Showing posts with label The 100 best nonfiction books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The 100 best nonfiction books. Show all posts

Thursday, April 6, 2023

The 100 best nonfiction books / No 76 / A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)




100 best nonfiction books

No 76 

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 

by Mary Wollstonecraft 

(1792)


This radical text attacked the dominant male thinkers of the age and laid the foundations of feminism

Robert McCrum
Mon 17 Jul 2017


T
he term “feminism” did not exist when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this short book (just 98pp in my Vintage Classics edition) and some critics have resisted its author’s identification with the movement. In hindsight, however, we can now see that its assault on “mistaken notions of female excellence” was the first great expression of feminist ideas. Although she does not insist on the equality of the sexes, you’ll still find, articulated in thrilling clarity, the essence of Wollstonecraft’s argument for the education of women, and for an increased female participation in everyday society. This little book, which declared that “from the tyranny of man, the greater number of female follies proceed”, set off the first ripples of what would eventually become the worldwide movement for women’s rights. A classic of post-revolutionary thought, shaped by the Enlightenment, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication changed life for women the world over.


Wollstonecraft began her career in 1787 with Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and then spent several years writing reviews, pamphlets, Mary (a novel), and her first foray into pre-feminist polemic, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), which was a passionate response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. This, one of dozens of pamphlets inspired by Burke, was, in Wollstonecraft’s words, an “effusion of the moment”, attacking “the grand principles at which he [Burke] has levelled many ingenious arguments in a very specious garb”.

Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Men attracted plenty of attention and brought her into the circle of the radical philosopher William Godwin, whom she would ultimately marry.
In 1792, however, she visited revolutionary Paris, where she fell wildly in love with an American, Gilbert Ismay, with whom she had a daughter, Fanny. Caught up in the ferment of the revolution, she became enraged by Talleyrand’s recommendation to the National Assembly that women should only have “domestic education”. She had already begun to consider the subjection of women in society; now she found an occasion for her arguments. Accordingly, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication carries a dedication to Talleyrand, a respectful appeal “to reconsider the subject, and maturely weigh what I have advanced respecting the rights of woman and national education”.
Written in 1791 and published in 1792, with a second edition appearing that same year, Vindication was sold as the first volume of a work that, in Wollstonecraft’s mind, would be “divided into three parts”. There were, she wrote at the outset, “many subjects, cursorily alluded to” that would “furnish ample matter for a second volume, which in due time will be published.” In the event, Wollstonecraft wouldn’t write any subsequent volumes.
Before this date, there had been books that argued for the reform of female education, often for moral reasons or to better befit women for their role as companions for men. In contrast, in her introduction, Wollstonecraft criticises women’s education thus: “I attribute [these problems] to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers… the civilised women of this present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.”
She goes on to say, with revolutionary ardour, that “I shall first consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties”.
But Vindication soon became more than a reassertion of women’s educational rights and, instead, a full-blown demand for men and women to enjoy the benefits of reason. Within a very few pages, she had plunged into her bold analysis of men’s “sexual character”, following this with an assault on Rousseau for the false distinctions he makes in his approach to the sexes in Emile.
As Wollstonecraft’s voice finds its polemical register, Vindication acquires its distinct character, at once passionate and idiosyncratic. With thrilling candour, she freely admits: “A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, and I will not stifle it, though it may excite a horse-laugh. I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour. For this distinction is, I am firmly persuaded, the foundation of the weakness of character ascribed to women; is the cause why the understanding is neglected, whilst accomplishments are acquired with sedulous care; and the same cause accounts for their preferring the graceful before the heroic virtues.”








Such a “wild wish” aside, an important part of Wollstonecraft’s purpose is to unfold an unambiguous argument: “From the tyranny of man, I firmly believe, the greater number of female follies proceed; and the cunning, which I allow makes at present a part of their character, I likewise have repeatedly endeavoured to prove, is produced by oppression.”
It’s here that Wollstonecraft gets drawn into a discussion on women’s character, opposing “sensibility” to “reason”. She herself has a strong preference for “modesty”, and struggles with the issue of sexuality: “Were I to name the graces that ought to adorn beauty, I should instantly exclaim cleanliness, neatness and personal reserve. It is obvious, I suppose, that the reserve I mean has nothing sexual in it, and that I think it equally necessary in both sexes.”

This is a rare, almost glancing, reference to the equality of the sexes. As quickly becomes apparent to every reader, and as many commentators have noted with dismay, she nowhere says unequivocally that men and women have equal rights. She is also prone to statements that must have made later feminists shudder: “As a sex, women are habitually indolent; and everything tends to make them so.” This, to modern readers, must inevitably diminish her finer moments of abstract, philosophical analysis: “Asserting the rights which women in common with men ought to contend for, I have not attempted to extenuate their faults; but to prove them to be the natural consequence of their education and station in society. If so, it is reasonable to suppose that they will change their character, and correct their vices and follies, when they are allowed to be free in a physical, moral and civil sense.”
Still, having made this concession, Wollstonecraft returns to the high ground of her argument: “Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority that chains such a weak being to her duty.”
Many subsequent feminist writers would take issue with the idea of “the weaker vessel”. Wollstonecraft, a pioneer, struggled to break free from the tyranny of that notion. Indeed, some of the best passages in Vindication flow directly from unresolved feelings about what it means to be a mother, a lover, even a wife, within a patriarchal male society, and how to assert women’s rights in such circumstances.
Vindication is an important book, but it’s not faultless. From its first publication, it has enjoyed a mixed press. Horace Walpole denounced her as “a hyena in petticoats”. In hindsight, the fate of the Vindication has become intimately braided with its author’s own story, her troubled relations with the opposite sex, and her attempted suicide. For many, from Virginia Woolf on, Wollstonecraft’s tragic, short life is now seen as just as important as her writing in the forging of a feminist critique of society. Indeed, Woolf described Wollstonecraft – her writing, arguments and “experiments in living” – as immortal: “She is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.”
Her relationship with the proto-anarchist William Godwin was unconventional. She married him after becoming pregnant. In August 1797, Wollstonecraft gave birth to a second daughter, who would grow up to be Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. The birth was followed by the agonising complications of puerperal fever. Mary Wollstonecraft died 11 days later. She was 38.

A signature sentence

“To account for, and excuse the tyranny of man, many ingenious arguments have been brought forward to prove that the two sexes, in the acquirement of virtue, ought to aim at attaining a very different character; or, to speak explicitly, women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue.”

Three to compare

Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)

JS Mill: The Subjection of Women (1869)

Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own (1929)

• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft is published by Penguin (£4.99). 


THE 100 BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF ALL TIME





Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Wednesday, April 5, 2023

The 100 best nonfiction books / No 52 / De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1905)





The 100 best nonfiction books: No 52 – De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1905)


There is a thrilling majesty to Oscar Wilde’s tormented tour de force written as he prepared for release from Reading jail 

Robert McCrum
Monday 30 January 2017 05.45 GMT

I
n life and death, Oscar Wilde possessed a unique self-mythologising genius. Long before he secured his place in Britain’s pantheon of great dramatists, he had established himself as the witty icon of an aesthetic ideal. By the spring of 1882, when he went to America declaring his “genius”, he was doubly celebrated in both the United States and England (where Gilbert and Sullivan had just satirised Wilde’s aesthetic movement in the character of the poet Bunthorne in Patience), as much for himself as for his writing. For a tantalisingly brief period, until the summer of 1894, when he wrote The Importance of Being Earnest in three weeks, Wilde blazed like a meteor across Victorian London before crashing and burning at his Old Bailey trial (after the disaster of the Queensberry libel case) in May 1895. A lesser artist might have been broken by that fall, but Wilde was ultimately inspired by it.

In his cell, between January and March 1897, in preparation for his release from Reading jail in April, Oscar Wilde began to write an extraordinary letter. He wanted to address his notorious relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the fin-de-siècle romance that had swiftly become a fatal tragedy. “Bosie” had remained aloof from his former lover throughout the two years of Wilde’s sentence (“with hard labour”), and the 80 pages of manuscript written on 20 folios of thin blue prison paper became Wilde’s tormented bid for some kind of rapprochement. What began as an act of would-be reconciliation blossomed into an excruciating, and utterly compelling, chapter of autobiography, an aesthetic apologia (Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis – “Letter: from Prison and in Chains”) , and finally a tour de force of prose by a late-Victorian writer of genius.

Oscar WiIde, photographed at the height of his success, five years before the trial that send him to prison in 1895.


Wilde was always a master of disguises and personas. The Importance of Being Earnest is all about double lives. In De Profundis (its title, “from the depths”, is taken from Psalm 130), he puts on the mask of the disgraced, and penitent, prisoner to review his affair with Bosie, to attempt a kind of confession and then, suitably purged, to assert “a fresh mode of self-realisation”. More than a century after its first appearance (Wilde’s friend Robert Ross both gave the manuscript its final title, and arranged for its publication), the ruthless and often self-lacerating candour with which Wilde lays himself bare is still shocking.
At first, he addresses the heyday of his affair, its carefree and irresponsible passion, and his reckless indulging of the younger man:
“From the very first there was too wide a gap between us. You had been idle at your school, worse than idle at your university. You did not realise that an artist requires for the development of his art the companionship of ideas, an intellectual atmosphere, quiet, peace and solitude.”
As Wilde’s realisation of his self-destruction sinks in, he rehearses the terrible sequence of events that would lead to his downfall, disgrace, and imprisonment: “Everything about my tragedy has been hideous. Our very dress [as convicts] makes us grotesques. We are the zanies of sorrow…”
A famous passage recalls the prisoner’s transfer from London to Reading, by train, on 13 November 1895:

“From two o’clock till half-past two on that day I had to stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction, in convict dress and handcuffed, for the world to look at. Of all possible objects I was the most grotesque. When people saw me they laughed. Each train as it came up swelled the audience. For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering mob. For a year after that was done to me, I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time.”


This episode sees Wilde at one of his worst and lowest depths. Thereafter, De Profundis gains vigour and confidence as the prisoner charts his brilliant career as “a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of his age”. He contrasts the high moments of his art and its astonishing success with the humiliation of bankruptcy and jail. Somehow, he must come to terms with the great “Oscar” becoming a drab prison number “C.3.3.”, a cipher. Other parts of De Profundis hint at Wilde’s subsequent campaign for prison reform (“the prison system is absolutely and entirely wrong”), and the fate of the system’s inmates, an obsession that culminated in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, his lyrical masterpiece.
Thus emboldened, and with his artistic muscles recovering some of their old potency, Wilde begins to make a comparison between his life as an artist and the life of Christ, a theme that runs fitfully through his earlier prose writing, especially The Critic as Artist (1890) and The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891). For Wilde, the noble artist, the figure of Christ is the supreme archetype of the suffering creator, as well as the ultimate individualist. In the degradation and shame of his 1895 trial, Wilde finds the glimmerings of his role as a martyr, a role he is happy to share with the son of God.








Never let it be said that Oscar Wilde was short of self-belief. “All of this”, he writes, “is foreshadowed and prefigured in my art… A great deal of it is hidden away in the note of Doom that like a purple thread runs through the gold cloth of Dorian Gray.”
“I now see that Sorrow is at once the type and test of all great Art. What the artist is always looking for is that mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which Form reveals…”
“To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead. But to Christ it was not so...
Having made this grandiose connection, the letter descends into a sustained rebuke of Bosie’s character and behaviour, in which his “horrible habit of writing offensive letters” comes across as perhaps the least troubling quality in a young man whose vanity, greed, treachery and vicious self-centredness dragged Wilde down.
And yet, remarkably, Wilde concludes with instructions for their joint future conduct once he has been released, and ends on a note of reconciliation:
“You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty. Your affectionate friend. Oscar Wilde.”
It’s hard not to conclude that the thrilling majesty of Wilde’s prose was wasted on Bosie. Within three and a half years of completing this extraordinary document, Wilde was dead. He was 46.

A Signature Sentence

“Our ill-fated and most lamentable friendship has ended in ruin and public infamy for me, yet the memory of our ancient affection is often with me, and the thought that loathing, bitterness and contempt should for ever take that place in my heart once held by love is very sad to me: and you yourself will, I think, feel in your heart that to write to me as I lie in the loneliness of prison-life is better than to publish my letters without my permission or to dedicate poems to me unasked, though the world will know nothing of whatever words of grief or passion, of remorse or indifference you may choose to send as your answer or your appeal.”

Three to Compare

Cardinal Newman: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864)
John Stuart Mill: Autobiography (1873)
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
• De Profundis is published by Penguin (£9.99).



THE 100 BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF ALL TIME



Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Tuesday, April 4, 2023

The 100 best nonfiction books / No 46 / The Waste Land by TS Eliot (1922)




The 100 best nonfiction books

No 46

The Waste Land

by TS Eliot 

(1922)


TS Eliot’s long poem, written in extremis, came to embody the spirit of the years following the first world war


Robert McCrum
Monday 12 December 2016 05.45 GMT
T
he Great War was a mass slaughter. It also became the catalyst for a social and cultural earthquake. But not until a young American poet began, in 1919, to address the desolate aftermath of this Armageddon did the interwar years begin to acquire the character we now associate with the 1920s, and also become explicable to the survivors of an apocalypse.

The Waste Land has attracted many labels, from the quintessential work of “modernism” to the “poetical equivalent to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring”. It was also one of those very rare works that both embody and articulate the spirit of the age. As such, it would be adored, vilified, parodied, disparaged, obsessed over, canonised and endlessly recited.
A generation after its publication, Evelyn Waugh would conjure the mood of interwar Oxford, and Charles Ryder’s initiation into university life in Brideshead Revisited, by having Anthony Blanche declaim The Waste Land at the top of his voice from Sebastian Flyte’s balcony.


TS Eliot first announced “a long poem I have had in my mind for a long time” in a letter to his mother at the end of 1919. Actually, its origins can be traced to 1914, the year the young poet finally left Harvard and crossed to Europe, settling first in Oxford, as the first world war began.

Eliot’s “Oxford year” (1914-15) was decisive. It was then that he encountered Ezra Pound. Soon after, perhaps betrayed by his “genius for dancing”, he met and married his first wife, Vivien(ne) Haigh-Wood. This self-inflicted wound, by many accounts, holds the key to The Waste Land, which became a mirror to all his most acute marital difficulties. “All I wanted of Vivien,” he later wrote, cruelly, of this relationship, “was a flirtation.” He had persuaded himself he was in love, “because I wanted to burn my boats” and stay in England with Pound. This instinct was correct. Eventually, Pound would play a decisive editorial role in the making of the poem.
Eliot’s 1920 New Year resolution, to “get started” on his “long poem”, came after some very difficult months. His marriage to Vivien (who was also sleeping with Bertrand Russell) was going from bad to worse, and he was struggling to make ends meet professionally. In extremis, Eliot began to compose the lines that would morph into a new poem, much longer than anything he had written before, with the working title He Do the Police in Different Voices.
In The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, Eliot had perfected a radical modernist kind of dramatic monologue, given in a single voice. Now, he was experimenting with a cubist narrative and “different voices”: a famous clairvoyant (Madame Sosostris), a neurotic wife (“My nerves are bad tonight”), two cockneys yakking in a pub (“if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said”), another distracted woman “the hyacinth girl”, a wandering poet (“I had not thought death had undone so many”) and a ragtime singer (“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag…”) to identify some of the most famous.
Intercut quasi-cinematically with these vernacular scraps are Eliot’s other “fragments … shored against my ruins”. These include half-stated Christian and Buddhist themes, mixed with Arthurian legend and classical mythology. In the final section “the Thunder” delivers some sonorous commands, until the crisis of the poem is brilliantly resolved with “Shantih shantih shantih”.



In Eliot’s own life, there were no commensurate reconciliations, just the daily torment of his marriage to Vivien, who suffered equally from her life with “Tom”. At the end of 1919, she wrote: “Glad this awful year is over … Next probably worse.” Eliot, almost as fragile as his wife, took himself off to Lausanne to consult a therapist. It was here that he wrote the haunting last verses of his work-in-progress as if “in a trance”.
By January 1922, The Waste Land was ready for submission to the Dial and, more importantly, Ezra Pound’s maieutic brilliance. Pound had no doubt of its genius. “About enough, Eliot’s poem,” he wrote, “to make the rest of us shut up shop.”
For Eliot, meanwhile, 1922 was almost as troubled as 1919. While he wrestled with the final draft of The Waste Land, his distracted wife Vivien was undergoing a new treatment, Ovarian Opocaps, distilled from “the glands of animals”, plus a starvation diet. The result was colitis, high temperatures, insomnia and migraine. Rarely had life and art been so inextricably braided together.
The Waste Land is a poem of its time, and for all time. It is about ghosts and heroes, civilians and veterans, and recently mobilised wartime women exposed to predatory young men; it is about loss and despair, sex and madness, seduction and grief, and the poet’s own anguished quest for meaning in a shattered and desolate world.
Ezra Pound would play the role of the midwife in delivering this disturbing and extraordinary new voice to the poetry-reading public and ultimately the canon, but crucial though his intervention undoubtedly was in focusing the text, his editor’s scissors hardly touched the basic structure of Eliot’s vision. The five parts of The Waste Land are: The Burial of the Dead; A Game of Chess; The Fire Sermon; Death by Water; What the Thunder Said.

The sections that Eliot (and Pound) agreed to drop include: Song. For the Opherion, The Death of the Duchess, Elegy and Dirge. Published in 1971, the facsimile and original transcript edition, edited by Valerie Eliot, the poet’s widow, gives a remarkable insight into the process by which The Waste Land achieved its final form. For the critic Cyril Connolly, who came of age during the years of The Waste Land, this is the essential version: it was, he wrote, “indispensable for all lovers of poetry, students of the early 20th century, and survivors like myself”.

In 1922, the original edition, a text of 434 lines, was followed by several pages of notes, which were requested by the New York publisher Horace Liveright, to justify publishing the work as a book.
Eliot himself affected a certain unease at the claims made for The Waste Land. He told one American literary friend that “various critics have done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.”

A signature sentence

“April is the cruellest month, breeding 
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing 

Memory and desire, stirring 

Dull roots with spring rain.”

Three to compare

JG Frazer: The Golden Bough (1890) 
Jessie Weston: From Ritual to Romance (1920) 

Robert Graves: The White Goddess (1948)







Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)