The Things that Matter reviewed again

Some newspapers review Edward Mendelson's The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life, that we presented several days ago. The seven classic novels included Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

The New York Sun explains why Mr. Mendelson only has chosen novel written by women in a very specific period of time:

First, and perhaps most provocatively, all the novels he discusses are by women: one each by Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and three by Virginia Woolf. This is not due to any trendy agenda. Mr. Mendelson is passionately interested in those novels that "treat most deeply the great experiences of personal life." As he explains it,

The reason that women writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were more likely than men to write about the emotional depths of personal life is that they were more likely to be treated impersonally, to be stereotyped as predictable members of a category, rather than recognized as unique human beings — and a woman writer therefore had a greater motivation to defend the values of personal life against the generalizing effect of stereotypes, and defend those values by paying close attention to them in her writing, by insisting that those values matter to everyone and that everyone experiences them uniquely.

Later we know more of Mr. Mendelson's analysis of Charlotte and Emily's novels:

Or of "Wuthering Heights," he notes aptly that "Childhood, in this novel, is a state of titanic intensity, adulthood a state of trivial weakness." He is especially fine too in his tactful counterpoint of the drastically contrasting personalities of Emily and Charlotte Brontë (whom he links respectively with "childhood" and "growth"). In his hands each sister comes to seem more familiar yet remains unreachably mysterious. (...)

Mr. Mendelson writes lucidly; he eschews pretentious lit-gab but is too mannerly to polemicize. Still, he can't resist a few sly jabs. In describing Emily Brontë's sense of the cruelty in nature, he mentions the Marquis de Sade and comments,

De Sade is no more dangerous than a professor expounding transgressive ideas to a graduate seminar (which is one reason why de Sade has recently been in academic vogue); Emily Brontë is a more profoundly terrifying figure because she leaves behind the whole world of argument and discussion.

The New York Observer highlights the following comment about Jane Eyre and sex:

Here’s a passage from his chapter on Jane Eyre that’s typical both in method (tripping lightly from the pages of a novel straight into your personal space) and message (casual sex is a no-no): “Charlotte Brontë understood that an unequal sexual relation between adults is necessarily an unloving one; she also seems to have sensed that sex is experienced differently—that is, produces different physical and emotional feelings—in unloving relations and loving ones.” A footnote elaborates: “Post coitum homo tristis —‘After sex the human is sad’—is far truer about unloving relations than loving ones; if the union between two partners is limited to the sexual act, then loneliness inevitably follows it.”

De Sade and casual sex ? Is this what the nineteenth-century reviewers were meaning by coarse ?

Categories: Books, Charlotte_Brontë, Jane_Eyre,Emily_Brontë, Wuthering_Heights