Review: Andrew Davies' adaptation of Gaskell's "Wives and Daughters"

While not quite reaching the heights of Andrew Davies’ “Pride and Prejudice” adaptation, this well-paced, enjoyable rendition of a later Gaskell novel worked, showing Davies’ capacity to deliver sound work when he feels like doing so. It’s a woman-centred story, as the title might suggest, and the characters are generally distinct and well-drawn. Lady Harriet only swoops in for an occasional cameo, but when she does she’s amazing—except for her weird pixie cut in the final episode, too late to be part of that Terror-inspired wave of them. This is set in the 1830s, so what was going on there?

The protagonist’s stepmother Hyacinth and Hyacinth’s daughter Cynthia sucked a little as people in ways that felt fresh and realistic. Hyacinth attempts to make people happy by giving them what she herself would want. She’s consistently incapable of listening to others’ opinions, which is why the care-labour of being a companion to rich people must have been so constantly vexing to her, relying as it does on listening skills which she otherwise refuses either to learn or to employ. Self-obsessed Hyacinth doesn’t quite understand people around her as fully real, with emotional lives disconnected from her own. She earnestly believes her remarriage will be a boon to her stepdaughter: why wouldn’t it be, when she’s soaked up all these posh airs and is thus god’s gift? She’s not intentionally cruel except in that she never seeks to do anything about this persistent character flaw, however serious its consequences are for other people and her relationships with them. 

Cynthia is cleverer than her mother and significantly more self-aware, but she thinks about her rash flightiness like a congenital illness: she just can’t help being more fundamentally immature than her surface polish would suggest. It’s her nature! Cynthia is pleasant and funny, and infinitely more sinned against than sinning in the matter of her early engagement, but she’s prone to bad decisions that hurt even people she truly cares for like her long-suffering stepsister Molly, the heroine. Molly herself is under persistent narrative threat of retreating into the background on account of having fewer dramatic problems than those around her, but then that’s very true to life with Eldest Daughter Syndrome: the final scenes, as Katy reminded me, afford Molly no lines in her own happy ending.

I realise there’s a parallel structure with Molly briefly preferring the poetic Osborne to his steady brother Roger and Roger preferring Cynthia to Molly. Molly, however, was younger at the time, quickly amended her judgment based on learning more about the brothers and never embarrassed herself as Roger does with his engagement to Cynthia, who likes Roger about as much as she’d like a fairly comfortable chair, and for essentially the same reasons. (Osborne is another interesting, imperfect figure, though in another line, his flaws owing more to a failure to manage unfavourable circumstances outside of his control. His father, the Squire (aka Circumstances), lives long enough for a redemption arc, facilitated by Molly.) It’s hard to fully forgive Roger for sister-zoning the woman who learned botany for him, who follows his letters with compassion and avidity, who did all the familial heavy-lifting around his mother and brother’s deaths, and who is easily as hot as Cynthia. What is turning him off, here? Is it the fact that she’s hard-working rather than some ephemeral ideal of fuckable womanhood? At least he finally shapes up, but Jesus. 

As Katy put it, if you have an 'only real P&P adaptation'-shaped place in your heart, this will slot in in a way few other period dramas will. 

Review of "Hot Life" documentary on Netflix

Some notes on this documentary on hot pot in various regions of China:

- They use the term ‘hot pot’ far more expansively than I thought was permissible, in a way that encompasses set, planned and pre-prepared dishes. superborb says she thinks “the only common factor is soup served over a heating element”.

- This guy in the middle of Macau goes five kilometres up a mountain every day with two Culligan jugs yolked on a stick to fetch extra-good spring water. That is so much fucking work.

- Apparently Macau’s cooked food stands can only be passed to lineal descendants, and new licences aren’t issued.

- I enjoyed the intense dramatic montage of men making a copper pot. Their pumpkin-shaped bronze tea pot was very cute, as well. Yunan copperware can get it.

- ‘A fierce dog guards the entrance to the shed where the secret blend is made.’ Cut to: the most innocuous dog you’ve ever seen, just pure O-O.

- This guy lighting his cigarette with a kitchen blowtorch while he works is a whole sexuality for someone, I am sure. 

- This other restauranteur is a Taiwanese immigrant to Chongqing, which is interesting as that’s not a directional flow I’ve heard about before. 

- ‘My son was tricked by duplicitous goat sellers.’ What a problem to have.

- This child’s shoes have small stuffed dumplings on the tips. Astounding.

- This next guy is having ginger milk curd for breakfast. superborb gave me this recipe for it, but I couldn’t get the microwave version to work at all. I might try the stove-top version later. I saved the leftover ginger pulp for cooking: inclusion in a stock might suit it best. 

- WHY IS THERE A SNAKE? superborb says snake tastes fine, it just has too many bones. I say this is like “Condor Heroes” all over again. You can’t trust people. Suddenly, they’re eating a snake. 

- Man, now they’re showing the live bamboo rats they’re going to cook? Sigh. I’m not about that Hot Life. 

- This guy is like, “fuck work, it’s mushroom season and I’m driving home for special mushroom hot pot.“ Who among us?

- This chef is visiting his dad’s grave with hotpot sauce in fancy packages to tell him they introduced his sauce to the Belgian market and it won an award. 

- Some of the show’s participants live in a Tulou village, which is very pretty. 

-  At one point someone in Chongqing with seemingly little money mentions that his wife is pregnant with his second child. I suppose this must have been filmed after 2015, so one-child policy is no longer an issue (the fine previously having been multiple times an average annual income, growing larger with each violation—I think it might have been income-linked, as well). Yet throughout the show, I kept catching strange details related to the topic. A ninety-year-old had multiple daughters: that made sense. But then the show focused on three forty-year-old brothers. The family originally hailed from a village, so perhaps they’d qualified for a relevant exception? 

In general, one-child policy seems so much more situationally porous and time-bounded than I think of it as, in terms of a ‘rule’. There seem to have been many cases where it didn’t quite apply. I guess if your local ‘council’ makes a case for not enforcing this (or simply has other priorities), it’s like any other rule oversight. Croydon Council is 'supposed' to be doing regular rubbish collection, too: a lot of things are supposed to happen.

superborb found a reference stating that many “cadres were middle-aged women who went through the collective period when childbearing was encouraged. They experienced continuous childbearing, and so were strongly supportive of the one-child policy." She commented that she didn't “consciously realise the effect the sudden shift from 'have more kids!' to 'have [fewer] kids!' would have had. In the 90s rural areas also stop violating the one child policy as it becomes [normalised], and this is consistent with rising economic” conditions. She also pointed out that many families registered children under relatives’ names.

It feels like a situation where the original motivations on the ground aren’t immediately comprehensible in retrospect. My understanding of the topic has been shaped by a much later, contemporary reaction narrative that’s entirely external, and specifically Western. Western coverage focuses on this programme as an inconvenient limitation of rights, and is almost entirely disinterested in the policy’s stated goals and the realisation thereof. But from this earlier point of view, imagine the justification and support this must have afforded a fuckton of women who weren’t necessarily interested in being baby factories.

Review: "A Little Princess", by Frances Hodgson Burnett

 “The Little Princess” is convinced that the climate of India is bad for children, despite the fact that an abundance of children obviously call the subcontinent home. The same writer opens “The Secret Garden” with a scene of mass epidemic death there, which treated as a matter of course apiece with the scenery. Per Aisha, “everyone in India is dead because that's just what India is like”. This is a recurring theme with varied textual presentations, but where it occurs it’s treated as quite a serious problem. “Martin Chuzzlewit” believes that the American midwest is similarly unhealthy, despite the area’s long settlement by Native Americans and current considerable population. “Treasure Island” thinks that the pirates won’t last a week encamped on the island before taking severely ill. There’s some discussion of a risk of malaria, but the onset of decay is almost instant: the night fog touches the pirates, and by morning they’re on the wane. It’s an almost science fictional conceit. The titular Treasure Island even has conifers (which does seem reasonable), despite what the cinematic imaginary of the story in adaptation had led me to believe: how much of a shock to the system can such a climate really be? What exactly are all these writers on about? 

Aisha, who specialises in post-colonial scholarship (and who, somehow, survived spending her early years in India), suggested a few probable causes. “One is obviously just racism: [the fact] that brown people are okay in these climates doesn't mean they're hospitable to real (white) people. But also, at least with India (I don't know as much about American colonialism, though probably there too), there's often a very determined attempt to live as Europeanly as possible (and I think that's exacerbated by fears of going native). So they do a bunch of stupid shit re: clothing and food that doesn't work in this climate, and then suffer for it. Though I also like the idea of hostile climate as a sort of manifestation of colonial guilt.”

For one thing, these are stories rather than historical records. Ailments afflict characters more as a matter of narrative convenience than as an accurate depiction of the consequences of white incursion into previously non-white space. Yet narrative events must, to a degree, feel plausible: these Victorian novelists and their readers brought a firm conception of extra-European climates as not just hostile but toxic, at least to white bodies, to their engagement with literature. 

Even so, this is a lot to simply invent out of whole-cloth. Were these writers drawing on actual experience? I feel they have to be fitting a theory to some form of data, potential preconceptions about the folly of leaving the mother country aside. Give or take a few poisonous snakes (a legit new one for you, if you’re British), what made American frontier settlements in “Martin Chuzzlewit” such a death trap in a temperate climate where dressing and living in a European manner would have been wholly appropriate? How the fuck do you manage to die due to the environment in like, Kansas? Seriously? Are we just talking about the struggle to build infrastructure for a new community? Is this a problem of sanitation? It’s bizarre that Dickens doesn’t raise similar objections to Australia, which arguably really is a landscape that wants people who don’t know what they’re doing dead. 

***

Frances Hodgson Burnett is a bizarre writer, intensely interested in class and empire but never quite interested enough to commit to the premises she herself chooses. She suggests that the problem with Sarah’s sudden fall from grace isn’t Sarah’s poverty, particularly, but that children go hungry, full stop. Yet throughout the book, Burnett remains fixated on Sarah’s inherent nobility, which she presents as a classed, raced quality. Even in the depths of her depravation, Sarah still thinks things like 'I suppose whoever comes to live in the attic opposite mine will only be an under-servant’. At this stage, Sarah herself is an under-servant. Wither this disdain? Acting like a princess can make you one, but in order to act like a princess, you have to know how to do so. Sarah’s is a “Prisoner of Zenda” level transformation, where you can pretend to be the King of Ruritania if you’re already an English noble—and in fact, already the king’s cousin. 

Nods to the general weal are undercut by Sarah’s dreamy recollections of how many servants she had back in India, a situation that Burnett never looks askance at in the way she does the internecine warfare of white classism. Aisha reminded me that similarly,  in “Secret Garden”,  “Mary's big problem is not understanding that servants in Yorkshire are real people, not like Indians, so you have to talk to them like they're human.” “Little Princess” is sometimes interested in Sarah’s being half-French, but never in her having lived her entire life up to this point in India (until suddenly and conveniently, she does speak rudimentary Hindustani).

When kindly strangers decorate Sarah’s bare attic room, the descriptions of the works indicate that what they have created is an Oriental fantasy. Given their descriptions and provenance the fabrics draping the surfaces are probably Indian textiles, though this is never explicitly stated. Some other furnishings and the general decorating style bolster this, but the narration is oddly coy on this point. You have to guess from the details. These are probably the sort of furnishings Sarah grew up with, and thus a source of comfort to her and the manifestation of an understanding and a connection between her and the giver. Yet for all this Sarah never asks herself, 'could my unknown benefactor be the Indian man I met, the only adult besides my tormentor who I've ever seen come into this attic?' You get the feeling that Sarah would have been disappointed if ‘the laskar’ himself had been the direct source of her life’s improvement rather than his employer, 'the Indian gentleman' (who is white). 

Burnett is, despite these points, quite skilled. She depicts the interior lives of her various strange, ‘old-fashioned’ children well. It'd be easy to dismiss her as twee, but you can't fully: she's smarter and weirder than that. There are moments when the book is reminiscent of “Jane Eyre”, and acquires some of its predecessor’s heft.

Frances Hodgson Burnett seems almost to know, at points, that she’s bitten off more class commentary than she can chew. She tries to force the book into a fairly conventional 'hot dog, I recover my fortune!!' shape that it no longer comfortably fits, complete with, because Burnett can’t neatly resurrect the dead, a replacement father. Like a Marvel movie, Burnett is obsessed with empire but either unable or unwilling to commit to a political project or even make any definitive comment on the subject—which is, of course, ultimately a political project in its own right. “Just accept the situation ¯\(ツ)/¯ .” Aisha felts this approach even risks becoming a Joseph Conrad affair, where "the situation is bad because it taints me, one of its beneficiaries”.