Wednesday, December 26, 2018

012 Prisoner of Chillon

As of December 26, 2018, the page for Byron's poem "The Prisoner of Chillon" does not yet mention the fact that there is an indirect allusion to it in Henry James's Daisy Miller (Miller and our protagonist Winterbourne visit the castle of Chillon in Geneva, and Winterbourne recounts the fate of Bonivard. Further evidence is provided later in the story that he is a Byron fan -- he recites aloud to himself (people are always doing this sort of thing in old novels) several lines from "Manfred" while waiting alone in the Colosseum at night. Perhaps all this is intended as an ironic commentary on the fact that Daisy Miller will be subjected to the same kind of fanatical persecution and ostracism that Byron's prisoner undergoes.)

011 Victor Cherbuliez

As of December 26, 2018, the page for 19th century French novelist Victor Cherbuliez does not yet mention his novel Paule Méré, despite the fact that there is an intriguing allusion to it in Henry James' Daisy Miller, which draws an oblique parallel between the persecution of Cherbuliez's heroine and that of James's.

Saturday, December 8, 2018

010 McLean Hospital

It's that famous hospital for wealthy Boston brahmins and literary types who have gone a little haywire in the head ("thoroughbred mental cases," as one of their number, Robert Lowell, once put it). But one of its former patients (fictional, in this case, but no less blue-blooded) who is not yet mentioned on the Wikipedia page (as of December 8, 2018) is Polly Perkins, from the great 1990 Whit Stillman film Metropolitan. Perkins is doubly fictional in this case, as she is made up by one of the characters (no, not made up, a "composite," he insists, "like they do in New York Magazine"), but in any case it is clearly stated that she -- addled debutante that she is -- did time in McLean.

022 Isaac Casaubon

As of August 21, 2023, the entry for the sixteenth century scholar (and namesake of a famous character in Eliot's Middlemarch ) Isaac Ca...