The Ultimate Literary Crush: Mr. Thornton v. Mr. Darcy

My dearest Darcy,

I fear I find myself the victim of a handsome face and an iron sense of integrity. I fear that my once constant heart, a heart so dedicated to one man, to you, has found itself longing for another. I fear, my darling Fitzwilliam Darcy, that I no longer "ardently admire and love you." I like you, rather a lot, but I can't say Love -- at least not since I met the heir to your character. Forgive me, Mr. Darcy, but Mr. John Thornton of Milton has wooed my heart and I don't believe there is any going back.

Darcy, when we first met you were rude and prideful -- you put down my dear friend Elizabeth Bennet and dismissed her family as silly, wealth-obsessed, and generally beneath your social and personal standards. Your prejudices against those less fortunate than you were made painfully evident. Indeed, I misjudged you. Charmed by his affections towards Lizzy, I took Wickham's side when it was really you who were wronged. By the end of our acquaintance, Miss Bennet had come to realize your inner kindness, yet, let us be honest, your Pride and your Prejudices still remained. Let us consider the famous moment of your proposal...you claimed to admire and love Lizzy, but still put down her family and still acted as the agent of her sister's misery. Furthermore, you retained your sense of class superiority. You were born with your wealth and status, Mr. Darcy; you were not its maker.

I do not wish to dismiss all your heroic acts, all your subtle and genuine declarations of affections for Lizzy, but i have to wonder if you are really the hero for a modern woman?

John Thornton may be many years your junior, his story coming into being in the mid 1850s, and he is not a gentleman by your standards -- he did not inherit wealth, he made it in trade. He ran a mill in Milton, a rapidly industrializing town, and he ruled it with an iron fist. When I met him, he was beating up a worker who's carelessness with a smoking pipe might have set the mill ablaze. His response seemed cruel and beast-like. But I can understand his anger -- one flame and hundreds of workers would have lost their lives. Miss Margaret Hale didn't like Mr. Thornton at first, neither for his temper nor his modern, business-like ways. Yet, throughout our knowing one another, he was consistent in his admiration of her character and her ethics. When he proposed, he said simply that he loved her -- no put downs, no dismissals. Only heartbreak at her initial refusal. He too was an ethical man, ensuring always that his workers were protected and properly cared for. And regardless of the hurt he felt at Miss Hale's rejection of him, he was always willing to put himself on the line to save her. He refused to engage in a risky speculation because he refused to play with his workers' livelihoods. He has a temper and is prideful, but he is not selfish.

Mr. Darcy, forgive me. For you shall always be my first love, but Mr. Thornton has stolen my heart. He is a bit darker than you, a bit gruffer than you, for sure. He has no Pemberly, just a mill and a large house in a gloomy Northern town. But he is the man of the future, off his high horse and Byronically handsome in a Richard Armitage sort of way.

Forever partly yours,
Kathleen

In Case You were Wondering...

what I was writing my thesis on, here's a slightly abbreviated version of my proposal...

Born in 1855 to a prominent and pious Boston family, Ellen Day Hale was one of thousands of girls who enrolled in art schools in the latter half of the nineteenth century. She was one of a handful of these girls who made art-making their lifelong profession. She lived through the American Civil War and the First World War, the 17th Amendment and the 19th Amendment, the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. She died in 1940 on the eve of a Second World War and the rise of Rosie the Riveter. Her life and artistic career straddled two centuries and two opposing feminine personas -- that of the “Ideal” Victorian Woman and of the “New” enfranchised twentieth century woman.

Hale was a prolific artist, who besides a number of less formal portraits and still-lives, amassed a large portfolio of etchings and earned several commissions to paint portraits of Washington, D.C.’s most prominent residents including the President and Vice-President. Today, Hale is best known for a handful of her paintings. However, during her lifetime, Hale was as well known, if not more celebrated for her etching. I believe it is her work as an etcher and her involvement in the painter-etcher movement of the late nineteenth century that offer the most new insights into Hale’s biography, and furthermore, offer insight into the position of women in the American artistic community.

In the late 19th century, women who sought economic independence through art-making benefited greatly from a burgeoning publishing industry that demanded illustrators and printers (wood engravers, lithographers, and photographers). As printmakers, women could enter the work force and earn an income without radically rebelling against societal norms. Many women, including Hale, sought formal education in painting and proceeded to have successful careers as painters, domestically and abroad. Hale and a number of these women would venture beyond the canvas to take part in the etching revival that migrated across the Atlantic from France and took hold in America in 1877. These women looked to etching not only for its commercial viability but also for its appeal as an alternative artistic outlet.

Before examining Hale’s turn to printmaking, it is important to understand the context under which she made this move. What was the etching revival, known as the painter-etcher movement? What was its impetus and who was at the forefront? What distinguished the painter-etchers from others who employed the printing technique? A number of important and influential American artists tried their hand at etching, including Mary Cassatt and James Abbott McNeil Whistler. Some gave up painting and centered their careers entirely on etchings. What was the appeal of medium to American artists like Whistler, Thomas Moran and Ellen Day Hale?

In 1887, hot off the heels of hosting the first major exhibition of etching in the US, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston opened the Exhibition of the Work of the Women Etchers. This 400+-work exhibit sought to carve out a place for women in the etching world while also further promoting the art form. Yet, in the same year, the New York Etching Club, the country’s most well-known etching club and the group that launched the etching revival in America, still only boasted one female on its membership roster. Only a few years earlier, art critic and author Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer called the painter-etchers “our men.” Additionally, the language critics employed to describe the revival’s artists echoes the rhetoric found in the speeches of Frederick Jackson Turner and President Theodore Roosevelt – rhetoric that ultimately characterized the American national identity as male. Thus, while printmaking might have been a traditionally female art form, the painter-etcher movement was decidedly male. The critics and exhibitions present conflicting views on the activeness of women in the painter-etcher movement and beg the question: what was the role of women in the etching revival of the 1880s and 1890s?

More specifically, what was Ellen Day Hale’s place within the painter-etcher movement? How much of her oeuvre is made up of etching and what were her motivations for exploring the medium? What does her biography and work tell us about the painter-etchers broadly speaking, and particularly, about the women painter-etchers? Finally, what does her long career as an artist – as a painter as well as an etcher -- tell us about Ellen Day Hale? Academics in the last decade have frequently invoked her life and work in discussions of women artists in ¬fin-de-siècle America, yet there seems to be little understanding of the character of the woman whose biography has made her an art historian’s artist. This is something I hope to remedy while also challenging earlier writings that establish 1907 as the end of Hale’s career.

Advice from Women of Centuries Past for Women of the Present Century on Procuring a Valentine

From the ever wise Jane Austen via the ever pragmatic Miss Lucas in Pride and Prejudice (1813):
"A slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better shew more affection than she feels."

In other words: If you like the fella, you'd better whip out the marquee, because he's so dense he'll miss your subtle hints. And while you're trying to let him know through telepathy, some other hussy will flaunt cleavage and steal you man.



From the first edition of Godey's Lady's Book (Jul. 1830):
"WHEN we are in the company of sensible men, we ought to be doubly cautious of talking too much, lest we lose two good things - their good opinions, and our improvement; and disclose one thing which had better have been concealed - our self-sufficiency; for what we have to say we know, but what they have to say we know not."

The bottom line: Don't let men know you're an independent thinker and smarter than them, because they're just not interested in women that know more than they do.


Following in a similar vein, Truman Capote's ever wonderful Holly Golighty of Breakfast at Tiffany's (1950) tells us exactly what women should learn to talk about if they want to impress a man with their intellect:
"There's so few things men can talk about. If a man doesn't like baseball, then he must like horses, and if he doesn't like either of them, well, I'm in trouble anyway: he don't like girls."

Okay, so Capote wasn't a female author, but I think he got this one just about right. Keep it simple girls -- sports, men get sports. Pick a team, learn a few stats (yes, stats -- don't just say you think Derek Jeter is the best player in baseball with out a number to back it up) and buy a cap.



And just remember, when romance doesn't seem to be blooming take Elizabeth Gaskell's words to heart: "A man... is so in the way in a house."

Looking back on 2008... a few Things I've Learned

It pays to be a humanities student when the stock market crashes -- While many of my wall street friends have to worry about whether or not they'll still have a job in 2009, I'm applying for fellowships which means people will be paying me to be a student and write about art for the next 7 years (hopefully, this will be just enough time for the economy to get back on track and for millionaires to start investing in paintings again)

Believe -- Watching the US Olympians in Beijing was incredibly inspiring. In the end, the lesson I learned watching our fencers bring home a historic 6 medals (oh and Michael Phelps winning those lovely 8 golds) is that you have to believe in yourself. As someone who so often lacks self confidence and so often doubts herself, BELIEVE is my new mantra for 2009.

3. Keep Fighting -- Last fall, my mother had her hip replaced. In less than a year, she was walking better than ever and made her way onto the US Veterans Fencing World Championship Team. She proceeded to be the best finisher from the US in her age category. A year before she couldn't bend to touch her knees. It's pretty amazing what we can get through if we refuse to give up.

Cellulite Creams don't work -- They don't and in learning this, I also learned to embrace my thighs and accept the fact they are what they are because they work hard and because they belong to an athlete (or at least, to someone who spends a minimum of two hours a day at the gym, whether she looks it or not).

My Irish Gene is dominant -- One of my childhood fantasies was fulfilled this Christmas when my parents gave me a pasta maker. I had visions of rolling out piles and piles of fresh fettucinni with an expert hand in a matter of minutes. Yea, right. Try several hours of kneading, rolling, re hydrating, and kneading. Now, give me a potato and I'm an ace. But this whole pasta from scratch thing is a little more work than Giadi de Laurentis would have us believe.

I've read too much Jane Austen -- at some point this year I realized Mr. Darcy "lived" in the 19th century and I should bloody well get over it.

I'm really just a country girl at heart -- For a long time I had this idea I was a city girl a la Carrie Bradshaw (but with half a heart belonging to the Rockies). My trip to Limoges, FRA and my extended stays at home made it clear to me that I like my rolling hills and fields, my small farm-style houses and long walks.

Country Music is the only place where the Guitar still lives -- contemporary pop killed the guitar solo. But listen to groups like Big and Rich and you'll find there's still a lil Stevie Ray on today's charts.