Unnerving Short Stories by Rudyard Kipling

I have known for a long time that there are two basic views of Rudyard Kipling:

1.      Rudyard Kipling the author of The Jungle Book and Just So Stories…thus, a children’s author.

2.      Rudyard Kipling, author of The White Man’s Burden…thus, a racist.

The Kipling I met when reading the collection Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror & Fantasy (edited by Stephen Jones) was bits of both, yet neither.

While I prefer novels where I can really settle into a world and get to know the people that live there, I have recently begun to appreciate one aspect of short stories: collections of one author can showcase the broad spectrum of their talents, and thus reveal more of themselves.

Reviewing "The Sittaford Mystery" by Agatha Christie

Originally titled The Murder at Hazelmoor, The Sittaford Mystery possesses all the needed factors to make a quintessential Agatha Christie whodunit:

• Locked room” murder situation
• Small English village in the country
• Variety pack of suspicious characters
• Distracting fear of foreigners
• Level-headed police investigator
• Charismatic and beautiful young woman
• Ace reporter helping said young woman with an independent investigation
• Lots of random red herrings

Charles Dickens vs. Mark Twain: Comparing Their Styles of Travel Satire

As I was being infuriated by Charles Dickens’ overwhelmingly negative portrayal of the United States in Martin Chuzzlewit, I could not help but compare his “satirical” treatment of traveling abroad with Mark Twain’s work, particularly A Tramp Abroad, which I have previously reviewed.

I loathed “The American Part” of Martin Chuzzlewit, where Englishmen immigrate to the United States. Yet I loved A Tramp Abroad where an American visits France, Italy, Switzerland, etc. This made me wonder: was I being a hypocrite, oversensitive about my own country being made fun of, yet laughing at other countries’ expense?

The American Part of Charles Dicken's "Martin Chuzzlewit"

I glossed over “The American Part” of Martin Chuzzlewit earlier because it warrants its own discussion. Charles Dickens obviously wrote this book on his return to England from his first tour of the United States. From the biographies of Dickens I’ve read, he was NOT impressed by the New World. And it definitely shows in Martin Chuzzlewit.

Heroic Hot Potato in Charles Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit"

The novel Martin Chuzzlewit was fundamentally flawed even before it was written. Charles Dickens decided he wanted to write on the theme of Selfishness, building a story around that infrastructure rather than incorporating it more organically. Aside from this ambiguous topic, it doesn’t seem like Dickens really had an idea where he wanted to go with the plot, or the journeys his characters would take.

Breaking the cardinal rule of storytelling, Show, Don’t Tell, the reader is told that Martin Chuzzlewit is the main character. Yet even when Martin is not being mind-numbingly boring, he’s being mind-numbingly annoying. Whether Dickens ever admitted it or not, I think he felt the same way, which explains why Martin disappears for chapters at a time. (And the reader doesn’t even notice, much less miss him!)

The Plot of Charles Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit"

A lot of Charles Dickens’ novels are titled with the name of the main character:

•  The Adventures of Oliver Twist
• The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
• Barnaby Rudge
• Little Dorrit
• The Mystery of Edwin Drood
• And, of course, Martin Chuzzlewit

Dickens usually has loads and loads of characters—some being more interesting or assertive than the titular character—often divided into subplots of their own which eventually weave tighter and tighter together. These subplots orbit the main plot that concerns the title character, sometimes converging. Sometimes the titular character is not so much the Hero as the MacGuffin…like Edwin Drood who is allegedly killed.

But, through it all, one has a good idea who to root for and to which characters one is supposed to become emotionally attached.

No such luck in Martin Chuzzlewit, however. This story opens not with an introduction of the hero, but with the villain: Seth Pecksniff. 

Fundamental Problems with Charles Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit"

I’m not mad, just disappointed.

Okay, I’m lying. I’m pretty mad, too.

At long last I finished reading Martin Chuzzlewit, a novel Charles Dickens apparently thought one of his best books. Which just goes to show that a person doesn’t always have an accurate gauge on the worth of their works.

(I guess that could be considered something positive that came of this reading experience. If a person can overestimate the worth of something they do, then it’s just as easy for a person to underestimate the worth of the humdrum things they do every day.)

Martin Chuzzlewit was written, as Dickens explains in a preface, as a condemnation of Selfishness. Having established himself as a force of social reform in Oliver Twist (treatment of orphans) and Nicholas Nickleby (the harsh world of boarding schools) among other works, Dickens decided to approach a broad subject of human self-centeredness. As a result, almost every character in Martin Chuzzlewit is selfish to the core.

Perfect Little Protagonists: from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “Little Lord Fauntleroy”

 Little Lord Fauntleroy is a quintessential rags-to-riches story of an American boy named Cedric becoming the heir to an English Earl. His father was the disowned son of the current Earl, a crotchety, proud, and selfish man. Through Cedric’s pure-hearted love and generosity, the Earl turns over a new leaf.

Basically, it’s Annie with a British Daddy Warbucks.

Thoughts on Longinus' "On the Sublime"

It is natural to us to feel our souls lifted up by the true Sublime, and conceiving a sort of generous exultation to be filled with joy and pride, as though we had ourselves originated the ideas which we read.

Though I’ve read quite a bit of ancient Greek/Roman literature, I don’t think I’d read anything by Longinus until this year. His On Good Writing was a suggestion on my Goodreads account, and when I couldn’t find that particular book in either a free e-book or at my local library (I don’t usually purchase books by authors I’ve never read before), I settled for one I did find: a free Kindle book called On the Sublime.

As it turns out, “Longinus” is sort of a placeholder in the author’s byline, as scholars aren’t really sure who wrote this book. Whoever the author was, the book was written in Greek during the first century A.D. (the date is more certain as the work was a reaction against another book of that time), and references other famous works and writers of Classical thought, including Plato, Homer, and Sappho.

Reviewing Anthony Hope's "The Prisoner of Zenda"

One of my favorite books—and perhaps my favorite of any adventure/swashbuckler—is Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda. I began reading this book completely ignorant of its genre or plot. In fact, I believe it was one of the books I’d had on my shelf for a decade or so, and had originally purchased at a library used book sale just because I liked the cover and thought the title intriguing.

As it turns out, this book is one of those action-packed, romantic, larger-than-life plots set in a fictional, vaguely European country and peopled by beautiful heroines, dastardly villains, and chivalrous heroes.

Rudolph Rassendyll is an Englishman visiting the land of his ancestors, Ruritania. His visit coincides with the coronation of a distant cousin of his, also coincidentally named Rudolph. And, coincidentally, they happen to look exactly alike. All these coincidences are coincidentally fortunate because King-to-be Rudolph’s jealous brother Michael drugs the heir apparent and has him kept prisoner in a castle in the town of Zenda (hence the title).

Reviewing Agatha Christie's "A Murder is Announced"

I read A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie in tandem with The Rosemary Tree. While thematically and stylistically different, the setting of 1950-something English small towns sometimes made me mix up the two.

In this Miss Marple mystery, several characters are introduced reading the paper in their separate homes, and finding the strangest announcement that a murder is to occur at Letitia Blacklock’s house at 6:30 that night. For some reason a ton of people decide to show up, assuming it’s a joke or theme party of some kind. But since this is Agatha Christie, we readers all know that no matter how frivolous the warning, the murder itself is dead serious.

Reviewing Hans Brinker (or, The Silver Skates) by Mary Mapes Dodge

Winter Landscape with Skaters on a Frozen Lake by Dutch painter Anthonie Beerstraten

Mary Mapes Dodge’s classic, Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates is one of the (many) books I remember my mom reading to my brother and I when she home-schooled us. From that original reading I remembered the main character, Hans Brinker, his sister, the skating race with a prize of the silver skates, that they lived in Holland, and that his father had been brain damaged from a fall off the dykes and was the only one who knew where their money had been hidden, thus causing them to live in abject poverty for a long time.

I remembered liking the book, and so decided to re-read it this winter, as the atmosphere is appropriately frigid for reading a story centered around an ice-skating contest.

Except, much to my surprise upon re-reading, the contest—and the silver skates themselves—figure very little into the plot.

The Mabinogion - The Fairest of Them All

If you thought it was fun counting how many injuries should have killed Sir Kai, you’re in for another counting treat: How many of the maidens in this book are the most beautiful in the land?

If you want to know the answer but don’t have time at the moment to read the entire Mabinogion, don’t worry. I did it for you:

The Mabinogion - The Immortal Sir Kai

I had mentioned before how The Mabinogion’s stories contained a lot of gruesomeness. What I did not have time or space to mention, however, was that as I was reading the book, the majority of that violence seemed to be aimed at one character: Sir Kai.

Now, Sir Kai (also spelled Kay, Cei, or Cay depending on translation and author’s spelling preference) is the foster-brother of King Arthur himself. Anyone who’s read T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (or seen the Disney movie, which is fairly accurate despite lacking the thematic depth of White’s prose) may remember that Arthur, although heir to the crown of England, was raised by rather mediocre knight named Sir Ector and everyone was ignorant of Arthur’s true birthright until he pulled out the sword in the stone. Sir Ector’s own son, Kai, although generally characterized as a bully or boor, is made knight of the Round Table upon his foster-brother’s ascension to the throne.

His role in these stories is usually negative—he serves as the brutish muscle, the hotheaded person picking fights and challenging duels, or mocking the new Camelot arrivals even though they are really diamonds in the rough who will show him up with their superior deeds of valor and questing. However, I’ve always felt sorry for him, and feel he gets a bad rap.

The Mabinogion - An Easy Quest

Since Sir Owain tends to be a jerk going around in disguise and making all his relatives—including King Arthur himself—put out Missing Persons lists about him, portraits of him on whatever Camelot used for milk cartons, and generally assuming he was dead in the ditch somewhere, a fair amount of The Mabinogion’s Camelot segment is devoted to people going on quests looking for him.

One of my favorite exchanges is the result. King Arthur, now thinking that Owain is dead, has put out a call to his knights to go out into the land and find out Owain’s ultimate fate. Before anyone goes anywhere, though, he puts on a grand tournament…which of course Owain shows up to in disguise.

In a rare instance of poetic justice to Owain—the other one being where a dwarf gives him a good smack—his opponent is also in disguise. It’s Gawain (here called Gwalchmai), which, taking into account their uncle Arthur’s penchant for going incognito as the Black Knight, and also Arthur’s sisters Morgause and Morgan le Fay being enchantresses who regularly change their appearance, makes me think this whole disguise-y thing is a family trait.

The Mabinogion - Sir Owain the Jerk Knight

If Sir Gawain is my favorite Knight of the Round Table, his cousin Owain is the opposite. It’s not just that, in later stories, Owain is portrayed as this easy-going nice-guy character who has to deal with his churlish cousin Gawain’s jealousy of his obvious superiority…although that has a lot to do with it, too.

It’s that, much as the storytellers seem to admire Owain, as I’m reading about him I can’t help but feel he’s a bit of a jerk. Especially to ladies.

Here’s a handy list to make my point:

1)  Falls in love and promises to marry lady. Goes off questing instead of marrying her.

2)  Stays at a place hanging out with friends for three years instead of three months. How can you even make that kind of mistake?

3)  After six years he finally gets around to marrying his lady.

4) Outlives his wife so he can conveniently be paired up with all the other maidens he encounters in his stories.

5)  This little line (which I admit is the fault of the author and not Owain, but still conveys the sort of attitude he seems to have):

The Mabinogion - Introduction

The Mabinogion is compilation of medieval British (specifically Welsh) stories of love, war, and magic. Although there are many references to Arthurian legends, this compilation includes a variety of other tales as well. Although probably not as well-known as Mallory’s Le Morte D’arthur, The Mabinogion nevertheless has had a lasting impact on literature. To reference some past blog posts where I discussed this influence, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion is one example, and Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain another.

To the contemporary audiences of the 12-13^th centuries or even before, this was their form of entertainment. Like television today, these oral recitations (or, once the stories were finally written down, read-alouds) had to serve in many roles: Romance, action, mystery, fantasy, philosophy, history, and perhaps even a little theology.

It takes a shift in values to understand how original audiences received these stories. To the modern reader, many of these heroes come across as meatheads and braggarts. Take Sir Kynon:

“I was the only son of my mother and father, and I was exceedingly aspiring and my daring was very great. I thought there was no enterprise in the world too mighty for me…”

Wow. Humble much?

Emmuska Orczy's Lord Tony's Wife - A Parody - Part 2

Last we left our heroes, Lord Tony (friend and sidekick to the Scarlet Pimpernel himself) and French aristocrat Yvonne de Kernogan in oblivious marital bliss. But Yvonne's British-hating father is intent on having the marriage declared null and void, and marry her off to the rich Frenchman Martin-Roget. Unbeknownst to everyone, Martin-Roget is actually Pierre Adet, a Revolutionary who has sworn revenge against the de Kernogans because of the unjust death of his father...

Scene 6

DE KERNOGAN: Oh my daughter how I’ve missed you!

YVONNE: Dad? Are you feeling okay? You’re looking all sentimental and suspiciously not furious with me for marrying an Englishman against your will. Also, how can you have missed me? It’s only been like 16 hours since I eloped.

DE KERNOGAN: How can you say such hurtful things about your loving papa? You know I’ve always had your best interest at heart.

YVONNE: So what was all that “You’d better marry Martin-Roget or else!” stuff?

DE KERNOGAN: I only wanted you to marry Martin-Roget because he was rich and handsome and French and awesome (although those last two things are so alike it’s redundant). If I’d known you already had a boyfriend I would have supported your decision.

YVONNE: I told you I was in love with Lord Tony! And us getting married should be no surprise to you. After all, look at the title of this book! I’m Lord Tony’s Wife!

DE KERNOGAN: Still, there was no need to keep this a secret from your old man, to get married in the middle of the night rather than in pomp and circumstance! I didn’t even get to give you away at the altar!

YVONNE: Well, Dad, I guess I’ve completely misjudged you on account of you behaving like a controlling jerk all my life. I’m so sorry! Here, stay with us for a while and completely ruin our honeymoon.

LORD TONY: I told you we should have gone to Niagara Falls.

DE KERNOGAN: Okay, you’ve talked me into it. But just so you know, *cough cough* I’m not feeling all that good. You know how frail and sickly your poor elderly father is, and how close to death…you know what I think I want to go home and die in my own bed.

YVONNE: Oh no!

DE KERNOGAN: Don’t you worry about me. *cough cough* Weak and helpless as I am, I can make it home on my own…probably.

YVONNE: Father you can’t go alone! Tony, is it okay if I escort my father home?

LORD TONY: Sure! What can go wrong?

Thoughts on Stephen Crane’s "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets"

Maggie Johnson is born into poverty and degradation, a life without hope of escape from her circumstances, and without the education or resources to do anything to better her life. It is her innate desire for a better life that drives the rest of the story. Maggie attempts to elevate her lifestyle through a relationship with Pete, a man whom she believes will help her break away from her present circumstances, but in doing so she brings about her downfall.

Written in the gossiping tone of a bystander, Crane reports life in the slums, where people are hardened until their humanity is almost unrecognizable. These people are trapped by the world they were born into and slowly assimilated into the culture so as to obstruct them from any escape. After the story’s tragic ending, Crane makes no editorial comments, preaches no possible solutions. He doesn’t have to, because if there is any remaining empathy within Crane’s readers, the story’s message speaks for itself.

The Injustice of Fate in Mark Twain's "Pudd’nhead Wilson"

The dichotomy between an individual’s willpower and inherent destiny is one of the predominant themes throughout Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson. The original title, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, implies that the ultimate outcome is somehow predestined and unchangeable by any human effort. Thus within this world some things cannot be altered; a person’s birth dictates their status rather than their individual merit. This point is evidenced by the way neither Tom nor Chambers’ identity can be hidden; no matter what they do, their fingerprints are a constant which identify them in the end.