Hogan/DeadWomenTalking/ScandalinBohemia

Today I read the next fifty pages of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit. I must say that I felt that this section of the novel is treading water a little bit. The divisions between the white and Indian communities are becoming more and more extreme as the ecological devastation intensifies. The severity of the situation is exemplified by two incidents. First, when a group of white men are shooting a colony of bats because they see them as a rabies threat, Belle Graycloud takes an armed stand against the men and is soon joined by other Indians in what is clearly a ‘drawing a line in the sand’ moment. While this line is being drawn another is being erased, so to speak, when the Hill People decide to hide the path to their community, partly because they feel that too many people are finding their way to it, and partly because the situation in Watona is worsening to the extent that they see the town as a form of contagion. These developments are a continuation and intensification of a situation Hogan has been describing for the past 100 pages or so, and there’s a danger that it’s becoming a little repetitive.

I also read the next fifty pages of Brian Norman’s Dead Women Talking. Interestingly, Norman’s first two detailed examples of the phenomenon of dead women talking, Madeline Usher from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Miss Jessel from Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” do not actually talk (and in Madeline’s case, are not even dead)! Although Norman makes an interesting case for why these two characters should be considered as precursor figures in his study, he’s on much more solid ground when he proceeds to a discussion of Addie Bundren in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Alice Walker’s search for the gravesite of Zora Neale Hurston. The emphasis remains on how dead women posthumously insist upon their citizenship rights in a community of which they continue to see themselves as active members and on how this insistence on citizenship is potentially reparative: “The literary tradition of dead women talking…holds the power to correct such injustices through a concrete means by which to commune with the dead, especially the forgotten, misremembered, or improperly buried.”

As I’m teaching Conan Doyle again shortly, I also watched the Jeremy Brett incarnation of Sherlock Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia". One of the nice things about Benedict Cumberbatch’s phenomenally popular reinvention of Holmes in "Sherlock" is that it is so different from Brett’s version that I can enjoy both of them without feeling like I have to choose between them.  Brett’s Holmes is, of course, the more traditionally ‘faithful’ adaptation of the two (a fact cleverly alluded to in the opening credits of “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” at those moments when the live action shot pauses and turns into a sepia-colored old photograph) with its lovingly detailed recreation of late-Victorian London, but of course there are still significant differences between Doyle’s story and this version of “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Some of the changes are nothing more than mere padding (for example, the annoyingly pointless flashback scenes showing Irene Adler and the King of Bohemia when they were happily in love) but others work far better, as when we get to see Brett show off his acting skills in his impersonations of the disreputable groomsman and the kindly priest, episodes that are merely described by Holmes rather than shown in the original story.