about the Frederica Quartet
Jun. 7th, 2021 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseThese books did exactly what I needed them to do, exactly when I needed it. In the last gasp of this awful year-plus of covid, these four novels of A.S. Byatt's engrossed me, helped me think, helped me feel.
As a whole, the group of novels remind me of a looser, more capacious and many-layered, dare I say laminated, version of the same sort of creative project as The Children's Book. The latter makes sense as a refinement and compaction of the former, crushing all of the creativity and intellectual angst and family drama and period detail into a single long novel, instead of breaking the portrait down into four discrete, shorter works. I like the baggier version very well, although I also admire the streamlined punch of The Children's Book.
But these novels are so inclusive, with so much interpolated material, such long discursions presented embedded into the text! Huge chunks of novels, reviews, essays, newspaper pieces, research notes, legal transcripts, reproduced as a part of the narrative. What a rich, impressive, mentally varied style! There's so very much to eat.
Byatt directly thematicizes this very concept, giving her central character Frederica an experimental interest in the idea of creative and personal "laminations." Frederica imagines that if she can seal off separate layers off her thought and person, she can have more of the various identities available to her as a midcentury modern woman. Sometimes, she succeeds in this. But it's the same thing Byatt does with the multimedia multivocality, putting one thing against another to set up resonances, arraying a diverse archive about life and academia and creativity and being female.
I started, unknowing, at the beginning of the series, thinking I had hold of a one-off book. I've read it at least five times over, now, and find it winding down very deep into my heart. Goodness.
There are two separate aspects of the novel that get at me. The descriptions of verse drama reenactment, the paraphernalia and the community, are very fine, lush and perfectly tipped to convey poignant imagery. The attempted dramatization of Elizabeth lets you see the characters engaged in imagining, and additionally creates a very pleasing ghostly unfocused image of the legendary queen, not as she was but as she's been remembered.
Also, the romance between Daniel and Stephanie hit me where I live. I lost my heart to Daniel right off the bat, when he goes home after an argument with Stephanie's atheist father and immediately sits down to read, and revel in, Shakespeare's King Lear. The passage about his reading of Lear is sharp and beautiful, showing a powerful heart tied to a determined mind.
I'm an originary Samwise Gamgee fan; I have a type.
And then Stephanie. I've never been Frederica, I've always been Stephanie. The descriptions of her figure, frequently making her look matronly although she's a very young woman, were pointed for me, and picked at a gendered discomfort I've had with my own looks since puberty, the sense of a more florid figure than warranted by a quiet personality.
So, there's some shipping potential :)
As I read further into the quartet, I identified Daniel, Frederica, Marcus, and Alexander Wedderburn as a sort of triumvirate of series main characters. Sometimes one or the other is more focal, but the three of them consistently map out the dilemmas and patterns at the center of each of the novels.
In this first one, all three are driven by a personal determination, on the one hand, and a sexual determination, on the other. Alexander wants to bring off his play about Queen Elizabeth the First, and get his rocks off with either his Jenny, or with virginal Frederica, and never mind about any inconvenient tie-downs. Frederica longs for everything, inchoately, and manages to focus in on acting and sex, achieving both. Marcus loses himself in what he hoped was destiny, but turns out to just be unwanted sex. Stephanie chooses marriage as her way to advance her ambitions, instead of academia, as her father had hoped.
Alexander is a bit of a putz, but both he and the narration know it; and he's far from the worst old lecherous man in the novel. TBQH, there were a few too many of those. I don't mean to be naive, but ughhh do we have to keep looking through these unpleasant old fellows' eyes at young women who we know are discomfited by it???
I'll admit that I struggled to read big chunks of Marcus's story-strand. A young non-neurotypical person, he gets glommed on to by a charismatic "alternative" woo-obsessed educator from his school, and it culminates in pressured sexual touching and mental breakdowns all around. The shared delusions of the pair, the "experiments" and mysticism, are reproduced at length, as is often the case in these novels. No summing up here! And it was so familiar, more than a bit triggering; the dark side of being raised by bohemian Spiritualists is that you've caught a good smell of adult scam and abuse once you've grown up. I don't regret it was there; but I was very glad to be reading a paper book, to be able to peek lightly for a few pages and keep emotional and mental distance, before getting lost in the Elizabethan recreation fun again.
This is the third book in the series, but I read it second. Honestly I'm glad I did; it was more pleasant to sit with Daniel in grief for lost Stephanie, ride it out for a whole book, and then deal directly with the cutting-off of her death. It upset me a lot when Tom died in The Children's Book, I wasn't braced enough for his suicide, and it messed with my head for a good bit. Byatt's too good a character killing; I kind of liked being forewarned.
An absolute masterpiece of a book. I can't but be impressed by the detail, the construction, the elaborateness, the weight. An achievement, for sure.
Frederica's domestic violence experiences and divorce punch *hard.* The reference to Rebecca is more than earned, with that gothic nightmare sense of a romantic dream gone horribly wrong. I was also delighted by the repeated references to Howards' End; I'd just rewatched the film when I read this, and had been chewing over the problem of its happy (?) ending once more myself.
The DV scenes turn a lot of things up to 11. Still, a lot of it was personally familiar, enough to make the content gripping and disturbing. It was like all the worst things you're grateful your abuser could never get it together to do. Brr. The problem of a child post-DV is a personal nightmare of mine, something I've carefully, carefully avoided in my own life.
I've complex feelings about that personal decision after reading these books; gratitude for my control, my ease of escape, mixed with sadness that I've not so far had the children I wanted. Do I envy Frederica and Stephanie, or do I thank my stars for the divorce and reproductive rights that have kept me free and without children into my mid-30s?
The climax of the novel juxtaposes a literary obscenity trial with Frederica's divorce case. Frederica wins, the author, her friend Jude Mason, does not. Both trials, as well as long excerpts from Jude's sexually and violently explicit experimental novel Babbletower, are reproduced in the text. Meanwhile, Alexander Wedderburn is on a national committee to investigate innovations in children's education. This circles back, as Babbletower is in part a processing of institutional sexual abuse at an elite boys' boarding school.
Babbletower, like Marcus's "experiments," felt very familiar to me, and not in a particularly pleasant way. And I confess that it took a good while for me to warm up to Jude, mostly because he's introduced as a repeated taunter of Daniel by way of a church-run suicide hotline. Come for my boy, I take agin ye. But by the desperate scenes of his trial he'd won me over, esp. when it was revealed that he'd re-named himself after Thomas Hardy's Jude following a traumatic break and a self-reinvention. Possibly I felt rather called out by the portrait of a bitter, brilliant, eccentric, social-dropout artists' model and erotica writer, lol. These books make me feel so *seen.*
The intertwined problems of women's liberation, sexual freedom, the raising of children, and the best ways to educate the people of tomorrow are also very familiar to me from fandom contexts. I wonder, given that I struggled to *like* Jude's banned book, if I would have had different feelings about the obscenity trial if I hadn't locked so firmly into absolute literary permissiveness as a young fanperson. It's really just like antis on the internet, still.
As a whole, the group of novels remind me of a looser, more capacious and many-layered, dare I say laminated, version of the same sort of creative project as The Children's Book. The latter makes sense as a refinement and compaction of the former, crushing all of the creativity and intellectual angst and family drama and period detail into a single long novel, instead of breaking the portrait down into four discrete, shorter works. I like the baggier version very well, although I also admire the streamlined punch of The Children's Book.
But these novels are so inclusive, with so much interpolated material, such long discursions presented embedded into the text! Huge chunks of novels, reviews, essays, newspaper pieces, research notes, legal transcripts, reproduced as a part of the narrative. What a rich, impressive, mentally varied style! There's so very much to eat.
Byatt directly thematicizes this very concept, giving her central character Frederica an experimental interest in the idea of creative and personal "laminations." Frederica imagines that if she can seal off separate layers off her thought and person, she can have more of the various identities available to her as a midcentury modern woman. Sometimes, she succeeds in this. But it's the same thing Byatt does with the multimedia multivocality, putting one thing against another to set up resonances, arraying a diverse archive about life and academia and creativity and being female.
I started, unknowing, at the beginning of the series, thinking I had hold of a one-off book. I've read it at least five times over, now, and find it winding down very deep into my heart. Goodness.
There are two separate aspects of the novel that get at me. The descriptions of verse drama reenactment, the paraphernalia and the community, are very fine, lush and perfectly tipped to convey poignant imagery. The attempted dramatization of Elizabeth lets you see the characters engaged in imagining, and additionally creates a very pleasing ghostly unfocused image of the legendary queen, not as she was but as she's been remembered.
Also, the romance between Daniel and Stephanie hit me where I live. I lost my heart to Daniel right off the bat, when he goes home after an argument with Stephanie's atheist father and immediately sits down to read, and revel in, Shakespeare's King Lear. The passage about his reading of Lear is sharp and beautiful, showing a powerful heart tied to a determined mind.
I'm an originary Samwise Gamgee fan; I have a type.
And then Stephanie. I've never been Frederica, I've always been Stephanie. The descriptions of her figure, frequently making her look matronly although she's a very young woman, were pointed for me, and picked at a gendered discomfort I've had with my own looks since puberty, the sense of a more florid figure than warranted by a quiet personality.
So, there's some shipping potential :)
As I read further into the quartet, I identified Daniel, Frederica, Marcus, and Alexander Wedderburn as a sort of triumvirate of series main characters. Sometimes one or the other is more focal, but the three of them consistently map out the dilemmas and patterns at the center of each of the novels.
In this first one, all three are driven by a personal determination, on the one hand, and a sexual determination, on the other. Alexander wants to bring off his play about Queen Elizabeth the First, and get his rocks off with either his Jenny, or with virginal Frederica, and never mind about any inconvenient tie-downs. Frederica longs for everything, inchoately, and manages to focus in on acting and sex, achieving both. Marcus loses himself in what he hoped was destiny, but turns out to just be unwanted sex. Stephanie chooses marriage as her way to advance her ambitions, instead of academia, as her father had hoped.
Alexander is a bit of a putz, but both he and the narration know it; and he's far from the worst old lecherous man in the novel. TBQH, there were a few too many of those. I don't mean to be naive, but ughhh do we have to keep looking through these unpleasant old fellows' eyes at young women who we know are discomfited by it???
I'll admit that I struggled to read big chunks of Marcus's story-strand. A young non-neurotypical person, he gets glommed on to by a charismatic "alternative" woo-obsessed educator from his school, and it culminates in pressured sexual touching and mental breakdowns all around. The shared delusions of the pair, the "experiments" and mysticism, are reproduced at length, as is often the case in these novels. No summing up here! And it was so familiar, more than a bit triggering; the dark side of being raised by bohemian Spiritualists is that you've caught a good smell of adult scam and abuse once you've grown up. I don't regret it was there; but I was very glad to be reading a paper book, to be able to peek lightly for a few pages and keep emotional and mental distance, before getting lost in the Elizabethan recreation fun again.
This is the third book in the series, but I read it second. Honestly I'm glad I did; it was more pleasant to sit with Daniel in grief for lost Stephanie, ride it out for a whole book, and then deal directly with the cutting-off of her death. It upset me a lot when Tom died in The Children's Book, I wasn't braced enough for his suicide, and it messed with my head for a good bit. Byatt's too good a character killing; I kind of liked being forewarned.
An absolute masterpiece of a book. I can't but be impressed by the detail, the construction, the elaborateness, the weight. An achievement, for sure.
Frederica's domestic violence experiences and divorce punch *hard.* The reference to Rebecca is more than earned, with that gothic nightmare sense of a romantic dream gone horribly wrong. I was also delighted by the repeated references to Howards' End; I'd just rewatched the film when I read this, and had been chewing over the problem of its happy (?) ending once more myself.
The DV scenes turn a lot of things up to 11. Still, a lot of it was personally familiar, enough to make the content gripping and disturbing. It was like all the worst things you're grateful your abuser could never get it together to do. Brr. The problem of a child post-DV is a personal nightmare of mine, something I've carefully, carefully avoided in my own life.
I've complex feelings about that personal decision after reading these books; gratitude for my control, my ease of escape, mixed with sadness that I've not so far had the children I wanted. Do I envy Frederica and Stephanie, or do I thank my stars for the divorce and reproductive rights that have kept me free and without children into my mid-30s?
The climax of the novel juxtaposes a literary obscenity trial with Frederica's divorce case. Frederica wins, the author, her friend Jude Mason, does not. Both trials, as well as long excerpts from Jude's sexually and violently explicit experimental novel Babbletower, are reproduced in the text. Meanwhile, Alexander Wedderburn is on a national committee to investigate innovations in children's education. This circles back, as Babbletower is in part a processing of institutional sexual abuse at an elite boys' boarding school.
Babbletower, like Marcus's "experiments," felt very familiar to me, and not in a particularly pleasant way. And I confess that it took a good while for me to warm up to Jude, mostly because he's introduced as a repeated taunter of Daniel by way of a church-run suicide hotline. Come for my boy, I take agin ye. But by the desperate scenes of his trial he'd won me over, esp. when it was revealed that he'd re-named himself after Thomas Hardy's Jude following a traumatic break and a self-reinvention. Possibly I felt rather called out by the portrait of a bitter, brilliant, eccentric, social-dropout artists' model and erotica writer, lol. These books make me feel so *seen.*
The intertwined problems of women's liberation, sexual freedom, the raising of children, and the best ways to educate the people of tomorrow are also very familiar to me from fandom contexts. I wonder, given that I struggled to *like* Jude's banned book, if I would have had different feelings about the obscenity trial if I hadn't locked so firmly into absolute literary permissiveness as a young fanperson. It's really just like antis on the internet, still.