anorthernskyatdawn:

anorthernskyatdawn:

bookhobbit:

spontaneoustangent
replied to your post “good evening it’s been three and a half years since Moll and I first…”

As someone who can’t pick up on that kind of stuff without it being spelled out for me, I would be incredibly interested in description of how exactly Clarke leverages those things. What stereotypes is she playing off of?

So @anorthernskyatdawn is the one who does Four Nations stuff (and has actual real-life experience on the complications of British identities) and therefore is much more qualified to discuss this than me, but I’ll give it my best shot and he can hop on afterwards!

I’m mostly working with 19th century concepts of “proper Englishness” here, both because that’s what’s relevant for jsmn, and because that’s what I happen to know. Anyway, “proper Englishness” was pretty narrowly restricted by the upper-class English in this period: a “properly English” person was middle or upper-class (you get a lot of weirdness with working-class people and servants being somehow faintly foreign in 19th century lit), white, southern, and, of course, English (not “Celtic”). Strange and Norrell have rich and white taken care of, but it’s the latter two properties I’m interested in.

I should back up the “northern England isn’t REAL england” thing a bit: here’s a page from a book about Northern English linguistics that explains it well. You can also see this in a lot of period novels: in North and South particularly, the two regions are portrayed as almost literally different countries (”they don’t understand our northern ways blah blah blah”). This is in our actual world, so imagine how much greater this split in identity must be in a world where the North was in fact an actual different political entity for another three hundred years or so.

The stereotypes I’m working with are (and I should emphasize that they’re complete crap really like all stereotypes are, I don’t agree with them or anything, but they’re pervasive in literature):

-”“celtic”” people are fanciful, dreamy, romantic, creative, and stuck in the past” (this is a sort of pan-Celtic stereotype that the 19th century English liked to apply to Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Cornish, etc folk all alike)

-people from the North, at this time lately the site of the Industrial Revolution, hardheaded, practical, mercenary, and fixated on the modern and the future to the destruction or exclusion of the past*.

So, we’ve got Strange and Norrell: 

-Strange is energetic, mercurial, his name literally means, well, strange, and his approach to magic is highly charismatic, highly romantic. He also spent half his childhood in Scotland and the other half on the actual border with Wales. Although he doesn’t seem vested in claiming a Celtic identity, that wouldn’t necessarily prevent these stereotypes being applied to him because English folks thought culture was like, in your blood or some xenophobic nonsense. And he wants to bring back the Raven King and his magic, and reopen communication with Faerie.

-Norrell hates mystical nonsense and thinks that magic should be modern – I know we think of him as old-fashioned, but “modern magic for the modern age” is a thing he actually utters. He hates the Raven King, he wants to erase the legacy of the Aureates as far as possible, and thinks fairy-magic is a grave mistake. Also, his name means “from the North” as far as Moll can find. And, I mean, he is A Northerner in his own mind as well as others’. I think he tries to downplay it for the sake of safety (he’s much more aware of his uneasy status than Strange is) but it’s there: cf “Childermass and Norrell’s respect for Vinculus would have increased a little, knowing that he was like them, a Northerner.”**

I don’t want to make too much of this, I don’t think it’s a major theme of the book or anything, I just think it’s quite possibly another thing she plays with very subtly to emphasize the differences both between Strange and Norrell and between the two magicians and the London society they are living in for most of the story.

*Moll says there’s another “backwards and provincial” contrast to the latter, but ask him about how they interact, this is part of his Thing, he calls it Thornton versus Heathcliff; this is partly a class thing, so Norrell being rich plays on the forward-thinking. You could do something interesting with the difference between Norrell, a rich man, and Childermass, a working class man, ‘s view of the Raven King and his role in magic, but I digress. 

**interesting that Vinculus was conceived in Wapping so he was almost certainly born and raised in the environs of London, but because his father was from Yorkshire, he is still A Northerner to a degree significant enough to count to both Childermass and Norrell, so that’s more “the North is another country” stuff – by analogy if your dad is Spanish but you’re born and raised in England, you’re still going to be thought of as least partly Spanish, probably.

I’m going to give a real expansion of some of these things later once I’ve had a think but I want to share this, from the opening of Matthew Arnold’s On The Study of Celtic Literature from 1867, emphasies mine:

“But, putting aside the charm of the Liverpool steamboats, perhaps the
view, on this side, a little dissatisfies one after a while; the horizon
wants mystery, the sea wants beauty, the coast wants verdure, and has a
too bare austereness and aridity. At last one turns round and looks
westward. Everything is changed. Over the mouth of the Conway and its
sands is the eternal softness and mild light of the west; the low line
of the mystic Anglesey, and the precipitous Penmaenmawr, and the great
group of Carnedd Llewelyn and Carnedd David and their brethren fading
away, hill behind hill, in an aërial haze, make the horizon; between the
foot of Penmaenmawr and the bending coast of Anglesey, the sea, a
silver stream, disappears one knows not whither. On this side,
Wales,—Wales, where the past still lives, where every place has its
tradition, every name its poetry, and where the people, the genuine
people, still knows this past, this tradition, this poetry, and lives
with it, and clings to it; while, alas, the prosperous Saxon on the
other side, the invader from Liverpool and Birkenhead, has long ago
forgotten his. And the promontory where Llandudno stands is the very
centre of this tradition; it is Creuddyn, the bloody city,
where every stone has its story; there, opposite its decaying rival,
Conway Castle, is Diganwy, not decaying but long since utterly decayed,
some crumbling foundations on a crag top and nothing more; Diganwy,
where Mael-gwyn shut up Elphin, and where Taliesin came to free him.
Below, in a fold of the hill, is Llan-rhos, the church of the marsh,
where the same Mael-gwyn, a British prince of real history, a bold and
licentious chief, the original, it is said, of Arthur’s Lancelot, shut
himself up in the church to avoid the Yellow Plague, and peeped out
through a hole in the door, and saw the monster and died. Behind among
the woods, is Gloddaeth, the place of feasting, where the bards
were entertained; and farther away, up the valley of the Conway towards
Llanrwst, is the Lake of Ceirio-nydd and Taliesin’s grave.

ETA: I’m not just leaving this quote hanging – I am going to talk about this properly in a bit when I have spoons and have ceased misplacing my glasses, but I wanted this here because imo it’s important context for Strange

So, I have spoons now and I got my glasses.

@bookhobbit has been very thorough here, and I just want
to fill in a few things that might help with the full weight of what Clarke is
doing here.

They mentioned my “Thornton vs Heathcliff” thing, and I’d like
to expand on that quickly before going on to apply that to JSMN.

First, to start with Heathcliff. Our narrator, Lockwood, casts
Cathy and Heathcliff in just about the most Gothic-Romance roles he can manage,
and by doing so, locks (ha) the North out of narratives of modernity. This is,
for the London reader, armchair tourism; this is looking at the “isolated
peasantry” of Europe on the Grand Tour except Europe is shit right now (then)
so we’re going North instead. Heathcliff and Cathy are being cast as part of
that isolated peasantry even though they’re landed, albeit poorish, gentry.

Heathcliff, to Lockwood, is a historical kind of gentleman;
he’s not your modern type like the Lintons over the moor. He belongs to another
time; he’s distant and moody and Gothic*, his house is old-fashioned, etc etc.

There’s very few, if any, references to Northern modernity
in WH, apart from the fact that as I say the Lintons are the modern foil to the
Gothic and thus historical Earnshaws (Heathcliff is an Earnshaw fight me).

The Earnshaws are not working class, but they are rural and
not especially rich; it’s not quite right
to say Childermass is a Heathcliff-type or that the North of WH is also
Childermass’s North. It is however important to note that Clarke pulls on the
same things (Ann Radcliffe) that Bronte is pulling on with Heathcliff. Clarke
pulls on Radcliffe to Gothicise and thus historicise Childermass (thus putting
him in the category of “backwards and provincial”, even though he (and Heathcliff)
are absolutely not either of those things), and Bronte pulls on Radcliffe to Gothicise
and thus historicise Heathcliff.

Anyway. This isn’t actually supposed to be an essay on the
similarities between Childermass and Heathcliff. What I’m trying to show here
is that the North is romanticised, by Lockwood, into being a place where, to
quote Arnold, the past still lives.

This is something still going on in JSMN, which is obvious
by the fact that Norrell has to loudly and repeatedly reject it and Childermass,
your archetypal Gothic Hero who looks like one would expect a magician to look,
is connected to Heathcliff – in whom the past still lives.

The Thornton part of this, on the other hand, is that aspect
of the North that’s progress at all costs, industry, destruction of the past***,
etc, etc. While Heathcliff is poorish landed gentry-by-adoption, Thornton is “dragged
myself up by my bootstraps once-working-class/(probably actually lower-middle)
nouveau riche”. It’s also important to note that this still doesn’t give you
complete access to Southernness or “True Englishness”, because most of N+S is
spent with Thornton having No Idea how to access “True Englishness”.

So what I’m aiming at with this Heathcliff vs Thornton
dynamic of 1800s Northern identity is that Norrell is on very thin ice. Magic
is a thing that belongs to the Heathcliff type – the Celticised North, let’s
say, yr hen ogledd – but Norrell has dressed it up in Thornton’s clothes.

The ultimate tragedy of identity here is that, because of
the gauche, nouveau riche implications Thornton’s clothes, magic is never going
to be fully accepted when it’s coming from a Northerner. It’s either backwards and
provincial or gauche and embarrassing.

This is where Strange comes in. Now, Strange is a stranger
in quite a few ways, as Book noted. He’s half Scottish and from the Welsh
Marches – but he also has access to Southern, London-based Cultural Englishness
and is thus a stranger to the North as well.****

The access to Cultural Englishness is something else that
shows up Strange’s identity as tangled just like Norrell’s is. According to the
wiki, Ashfair is conceivably medieval – and thus more rooted than Hurtfew
(although Hurtfew is built on very old ground). This suggests an older, more
rooted family – and thus not remotely mistakable for nouveau riche. This gives
him the cultural capital to get away with Doing Magic in the Celtic Way – especially as he can dress it up in the
language of the literary elite.

Norrell, through the twin identities of the North, cannot
access the elite. Strange, despite his access to and use of Arnold-esque Celtic
stereotype, cannot escape the elite.

---

*Important to note that Gothicism at this time drew heavily on
medievalism (that’s why we call it Gothic); if the Heights makes you think of a
medieval manor house and Heathcliff as a potentially warring local lord from 1500,**
that’s intentional

**See my theory about how the constantly interlocking names
in WH are meant to evoke the sense that life there is, and ever was, cyclical.
The house was built in 1500 by Hareton Earnshaw, and Hareton is also the young man
at the end of the text who is the leader, with young Cathy, of the new
generation.

***Please see the Jacobites in JSMN as an analogy for the
Luddites. Smashing machinery that destroyed your way of life 5eva. Also see how Luddite has become a byword for
backwards, provincial resister of progress, and thus falls into the Heathcliff
camp

**** Strange was at Cambridge