Review: Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is not the most thrilling novel. Even amongst its less-than-thrilling brethren, it may seem a bit dull and uneventful. It is the story of a relatively poor young girl who is taken in by her wealthy uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, and for years lives with him, his wife, and his four children on their big estate, Mansfield Park. Fanny Price --that is the girl's name-- is never treated unkindly, but she is always made to feel apart, not a servant yet not on the level of the Bertram children.

The book skips fairly quickly to her young womanhood, to around the age of 18. Sir Thomas has gone off to see to business matters in Antigua, and you know how it is with mice when their personal member of parliament is away. The young Bertrams are especially a'tizzy about the arrival of a dashing brother-sister pair from London. Love interests and intrigues abound amongst the others, while Fanny sits quietly by.

Fanny seems to be a matter for contention amongst readers and reviewers. She does seem awfully timid and dull. Why, even the author herself seems to neglect Fanny through much of the first half of the book, and after reading just one chapter of Emma I am convinced that she is no Emma Woodhouse. Yet, I like her. I feel she and I are of a similar mind -- at least, while reading, I need not examine and contrast the depicted worldview with mine. And as dull and timid as she may seem on the surface, she is simply bubbling over with things to say, on the inside. It is her sense of propriety, and probably some feeling of inferiority, that make her hold her tongue.

Fanny is a character for the middle child, the girl who has felt neglected amongst the wooing of the eldest and the cooing at the baby. As Fanny bears the neglect beautifully and later flourishes, ultimately triumphing in her way, those who have felt neglected in their time can learn from her and take hope. She is a wonderfully strong character, though she works within the conventions of society. As she is no Emma, so she is no Antigone -- she is a quieter sort of heroine. I like her, yet I understand the demand for a lively, fiery protagonist. And yes, I long ago decided that I, like Fanny, might make a dull main character.

Now a bit about some of the other characters:

Mrs. Norris, the unpleasant cat of Hogwarts caretaker Argus Filch in the Harry Potter series, is a fitting tribute to the Mrs. Norris of Mansfield Park. Fanny's other aunt (along with Sir Thomas' wife, Lady Bertram), Mrs. Norris is eternally harassing and chiding the girl. She is a bustling, meddling creature, and the only characters who like her are the two Bertram sisters, on whom she dotes.

Tom, Maria, and Julia Bertram: Three of Fanny's cousins, they are all greedy and opportunistic. The girls especially are perfect foils to Fanny, examples of greed and other "ill thoughts" that Fanny does not, cannot posses. They are certainly not evil incarnate, and I felt they all deserved to be forgiven for their faults and misdeeds, but they do each receive a degree of punishment.

Edmund Bertram: Fanny's fourth cousin, he is good-hearted and proper, but at times misguided. To Fanny, he is always her only something, whether companion, advocate, listener, or... I'll let the ellipsis tell the tale.

Henry and Mary Crawford: The dashing young broth-sister duo from London, everyone at the Park is impressed by them, except Fanny, naturally. They seemed more like plot devices than characters to me.

Sir. Thomas is the dignified, above-it-all patriarch, though that view is occasionally parodied. He does not play an enormous role, though I found myself liking him, for some reason, so that is why he gets a mention.

I think of this as a novel of characters; there are many strong, interesting characters, and yes, with the absence of a thrilling plot, the characters must needs take over. In the second half, when the plot has much more life, the characters come even more alive. I imagine few will fall madly in love with this novel, but I still consider it worthwhile to have read.

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Carrots, by Abe Kurp

Below, a short-short story I wrote yesterday, polished today. Carrots, by Abe Kurp, is A tale of lost love and the consequences, with copious (unintentional) Shakespeare references. Carrots are also little orange vegetables that help you poop and see in the dark.

It was six months ago when he began this deadly, silly folly. She, the wife, had played the fool and pretended not to know; she knew, in reality, five minutes after his first orgasm that wasn't hers. She cried, stopped, then cried anew. But the hours passed, with no manly shadow at the door --Nothing --No one, at which to yell, scream, throw.

The hours passed and she fell in love again. She waited for her sweet prince, flights of angels --or hordes of little goblins-- no longer in her mind. He came home, returned to the house at last, oblivious to all the torment, his mind on but two things: a) sex, b) affair. He had done it on an impulse, to satisfy a craving long left unfulfilled. Now Impulse was a magical word; now, he longed for more.

Luckily, he was a good actor (they didn't hand out the role of Othello to anyone). Luckily, she seemed simply unaware: she a sheep, the affair a part of the wide world beyond her little pasture. Even if she knew, or contrived sketchy weavings of his distant rumblings, she never said a word.

She was quiet like a sheep, he thought, though he had never been near the countryside. His liaisons continued without cause or reason for abatement. When interest faded on his first --really, truly his second-- he was not miffed; there were always more to come.

His lust for others defied all attempts at reconciliation. Her make-up dinners and forgiveness stews were eaten with indifference at best, and heartiness at worst --fuel for the next round of dicking around. The hours they spent together --in wind-swept meadows, dim-lit bars: romantic spots he used to love-- were now only a reprieve from constant thrusting.

She was chopping carrots in the kitchen when he returned. He was drunk: she could hear his stumbling and slurring in the hall. He was not alone: there was a pair of slurs and stumbles, distinctly heard. Her longtime fears were rectified: the other was a woman; he had brought a woman to the house.

The giggles and slurs came closer, the chops of the knife against the cutting board grew closer and closer to their brethren.

The door flew open and banged against the wall. A red-faced, sorrowful man stood there, clinging to the arm of a blond-haired young one, all smiles till she saw the kitchen's occupant. The bright lights of the kitchen flashed against the dark blue sequins on her dress. Both faces lost their color.

With tiny, discolored sentences he tried to make his stand, to defend his improprieties. Sixteen years of love's labor would be lost in only a few nights of breezy infatuation. Was it worth it, now, to fling it all away?

She heard but did not listen, nor did she speak. Even he seemed to know the time of forgiveness had already passed. To Abyss she had lost him, to Abyss he now would go: it was time to cut this matter short.

Reflections on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe

Note: Anyone wishing to experience these stories for themselves can download them, in a variety of formats, from Project Gutenberg, or read them online at PoeStories.com, or else download free, volunteer-recorded audio versions of some tales (of varying quality) from Librivox.org.

Edgar Allan Poe, master of the macabre, perverse, and mysterious, has been the subject of my reading for some months. Since I came upon "The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe" in my sister's room, I have been reading at least one story each week, on Sunday. Here they are now, in the order in which I read them, accompanied by a short, non-spoiling blurb.

The Pit and the Pendulum: A prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition suffers horrible and unusual torture, more of mind than of body. "I was sick, sick unto death..." An English teacher would surely write "Good use of imagery!" in the margins.

Fall of the House of Usher: An unnamed narrator visits an old friend, only to find a decaying house, and two frail, equally decaying siblings, the remains of the name of Usher. The narrator does what he can to ease the man's grief in his twilight hours, but the House of Usher -- both the physical house and the bloodline -- are doomed to fall.

Balloon-Hoax: An account of a trans-Atlantic balloon flight, originally represented as fact, the article caused quite a sensation when it was published in 1844, though now it is a mere curiosity (and precursor to the "Balloon boy" hoax).

The Masque of the Red Death: When a terrible plague strikes his kingdom, Prince Prospero locks himself away in his palace with his royal retinue. Months pass with no relief, so the arrogant prince decides to throw a masked ball, but it seems even the rich and arrogant cannot avoid the grasp of Death...

The Tell-Tale Heart: An obviously insane man tells us of his attempts at murdering an elderly fellow resident -- whom he refers to only as "the old man" -- all the while insisting that he is not insane. Perhaps he is not -- that is, if guilt be a sign of sanity.

The Black Cat: Similar to The Tell-Tale Heart, and often paired together by scholars: both are tales of a murderer wracked with guilt, from the murderer's point of view. The Black Cat features the addition of the titular feline, and has a few more supernatural elements; It also seems a bit more gruesome.

The Oval Portrait: A very generic (though very short) Gothic-style "horror story." It even mentions Ann Radcliffe, queen of the Gothic novel (with whom I'm familiar only through Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen) so that should give you an idea of where his mind sat. It tells the tale of a portrait of a young lady, which gradually reveals the evil of the artist. I hear this story inspired Oscar Wilde in his own little whiny tale about a painting.

The Angel of the Odd: A man, while reading the newspaper, is disgusted with the number of improbable stories and with the people that believe them. Then a man with a wine barrel for a torso and wine bottles for limbs appears, and things get unlikely, strange and -- okay, I'll say it -- Odd.

The Premature Burial: The narrator details several accounts of premature burial -- that is, entombment before one is truly dead -- before recounting his own supposed experience. He has an illness that causes him, on occasion, to give all appearances of death without it being so. Terrified of being buried alive, he takes all conceivable precautions against it, but can they be enough?

The Cask of Amontillado: A man lures another to his doom with promises of fine wine. I have a distinct mental picture, from reading this story in middle school, of the narrator slowly and steadily going about his brickwork.

The Imp of the Perverse: The urge to do wrong simply because you know it's wrong. The narrator explains this concept at length, in essay-like fashion, before divulging his own dirty little secret.

The Island of the Fay

The Murders in the Rue Morgue: Often regarded as the first detective story, this tale depicts an amateur detective and his friend as he pieces together the true story behind a mysterious double-homicide in a Paris mansion. The answer involves a man in a monkey mask, or so I've been lead to believe.

"Gender Genie" Internet Tool Can Discern Gender Without Looking in Underwear

I recently found a neat little curiosity, The Gender Genie:

Inspired by an article and a test in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author.

You simply copy and paste a block of writing into the text box, choose the genre of the writing (you can pick from "fiction," "nonfiction," and "blog post") and press "submit." The tool quickly analyzes the text and spits out two columns of words (one for each gender), and tells you whether it thinks the author of the work is male or female. It is supposedly around 80% accurate.

The tool scans the document, picks out certain key words, and assigns a numerical value to each word. Then adds up all these numbers -- when the answer falls within a certain range, the author is determined to be a certain gender.

The number each word is assigned is apparently based on how "masculine" or "feminine" it is -- but not in the ways you might expect. For more on the "gender of a word" see Alexander Chancellor's article about the tool from The Guardian:

One of [the researcher's] findings is that women are far more likely than men to use personal pronouns ("I", "you", "she", etc), whereas men prefer words that identify or determine nouns ("a", "the", "that") or that quantify them ("one", "two", "more"). According to Moshe Koppel, one of the authors of the project, this is because women are more comfortable thinking about people and relationships, whereas men prefer thinking about things. But the self-styled "stylometricians", in creating their gender-identifying algorithm, have been at pains to avoid the obvious.

The algorithm pays no attention to the subject matter of a piece of writing, or to the occurrence in it of words that might suggest a greater interest by one sex or the other, such as "lipstick" or "bullets". Instead, it looks for little clues that both writers and readers would probably fail to notice, such as the number of personal pronouns used.

Unsurprisingly, the tool picked me out as a male every single time -- even when I tested it with The Stark White Elevator, a story I wrote with a female narrator. I must admit, I have always felt more comfortable with thinking in the realm of objects than the world of feelings, people, relationships. Psychologists have been calling us "Left Brainers" for years: we are good at math and other logical things, though we can never understand why puny humans cry. And I guess my cries of "I am not a Robot!" have been easily found out as lies -- even, ironically, by a computer program.

So I am a Robot; now I know. But after learning that almost all of the female contributors to The Guardian were discerned by the program to be male, I wanted to experiment some more, to see if I too could trick the system. So I put in my sister's report on Woodie Guthrie and Odetta Holmes, but it was determined to be distinctly feminine.

But then I tried her report on Macbeth, which came up male! Yet another startling revelation? Maybe Hannah is a man, or maybe the machine had gotten it right in a different way. I distinctly remember helping "a lot" with that report. How much is "a lot" could and would be debated to the end of the Earth, but now Robots do not lie.

Now try the tool out for yourself, and ta-ta for Tao!