt like she was completely de-humanized and turned into a case study for all the (male) doctors with their pet theories about women and their sexuality. I remember from my Rhetoric of Women's Suffrage class in my Ph.D. program that women were seen as likely to suffer from hysteria that arose from their uterus, making them unsuited for intellectual activities like, say, voting or anything, really, that was not within the "domestic sphere." Don't we still see echoes of that line of thought today? Why is it so often an issue that a woman is trying to do something outside of traditional gender roles? 

I was also kind of disgusted by the media coverage of the trial and the apparent appetite the public had for all the juicy details. The Saturday Review condemned the publication of the diary entries, calling them a "stream of filth" that were "unfit for the reading of any decent woman" (that "hysteria" thing again, I guess). And yet, the "filth," not just of the Robinson case but of other divorce trials, continued to be published, to the point that even Queen Victoria decried them as making it "almost impossible for a paper to be trusted in the hands of a young lady or boy." We think of the Victorian age as a period when people were extremely prudish, to the point that piano legs had to be covered with skirts. Yet, there was apparently a thriving market for pornography in Holywell Street in London. It's the hypocrisy that gets to me, I guess - on the one hand, condemning Isabella's diary while on the other buying and devouring the newspaper accounts that included the diary's details.

Henry Robinson lost his divorce suit, but Isabella was ruined; she lived the rest of her life in several rented houses, moving from town to town (maybe to escape public notoriety?). Summerscale has a poignant conclusion to her work when she tries to answer my question above (why write a diary about things you are doing you know will get you in trouble?). She says, "Part of her, at least, wanted to be heard." Poor Isabella. Stuck in an abusive marriage, consumed by wanting someone she shouldn't want, having her private thoughts made a public spectacle, unable to escape the rigid place her time in history squeezed women into. I didn't really like her, but I felt for her.

One last thought - while I liked the look into Victorian social history, there were several times while I was reading this book when I thought, "how, HOW can someone take a subject like this and make it so boring?" Granted, that wasn't my reaction through the entire book, but there were a lot of side trips into social history (like about diary-writing in general) that interrupted the flow of the narrative.  But....isn't the social history why I read it in the first place? I guess you could say I'm ambivalent about the book.
 

Did I Miss Something?

I usually read a little each night in bed, even though there are some nights I am so tired after a day of farming that "a little" is very little. My eyes will roll shut, and I've even been known to whack myself in the face with a book that has fallen out of my sleeping hands. I was pretty sleepy one night when I was reading what seems to have been an important chapter in Gary D. Schmidt's Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, and given how the book turned out, I think I must have missed some major developments in my sleepy condition.

Here a quick synopsis of the story: It's 1912 or so. Turner Buckminster III has moved with his family to the town of Phippsburg, Maine, where his father is the new minister at the First Congregational Church. It's a rough transition for Turner; the local boys, led by Willis Hurd (son of a church deacon) bully him, and members of the congregation tattle to his father every time Turner fails to match the image of the perfect son of a minister (which is pretty often). His father is demanding and harsh. Homesick and lonely, Turner takes to spending time on the coastline looking at the ocean. That's where he meets Lizzie Bright Griffin, a girl from the black community living on nearby Malaga Island. Turner and Lizzie become friends despite the disapproval of everyone else in town.

Things get complicated because a group of important men in town want to clear the black families off Malaga Island to make Phippsburg more attractive (in their view) as a tourist attraction. The leader of the group is Mr. Stonecrop, who is leading an investment group to build a big hotel. Some of the black families leave, but some, like Lizzie and her grandfather, refuse. Eventually all the families are evicted, and "difficult" ones like Lizzie are shipped to the Pownal home for the feebleminded and insane (that's not the name in the book, but I'm too lazy to look it up). Turner is forced to deal with a lot of "adult" issues--death, racism, deciding how to respond to enemies.

Ok, now for what I think I missed (probably lots of spoilers in this paragraph....). First, Turner's father has a drastic character change. He goes from requiring Turner to read boring theology texts for his homeschooling to having him read the works of Charles Darwin, which seems out of character for a strict minister. He begins to stand up to the investment group, when at first he seemed supportive of their vision for the town. The same thing happens to Willis Hurd. He goes from being a tormentor of Turner to a friend who warns him when the eviction is about to happen. 

Now, I know that characters should change over the course of a story. That's part of the joy of reading, right? But these changes seem so drastic and unmotivated, more like the click of a switch than a growth process. That's why I think I must have missed something during my sleepy reading. I need to go back and revisit Chapter 8 (I think it was 8). But first, to finish planting purple hull peas since there is rain in the forecast for the rest of the week. Will update later!

UPDATE: I looked back at Chapter 8, and I remembered all of it, so I don't think I was too sleepy when I read it. And my first impression seems to be correct - there are some characters in the book who conveniently (too conveniently, if you ask me) change their personality to fit the story. I might be able to buy the change in Willis. Chapter 8 has another baseball game (the book started with one) in which Turner makes a strong statement of defiance by hitting a bunch of foul balls so far the balls are lost and then very obviously lets the last pitch drop on home plate. The book notes that Willis smiled, so we see that he got the point Turner was making and maybe admired him for it, I guess? I can see that as growth out of being a bully to being a friend. Turner's father, though - in Chapter 7, he gives Turner a Friday afternoon off, and then within a couple of pages is handing him The Origin of Species. What? Why? Maybe it was a visit from Mr. Stonecrop that made Turner's father rethink the ethics of being a minister of God who's conspiring to throw people out of their homes, I don't know. Whatever happens, happens in the character's head. These are not the only examples, either; there are a couple of other things that caught me off-guard because they seemed to come out of the blue.

I think that's the main problem I had with this book. We don't get to see characters working out their changes, they just change for the sake of the story. The book has lovely language describing the ocean and sea breezes. There is a key subplot where Turner encounters a pod of whales while floating in the bay and gets close enough to look in the eye of one whale. That moment comes back to Turner whenever he needs some courage, and I think that is a neat touch. The book is also based on some real history - a black and mixed race community was actually evicted from Malaga Island in the early 20th century to try to develop tourism in the area. Even with all those positives, though, I couldn't get past what to me is the important part of a story - that it needs to "ring true" in terms of the characters, that the characters do what people realistically and logically would do and not just be cardboard cutouts that the author moves around and changes at will to fit the story they want to tell.