u/Mike_Bevel

I way-on-to-way'd myself into Montague Summers after he was briefly mentioned in a book of essays by Robertson Davies.

Summers was a turn-of-the-20th-century English writer on the occult. He wrote two books on witchcraft, one on vampires, and one on werewolves, among others (e.g. translating the Maleus Maleficarum from Latin into English). They are endearingly credulous, rabidly Catholic (in a good way -- you'll see), but also fascinatingly filled monographs that explore each topic throughout history. So, with werewolves (the one I'm currently reading) he starts with the Greeks and the werewolves at the Olympics, and then jumps from primary source to primary source, though interspersing it with evidentiary stories Summers alleges are true, but also often take the form of, "A certain man drank from the paw print of a wolf..." You can believe or not (believing is entertaining).

He feels a little like reading all the weird historical flotsam and jetsom Umberto Eco throws into his novels. That also could be the cement walls of untranslated Latin, French, German, and Greek but not the Greek with the Roman alphabet; the one that looks like elegant caterpillars. That's a selling point for me (maybe not the translation stuff); it doesn't work for everyone (exactly like the translation stuff). (And it really only works for me from Eco and Dorothy Dunnett.)

Some things I'd like:

1. Anything you want to share about any Summers you've read.

2. Biographical information. I'm trying to find biographical information on him beyond Wikipedia and its sources. Do you know if anyone in Weird Lit talks about Summers as a source?

ETA: There's definitely some anti-Semitism. Summers is, as I said, Catholic, but no, this isn't the "fun part" of his Catholicism, I chose my words poorly, but because he's writing in the 1920s and '30s, even though I don't agree with it, he definitely believes that Jews are a problem.

A question that I've encountered, either when teaching or lecturing about Victorian novels, is: "But why didn't she just..."

Why didn't she just leave the cad who was jilting her?

Why didn't she just get a job and make her own money?

Why didn't she just nope the heck on our of there?

The questions are good; I think they show that the reader is paying attention. It also points toward a very modern idea of will and agency. But the questions are also not entirely fair, because the nineteenth century was a challenging time to be a woman.

This is a passage from Wilkie Collins's 1870 novel, Man & Wife. I think it's a useful example here, in part because of how popular Collins was, but also because of the exposure an idea such as this one would get, being published serially:

>However persistently the epicene theorists of modern times may deny it, it is nevertheless a truth plainly visible in the whole past history of the sexes, that the natural condition of a woman is to find her master in a man. Look in the face of any woman who is in no direct way dependent on a man—and, as certainly as you see the sun in a cloudless sky, you see a woman who is not happy. The want of a master is their great unknown want; the possession of a master is—unconsciously to themselves—the only possible completion of their lives. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, this one primitive instinct is at the bottom of the otherwise-inexplicable sacrifice, when we see a woman, of her own free will, throw herself away on a man who is unworthy of her.

After we all acknowledge Collins's co-opting of Jane Austen's dictum ("It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife"), there's a lot of astonishingly reductive rhetoric here.

Is Collins wrong? I don't know if that's an answerable question. Or, maybe, it doesn't matter if it's right or wrong; what matters is that this is a typical point of view that many men and women had at the time. When an entire era is openly dismissive of half of the world's population, maybe "why didn't she just...?" starts to be understandable. Not agreeable; we don't have to agree. But if we want to understand characters in a Victorian novel in their context, knowing who has power and how it's used can be a big hint in figuring out a character's motivation.

I was cleaning a bookshelf and found a copy of The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara.

I think it's an incredible book, and the story it tells about abuse felt worth my time. I think the book is structured well, and I don't have memories of feeling as if it lags anywhere. I really like that Yanagihara doesn't feel like she needs to judge the actions of the characters; she seems to trust the reader enough to hold their own thoughts.

The book offers a fictionalized account of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (Dr Abraham Norton Perina in the novel), and his fall from grace over mounting evidence of pedophilia. Gajdusek is interesting to me in part because of the incredible work he did, especially on the transmissibility of kuru, a prion disease as nasty as all the other prion diseases we know of. Gajdusek and Baruch Blumberg won the Nobel in physiology and medicine in 1976.

I think one of the things Yanagihara wants the reader to sit with is why some violations of another person's autonomy -- the child molestation -- seem to have harsher consequences than other violations of a person's autonomy (the experimentation on the fictional Ivu'ivu in the novel). One act won him the most prestigious award in medicine; the other absolutely destroyed his career.

I would love to recommend it to others -- but something about having to tell someone, "Oh, there's mild to severe pedophilia," discourages me.

I was hoping others might have a book in their life that they love, and would want to recommend to others, but *something* about the book makes it a dicey proposition.