I taught The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'Ubervilles, and Jude the Obscure in a senior English class. I felt so badly for subjecting my students to eight weeks of depression that I baked them all cookies at the end of the quarter.
I made the mistake of reading Jude the Obscure on a train. A kind old couple came over to see if I needed help with some kind of dreadful life emergency. (They obviously thought I was bonkers when I explained the floods of tears...)
My English class was assigned "Jude the Obscure" by a sadist who was apparently trying to kill any further interest in literature. That was more than half a century ago, and I still remember how horrified I was when the kid hanged his younger siblings on the door. And I was a teenage boy--not easy to shock.
I've read quite a few of these. The Yellow Wallpaper scared the bejesus out of me, it's THE most horrible story of abuse and descent into madness. The crawling around the room was terrible.
Tess - holier than thou Angel Clare on his high moral horse being a shit while Tess simply dwindles into nothingness. I wanted to kill him.
Wuthering Heights - a romance? Absolutely, definitely, really NOT. Abuse, possible murder, obsession, necrophilia, starvation, anything goes.
I can't read Henry James - even when I know it's not boring, I think it's boring.
This post is a great analysis of these classics. More please.
Your description of Made Bovary immediately connected it to The Great Gatsby for me. Here is why Gatsby may only slightly less unhinged.
What People Think It’s About: Rich guy throws parties. Obsesses over a woman. Gets shot. Moral lesson about money and decadence?
What It’s Actually About: James Gatz invents Jay Gatsby from scratch because he cannot stand being who he was. He gets rich through shady means, buys a mansion across the bay from Daisy, and turns his whole life into a machine designed to get her back. Daisy, meanwhile, is married to a racist brute with old money and zero soul. Gatsby thinks if he gets the setting right, the house right, the shirt right, the weather right, he can make the past come back and stay. He can’t. Daisy folds. Myrtle dies. Gatsby takes the blame. George Wilson shoots him in his pool. Almost nobody comes to the funeral. The end.
Why It’s Unhinged: Because Gatsby is running an entire spiritual enterprise on the belief that reality can be bullied into matching his desire.
He is not just in love. He is fully, insanely committed to the idea that time is reversible if you have enough money, enough nerve, and enough faith in your own invented myth. He doesn’t want Daisy as she is. He wants Daisy as proof that his self-creation worked. He is obsessed with himself and wants to erase the gap between who he was and who he decided to become.
It is not really about romance or the collapse of the American dream (though it is that too). It's about obsession, class, reinvention, and the deranged though the past is a thing you can repossess or return to. Fitzgerald doesn't moralize about it. He shows you a world where the careless survive, the dreamer dies, and the people with the most feeling are the least equipped to live there.
The Line That Gives It Away: “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!”
Translation: Gatsby’s problem is not that he loves too much. It's that he believes his desire will beat reality.
Why You Were Told It’s Boring:
Because it gets taught as middle school and high school book about symbols (the American Dream, green lights, and rich people behaving badly). But the book is stranger and sadder. It's about a man who lies about who he is and then dies because that lie cannot survive contact with the real world.
Right? Both are about people building lives based on myths versus reality. Emma imagines a life of passion and luxury borrowed from romantic fiction. Gatsby turns Daisy into the symbol of a perfect past to power his invented ego. Love gets tangled up with class, status, and performance. And then in both, the fantasies eventually collapse into humiliation, emptiness, or death.
Each is story has a very different style for sure—Flaubert is very cold and observational whereas Fitzgerald is a little more sentimental and mournful—but they’re really in the same gear. Age of Innocence feels close too.
The Yellow Wallpaper was the scariest thing I have ever read! I kid you not! When I try to recall how vividly the author described the process of actually losing your mind, it still gives me goosebumps. At the time I almost didn't want to finish it, but I couldn't stop reading either. But today, you could never pay me enough to read it again! Once is more than enough!
While reading part 2, then reviewing the list, it became clear to me the Edith Wharton and DH Lawrence’s depictions of life at that time & societies requirements of women made me feel suffocated… I grew up in the 70’s - the 1st generation with “freedom” and never looked back. Those books were very impactful with respect to the choices made. I know I’m not alone.
Since when do classic novels and short stories have to be “just one thing?” Is “The Lottery” not a great short story because the “winner” is an innocent woman who gets stoned at the end? Because one might make the argument that the stories of Flannery O’ Connor (and Poe, for that matter) are “unhinged,” does that them any less works of art. (Or is Picasso’s “Guernica” any less a great painting because of the horror it depicts?) It was Henry James who said that one must grant artists their subject. I first read “Heart of Darkness” in 10th grade and have re-read it many times since. I always discover something new.
I read this post the other way: part of the reason these are classics is specifically because they are not "just one thing." Great art should, as you point out, always help you discover something new when you come back to it.
A suggestion: "McTeague" by Frank Norris. Early naturalistic novel about a low-IQ correspondence-course dentist who's life sinks into misery and confusion, before he dies in Death Valley, handcuffed to his former best friend, with his pet bird in a cage. In a final act of mercy, he releases the bird, which immediately dies.
I taught The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'Ubervilles, and Jude the Obscure in a senior English class. I felt so badly for subjecting my students to eight weeks of depression that I baked them all cookies at the end of the quarter.
My high school English teacher assigned "Jude the Obscure". I thought it was some kind of sadism. Maybe he hated teenagers. But you sound quite nice.
I did manage, many years ago, to make it throught Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I'm still traumatized. Easily the most depressing book I've ever read.
You might change your mind if you read "Jude the Obscure".
😅😅😅
I made the mistake of reading Jude the Obscure on a train. A kind old couple came over to see if I needed help with some kind of dreadful life emergency. (They obviously thought I was bonkers when I explained the floods of tears...)
My English class was assigned "Jude the Obscure" by a sadist who was apparently trying to kill any further interest in literature. That was more than half a century ago, and I still remember how horrified I was when the kid hanged his younger siblings on the door. And I was a teenage boy--not easy to shock.
Oh MY!
I've read quite a few of these. The Yellow Wallpaper scared the bejesus out of me, it's THE most horrible story of abuse and descent into madness. The crawling around the room was terrible.
Tess - holier than thou Angel Clare on his high moral horse being a shit while Tess simply dwindles into nothingness. I wanted to kill him.
Wuthering Heights - a romance? Absolutely, definitely, really NOT. Abuse, possible murder, obsession, necrophilia, starvation, anything goes.
I can't read Henry James - even when I know it's not boring, I think it's boring.
This post is a great analysis of these classics. More please.
I've liked some of James's books, but some are so nearly impossible, getting through to the end is a struggle.
Henry James should have been sent to Purgatory and forced to diagram every sentence that appeared in his novels.
🤣 yup, that's the difficulty. Victorians, in so many of their aspects, are over complicated, inscrutable and multi layered.
Really. I learned how to write business letters from Victorian literature. Nobody understands them. :)
Your description of Made Bovary immediately connected it to The Great Gatsby for me. Here is why Gatsby may only slightly less unhinged.
What People Think It’s About: Rich guy throws parties. Obsesses over a woman. Gets shot. Moral lesson about money and decadence?
What It’s Actually About: James Gatz invents Jay Gatsby from scratch because he cannot stand being who he was. He gets rich through shady means, buys a mansion across the bay from Daisy, and turns his whole life into a machine designed to get her back. Daisy, meanwhile, is married to a racist brute with old money and zero soul. Gatsby thinks if he gets the setting right, the house right, the shirt right, the weather right, he can make the past come back and stay. He can’t. Daisy folds. Myrtle dies. Gatsby takes the blame. George Wilson shoots him in his pool. Almost nobody comes to the funeral. The end.
Why It’s Unhinged: Because Gatsby is running an entire spiritual enterprise on the belief that reality can be bullied into matching his desire.
He is not just in love. He is fully, insanely committed to the idea that time is reversible if you have enough money, enough nerve, and enough faith in your own invented myth. He doesn’t want Daisy as she is. He wants Daisy as proof that his self-creation worked. He is obsessed with himself and wants to erase the gap between who he was and who he decided to become.
It is not really about romance or the collapse of the American dream (though it is that too). It's about obsession, class, reinvention, and the deranged though the past is a thing you can repossess or return to. Fitzgerald doesn't moralize about it. He shows you a world where the careless survive, the dreamer dies, and the people with the most feeling are the least equipped to live there.
The Line That Gives It Away: “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!”
Translation: Gatsby’s problem is not that he loves too much. It's that he believes his desire will beat reality.
Why You Were Told It’s Boring:
Because it gets taught as middle school and high school book about symbols (the American Dream, green lights, and rich people behaving badly). But the book is stranger and sadder. It's about a man who lies about who he is and then dies because that lie cannot survive contact with the real world.
You know now that you say that, I see the connection too! Great catch!
Right? Both are about people building lives based on myths versus reality. Emma imagines a life of passion and luxury borrowed from romantic fiction. Gatsby turns Daisy into the symbol of a perfect past to power his invented ego. Love gets tangled up with class, status, and performance. And then in both, the fantasies eventually collapse into humiliation, emptiness, or death.
Each is story has a very different style for sure—Flaubert is very cold and observational whereas Fitzgerald is a little more sentimental and mournful—but they’re really in the same gear. Age of Innocence feels close too.
The Yellow Wallpaper was the scariest thing I have ever read! I kid you not! When I try to recall how vividly the author described the process of actually losing your mind, it still gives me goosebumps. At the time I almost didn't want to finish it, but I couldn't stop reading either. But today, you could never pay me enough to read it again! Once is more than enough!
Agree, it’s so disturbing. It makes me feel like I’m going crazy.
It’s supposed to. 😁
Unhinged book I enjoyed was Picture of Dorian Gray. But I don’t think it was boring.
While reading part 2, then reviewing the list, it became clear to me the Edith Wharton and DH Lawrence’s depictions of life at that time & societies requirements of women made me feel suffocated… I grew up in the 70’s - the 1st generation with “freedom” and never looked back. Those books were very impactful with respect to the choices made. I know I’m not alone.
PART 3
Your entertaining explanations have inspired me to read more classics to find out what they are really about.
Classics are books I should have read but didn't either from failure or refusal. This post is amazingly edifying. Cannot thank you enough.
Since when do classic novels and short stories have to be “just one thing?” Is “The Lottery” not a great short story because the “winner” is an innocent woman who gets stoned at the end? Because one might make the argument that the stories of Flannery O’ Connor (and Poe, for that matter) are “unhinged,” does that them any less works of art. (Or is Picasso’s “Guernica” any less a great painting because of the horror it depicts?) It was Henry James who said that one must grant artists their subject. I first read “Heart of Darkness” in 10th grade and have re-read it many times since. I always discover something new.
I read this post the other way: part of the reason these are classics is specifically because they are not "just one thing." Great art should, as you point out, always help you discover something new when you come back to it.
Thank you! Great point.
A suggestion: "McTeague" by Frank Norris. Early naturalistic novel about a low-IQ correspondence-course dentist who's life sinks into misery and confusion, before he dies in Death Valley, handcuffed to his former best friend, with his pet bird in a cage. In a final act of mercy, he releases the bird, which immediately dies.
I love these summaries! Yes, please - Part 3!
I would love to read your thoughts on ‘The Awakening’ and ‘Sister Carrie.’ (I always felt Flaubert was a poet who relished torture: hence, prose!)