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The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life, by Edward Mendelson
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She felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all that chatter, and pick out one particular thing; the thing that mattered . . .
—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
An illuminating exploration of how seven of the greatest English novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts—portray the essential experiences of life.
Edward Mendelson—a professor of English at Columbia University—illustrates how each novel is a living portrait of the human condition while expressing its author’s complex individuality and intentions and emerging from the author’s life and times. He explores Frankenstein as a searing representation of child neglect and abandonment and Mrs. Dalloway as a portrait of an ideal but almost impossible adult love, and leads us to a fresh and fascinating new understanding of each of the seven novels, reminding us—in the most captivating way—why they matter.
- Sales Rank: #1039425 in Books
- Brand: Mendelson, Edward
- Published on: 2007-11-06
- Released on: 2007-11-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.99" h x .60" w x 5.20" l, .47 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Columbia professor Mendelson's interlocking essays on the subtexts of seven great works of fiction (all by women) are lucidly expressed, insightful and often provocative. However, in arguing that one can learn the essentials of human existence from close readings of Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch and three Virginia Woolf works, he stretches Freudian imagination. In the chapter "Birth," for example, Mendelson demonstrates that Frankenstein is pervaded by fears of abandonment and death. Readers must invoke the subconscious to accept that these fears are common to human beings contemplating or existing in that earliest stage of life. What Mendelson does accomplish, and brilliantly, is to analyze these novels as extraordinary representatives of changes in moral and cultural mores in the 19th and 20th centuries. He offers a fascinating glimpse into the hidden visionary narrative in Wuthering Heights; convincingly finds that Middlemarch ("Marriage") and other of George Eliot's novels "expound more knowledge than any other body of fiction in English, and more wisdom than most"; and credits Woolf with groundbreaking insights into human emotions. As literary guides to these seven books, Mendelson's essays offer significant intellectual pleasure. (Aug. s15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Though the book is somewhat hit-or-miss, critics agree that the hits outnumber the misses. A particular standout is Mendelson's essay on Mrs. Dalloway, which both conveys the essence of the novel and offers acute insights into its eponymous protagonist. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the Frankenstein piece, less coherent and evocative than the others. The writing is sometimes overly constrained by the "stages of life" structure, though Mendelson delves into his characters' moral journeys as well. This collection will be best enjoyed by literary enthusiasts who know these novels well and can interact with Mendelson's work from a standpoint of personal experience and opinion.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Defying fashionable theories of literature, Mendelson approaches fiction seeking not to understand symbolism but to gather practical wisdom. In seven classic nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels--written by Mary Shelley, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf--Mendelson finds insights into the crises that define the life course. In Shelley's Frankenstein, for instance, he probes the reasons a parent creates life without nurturing it. In the sharply diverging visions of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre Mendelson contrasts a child's obsessive yearning for a world impervious to change with a mature woman's acceptance of the painful transformations that precede real intimacy. Middlemarch clarifies why a successful marriage requires a hard-won realism. And a trio of Woolf novels illuminates the ways in which the human dynamics of the family--often suffused with bitter ironies--diverge radically from those of the public sphere. It may puzzle some readers that Mendelson devotes three life-lesson commentaries to Woolf, particularly since her fictional trajectory anticipates her own suicide. But devotees of all of the authors examined will applaud Mendelson for reconnecting literary art and real life. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
Brilliant!
By Bruce Oksol
I echo Tom Casey's review below. I read some of these novels thirty years ago, and started re-reading them two years ago. What perfect timing, then, for Edward Mendelson's very interesting approach on these novels. On the surface this book does not appear to be the typical academic work it is, but each chapter on its own could have been a doctoral thesis. To tie these seven novels into passages of life is quite remarkable. In addition, footnotes, though infrequent, shed light on very important issues of the times that are easily overlooked. To enjoy this book one should have a fairly good knowledge of the novels. But you can read the essays in any order that you want; each essay stands alone. Highly, highly recommended.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Such an interesting read
By Armchair Interviews
"This book is about life as it is interpreted by books. Each of the chapters has a double subject: on the one hand, an English novel written in the nineteenth or twentieth century, and on the other, one of the great experiences or stages that occur, or can occur, in more or less everyone's life." These opening lines of Edward Mendelson's work of literary criticism - The Things That Matter - encapsulate his intent. A study of seven classical novels by Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Mendelson's essays present his thesis that novels provide insight into specific stages of life and, these novels, when viewed collectively present a "history of the emotional and moral life of the past two centuries."
Mendelson has aimed his work at readers of any age, the only prerequisite being knowledge of the seven novels. He writes in a conversational manner, as if lecturing directly to the reader. Theories and supporting arguments are presented within the text, footnotes included only when critical. Woven throughout is information about the prevailing theories and literary themes of the period.
In the section on Wuthering Height_s Mendelson explores Brontë's idea of romantic childhood, tracing its roots to the romanticism of Wordsworth and Freud. His _Wuthering Heights is a very different one than the one commonly studied in high school. Heathcliff and Catherine are desperate to recapture the total unity experienced as children, to merge two selves into one. Whereas the commonly held perception is of a novel of thwarted passion and cruelty, Mendelson believes Brontë deliberately led readers to this conclusion and away from her true meaning. "She disguised Wuthering Heights as a story of doomed sexual passion perhaps because she regarded her potential readers with something close to contempt...they could not understand what this book tells them."
Each of the authors is examined with the same focus, each essay meriting its own review. Mendelson states that he "could easily imagine a similar book to this one made up of entirely different examples."
I'll keep my fingers crossed that inspiration strikes and Mendelson shares more of his thoughts on life and literature.
Armchair Interviews agrees.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Meaning in novels
By C. Matthew Curtin
"This book is about life as it is interpreted by books."
So begins the introduction of Edward Mendelson's The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life. As a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, Mendelson has read and discussed many novels. What interests me more than his being well-read, though, is his approach to reading novels.
Novels, of course, present a world full of life and characters of their own and should be read to understand that world and those characters. Mendelson takes a view like my own, however: that novels are not meant to be read in vacuo. "A reader who identifies with the characters in a novel is not reacting in a naïve way that ought to be outgrown or transcended, but is performing one of the central acts of literary understanding."
When I began to read novels in earnest I was a bit late to the game; most of my unassigned reading while I was growing up was taken from the topics of the sciences and computers. Before I had entered my twenties I had achieved unusual proficiency in those areas, even for a specialist, but I was embarrassed by my ignorance of literature. Of course I had read the usual works covered in the public school system but no one had managed to impress upon me the value of novels. Consequently, it would be more correct to say that I skimmed the usual novels and I could regurgitate various facts about The Scarlet Letter, Lord of the Flies, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but they didn't mean much to me at the time. So instead I read The C Programming Language, TCP/IP Illustrated, and UNIX Programmers Reference. Even much of the history that I managed to read was for a rather specific topic, as was the case with The Codebreakers.
Rather than attempt to go through life hiding my ignorance of literature and constantly fearing its exposure, I decided to solve the real problem by actually reading novels and attempting to understand them. I started with some that I remembered enjoying in high school, such as Alas, Babylon. I then returned to The Scarlet Letter and branched out to things that I should have read but had managed to avoid and in the process discovered the likes of Jane Austen. Though my love of books was always present, it was in returning to the novel that my love of reading grew.
In The Things That Matter, Mendelson takes us on a tour of the stages of life, discussing each in turn as it is considered in one of the seven novels featured.
Birth
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)
Childhood
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë (1847)
Growth
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (1847)
Marriage
Middlemarch, George Eliot (1871-72)
Love
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (1925)
Parenthood
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (1927)
The Future
Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf (1941)
In Mendelson's capable hands, each of these novels is able to take on particular meaning. Not only are the events of the author and the historical context considered, as might be true in any literary criticism, but each is tied back to the stage of life that is the focus and what it means. In discussing meaning, Mendelson does not arrogantly push a pet theory on the reader. "Theories belong to science," he writes, "which relies on repeatable results that can be tested by experiment or refuted by fact..." Reading a novel is a personal experience and writing about novels is from an individual perspective.
Readers are invited explicitly to join in the dialogue, judging what is written for themselves, and considering meaning for themselves. Disagreement with the writer is the reader's prerogative. I love how Mendelson treats the situation. "I hope our disagreements, when they occur, can provide the comforts of both heat and light."
I enjoyed The Things That Matter thoroughly, as I'm sure will any reader who thinks of novels as worthy of reflection and consideration beyond what they mean to the author.
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