the Brontes and Peter's Room

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

I cast an eye over Peter's Room (which I don't own, and know far less well than other AFs) lately, and found myself wondering about the sections that deal with the Brontes, before the Marlow/Merrick Gondal kicks off - the conversation in the Shippen where Ginty tells the others about the Brontes, and Gondal and Angria, and the slightly later one where Karen (all hot water bottle and Thucydides) nudges Nick and Ginty through a sort of Socratic dialogue about art vs life and the general wrongheadedness of adult addiction to fantasy games. (I suppose there weren't role-playing societies at Oxford in her day, and one can imagine her opinion of on-line RPGs...)

It's completely fascinating and the usual intellectually-sophisticated AF stuff, but I found myself wondering whether the novel actually required so much Bronte material? It's probably my own favourite part of the novel, but, after all, all the characters in PR have independent capacities for starring in their own fantasies, as shown in the novels as a whole, and the collective fantasy isn't so much of a stretch from Nick's Scott or Lawrie being a resistance fighter when her conduct mark is read out etc etc. So - in some ways the Bronte stuff reads like a compulsively readable red herring. I'd forgotten simply how much of the early part of the novel those two conversations actually take up, effectively postponing the start of the 'action'. Also, I have no memory of when I first read the novel, but I read the Brontes young, and so probably knew what AF was talking about from other sources, but there may well have been readers completely befogged by the very elliptical way in which the Brontes' story is told by various AF characters. I was talking about it to a children's book agent friend the other night and she didn't think that kind of digression would get past an editor these days.

So - how effective/necessary is the Bronte stuff to Peter's Room? If you read PR young and without any knowledge of the Brontes, were you at sea or not? Did anyone read the Brontes because of PR? And, because this occurred to me as I was reading, how does anyone imagine the Marlow/Merrick Gondal to have been carried out, exactly? We know they don't act it out by actually moving around and doing the actions, apart from the very end, because Patrick says so, but are we to imagine them taking it in turns to narrate a kind of recitative, something like the italicised narrative the reader gets? Or just speaking their own parts?

Comments

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

I've always thought that PR is to role-playing rather like Mansfield Park is to amateur theatricals - and, indeed, having read Peter's Room it helped me with reading MP for 'A" Level no end. After all, our English teacher made it clear to us that Austen enthusiastically participated in the plays they put on in the barn: it's far too over-simplified to see MP as being "The Theatre Is Eval Oh Woah!" And Nicola, of course, is quite happily a Polar Expedition. What I think AF is doing is saying that just like Lovers' Vows is wrong for the MP crew, Gondal is wrong for the mob in the Shippen. It isn't in the least saying this is wrong in itself (which is why the line about plenty of people living at Haworth without turning into Brontes). I think she's warning against hidden agendas, not against role playing per se.

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly--the danger is simply that people can too easily use role-playing as a means to pursue those hidden agendas--it's a masking device.

[richenda.livejournal.com]

>>>>What I think AF is doing is saying that just like Lovers' Vows is wrong for the MP crew, Gondal is wrong for the mob in the Shippen. It isn't in the least saying this is wrong in itself (which is why the line about plenty of people living at Haworth without turning into Brontes).

I agree - hence my making the contrast between Gondaling and puppet theatres, which were very popular at the time that she was writing PR, and perhaps carried less risk. The description of people's feelings after Gondaling is very well done, as a hint that it's the obsessiveness of an activity that is dangeroius rather than the activity itself.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

Isn't Coppelia a bit of a warning about the dangers of puppet theatres? In fact, given the popularity in folklore and children's literature generally about dolls which come to life, sinister marionettes and so forth (Ruth M. Arthur's A Candle In Her Room springs to mind as an example of the satanically possessed doll genre which is contemporary with PR) to say nothing about the absolute horror movie cliche of the ventriloquist's dummy, possibly the reason why AF never mentioned puppet theatres in the whole of her oeuvre so far as I'm aware is that she thought the dangers inherent in marionetting, and the fact that the effects of being exposed to marionetting in childhood could persist years and in fact decades later had been done to death by other writers - ie she wrote PR about Gondal rather than puppet theatres for much the same reason that she wrote FL about hawks rather than ponies?

[richenda.livejournal.com]

>>>Isn't Coppelia a bit of a warning about the dangers of puppet theatres?

Thank you! I hadn't worked that out or seen it like that!
That strengthens what I still want to say about the difference between safety and danger in role-playing.
This might be measured by how we feel when we come out of role - and that is why I find her descriptions so interesting about how her characters feel when they come out of role - and why it matters so much that Patrick shows a Rupert face when he breaks hunting etiquette.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Hmm - off-topic here - I feel Austen had also sat through far too many dire amateur productions - doesn't someone say somewhere that amateur theatre may be fun for the participants but not for the audience forced to watch it?

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Well, considering that the poor woman was stuck for most of her childhood in what was to most intents and purposes a boys' school, I would have thought that amateur-theatricalling would be endemic.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

Edmund says he wouldn't cross the room to see acting by people like them.

It's rather reminscent of Madame Orly saying in End of Term: "Amateur productions are for the drawing room, not for an audience of several hundred people."