Welcome, my loves, to Cornflake Victorians!
Here, twice a month, we will indulge in all matters 90s, Victorian, and very likely other various and sundry topics. There will be Big Feelings, always. There will be swan dives into delicious pop culture. There will probably not be cornflakes, at least the conventional breakfast sort. (If you’re wondering about the reference, allow me to brighten your world. Tori Amos will loom large in this space.)
Originally I planned to launch this newsletter on May 30, primarily because I am ensconced in book revisions and was using this as a carrot that I might enjoy after, if not totally completing, at least nearing the end of what has proven to be a very intense—rewarding, but intense—editorial process. But instead, I began working on it right after Mother’s Day: if you are familiar with me and/or my writing, you know that my own mom died just shy of a year and a half ago, after enduring three and a half years of ovarian cancer and the ravages of both disease and its treatment. This was my second Mother’s Day grieving her, and while I can never predict how I will react to these family-centered holidays so imbued with cultural meaning, it was no surprise that I felt, well, acutely shitty. When I woke up the next morning morning, my head and heart addled by a bizarre mélange of mourning and agitation over a now-erstwhile dragon-y television show, I decided that beginning work on this newsletter a bit early would be the way I eased into the rest of the month. And so here we are, the Cornflake Victorians!
Before we begin in earnest, a quick word about my credentials: although I was in training to become a Victorianist, I did not complete my doctorate, although was relatively close. So I remain, in perpetuity, ABD—“all but dissertation.” But although I do not write to you as a bonafide professor, I am very well-read and well-trained, as well as honest about the extent of my knowledge. I promise never to speculate or assume when I can offer definitive historical information, and I will always let you know what I’ve been in error, as I’m sure I will be, at times—though hopefully not too much! And this is not meant to be a lecture series in the form of a newsletter; this is supposed to be something more whimsical and, hopefully, interactive.
So, here we go!
As I’ve suggested on Twitter, I want to begin by bringing together the obsessions to which the title of this newsletter refers and write a bit about one of my favorite films AND favorite novel adaptations: Alfonso Cuarón’s 1998 film, Great Expectations starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Estella (oh, those halcyon pre-GOOP days), Ethan Hawke as Finnegan Bell (aka Philip “Pip” Pirrip), and the late queen Anne Bancroft as Ms. Dinsmoor (an updated, delightfully deranged and over-the-top Miss Havisham). Cuarón does not look back at his work with much fondness. At the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival he actually said, “I think it’s a complete failed film.” Yowza. I, on the other hand, love it for a myriad of reasons, some of them admittedly quite personal. But in fact I would argue that it’s a robust interpretation of the original work that, if rather heavy handed at times, lays bare how and why we attempt to reinvent ourselves, and what happens when, in so doing, we find ourselves utterly and emotionally unmoored. It’s also extremely sexy and lush, and I see no reason to apologize for that. A beautiful, horny film is a gift.
Because this is a modernized adaptation of Charles Dickens’s novel, which was serialized from 1860 to 1861 we must expect changes to the narrative (A quick note: books were prohibitively expensive in the 19th century—many of the novels we read now, collected within one cover, were printed in magazines, in installments). I’m not going to detail all of the various narrative differences here, but if you’d like a quick and dirty primer on the original novel, you can check out this Wikipedia page. But I do heartily endorse the novel, despite its author being a virulent asshole, because it’s quite good: Estella is deliciously and tragically mean—a brutal beauty weaponized for vengeance who arguably understands the nuances of Miss Havisham’s motivations better than she does—and there are moments of queer tenderness that surprised me the first time I read it. And Joe Gargery, Pip’s surrogate father, is a king among men, far better than Pip ultimately deserves. On the one hand, the novel is yet one more piece of evidence revealing Dickens’s myopic, misogynistic perspectives on women and the blame he casts upon him for his own misfortunes. As I’ve written elsewhere, Dickens endured a miserable childhood, and it curdled his estimation of his mother, as well as prompting him to fuss about Mothers Who Don’t Properly Mother Their Sons all over his oeuvre. Miss Havisham is the sort of bonkers, tragic character who materializes from one male author’s outsized opinion of men’s importance on this earth—and who has, understandably, become something of a punchline (I mean.)—but who also never fails to instill me with profound sadness. To want so desperately and lavishly, and to be so distorted by heartbreak that existence is only tenable by nurturing revenge by proxy—well, what a horrifying way to linger in the world. And as you learn in the novel, the young Miss Havisham is treated pretty monstrously.
Let’s pause for a moment to admire Anne Bancroft doing the damned thing. For my money, she is one of the finest Miss Havishams to grace the silver screen.
I don’t want to spoil all the various the nooks and crannies of the novel for those who haven’t yet read it, but it really is so weird and tender and marvelous in a way that makes me even angrier at Dickens for being such a shitbag. Did you know that he tried to have his perfectly sane wife committed to an asylum so that he could bone somebody else? Because he absolutely did that. Thankfully, he was unsuccessful—that wasn’t always the case in situations like those, which were more common than you might want to suppose. Women were great in spite of the Victorian era, but the Victorian era, well, it was stridently lousy for women.
But I digress from our scheduled programming (from time to time I will probably digress in these newsletters, and I hope you’ll forgive that)!
Rather than England, Cuarón sets his film in the Gulf Coast, where Finn, an orphan, is brought up by his sister and her partner, Joe, the latter role exquisitely rendered by Chris Cooper. The overpoweringly verdant environment is ideal to the film’s rippling current of somatic, lush desires: for sex, for money, for a new identity, for power. Before Finn moves to New York City to pursue both a career in art and, obviously, Estella, greenery thrusts its way into most every scene (and even then, we are treated to a luscious park scene).
Cuarón’s Florida, however, is mossy and dank and fecund in a sweaty, claustrophobic way. It’s a proper motif for the way in which yearning and lust—and their twinned entanglement—crawls at the bottom of each of us, twining and twisting in our bloodstreams and seizing upon our atomic matter. It is there, creeping in our bodies, as soon as we first draw breath, and when it goes unchecked, it will dismantle us with total brutality. Thus, the shots of the Dinsmore estate:
The name of the estate is a little on the nose, but we’ll let it slide.
And because Estella represents, for Finn, these many desires, it’s only appropriate that green is her signature color. Let’s take a moment to appreciate Paltrow’s sumptuous, gloriously 90s costumes.
Ugh. Perfect.
If you’ve seen the film, you obviously remember this scene. And I wager that you, like me, cannot hear Chris Cornell’s “Sunshower” without feeling, shall we say, a bit flushed?
That said, most of the characters wear green at some point. Miss Dinsmore certainly does, which makes sense: she is the embodiment of destructive desire. Poor Joe wears a frilly mint green tuxedo shirt in a pivotal and heart-shattering scene. Finn wears it less often once he’s in New York City, but it does make appearances.
It’s not my intent to spoil the film for those who haven’t seen it, so I won’t inch through scene by scene. I do want to note that one deeply queasy aspect of the film is its sexualization of young Estella which, while it may make narrative sense, and gesture to the sort of emotional abuse inflicted by her obsessive, misandrist guardian, is carried out in a way that exploits a young girl’s precocious beauty rather than urging us to be disturbed by it. In this way, the film, like Miss Dinsmore, presents her as a sort of doll to be admired, and if Cuarón came to recognize that, well, good. The water fountain scene, however, is a stroke of genius, and although I was in high school when I first saw the movie, it seized my gut, not only in a visceral reminder of my first lusty stirrings, but as a resonant call to a girl who found herself both dazzled and bewildered by the broad, wild sweeps of desire that seemed to surge within me like an ocean. Often they were tied to a person, and sometimes they were something more protean and free-floating, a yen for satisfaction I couldn’t yet fathom but knew was at the bottom of me.
For that reason, the infamous “Kissing in the Rain” scene could almost bring me to tears. I was transported by it: the fact of desire and the will to act on it. I was 15 and deeply romantic, so of course I wanted someone run through pouring rain in pursuit of me, and of course I wanted to have voracious sex (I would not have sex for a few more years and only possessed a vague comprehension of it), but I think, really, my response was far more primordial: it was cathartic to bear witness to so much want, and for it to be treated the way I understood it: like a mighty, soaking storm with the strength to fling a body out to sea. The comfort, then, was that Estella and Finn found anchors in one another.
(Psst, don’t watch the below video if you haven’t seen the film and aren’t keen on spoilers.)
My obsession with this film extends to the soundtrack and the score, and yes, Tori Amos does make an appearance, thank you so much for asking!
I highly recommend the score if you enjoy working with instrumental music in the background, and I recommend the soundtrack to everyone who lives for a fine compilation of 90s alternative.
After all, it includes this banger from Pulp, and its use in the film is ::chef’s kiss::.
In fact, the film is altogether quite brilliant in the way it incorporates music, and sound in general.
And of course, we’ve got Iggy:
My mother and I used to listen to the score in the car, playing “Kissing in the Rain” on repeat. Now, when I hear it, I am dizzy with competing associations and responses: teenage lust, sonic pleasure, and the bone deep mourning that found a home within me the day Mom died. But a story like Great Expectations accommodates grief, and so, ultimately, I wipe my tears and carry on.
***
We’ll wrap up here, although of course there’s much more to say, and we can certainly revisit past topics. I appreciate your patience as I experiment with structure and form; I’m still trying to determine how exactly this thing ought to take shape. Please do let me know if there are topics you’d like me to cover—I’d like for this to be collaborative, and if you’re shelling out hard-earned dollars for this newsletter you ought to enjoy what you read.
I hope you won’t be put off if I conclude with a little bit of personal news here and there. I’ll also see about collecting links to reading pertinent to Victoriana and the 90s. For now, the big news of the day is that my first book, TOO MUCH: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today, is available for preorder. You can easily order it on Amazon or at Barnes & Noble, but I really urge you to order it from your local independent bookstore. And yes! The cover does indeed pay homage to the Pre-Raphaelites. The glorious, snarling face you see belongs to Frederick Sandys’s “Helen of Troy.”
Two big essays of mine also ran this past week, one of which takes as its focus the 19th century poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon (not Victorian, strictly speaking, but adjacent). The other does not correspond to the topics at hand, but it would still mean a great deal to me if you read it. I also must recommend this gorgeous Mother’s Day essay by my dear friend Caitlin Gibson, who writes beautifully about mourning and mothering.
Until next time, my fellow Cornflake Victorians. Subscribers should expect the next installment in early June. In the meantime, may you have a happy, restful weekend. Stay in touch.
In muchness,
RVC