Google Book Settlement: The Lady and the Tiger

[purejuice]

The people on the Virginia Woolf listserv are all exercised about the Google book settlement.

I was listening the other day to the BBC Radio 4 serialized version of Clarissa (hot, throbbing, 18th century meats!) while painting the fathomless, seamless kitchen cabinets. There came a time in the narrative when the narrator told the story of the lady and the tiger. I always thought that was about choosing which door?* But it's about the well-born lady who was given a tiger cub, fed it with her own milk-white hands, and even when it reached a weight of 800 pounds, it followed her around the castle like a puppy.

One day it lept on her and dismembered her with its claws and teeth. With her dying breath, she said, But why?

The tiger said, It's my nature.

I first read this story, in a different version, about ferrying vipers across rivers on your back, in New York magazine ca. 1975. As far as I know, Richardson is its progenitor.

And the point is, how could Samuel Richardson be angry about having his story pass into general culture? Does he really want his estate to be paid every time somebody quotes him?

And, I am always just gobsmacked when scholars of the revolutionary Virginia reveal themselves to be autocratic snobs of the most repulsive Anglophiliac let's suck up to Oswald Mosley type. Holy shit. I've just been thinking about the incredibly marvelous virtues of Tokyo street fashion, Youtube, and the extraordinarily hip and nuanced commentary on the 2010 Go Fug Yourself Championship as examples of popular** culture at its finest. Democratic culture -- indeed, I think, all culture -- benefits from what hip-hop nation calls biting. High culture is also ravishing -- and Virginia is right up there; her diction would not exist without such predecessors and contemporaries as, say, Hakluyt, Mansfield, Eliot -- but the arrogance its acolytes confer upon themselves is repulsive.

Bite me and steal this book.
_____________
* There is a 19th century short story about choosing which door.

** But not libertarian, which is never chic; it's about acting out substance abuse and sex and sociopathological "rights". Part of chic is a willingness to give pleasure in public space, as part of the community.

Comments

[violetisblue.livejournal.com]

I read Pamela back in college and thought it was one of the funniest books I'd ever read, though I knew I wasn't meant to think that. (Shamela, Henry Fielding's parody, was also spot-on.) I haven't yet tackled Clarissa.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

see if you can catch the last two installments on radio 4 BBC listen again.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qfz6
it's just as filthy as pamela, and has been adapted to emphasize every prurient hook and eye.

[pomo-drunkard.livejournal.com]

I wrote kind of extensively on Pamela back last year (http://www.happyrobot.net/words/postModernDrunkard.asp?r=9708) when I tried to convince someone not to read it, except the more I talked about it, the funnier she thought the book was and the more she wanted to read it.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

i think it is fielding's point that pamela and clarissa are immortal because they're really, really dirty.

[pomo-drunkard.livejournal.com]

I much prefer Joseph Andrews, regardless.

[violetisblue.livejournal.com]

You've reminded me that I never did read Joseph Andrews! And I love Fielding. Thank you. *makes mental note to head to the library*

[minniethemoocha.livejournal.com]

"The Lady or the Tiger" was the name of the short story. Author was Frank Stockton. Required reading in my 7th grade class, for what reason I can't recall.