October 15, 2008
Fact into Fiction: How I Wrote The “Scandal of the Season”
Sophie G. Gee
Department of English, Princeton
Minutes of the Fifth Meeting of the 67th Year
The meeting was called to order by President George Hansen at 10:15 AM. After the invocation by Don Edwards, Nicholas Van Dyck read the minutes of the previous meeting, guests were introduced, and there was a reminder—to be repeated in future—of venues other than the Friend Center for these gatherings.
Ruth Miller then introduced our speaker, Sophie Gee, author of The Scandal of the Season. Professor Gee holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Sydney and a Ph,.D. from Harvard; she has been at Princeton since 2002, where she specializes in the literature of the 18th Century.
Professor Gee began by discussing how she turned nearly 10 years of academic research into an accessible (and, for this minute-taker, utterly captivating) novel. She wanted to tell, in prose, the “true” story of The Rape of the Lock, the great 18th Century mock-heroic poem by Alexander Pope. (1712). The poem itself is a stylized comedy of manners, e.g. an ironic, satirical look at a small enclosed social milieu. Such work is always narrated by an outsider of sorts, who is at the same time inside enough to be a close observer. Satires of this kind are, of course, also the stuff of Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh.
In The Rape of the Lock, Arabella Fermer, maiden of the upper-class, faints dead away when Lord Petre Baron snips a lock of her hair. Such an intimate gesture performed by a non-suitor is clearly a cause of temporary oblivion.
Professor Gee reminded her audience that the early 18th Century in England was bawdy, loose, profligate, diseased and glittering. She wanted to create, for her readers, the sense of being present at that time; to create how it sounded and looked in a kind of historical immersion. How to go about this? First, historical archives were there to be consulted. There was a now-forgotten author named Ned Ward who wrote for The London Spy, a paper which chronicled ribald, bawdy low-life accounts of his “contemporary” London. There was great social and sexual freedom in early 18th Century society: high-born women were allowed to receive male visitors in the morning in their bedrooms; widows, rich and free, could travel about without restraint, bath houses--where both sexes could come and bathe together naked—flourished, and there were the great masquerade balls of the 1720’s and 30’s, which were attended by 700 people at a time, and became such hotbeds (forgive the metaphor) of notoriety that they were banned eventually. They had ceased to exist by Jane Austen’s time, when rules of social control, the rise of the middle class, and codes of politeness had become entrenched. In Pope’s era, what probably also increased sexual freedom was the accepted aridity of many marriages, arranged and joyless, regarded as an absolute necessity for women who could not adopt a profession. One of the other great satirists of the age, Jonathan Swift, exhorted married couples to show no affection at all for each other, to “conceal your esteem.” Like all satire, near enough to the bone of the age to ring true.
How is it possible to write a novel comprised of nothing but the truth, which has as its goal not merely entertainment but placement of the reader in the social, emotional and cultural shoes of its characters?
If one is the wonderfully talented and highly intelligent Sophie Gee, one writes "The Scandal of the Season."
Respectfully submitted,
Claire R. Jacobus
Ruth Miller then introduced our speaker, Sophie Gee, author of The Scandal of the Season. Professor Gee holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Sydney and a Ph,.D. from Harvard; she has been at Princeton since 2002, where she specializes in the literature of the 18th Century.
Professor Gee began by discussing how she turned nearly 10 years of academic research into an accessible (and, for this minute-taker, utterly captivating) novel. She wanted to tell, in prose, the “true” story of The Rape of the Lock, the great 18th Century mock-heroic poem by Alexander Pope. (1712). The poem itself is a stylized comedy of manners, e.g. an ironic, satirical look at a small enclosed social milieu. Such work is always narrated by an outsider of sorts, who is at the same time inside enough to be a close observer. Satires of this kind are, of course, also the stuff of Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh.
In The Rape of the Lock, Arabella Fermer, maiden of the upper-class, faints dead away when Lord Petre Baron snips a lock of her hair. Such an intimate gesture performed by a non-suitor is clearly a cause of temporary oblivion.
Professor Gee reminded her audience that the early 18th Century in England was bawdy, loose, profligate, diseased and glittering. She wanted to create, for her readers, the sense of being present at that time; to create how it sounded and looked in a kind of historical immersion. How to go about this? First, historical archives were there to be consulted. There was a now-forgotten author named Ned Ward who wrote for The London Spy, a paper which chronicled ribald, bawdy low-life accounts of his “contemporary” London. There was great social and sexual freedom in early 18th Century society: high-born women were allowed to receive male visitors in the morning in their bedrooms; widows, rich and free, could travel about without restraint, bath houses--where both sexes could come and bathe together naked—flourished, and there were the great masquerade balls of the 1720’s and 30’s, which were attended by 700 people at a time, and became such hotbeds (forgive the metaphor) of notoriety that they were banned eventually. They had ceased to exist by Jane Austen’s time, when rules of social control, the rise of the middle class, and codes of politeness had become entrenched. In Pope’s era, what probably also increased sexual freedom was the accepted aridity of many marriages, arranged and joyless, regarded as an absolute necessity for women who could not adopt a profession. One of the other great satirists of the age, Jonathan Swift, exhorted married couples to show no affection at all for each other, to “conceal your esteem.” Like all satire, near enough to the bone of the age to ring true.
How is it possible to write a novel comprised of nothing but the truth, which has as its goal not merely entertainment but placement of the reader in the social, emotional and cultural shoes of its characters?
If one is the wonderfully talented and highly intelligent Sophie Gee, one writes "The Scandal of the Season."
Respectfully submitted,
Claire R. Jacobus