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Every so often a book appears with a fresh approach to familiar classics
which reinvigorates our belief in the importance of literature to the
experience of culture. Edward Mendelson is a Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University. As the subtitle declares,
The Things That Matter revisits seven novels with an aim of exploring a
central theme from each that can tell us something about how to
interpret emotional challenges that beset us in the course of our
lifetime. Frankenstein is offered as an examination of birth, Wuthering
Heights of childhood, Jane Eyre for growth, Middlemarch for marriage,
Mrs. Dalloway for love, To the Lighthouse for parenthood, and Between
the Acts for the future. Mendelson's premise is flexible enough to avoid
heavy-handed exegesis; what he has given us is a literary roadmap into
moral and emotional conundrums that the authors of these books have
confronted through story and character.
The selection spans two centuries and the authors are women. Three of
the books were written by Virginia Woolf. Mendelson believes that women
"had a greater motivation to defend the values of personal life against
the generalizing effect of stereotypes..." He makes a good point:
certainly the authors of these books took great pains to examine the
emotional life and its influence on actions and choices.
One gets from his book a keen sense of Mendelson's reverence for the
individual experience, whether as a reader, a writer, an artist, or
merely a soul confronting contradictions; and he seems to be saying that
the best literature offers visions in lieu of answers, and that the
visions given here have something of emotional truth derived from what
women know especially.
Authors exist in a relationship to their characters that creates a
second dynamic to the narrative. "The novels that I write about in this
book all emerged from their authors' arguments with themselves." From
this can be inferred arguments that authors have with their characters,
disapproving of their behavior even as they create situations that allow
it, and with their readers, for whom the story is told. It is precisely
the interpersonal aspects of literature and the visions that emerge from
speculation that excite Professor Mendelson, and he has given new light
to familiar books in this thoughtfully insightful meditation.
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