Literature, Art and History – Page 2

This summer has felt particularly long. Perhaps it’s because we’ve had intermittent heatwaves since April, but it’s more likely because we’ve been locked-down at home with only our daydreams of holidays yore and hopeful plans for future getaways.

Experiencing an alternate summer in literature, however, is the the ultimate way to escape: the heat-induced boredom leading to sweaty, sultry decisions; the slower pace forging the opportunities for pensive thoughts; the sense of madness, other-worldliness, oppressiveness and excitement. It all comes together in a literary haze that transports you from your own sense of idle summertime.

Whether you’re ready for the summer to end, or grasping at the last straws of long days and balmy nights, here are some of the best books that encapsulate the midsummer madness and that are set in intense, hazy heat. What better way to send off the long, hot summer of 2020.

Atonement, Ian McEwan (2001)

“Cecilia led the visitors into the drawing room, through the French windows, past the roses toward the swimming pool, which was behind the stable block and was surrounded on four sides by a high thicket of bamboo, with a tunnel-like gap for an entrance. They walked through, bending their heads under low canes, and emerged onto a terrace of dazzling white stone from which the heat rose in a blast. In deep shadow, set well back from the water’s edge, was a white-painted tin table with a pitcher of iced punch under a square of cheesecloth. Leon unfolded the canvas chairs and they sat with their glasses in a shallow circle facing the pool”

Set over three time periods, Atonement opens in a typical British heatwave. The stillness is oppressive, the boredom is apparent and the distorted haze of the summer evening leads passion-induced decisions and petulance-driven mistakes that propel the characters into a life-changing stream of events.

The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers (1946)

“It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid. In June the trees were bright dizzy green, but later the leaves darkened, and the town turned black and shrunken under the glare of the sun”

Frankie Addams longs to belong. As a twelve-year-old in a southern American state, she is bored, lonely, isolated and uncomfortable in her own skin. Set over a few days mid-August, The Member of the Wedding is often seen as a coming-of-age novel, but it is also a deeper reflection on the struggles of growing up, the vulnerability of a pre-teen girlhood as well as an exploration of race and sexuality through the eyes of a child.

A Room with a View, EM Forster (1908)

“It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and close below, the Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.”

A light-hearted critique of Edwardian society disguised as a romance, A Room with a View is set in both Florence, Italy and Surrey, England. The pages are filled with courtship, travel, tennis and tea as E.M. Forster epitomises social decorum and the shallow values of the upper classes in the early twentieth century.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1960)

“Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.”

To Kill a Mockingbird is a modern, and much loved, classic. Often read at school-level, returning to it as an adult feels warm and nostalgic. It is classed as a Southern Gothic, taking place in Alabama and follows three children over three years. While the plot follows Scout, Jem and Dill’s adventures, and their fascination with their reclusive neighbour, Boo Radley. The subplot, however, concerns a trial in which Scout and Jem’s father is hired to defend a black man accused of rape. A Bildungsroman with themes of racial injustice, innocence and childhood, this classic is the perfect summer read.

Holes, Louis Sachar (1998)

“Looking around, he saw a pool of water less than a hundred yards away from
where he was standing. He closed his eyes and opened them to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. The pool was still there. He hurried toward it. The pool hurried away from him, moving as he moved, stopping when he stopped. There wasn’t any water. It was a mirage caused by the shimmering waves of heat rising off the dry ground.”

After being falsely accused of theft, Stanley Yelnats, is send to Camp Green Lake, a juvenile detention centre in a Texan desert. Crawling with yellow-spotted lizards, inmates at Camp Green Lake must dig one hole each day: five metres wide and five metres deep. Holes is YA fiction but it explores themes illiteracy, homelessness and racism.

The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1982)

“Just when I think I’ve learned to live with the heat, the constant dampness, even steaminess of my clothes, the swampiness under my arms and between my legs, my Mend comes. And cramps and aches and pains? but I must still keep going as if nothing is happening”

Set in rural Georgia in the early 1930s, The Color Purple is an award winning book that confronts the exceptionally low position of African-American women in American society. Written in letters to God by 14 year-old Celie, this is a poignant, affecting and important text that not only revolutionised the epistolary form, but more importantly unlocked conversations about black women in western society, particularly the injustice and the abuse that they faced.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

“There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

The roaring 20s: hedonism, luxury, debauchery and extravagance. It is hard to distinguish whether The Great Gatsby epitomises this era, or whether the era now epitomises the text – it is almost as if they are so interlinked it is difficult to conceptualise that one happened without the other. Often considered one of the greatest novels of all time The Great Gatsby follows Yale graduate and hopeful salesman, Nick Carraway, to New York, where he spends the summer on Long Island and enters the world of Jay Gastby.

All pictures are my own unless otherwise credited. Permission must be obtained before any reproduction and credit must be issued in any reproduction.

I am a “Southerner”. I enjoy the semi-seasonal weather, the clear dialect and afternoon tea in the garden. I generally do not feel infuriated by the individualist coldness on the London streets and I value the well-connected public transport links. For me, The Midlands and The North blur into one and they feature the scary myths of Spaghetti Junction, stand-still traffic on the M1, dinner at midday, chips and gravy, and scantily dressed girls on nights out. It is as foreign to me as The North is to the Lannisters. A crime, I know.

Needless to say, my venture to Yorkshire to visit my boyfriend’s family home, as well as the Brontë Parsonage Museum, was an educational adventure. After 4 hours driving northbound, we arrived in Pannel, a small town in the heart of Yorkshire County. The winter darkness had set in two hours into the journey, cloaking the vast, unruly countryside promised to me by so many writers. There was also no sense of crossing a boundary, nor a formal feeling of entering the north – we simply arrived. While it wasn’t raining, the bracing February wind was fiercely cold as it lashed our exposed skin as we raced into the warmth.

Our itinerary for the weekend was busy, exploring the cobbled streets of local towns and cities, tasting “Northern” fish and chips (and scraps), taking Betty’s Afternoon Tea, and, most excitingly, visiting the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. I am a Brontë enthusiast: Jane Eyre taught me to be strong and resolute, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall encouraged me to be independent and Wuthering Heights introduced me to a world of wild passion and expansive emotion. These iconic texts not only caused trembles in the patriarchal world of Victorian authors, but they also continue to shape and encourage young minds in this modern world. They offer an essential insight into the constraints of Victorian society, the issues revolving around the married/creative/emotional woman. While these novels are steeped in epochal issues, they are timeless in their impact as they continue to promote equality.

On approaching Haworth, the scenery is breathtaking. The expansive rolling moors, divided only by the rustic stone dykes, and the crepuscular rays illuminating sections of the green grassland, elicit a solitary, but liberating feel.

Elizabeth Gaskell traversed this same Yorkshire terrain and explains in her biography of Charlotte Brontë that ‘all round the horizon there is this same line of sinuous wave-like hills, the scoops into which they fall only revealing other hills beyond, of similar colour and shape, crowned with wild bleak moors – grand from the ideas of solitude and loneliness which they suggest’. Gaskell perfectly depicts the rise and fall of the horizon and captures the vast, expansive nature of this countryside. Gaskell also comments on the ‘solitude and loneliness’ of these moors. While the clear lack of people does support this sense of isolation, it is not lonely. It is, instead, peaceful, serene and glorious. By no means do these Yorkshire moors live to their bleak and grim reputation in the South; the epithet of ‘God’s Own Country’ is certainly spot on.

Scenery, setting and description is synonymous within Emily’s Wuthering Heights, as the untamed moors emulate Heathcliff’s primitive nature and Cathy’s impulsive emotions. While Emily illustrates the moorland and Yorkshire countryside in such an evocative manor in her text, physically being elevated in the depths of the hills, encircled by the bitter (but invigorating) wind, provides a connection to Emily, to the text and to Cathy that was quite unexpected. I was half anticipating to see the ghosts of Heathcliff and Cathy wandering the moors.

Entering the site just the two of us through the bottom of the graveyard, the atmosphere is incredibly suggestive as the tall evergreens somewhat block the light, providing an eerie hue, while the skeletons of the trees tower over the graves and physically signify the corpses in the ground. These elements undoubtedly perpetrate the sensations of the supernatural – if I were a ghost-watcher, I am sure I would have have sensed a presence.

We first visited the church before heading up to the parsonage. The connection to the author was epitomised at this point, and my fangirling surfaced as I exclaimed to my boyfriend: ‘This is it! They lived here. They actually walked these paths, breathed in these rooms, and this is where they lay!”. When did I become such a stereotypical, fanatical tourist? I am somewhat ashamed to say that this excitement lasted the duration of our parsonage visit – indulging in the manuscripts, pouring over letters, marvelling at outfits and admiring the original set up of the house. While I was slightly disappointed by the few amount of original ‘Emily artefacts’ on show, I realised that this was probably due to her early death. Only three months after Branwell’s passing, Emily also died, aged only thirty. At the parsonage, death is omnipresent; not only does the house look over the cramped churchyard, the parsonage itself would have been dark, damp and dank, creating an environment that fosters disease and, ultimately, death. These sinister undertones are apparent at the very core of Wuthering Heights, as the bleak setting and tragic plot perpetrates the sense of loss and desolation that occurred on the doorstep of the parsonage.

Despite this sinister atmosphere of the past, the present Howarth is charming. It allures the international tourist by its quintessentially British set-up, and pleases the seasoned British traveller with its shops, tea-rooms, pubs and sloping cobbled streets. After a warming cup of loaded hot chocolate, a plate of ploughman’s and conversation with the fellow tables we were fully satisfied. Brontë country had served us well.

My first trip “T’up North” taught me many things: that it is anything but bleak, that it may be cold but the sun does shine and that Northerners really are very friendly. It grounded my interest in the Brontë’s, their lifestyle and literature, and sparked an idea that has developed into my MA thesis. A second visit is now in the making, and I look forward to exploring more of this rich cultural heritage in the future!

All pictures are my own unless otherwise credited. Permission must be obtained before any reproduction and credit must be issued in any reproduction.