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The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James
Lifespan | b. 1843 (U.S.), d. 1916 (England)
First Published | 1881
First Published by | Macmillan & Co. (London)
Original Language | English
Portrait of a Lady epitomizes Henry James’s favorite “international” theme: the relationship of naive America and cultured Europe, and the contrast between their moral and aesthetic values.
Isabel Archer is a beautiful and spirited young American woman, seeking aesthetic enrichment in Europe. She is not wealthy, but refuses two financially advantageous proposals of marriage, fearing they would curtail her imaginative and intellectual freedom. Yet ironically, when she receives a large inheritance, she realizes she has no actual aims or purpose with which to fill her future. Moreover, it brings with it the sinister attentions of the charismatic, urbane aesthete Gilbert Osmond. When Isabel marries him, she discovers that she has been manipulated for her fortune. Escaping from the captivity of enforced domestic convention, she finds herself embroiled in a scene of complex sexual and moral emotions, which even Isabel herself struggles to understand. But she chooses instead to accept the responsibility of her own free choice, even when that means knowingly renouncing the greater liberty she so cherished. Despite her vanity and self-delusion, Isabel is steadfast in her effort to lead a noble life.
Beneath the melodrama of the novel’s plot, James masterfully reveals the more subtle tragedy of lost innocence and curtailed dreams. “The world’s all before us—and the world’s very big,” Goodward entreats at the end of the novel. “The world’s very small,” Isabel now replies. DP
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1800s
The House by the Medlar Tree
Giovanni Verga
Lifespan | b. 1840 (Sicily), d. 1922
First Published | 1881
First Published by | Treves (Milan)
Original Title | I Malavoglia
“Be content to be what your father was, then you’ll be neither a knave nor an ass.”
The House by the Medlar Tree constitutes the first part of a grand enterprise intended to portray the fight for life at all levels of social reality, from the dispossessed to the powerful. Giovanni Verga surpassed the French naturalists’ commitment to depicting reality faithfully, and created a narrative in which the author disappears to leave space for the characters, who speak in a new style that directly reflects their sentiments and inner thoughts. The story is that of a tightly knit family of fishermen in a small Sicilian village, held together by their obedience to old traditions and patriarchal customs. The Toscanos represent the losers, who, like clams, hold on tightly to the sea-beaten rocks in a desperate attempt to resist the cruel waves of life, but in the end are swept away by the rough waters. Owners of a fishing boat, Padron ´Ntoni and his family are not utterly poor. Therefore, the catastrophe that hits them is a pitiless punishment for attempting to improve their life by engaging in an unfortunate entrepreneurial effort. The author’s message is absolutely clear: change and progress in Sicily are simply inconceivable.
Written especially for the bourgeoisie, Verga’s novel expresses the disillusionment inherent in the national unification of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1861, which it was believed would solve the problems of Italy’s southern regions. But the reality in the mid nineteenth century proved to be more complex. While the north thrived, the poor in the south were more destitute than ever, repressed by new customs regulations and an onerous obligatory requirement to serve in the military. The House by the Medlar Tree is an eye-opening representation of the crude and passionless life that was endured in southern Italy, and is a valuable contribution to realist narrative. RPi
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1800s
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Lifespan | b. 1839 (Brazil), d. 1908
First Published | 1881
First Serialized | 1880, in Revista Brasileira
Original Title | Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas
“Life without struggle is a dead sea in the center of the universal organism.”
Described by American critic Susan Sontag as “the greatest author ever produced in Latin America,” Machado de Assis was a writer of romantic fiction before this radically original book propelled him into the first rank of novelists of his time. Influenced by the anarchic comedy of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the Brazilian writer subverted the form of the nineteenth-century Realist novel while triumphantly achieving the Realists’ objective—a brutally honest depiction of contemporary society.
As in Billy Wilder’s movie Sunset Boulevard, the narrator is dead. This voice from beyond the grave sardonically surveys a lifetime of futility. Brás Cubas has belonged to the privileged elite of Rio de Janeiro, living off inherited wealth. His mediocre existence has been without sense or purpose, epitomized by a lengthy adulterous affair with a politician’s wife, which is as dull as the worst conventional marriage. Machado de Assis’s acerbic graveyard humor makes of this unpromising material a lacerating comedy. The fragmented narrative, circuitous and digressive, allows room for every variety of fantasy, meditation, and comic riff. The notion of human progress is mercilessly satirized in the person of Quincas Borba, an amateur positive philosopher whose optimism drifts into insanity.
Casual vignettes of the cruelty of Brazil’s inegalitarian society strike home like a slap in the face. In the last decades of his life, Machado became the intellectual doyen of Rio society and a Brazilian national hero. His later works include a partial sequel to Posthumous Memoirs, the novel Quincas Borba. Machado’s dark sense of humor, pessimistic view of human nature, and abandonment of conventional narrative make him seem today one of the least dated of nineteenth-century writers. RegG
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1800s
Bouvard and Pécuchet
Gustave Flaubert
Lifespan | b. 1821 (France), d. 1880
First Published | 1881
First Published by | A. Lemerre (Paris)
Original Title | Bouvard et Pécuchet
On a hot summer’s day, two clerks named Bouvard and Pécuchet meet on the Boulevard Bourdon in Paris, and discover that not only have they written their names on exactly the same spot on their hats, but they also have the same liberal political opinions, and, most importantly, the same yearning for knowledge. Thanks to an inheritance, they retire to the countryside, where they propose to test all existing theories in all areas of knowledge. As they challenge the received ideas, the protagonists become more and more aware of inconsistencies that are spread everywhere in their manuals. Bouvard and Pécuchet enter into a repetitive cycle of events: they consult numerous encyclopedias and monographs, apply their knowledge, fail catastrophically in their experiments, regret the falsity and defects of their chosen field, and move on to a new one. They investigate all topics, from archeology to theology, before giving up their quests and deciding to become copyists again.
This “grotesque epic,” unfinished and published posthumously, stands out in the history of the novel. It encapsulates a dramatic passion for knowledge, embodied by the heroes’ enthusiasm for every kind of problem. Conveyed in Flaubert’s economical style, Bouvard and Pécuchet’s episodic enthusiasms, earnest endeavors, and recurring disillusions are an exceptionally disquieting and comical affair. CS
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1800s
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
Lifespan | b. 1850 (Scotland), d. 1894 (Samoa)
First Published | 1883
First Published by | Cassell & Co. (London)
Original Language | English
A map drawn by author Robert Louis Stevenson depicts his fictional but impeccably realized Treasure Island.
“If this don’
t fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since my day,” Robert Louis Stevenson said on publication of his children’s classic. With its evocative atmosphere, peopled with fantastic characters and set pieces, Treasure Island has spawned countless imitations. Films such as Pirates of the Caribbean still encourage the romanticism of piracy, and Stevenson’s classic remains true to form despite various literary attempts to dispute his role in the popular canon.
However, Stevenson’s text contains few of the elements commonly associated with it. The rip-roaring tale of pirates and parrots is there, but perhaps some of the romanticism is due not to the nominal hero, Jack Hawkins, who staidly adheres to law and order, but to the turncoat ship’s cook, Long John Silver. Silver is a wonderful villain: erratic, bombastic, and deadly, and his obvious intelligence and relationship with Hawkins are both gripping and unpredictable. All the elements of a classic adventure are exaggerated by buried treasure, curses, strange meetings, storms, mutiny, and subterfuge. However, this tale of quest, siege, and recovery has one final trick in its rather unformed ending. Even though the villain escapes and the hero returns rich and prosperous, there is a feeling that all has only just begun. EMcCS
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1800s
A Woman’s Life
Guy de Maupassant
Lifespan | b. 1850 (France), d. 1893
First Published | 1883
First Published by | Corbeil (Paris)
Original Title | Une Vie: l’humble vérité
Despite its pessimistic depiction of a woman’s life, Maupassant’s novel also incorporates lyrical evocations of nature.
Guy de Maupassant wrote A Woman’s Life over more than six years. Even though the story is set in the period that extends from the Restoration of the French monarchy to the 1848 Revolution, it shows a complete disregard for political history. Instead, it focuses exclusively on the life of a provincial aristocrat, Jeanne Le Perthuis des Vauds, from the moment when she leaves the convent to her death in the Caux country. Maupassant was strongly encouraged by Flaubert, who found the subject “excellent,” and this story is the inverse of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. It recounts the story of a pious woman who suffers from a series of disillusions in her life, beginning with the unfaithfulness of a miserly, and ruthlessly ambitious husband. Jeanne’s progressive descent into resignation, if not her actual sense of masochism toward the series of misfortunes that she must suffer (miscarriage, the mothering of a premature child who becomes a swindler, the death of her parents, solitude, poverty, and so on), recalls Flaubert’s Un Coeur Simple.
A seminal work of naturalism, A Woman’s Life is also the cruel story of life’s traps and pitfalls, and the natural and animal “force” of its indifferent perpetuation. Maupassant’s criticism of marriage, which he believed restrains natural sexual instincts, of emotive women, and the downright pessimistic outlook of the story, show Schopenhauer’s decisive influence on the so-called naturalist or determinist ideas of the time. Even though the distribution of the book was provisionally blocked by the publisher Hachette, who deemed that its content was “pornographic,” A Woman’s Life was generally well received by the critics, even by the opponents of naturalism, who were swayed by the emotion and the lyricism of certain of its descriptions. JD
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1800s
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy
Lifespan | b. 1828 (Russia), d. 1910
First Published | 1884 (Russia)
Original Title | Smert Ivana Ilyitsha
Original Language | Russian
The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a short novel but not a modest one. As the spiritual crisis of Levin, Leo Tolstoy’s self-portrait, had been left unresolved in Anna Karenina, here he describes the agony of ambivalence that led to that resolution, albeit through the story of a less complicated man, a man less liable to crises of self-understanding than Levin.
Ivan Ilyich is an ambitious bureaucrat jostling his way up the ladder of advantages in a corrupt Russia still harnessed by the czar’s bureaucratic apparatus. He slides gracefully into the roles offered to him, adjusting the attitudes and ethics of his youth to fit with the exigencies of his career, and accepting gladly the circus of perks and consolations offered by fashionable society and its luxuries. He particularly enjoys playing cards, a pastime evidently despised by Tolstoy as much as by the German philosopher Schopenhauer, who thought it the most degraded, senseless and “automatic” behavior imaginable.
Following what seems like an unremarkable injury, Ivan becomes gradually more incapacitated until finally he is unable to rise from the couch in his drawing room. Tolstoy describes with ferocious zeal the intensity of Ivan’s physical suffering, which so exhausts him that eventually he gives up speaking and simply screams without remission, horrifying his attendant family. In the end, death proves not to be the destination of Ivan’s tormented and ignorant spiritual journey. Instead, it is simply the wasted province of all that he leaves behind by relinquishing his life, all the possessions and affectations, and even the human intimacies that he permitted himself in order to pass off his life as a reality worth settling for. Without a doubt, The Death of Ivan Ilyich represents Tolstoy’s most concerted denunciation of a prerevolutionary corrupted social existence. KS
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Against the Grain
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Lifespan | b. 1848 (France), d. 1907
First Published | 1884
First Published by | Charpentier (Paris)
Original Title | À rebours
Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against the Grain is a sensuous joy of a novel. It guts the aesthetic, spiritual, and physical desires of the late nineteenth-century high bourgeoisie and feasts on the remains. Luxuriating in self-disgust and self-love, Against the Grain has been called “the breviary of Decadence,” the mirror in which writers of the fin de siècle could recognize their own elegant longings for a world other than the coarsely materialistic one they inhabited.
Politically, “Decadence” incorporated sexual dissidence and stressed the sacredness of the body as a sensual matrix, but it was locked into a chronic antagonism with bourgeois materialism. Huysmans, Wilde, and Valéry all needed the bourgeoisie as much as they scorned them; without the utilitarian materialism and sentimentality of “respectable society,” their love affair with debauchery and excess had nothing against which to define itself.
Against the Grain embodies and exploits this political slipperiness. The Duc Jean des Esseintes is a frail aesthete, a lover of ecstasies both debauched and spritual, and the lone descendant of his once forbiddingly manly family, founded by medieval warriors and patriarchs. He is a “degenerate,” his lonely vices the consequence of the physical degeneration of the aristocracy. But the narrative lingers delicately over his experiments and despairs. The result is a lush, stylized study in intensity, a fascinating portrayal of an age through the eyes of one who abandoned it. PMcM
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1800s
The Regent’s Wife
Clarín Leopoldo Alas
Lifespan | b. 1852 (Spain), d. 1901
First Published | 1884–1885
First Published by | Daniel Cortezo (Barcelona)
Original Title | La Regenta
Clarín Leopoldo Alas here composed a romantic narrative in a naturalistic structure set in the Levitical society of Vetusta (Oviedo). As in so many nineteenth-century novels, the subject is adultery, but while in Madame Bovary Flaubert created an anti-romantic novel about a degraded romantic sensibility, in The Regent’s Wife Alas did the opposite.
Ana Ozores, orphaned by her mother and separated from her nonbelieving father, is brought up by strict aunts. She is disgraced by an innocent childhood incident that forces her to spend the night in the company of a boy, and, as a result of her guilt, she suffers from morbid hypersensitivity. The positivist Frígilis “scientifically”
arranges her marriage to the much older Quintanar, the Regent of the Audiencia (president of the court), who can give the impressionable Ana support and security. The positivist theories break down in the face of the unsatisfied needs of Ana, who is tied to an inadequate, fatherly husband.
Ana is courted both by her confessor, Fermin de Pas, a canon who relishes his influence in the city and is under the influence of his avaricious mother, and by the seducer Alvaro Mesía. Eventually, the hypocritical society of Vetusta witnesses the fall of Ana who, after years of fidelity and spiritual anxiety, falls into the arms of Mesía. He rounds matters off by killing the Regent in a duel and abandoning Ana, who is defeated and humiliated by Vetusta and rejected by everyone, apart from Frígilis. M-DAB
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1800s
Bel-Ami
Guy de Maupassant
Lifespan | b. 1850 (France), d. 1893
First Published | 1885
First Published by | V. Harvard (Paris)
Original Language | French
Guy de Maupassant is perhaps best known as a writer of short fiction, and he utilizes the shorter form as a structuring principle for his longer productions. The hero of Bel-Ami, Georges Duroy, arrives in Paris as an innocent from the provinces, but in realizing the ascendant power of journalism, rapidly apprehends (and cheerfully exploits) the amorality and decadence at its heart. This discovery occurs impressionistically, giving us lasting images of the cafés, boulevards, and newspaper offices of Maupassant’s city. But everything has a price and a limitation, so that the attempt to inscribe it with authenticity or infinite worth only shows up its absence of value, and devalues its possessor.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 22