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

Gondal

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

I don't remember the Bronte bits being that long, but I only read PR first a few years ago, when my only knowledge of the family was an ad for the London Review of Books with the acerbic quote "It can't have been easy being the brother of those Bronte sisters, but Branwell does seem to have made more of a hash of it than strictly necessary." So the Bronte content made the book into a quasi-historical novel.

I'd always considered the book to be part of the anti-roleplaying fearmongering that was a response to D&D and roleplaying becoming popular at universities and among disaffected youth, in the early 70s, but having just checked, PR was first published in 1961, and I'm not sure whether roleplaying had been heard of then - my impression from the book was that Patrick was familiar with the idea and the others weren't, which fits with Patrick being a geeky boy at boarding school. On the other hand, they're all at boarding school with no TV and only improving books - inventing characters as entertainment wouldn't be as odd as for similar kids doing the same now.

I see them sitting in a circle each speaking their own roles, with lots of gestures and "so I go over here and I'm hiding behind this snowdrift" etc. Like roleplayers now without anyone wanting to get into endless dice-throwing and point-totting...

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I read PR probably fairly shortly after it came out, in the 60s, and I already knew about the Brontes (have a feeling that the Sad Story of the Sisters may have featured in girls' comics of the more serious and improving kind) and had probably read Jane Eyre Villette and Wuthering Heights by that time, but had not previously heard about Gondal/Angria - the idea of which I found very exciting indeed. This stuff was, yes, I agree, compulsively readable, at least to this bookish adolescent who created private fantasy worlds.

There was at least one other YA book around the same time inspired by the Brontes' web of childhood - in which the wooden soldiers who started it all are discovered by a modern family.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I know I'd read the Brontes before I read Peter's Room, because for ages I only owned the four school books and was utterly perplexed by the Gondal bit at the beginning of The Attic Term.

I think I imagine some of them just speaking their own parts and some doing descriptive bits as well - I can see Ginty, for example, going into narrative flourishes about the frozen sea, far more easily than I can see Nicola doing so.

Re: Gondal

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

I know absolutely nothing about role-playing or its history, despite having a lurid imaginative life of my own, so this hadn't occurred to me as a serious point of comparison at all, let alone that the Brontes could be seen as the foremothers of Dungeons and Dragons!

Yes, I suppose AF does finally vindicate Nicola's suspicion of (and Karen's distaste for) Gondalling, but the reason it's such a good novel is partly that we are enthralled by the fantasy, and partly just as sad and let down as most of the characters when Nick stumps off to go lambing with the bracingly realistic Rowan, who would never have re-enacted the siege of Troy with the neighbour...

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

Yes, Ginty comes across as more of a flake than ever in PR - in fact, her obsession with coincidences would make her a perfect recruit to any oddjob conspiracy theory you could name. Her investment in the game, apart from initially wanting to identify with Emily Bronte, who has all the kind of ferocity and single-mindedness of character G feels she lacks, seems like the dawning of a kind of oblique sexual feeling that's easier to channel through a male character and a brotherly/romantic friendship. (Ginty as proto-slasher?) Which is possibly a nicer way of saying she wants to direct the plot so she can cop a feel of Patrick's body when his character dies in Crispian's arms.

[helixaspersa.livejournal.com]

I have tried and failed about three times to articulate why I feel that those opening sections are so important. I am now giving up, but I might try and come back to it. Certainly AF in general made me think more deeply than anything else I read as a teenager, with the exception of some of Chaim Potok, and an odd little book called 'I, Juan de Pareja', about the moral valency of art, and of what kind of troubling relation their might be (to be pompous) between art and virtue, both for the artist and the reader. (Northanger Abbey might have done this too but I read it a good deal later; actually re: adolescent girls 'The Rainbow' is very good on this too, Ursula in her hay loft thrilling to 'Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine the lily maid of Astolat'.)

I only actually got hold of 'Peter's Room' in quite late adolescence, but it certainly fitted with, and expanded upon, thought prompted by what I had already read of her.

I had an imaginary world myself as a child, but a solitary one, and rather different from the Gondal version - more in the line of endless maps and law acts and treaties and graphs of language distribution (seriously!). I did the accounts for my vast and populous country every Saturday morning for quite some time, and occasionally wrote speeches to deliver to my cabinet . . . (I don't know why I'm admitting all this. I'm going to stop right now.)

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

Language distribution graphs and accounts??? You ran an infant imaginary bureaucracy!

Though I remember once eating precisely nothing for almost three days because I was being starved and wandering in the wilderness in my particular imaginary world, so I suppose I was an eight-year-old masochist. My imaginary world involved me continually being kidnapped and mistreated, and occasionally being burned at the stake, for which I used to gather the sticks.

[helixaspersa.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think it's probably rather a shame that all my maths teaching at primary school was so singularly ghastly, as I obviously had quite an appetite for it that went entirely to waste. As I remember my people spoke a curious mixture of English, Welsh, and various imaginary languages: the map was carefully emended to indicate areas of particular linguistic anomaly! The accounts were quite something, because I made the numbers up as I went along (outgoings of various kinds; income largely of trade and taxes) so each week I wasn't quite sure whether we were going to come out in the red or not! My country was called Goston, and my rather marvellous name was Jaclceon Prettler; I was 32. Evidently I thought that *quite* old enough for stateswoman purposes.

It's odd how the practical side of these imaginary experiences can be by such a long way the most exhilarating part (ie stick-gathering for your pyre). I suppose it's something about the temporary coincidence of the fantastic and the real that's so pleasing (fantastic context; real sticks). My little sisters and I had a ridiculous but strangely marvellous game called 'weary traveller'. The entire content was: one sister limps up to the shed - the 'weary traveller' - is welcomed and met with 'soup'. This was fundamentally a pretext for the great pleasure of leaving grass and leaves to steep in an old kettle for long enough that the water turned green ('soup'). It is odd though, and pleasing, how resiliently children continue to play at the most archetypal stories (weary traveller could have come straight from Exodus really) despite the utter lack of any real life analogues whatsoever.

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

How on earth did you pronounce 'Jaclceon'?

[helixaspersa.livejournal.com]

Jack-el-see-on. I have no idea at all on what I might have drawn in thinking it up. But no doubt a competent analyst could have fun.

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

Having imaginary countries and role-playing is very common, I think; I role-played a lot as a child (er, not admitting that I still do!), and often wandered into the world of what is now called fanfic! It was always so disillusioning that none of my friends ever wanted to play in my world. Sigh....

Didn't C S Lewis have an imaginary country where he played with his brother?

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

I agree about the commonness of imaginary countries. That's why I wondered about the necessity for the Bronte material, given that it's not that unusual a scenario.

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

I made my little sister swallow some of our 'soup' once, then covered over the resultant sick with leaves and forbade her to tell our mother.

[antisoppist.livejournal.com]

I was 19 by the time I found a copy of Peter's Room in a charity shop for 50p (this is the only sought-after book this has happened to me with and it's happened twice) and by then I'd read quite a lot of Brontes, as well as Pauline Clarke's children's book The Twelve and the Genii, which involves the toy soldiers and the imaginary worlds. I'm not sure what I'd have made of it without all of that background information.

I had imaginary boarding schools with registers and school play cast lists and dormitory lists and floor plans and complicated timetables but I would have died rather than admit this to anyone, let alone pretend it with people listening. My sympathies in PR are entirely with Nicola and for years I skipped the fantasy sections altogether because they were just plain silly.

[richenda.livejournal.com]

>>>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?

I don't remember speculating about that. At that time I was much more familiar with the C S Lewis type of a fantasy world - all on paper, except when the toys were used to act out the scenes.
We all had "puppet theatres" during the 1950s, and the puppets were usually home made. I think that AF was ahead of her time in seeing the potential dangers of role playing games.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I think that AF was ahead of her time in seeing the potential dangers of role playing games.

What evidence do you base this on?

[richenda.livejournal.com]

>>>I think that AF was ahead of her time in seeing the potential dangers of role playing games.
>>>What evidence do you base this on?

Merely that I don't think that anyone in the 1950s/1960ssaw role playing as dangerous - it was just something that some children did, either on paper or through puppets.
I might be mistaken, in that the first intimation (apart from the hints in PR) was, for me, reading a novel about a Dungeons and Dragons game in the 1980s - but I might have got the dates wrong.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I think the book you mean may be Mazes and Monsters, which is unfortunately very sensationalist, and bears about as much relationship to the average gaming group as a Hollywood thriller with an Islamist villain does to the home life of most British Muslims.

As far as 'the potential dangers' of roleplaying games go, perhaps this link may be of interest: Myths About Roleplaying (http://members.aol.com/waltonwj/faq_myths.htm). It is very unfortunate that so many people are so ill-informed about what is basically a healthy, social hobby, if a somewhat geeky one - and that they don't go to the trouble of seeing whether their prejudices are justified.

Myself, I think that constructing alternative personas online, creating elaborate family relationships between them, and faking their deaths, is considerably more unhealthy.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I just managed to visualise Ginty and Unity as tinhatted slashers. I think I may have sprained something in my head.

[richenda.livejournal.com]

>>>It is very unfortunate that so many people are so ill-informed about what is basically a healthy, social hobby, if a somewhat geeky one - and that they don't go to the trouble of seeing whether their prejudices are justified.

This may well be the case - but we are talking about AF, who makes it clear that there can be dangers if boundaries are not established.
My own experience of role playing in pastoral care, and in three decades of historical recreations, has also demonstrated to me that there can be dangers in role playing, if boundaries are not clear.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

This may well be the case - but we are talking about AF

I was under the impression that you were speaking more generally, since you were talking about your own experiences, and continued to do so in this comment. However, since this community is for discussion of AF, and frankly I find her very much more interesting than tangents about puppet theatres, by all means let's return to the text.

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

*Laughs somewhat hysterically*

[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.

[coughingbear]

I find Peter's Room fascinating partly because I disagree with AF about the wrongness of the Brontes' role-playing, and role-playing in general, but do love the way she uses it to explore all the children's characters, particularly Peter and Patrick. I wrote a long post about this ages ago, which I am too lazy to summarise.

I think the stuff about the Brontes is partly there so as to suggest the pitfalls AF sees in roleplaying, but it works because it is interesting anyway, and as a plausible reason for Ginty to propose the Gondal. Maybe now a group of teenagers might think of this anyway, but perhaps it was less obvious in 1961.

And I can't help believing that AF herself must have been able to be swept away by her own fantasies, to be able to write about it as she does.

[coughingbear]

Ooops, sorry about my lack of html skills in that comment. I thought frankie_ecap had had most of the wine...