Jessica Witte on Volume 2 of *Barchester Towers*

           As we have discussed in class, realistic works often “push into” other genres, leading us to question what, exactly, defines the genre of realism.  Volume 2 of Barchester Towers can be characterized as a realistic melodrama that functions as a satirical commentary on the social rules governing Victorian society in general and Barchester clerical society in particular.  The drama, originating from Mr. Slope’s letter to Eleanor Bold containing improper content, develops in Chapter 28.  The Grantlys, Mr. Harding, and Mr. Arabin (or the “Grantlyites”) falsely interpret this correspondence as a sign that Mrs. Bold will soon become Mrs. Slope.  Because none of the characters is able to straightforwardly confront Eleanor, the rumor--which “one word” could have “cleared up” immediately--spirals out of control, increasing both the characters’ concern for her future and the novel’s melodrama (Chp. 28).

  

           In his letter, Mr. Slope refers to Eleanor’s son as “my darling little friend Johnny” who pulls on his mother’s “beautiful long silken tresses” (Chp. 27).  While this intimate correspondence makes Eleanor “nauseous,” it merely confirms her family’s suspicion that the two are planning to be married (Chp. 28).  This creates a dramatic irony wherein readers know that Eleanor has not tried to “encourage” Mr. Slope’s behavior, while the characters at Plumstead believe the opposite (28).  Within the strict rules governing nineteenth-century decorum, it would indeed be suspect for a single clergyman to address a widow in such a manner.  However, the narrator acknowledges that Mr. Slope “could not be expected” to understand the impropriety of his letter, suggesting a disconnect between middle- and upper-middle-class social norms (Chp. 27).  While the Grantlys and Proudies earn upper-class salaries typical of the clerical elite, Mr. Slope is a parvenu whom the former do not consider a true gentleman.  

         At the same time, the narrator also presents a satirical commentary upon Mr. Slope’s inability to “practice what he preaches”; as a purported Christian, Slope pursues the married Madame Neroni and manipulates everyone around him using the cowardly method of writing letters.  Excluded from the clerical elite both socially and (as the narrator suggests) ethically, Mr. Slope would not understand why his correspondence with Mrs. Bold is both odious and inappropriate.  In the Grantly’s world—which rests on the moderation of change—the only acceptable relationship to the low-church zealotry represented by the Proudie/Slope faction is one of pure disgust and rejection. 

           Furthermore, the narrator notes that Eleanor “[fails] to see that much more had been intended than was expressed” in Mr. Slope’s letter (Chp. 28).  Here, the narrator references her angelic nature as the perfect Victorian woman, a complete foil to Madame Neroni, the female sexual predator of the novel.  While Madame Neroni, the “noxious siren,” can “in no way live without catching flies” (men), Eleanor appears, at least in Chapter 28, innocent of coquetry and ignorant about the ways of men (Chp. 27).  However, we know this is not true; as a widow, Eleanor has a greater knowledge of men than perhaps she lets on.  

         

           Nevertheless, she is in the middle chapters that comprised the novel’s original second volume , too pure and meek to fully understand Mr. Slope’s designs, yet none of the characters take it upon themselves to discuss the gravity of his letter with her.  Even Mr. Harding’s “authority” over Eleanor “ceased when she became the wife of John Bold,” and he wishes to leave his daughter to her own choices (Chp. 28).  While young women without husbands are generally subjected to their fathers’ will, Mrs. Bold possesses a certain kind of freedom to freely judge on her own.  However, Dr. and Mrs. Grantly and the rest of the Grantlyites attempt to dissuade her from her correspondence with Mr. Slope.  Although Eleanor “greatly dislike[s]” Mr. Slope, she also believes that the Grantlyits are “prejudiced and illiberal in their persecution of him,” and so refuses to participate in the “persecution” of him (28).  Eleanor’s independent morality, rather than her purported affection for Mr. Slope, fuels the rumors, allowing the melodrama to continue. 

           At the same time, Eleanor’s innocence prevents her from defending herself against the rumors.  At dinner at Plumstead, the narrator describes Eleanor’s response to the “elephant in the room”:

She felt that she had been tried and found guilty of something; though she knew not what.  She longed to say to them all, ‘Well, what is it that I have done?  out with it, and let me know m crime; for heaven’s sake let me hear the worst of it; but she could not.  She could say nothing, but sat there silent, half feeling that she was guilty...” (28).

If only Eleanor could have asked these questions she raises internally!  However, as the narrator later acknowledges, “but then where would have been my novel?” (28).  The melodrama surrounding the potential Mrs. Slope extends into the final volume, sustaining its satirical purpose.  Ironically, it is Eleanor’s adherence to Christian morality that perpetuates the drama.  At this point, she can only quell the rumors that she will be married to Mr. Slope by falling into what she sees as Proudie/Grantlyite hypocrisy and condemning the young clergyman, allowing the “war” to continue between the two factions.

Sam Plasencia, "Taxonomies of Gender and Class in *True Detective*, Season 1, Episode 4, 'Who Goes There?'"

As we’ve discussed so far, Marty Hart is a character deeply invested in exerting and maintaining control. For example Jessica Witte has aptly argued that Marty “idealizes women who passively submit to men” and thus can only interpret women “within the virgin/whore dichotomy” (Witte)  As Aaron Burstein adds, Marty also attempts to rigidly compartmentalize his life, his “‘master threat’ … is the risk that his detective life, his home life, and his life of sexual infidelity bleed into one another” (Burstein) I’d like to build on Witte and Burstein’s commentary by suggesting that there is a significant class dynamic at play in these divisions.

The opening sequence visually compartmentalizes images along class lines. The very first image is a long shot of an industrialized horizon and unkempt grassland on either side of the foreground. This field is bifurcated by a clearing marked with tire impressions, a make-shift road that visually drives the viewer—watching from the safety and comfort of their private homes—towards the smoggy public world of what appears to be a single, geographically expansive factory campus. It’s significant here to consider the show’s intended viewership. HBO is a premium cable channel, a subscription-based service that can cost viewers anywhere from fifteen to twenty dollars a month. Illegal downloading and rental access aside, the original intended viewer is presumably one who can afford this added luxury above and beyond regular cable service, which itself is already expensive. Consequently the viewer’s perspectival plunge is more than just a shift from private to public; this ocular route takes them towards a different—and threatening—kind of private, the industrialized private of the underclasses; a world without the privileged illusion of compartmentalization.

Thus the second image is a close up of the factory from an angle showing that it is located right behind a ranch style house. In this image the backyard, a geographic appendage to the “domestic” and idealized by the middle class as a protective space of childhood innocence, is occupied by industry. The opening credit sequence is jarring to middle-class viewers precisely for such spherical collapses. It takes us into the world Marty seeks refuge from every night.

The gender dynamic of these juxtaposed images is also significant for thinking about Marty’s masculinity. In the first “public” image Marty’s face is enlarged, faded to look ghost-like and translucently superimposed over the cityscape, his head tilted and facing down as though protectively keeping watch over it. In the second “domestic” image the enlarged and superimposed picture is of a woman, centered and faded into the background as though part of the scene, and thus implicitly part of what Marty surveils. This contrast frames Marty Hart as paternalistic, a white, middle-class cop attempting to control an implicitly criminal rural poor. As such, the opening credits visually and metaphorically position Marty (and the 1995 cops) as guards against what might be called the “master threat” to characters in fictional nineteenth-century country towns such as Middlemarch and Barchester.  To borrow an insight from Elizabeth Edwards’ The Camera as Historian (2012) the “forces of [a] disordered modernity” continual threaten “cultural and material disappearance” (82).

Taken as a whole, the opening sequence emphasizes these parallels. As Witte notes, the female silhouettes overwhelmingly “suffer a voyeuristic dismemberment which the male silhouettes do not.” The men (all white) remain both whole and fully dressed, personifying the show’s cops with their clean shaven faces and neat but not too fancy suits. Moreover they’re repeatedly superimposed in authoritative ways. Like Marty in the first image, some are spatially positioned above the scenes of rural poverty and shambolic industrial development. Others are centered, standing stern, upright and visually foregrounded, thereby given literal prominence over scenes of industry. Their masculine, shaven faces aesthetically contrast them from the dreary and derelict images of rural Louisiana and its residents.

Moreover, their clean, neat suits are part of a material hermeneutic that, as Edwards notes, morally contrasts them, as material products of the middle class, from the material products of the criminal cityscape: women’s dismembered and half-naked bodies. These contrasts establish a class, gender, and racial dichotomy between the paternally authoritative, white, middle class cops and the racially diverse underclasses they desperately attempt to contain. What is at stake in Marty’s compartmentalization then, is the very existence of the private, of a material space—a locked room—away from the entropic forces of modernity.

Episode 4, “Who Goes There?,” finds these entropic forces finally collapsing the largely illusionary boundaries between Marty’s lives. As he bemoans his situation to Rust, Marty admits that he “fucked up” with Lisa and explains, “I like something wild, I always did, just it feels like it slews out the other parts of my life.” Marty’s use of the term “slew” reinforces his interpretation of Lisa as seductively wild, but violent and uncontrollable; the disordered modern force that destroyed his marital culture and the material configuration of his domestic space. And yet it’s quite telling that Maggie blames another modern configuration for their demise, what Weber called the iron cage.   

When Rust tells Marty that his meeting with Maggie went well—that he could see them back together in three months—he does so presumably for the same reason he tries to convince Maggie that everyone makes mistakes: because he needs Marty to have his back on their rogue undercover mission. For his life, and I’m sure he would say for the greater good, he sets Marty up for inevitable devastation. He does exactly what Marty does when he justifies his affair as a release valve, exactly what Maggie accuses him of: “at the end of the day” he “tuck[s] under rationalization, same as any of them.”

The phrase “at the end of the day” and the term “tuck” are significant because they conjure the image of sleeping, of tucking into the domestic bed that’s already polluted by the rational calculation of the public world. This language suggests that for Maggie it is not the criminal cityscape—the entropic forces of modernity—that destroyed their “cultural and material” domestic. Instead she suggests, it’s the system of rational control that’s poison.

This is perhaps most clear in the abrupt scene shift from Marty’s desperate attempt to get Maggie on the phone in 1995, to his contemporary account of the Dora case, in which he admits he made mistakes. In 1995 Marty is shaking, his breath heavy and erratic as he begs Maggie’s father to put her on the phone. The desperation of a man who needs to feel in control and has lost it materializes in his kicking the suitcases and verbally threatening Lisa with sexual assault. When the scene shifts to 2012 Marty admits, “did I make some mistakes? Yes, you know the detective’s curse? Solution is right under my nose but I was paying attention to the wrong clues?”

Although Marty is technically referencing the murder case, the abrupt shift between seemingly incongruent scenes function like the photo archives Edwards discusses, a system of material ordering that gives the parts being ordered new meaning. Had the two scenes not immediately followed each other, they would have told another story. But their compilation encourages us to read them together and consider how one gives meaning to the other. As such, it suggests that just as in the Dora case, in his marriage Marty was focusing on the wrong clues. It’s not the entropic forces of modernity (Lisa) that destroy the material configuration of his domestic world, but rather the bureaucratic rational control he attempts to impose on it. A taxonomy that concentrates the power in his male hands at Maggie’s direct expense.

Aaron Burstein, "Hart’s Three Lives in *True Detective*, Season 1, Episode 3, 'The Locked Room'"

Marty Hart’s attempts to compartmentalize the various aspects of his personal and professional life are among his greatest failings. Although episode three of True Detective is titled “The Locked Room,” the truth of the matter is that no room is ever definitively locked; a worldview continuously reflected in the Hart-Cohle dichotomy. Hart values surfaces and tangibility, causing him to resist Rust Cohle’s intensely analytic tendencies, which direct the two detectives into unsettling, uncomfortable truths. At the close of episode two, Cohle alludes to some “secret truth of the universe” that the case pushes toward. He conflates violent impulses with the fundamental natures of human existence.

These impulses are not specifically reserved for killers and sadists, however. Both Hart and Cohle’s will-to-violence is emphasized by the series. Cohle references the void-like years of HIDTA deep cover and Hart repeatedly displays reckless fits of rage. While Cohle appears to have repressed his anger through radical nihilism, Hart’s anger is always a response to a perceived threat. The primary “master threat” so-to-speak, is the risk that his detective life, his home life, and his life of sexual infidelity bleed into one another. It begins in the previous episode when Cohle deduces Hart is cheating on his wife, thus linking Hart’s detective life with his infidelity.

In episode three, this link spiders out in two major ways. The first occurs when Cohle mows Hart’s lawn. It is an innocuous chore and gesture, which makes it all the more threatening to Hart. Cohle’s life, work, and worldview are entirely symbiotic with his position as detective. His apartment is virtually unfurnished, and he does nothing in his spare time, opting instead to study the case all night because he is unable to sleep. He even remarks in episode two, “I can’t say the job made me this way. Rather, being this way made me right for the job.” Cohle, who completely embodies the detective life through his mere existence, breaches the boundary of Hart’s domicile without Hart’s permission by mowing the lawn. To Hart, these boundaries are critical. Hart even diagnoses Cohle’s behavior further along in the episode, stating “I think Rust needed a family. It’s boundaries. Boundaries are good.” It’s an ineffectually paternalistic sentiment made significant by how incongruous it is with Hart’s family life, which is clearly unraveling.

The second threat to Hart’s structure of identity occurs at the bar. To Hart, this threat is much more immediate and sinister, since the primary subjects of his three lives, Cohle, Maggie, and Lisa, are all present at the same location, in public no less. Maggie even sets Cohle up on a date, simultaneously predicting and echoing Hart’s belief that Cohle needs a family. The sequence culminates with Hart becoming drunk and violent. He confronts Lisa, follows her home, breaks into her house and assaults her date. Hart tries expressing ownership over Lisa’s sexuality as a backlash to the forced realization that it is something he cannot own. And that is perhaps the heart of the matter. In order for Hart to sufficiently compartmentalize his existence, he must express absolute control. This impossible end is further complicated by Hart’s seeming inability to empathize with those around him.

On a formal level, Hart’s lack of self-control and his excess of self-centeredness ties into the show’s broader arc. It’s no coincidence that episode three is also the episode most bound up in religious subject matter, at least up to that point in the series. Cohle demonstrates a worldview somewhat akin to New Atheism, in which religion isn’t only seen as false, but actively harmful. On the subject of Christianity and human exceptionalism, Cohle contends, “Such a desperate sense of entitlement… ‘Surely this is all for me.’” Cohle responds by arguing the smallness of humanity, an idea which other characters resist. Although Hart’s life does not explicitly represent this vast philosophical/existential dread, it does speak to a violation of Hart’s casual solipsism. Even though Hart tries to separate and block off the people that surround him, Lisa does not disappear when he is with his wife, his family does not disappear when he is at work, and so forth. Hart’s behavior becomes metonymic of human self-importance.

While driving through the isolated Louisiana countryside, Cohle remarks to Hart, “It’s like they don’t know the outside world exists.” But in spite of this amplified provinciality in the rural South, the setting pushes toward a quintessential conception of Americana. And even though Hart is deeply flawed, he is the everyman character within the structure of the series. While Cohle’s cool passivity and rationality may make him the more identifiable character in the face of Hart’s glaring faults, the show obscures certain realities of viewership. In normalizing Cohle’s alien nature, the audience is encouraged to forget they are actually the everyman, to forget that the outside world exists. 

Sam Plasencia on Volume 1 of *Barsetshire Towers*

In the “Trollopian Form” cluster Lauren Goodlad builds off John Carlos Rowe’s work to suggest that “‘Finediscriminations’ offers an interesting perspective on Trollope in formal as well as characterological terms” (851). For example, Carolyn Dever’s “Trollope,Seriality, and the ‘Dullness’ of Form” suggests that fine discriminations are “embedded in the narration of contingencies” (Goodlad 852). She argues that Trollope utilizes “narratively-fascinating, counterfactural, ‘embryo’ plots” to create suspense by “situating narrative tension within individual psyches that are tested by the uncertain expectations of social modernity” (863). I’d like to suggest that another formal fine discrimination is Trollope’s revised mock-up of the omniscient narrator.

Unlike readers and the characters they recount, omniscient narrators are not subject to the rules of time. While species and languages are “fundamentally temporal processes, capable only of retrospective” analysis, if omniscient narrators so wish they may foreshadow the coming events in the narrative, or explicitly reference them (Grosz 27). For example, in detailing one of Mr. Slope and Eleanor’s first meetings Trollope’s narrator notes that although at first Slope genuinely “ingratiated himself” to Mrs. Bold to win favor with the ladies of the town and not to woo her, “He subsequently amended his error; but it was not till after the interview between him and Mr. Harding” (124). Such “prospective” details make sense within the generic conventions of realism, which tend to narrate a fictive story that took place in the recent past (Grosz 27). From this perspective it is not surprising that Trollope’s narrator could disclose the ending of the Eleanor-Slope-Stanhope “embryo” plot from its very conception, asserting that he “would not for the value of this chapter have it believed by a single reader that my Eleanor could bring herself to marry” either man (144).

But such a reading of Barchester Towers’ narratorial realism depends on Trollope’s narrator chronicling the events from outside the narrative world, an omniscient perspective entirely free from the restrictions of time, place, and the insulated human mind, which his POV is not. Although for the most part the speaker appears omniscient, there are consistent narratorial ruptures that call attention to his corporeality and as such, his temporal and informational limits.

Some of these textual moments expose the limits of the narrator’s contextual and characterological knowledge. Unlike the narrator of the Palliser novels, who details the intricacies of Parliament, this narrator admits that he does “not precisely understand [the] nature” of the religious ceremonies for Dr. Proudie’s ascension to bishop, and therefore “will not describe the ceremony” (18). Of Mr. Slope’s parentage’s he admits “I am not able to say much,” and begins what short background he provides with “I have heard it asserted that…” (25). When describing the bishop’s participation in a Sunday school society, the narrator can’t seem to recall his exact role and explains that he was “a patron, or president, or director” (36). At other moments he qualifies the details of the narrative, as when he says “Mr. Slope ought to have been gratified. I have reason to think that he was gratified” (48 emphasis mine). 

Other moments contradict his omniscience by drawing attention to his temporal limits. He establishes a pattern of a present tense perspective early in the narrative when he explains that “of Mr. Slope’s conduct much cannot be said, as his grand career is yet to commence; but it may be premised that his tastes will be very different from those of the archdeacon” (31). Unlike his definitive disclosure of Eleanor’s ill-fated love affairs, this is a proposition about future narrative events based on a present temporality that necessarily excludes prospective analysis (Grosz). The narrator reinforces this POV in reference to the leading clergy’s debate, saying “such a meeting as that we have just recorded is not held in such a city as Barchester unknown and untold of” (59 emphasis mine). Later, at the opening of Chapter IX, the narrator locates himself in the present-tense of the narrative world, explaining “It is now three months since Dr. Proudie began his reign” (69). In these moments the narrator positions himself in the present tense, relating events as they are happening instead of recounting them from an already materialized future. In one instance the narrator is so present that he decides, “while [Eleanor is out of the room adjusting her cap] we will briefly go back and state what had been hitherto the results of Mr. Slope’s meditations on his scheme of matrimony” (146). And yet he uses the reader’s understanding of his omniscience to bait their continued investment in the narrative, as when he explains that Mrs. Bold’s father and sister falsely believe her to be interested in Mr. Slope, and writes “Poor Eleanor! But time will show” (132). As readers of a realist novel, we inherently trust that time will show, and implicitly agree to keep reading.

At the heart of such limits is the narrator’s corporeal presence in Barchester and his familiarity with its residents. This is most clearly seen when—eliding the difference between character/narrator and past/present—the narrator speaks from the temporal moment of the incendiary sermon and embodies the Grantly party perspective in a direct internal address to Mr. Slope,

With what complacency will a young parson deduce false conclusions from misunderstood texts, and then threaten us with all the penalties of hades if we neglect to comply with the injunctions he has given us! Yes, my too self-confident juvenile friend, I do believe in those mysteries, which are so common in your mouth; I do believe in the unadulterated word which you hold there in your hand; but you must pardon me if, in some things, I doubt your interpretation. (53)

We know the narrator is personally familiar with Mr. Slope because he exclaims “I myself do not like Mr. Slope” (62), and admits “I never could endure to shake hands with Mr. Slope. A cold, clammy perspiration always exudes from him, the small drops are ever to be seen standing on his brow, and his friendly grasp is unpleasant” (29). These are first-hand accounts that push on the boundaries of omniscient narration.

The narrator also locates himself in Barchester’s past by displaying a long established familiarity with residents. For example he claims that Madeline Stanhope’s “nose and mouth and teeth and chin and neck and bust were perfect, much more so at twenty-eight than they had been at eighteen,” suggesting that he has known her for at least ten years (74). In another moment he explains that “there was a depth of dark clear brightness in [Eleanor’s] eyes which was lost upon a quick observer,” implying he had been an attentive observer (145). While such descriptions might not raise eyebrows in the context of omniscient narration, because the narrator has already established himself as a corporeal person in this narrative world—for certain intents and purposes, as a character in this story—such moments carry more weight, and provide a glimpse at the narrator’s interiority and past.

Given his contingent status as character, perhaps it is understandable that the narrator differentiates himself from “the author” (72). At times they appear as co-writers of this narrative, such as when he writes “we need not say had been, she was never more beautiful” (74). At other times they’re united in perspective, like when the narrator explains that Mr. Harding “did not hate the chaplain as the archdeacon did, and as we do” (171). In yet other instances the narrator seems to speak on the author’s behalf, informing the reader that “here the author must beg it to be remembered” (136).

But in a very significant instance the two come together as the reader’s friendly counsel and guide through this narrative, a perspective that self-consciously defines the purpose of reading realism. In the last pages of Chapter 15 “The Widow’s Suitors,” the narrator asks if “it may be allowed to the novelist to explain his views on a very important point in the art of telling tales” (144). Speaking on their behalf, the narrator directs plot-invested readers to the novel’s “last chapter” to “learn from its pages all the results of our troubled story,” maintaining that

…the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed there by any interest in it to lose. Our doctrine is, that the author and reader should move along together in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe is never dignified. (144)

By aligning the novel reader with the privileged perspective of a spectator at a performance of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, the narrator argues that to get caught up in the individual [love] plots is as foolish as inhabiting the limited perspective of the dramatic characters who “mistake the [twin] Syracusan for the Ephesian.” The interest in reading this novel, he suggests, is in observing the plot—a comedy of errors—from the removed (ad)vantage of a theatergoer, one who can appreciate the whole precisely because one's perspective is not narrowly invested in the parts.

And yet such a definition of how and why to read realism implies an already complete, teleological text that’s narrated from the whole—the comedy’s—perspective; an insular POV that’s necessarily retrospective or omniscient. Neither of these perspectives correlates with the friendly embodied narrator-guide whom the reader “move[s] along” with in the present, a temporality from which “full confidence” necessarily excludes the future, and thus the whole. In publishing terms, to read (the comedy) like a theatergoer necessitates a complete novel, to “move along” the story “together” with the “author” necessitates a serial publication.

The author/narrator in Barchester Towers is at once the omniscient speaker and the corporeal, present character, a temporal marriage of novel and serial that like the embryo plots, is Trollope “hav[ing] his cake and eat[ing] it too” (Dever 864). Like an omniscient narrator, he is (mostly) all knowing and can jump from scene to scene, allowing us (mostly) full access to character thoughts and motivations. His realistic attributes (like his hatred of Slope) resonates with readers, investing us in his continued development. The narrator, with his perspectival limitations and personal biases, becomes our narrative guide with whom we “move along together in full confidence.” This narratorial “fine discrimination” “teach[es] us how to read culture” in two ways: as an author/narrator he cultivates and as a character he models an interpretive empathy “capable of understanding and interpreting the different and often overlapping ‘interests’” in social discourse (Rowe as quoted in Goodlad 851).

Jessica Witte, "The “Donna Reed Type": True Detective’s Woman Problem (Season 1, Episode 2)

            Episode 2 of True Detective is appropriately titled “Seeing Things”; while Rust hallucinates visually, Marty suffers from ideological delusions about women due to his attachment to the paradigmatic nuclear family.  This becomes clear both during and after the men’s interview with Dora’s mother, Mrs. Kelly, at the beginning of the episode.  Disconcerted by Mrs. Kelly’s migraine attack and ruined fingernails, Marty describes her as a “piece of work.”  Mrs. Kelly, who “worked in dry cleaning for 20 years” as a single mother to support her daughter, is the complete opposite of Marty’s “Donna Reed type” mother.  Marty fondly recalls how his mother “packed lunches” and “[read] bedtime stories” as the quintessential mid-century housewife.  In idealizing this cultural lie about the nuclear family, Marty also idealizes women who passively submit to men.  In other words, Marty can only accept the virginal woman within the virgin/whore dichotomy.

            So, who is a virgin and who is whore on True Detective?  Although not biologically “virgins,” the virginal women on the show rarely (if ever) appear outside of a Donna Reed- or June Cleaver-approved domestic setting, like the kitchen or the living room.  On the other hand, the “whores”—who are literally prostitutes—appear in public places, such as truck stops and bars.  Perhaps the only exception to this rule within this episode is the Kathleen, Marty’s “little vixen” secretary responsible for little more than making coffee.  Her unquestionably subordinate role in the office is in this way acceptable within the sphere of masculinity, and she can remain a “virgin.”  And, although Mrs. Kelly admits to working outside the home in the past, she appears in her living room during the episode.  Additionally, her fingernails--a classic symbol of femininity--were destroyed due to her work.  Is this her punishment for transgressing against the nuclear family by becoming her own breadwinner?              

            The episode shifts from the world of the virgins to the realm of the whores when Marty and Rust follow the trail of clues to “The Ranch.”  Here, we begin to learn the true extent of Marty’s delusional ideas about female sexuality.  He assumes that the young prostitute, a friend of the late Dora, is underage, and perhaps she is; the madam neither confirms nor denies Marty’s accusation.  However, it is clear that something besides the suspect legality of the young girl’s employment motivates his anger.  As the madam remarks, women “[screw] for free” all the time, but men are only threatened when women mix “business” in with sex.  While the “virgins” in this episode occupy an approved submissive relationship with men, the “whores” use their sexuality to exploit men financially.  In other words, female sexuality is permitted provided that men can “own,” or control, it.

            Marty’s relationship with his mistress, Lisa, is a particularly shocking example of masculine attempt to own female sexuality.  Lisa cannot be anything other than Marty’s sex object, and he even rebukes her for going out with her friends (or having a life of her own).  In an attempt to convince Lisa to stay home, away from the bars where she could “keep her options open” and perhaps “meet a nice man,” thus rejecting her role as his sex object, Marty warns her that a murderer is on the loose.  Although this could be interpreted as concern for Lisa, she does not live a high-risk lifestyle, and so it is unlikely that she will become the murderer’s next victim.  As Rust remarks earlier in the episode, “[Dora] was just an easy target” for the killer as a drug addict and prostitute.  So, Marty’s seemingly innocuous remark becomes a threat to his “virginal” mistress that, if she continues to rebel against his wishes, she will become nothing more than a “whore.” 

            While this episode focuses mainly on Marty’s treatment of women, it is seemingly unclear whether the other male characters share his views.  Rust, unlike Marty, appears indifferent to sex; he refuses advances from prostitutes and never discusses women other than his ex-wife.  However, Rust violently confronts Marty about his affair.  What motivates this confrontation?  Is it Rust’s alluded-to attraction to Maggie and his desire to possess her for himself, or is he truly repulsed by Marty’s behavior on moral grounds?  We need only consider the opening credits of the show to understand that Marty’s beliefs about women are, in fact, the series’ as well.  The images presented during this minute-and-a-half sequence depict human silhouettes overlaid with scenic images of rural Louisiana.  While the male silhouettes wear business attire, the female silhouettes are half- or totally naked.  Furthermore, the female silhouettes suffer a voyeuristic dismemberment which the male silhouettes do not.  Viewers might recall the particularly striking image of a woman crouching in such a way that only her buttocks and spiked stilettos--which appear to be sadistically digging into her flesh--are visible.  Her dismembered lower half is overlaid with scenery in such a way that she herself becomes a “frame,” signifying that women in True Detective must be like Donna Reed and fade, like the scenery, into the background.

            Perhaps “The Ranch” presents an alternative to female repression within the series.  The ranch women live in an isolated, matriarchal commune, whose only contact with men is to exploit them financially as customers.  As soon as we consider the connotations of the word ranch, though, we lose hope that this any type of “matriarchy” could exist within the series.  Just like cattle, the women of “The Ranch” are simply supplying a market-driven demand for “meat.”  Additionally, the protected communal status the women enjoy is only possible due to the sheriff, who uses his power within patriarchal society to permit the male-serving community to illegally exist.  Unfortunately, then, the women of True Detective are finally condemned to submissive secondary roles behind the men of the police department, virgins and whores alike suffering a “dismemberment.”

Emma Dent, "Surface, Depth, and the Materiality of Language in Balzac’s *Domestic Peace*"

      The narrator of Balzac’s Domestic Peace wastes little time, making clear that the “incident” he now commits to print “took place towards the end of the month of November, 1809, the moment when Napoleon’s fugitive empire attained the apogee of its splendor.”  The narrator not only quickly isolates the specific year in which these as-yet-unknown events unfolded, but also encapsulates the decadent spirit of the period in question, one marked by an “unbridled mania for everything glittering.”  Yet despite his seemingly confessional tone, our guide decidedly conceals as much as he evokes in these opening paragraphs.  Who exactly is this person speaking to us, in whom we must place at least a minim of trust?  The obvious choice is Balzac himself, particularly given that the story is dedicated to his niece Valentine Surville.  However, this concrete connection to the “real world” does not necessarily confirm Balzac as the narrator. 

The ambiguity of the circumstances surrounding the tale extends beyond the narrator’s identity.  The temporal relationship between Domestic Peace’s enigmatic chronicler and the events he records remains unknown until the story’s end.  Punctuated with the stamp of “July, 1829,” the conclusion resolves the issue of historical vantage, yet other questions linger unanswered.  Shrouded still from readers are the nature of the narrator’s motives and his position within “the incidents of the little imbroglio.”  Readers thus enter into a world of uncertainties, at once armed with information and disarmed by its absence. This immediate but subtle disarmament, however, will prove to be somewhat instructive as we fully enter the narrative’s action.  Indeed, it triggers a kind of necessary vigilance in the reader, suggesting that one’s absorption of the events and their constituent players would benefit from sharp, even skeptical, eyes. 

Tellingly, it is the mention of those vital organs that fully transports us from the narrator’s prefatory remarks to the episode itself.  “Turn your eyes a little towards the pedestal supporting that candelabrum,” demands an unknown voice introduced simply as the “first speaker.”  This request is as much for the speaker’s partner in conversation as it is for the reader.  Offered an unspoken invitation, the reader becomes yet another attendee at Comte de Gondreville’s luxurious fete.  As participant-observers in this affair, graced by the likes of Baron de la Roche-Hugon, Colonel Montcornet, Madame de Vaudremont, and Comte and Comtesse de Soulanges, our need for perceptual vigilance becomes essential. 

In The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, scholar Peter Brooks writes that “there is always a moment in Balzac’s descriptions of the world where the eye’s photographic registration of objects yields to the mind’s effort to pierce surface, to interrogate appearances” (2).  Indeed, Domestic Peace registers the play of surface and depth to which Brooks points.  For the ball at the center of the story is both exactly what it professes to be - a frivolous affair of mingling, drinking, and dancing – and much more.  In navigating the labyrinthine interactions of the story’s principal players, we come to view the soiree also as an engagement pregnant with sobering consequences: extramarital liaisons exposed, marriages on the brink of dissolution, fortunes secured and lost, and reputations ruined.  In Balzac’s hands, the Comte’s social gathering is really a theatre of social intrigue, one whose actors and actions require the discriminating attention of readers in order to divine.

 Yet as we mine Balzac’s work à la Brooks, we cannot help but marvel at the sheer materiality of the writer’s language.  Domestic Peace is a veritable feast of surfaces, a sharp-edged prism of shifting reflections (appearances, gestures, etc…) not unlike the sparkling diamond whose possession changes hands over the course of the evening.  Throughout the story, Balzac consistently draws our attention to the superficial, palpably rendering the exteriors of objects and of people, vis-à-vis facial expressions and body language.  Although positioned underneath a “huge candelabrum,” the “little blue lady” whose presence ignites the curiosity of Colonel and Martial remains obscured at the story’s opening.  Thus, while she rests near the candelabrum’s flame, her identity as the Comtesse de Soulanges has yet to fully, as one might say, “come to light.”  In this instance, Balzac suggests that light does not always provide clarity, neither for the readers nor for the characters.  In other moments, however, light illumines that which the actors most wish to camouflage: emotions, secrets, motives, etc…  At one point, Balzac writes: “the chandeliers and the flambeaux on the chimney-shelf shed such a flood of light on the two friends that their faces, strongly illuminated, failed, in spite of their diplomatic discretion, to conceal the faint expression of their feelings either from the keen-sighted countess or the artless stranger.”  Here, light not only animates the two men’s physical forms, but also makes public the nature of their clandestine conversation to potentially deleterious effects. 

Immediately following this aforementioned description, the narrator offers commentary of the play-by-play he has just provided, observing: “this espionage of people's thoughts is perhaps to idle persons one of the pleasures they find in society, while numbers of disappointed numskulls are bored there without daring to own it.”  It is in such moments of biting editorialization – a frequent occurrence in Domestic Peace - that the kind of interrogation of appearances advocated by Brooks finds force.  Balzac sketches the cunning Madame de Lansac as a woman who “coated her cheeks so thickly with rouge that the wrinkles were scarcely visible.”  In doing so, the writer endows her surface, that is to say her physical appearance, with much deeper import.  Madame de Lansac’s exaggerated maquillage suggests a kind of war paint, and this connection is made all the more convincing by Balzac’s earlier use of the expression “engage battle” to describe her social machinations at the ball.  It is, perhaps, also significant that Madame de Lansac’s preferred weapon in this “battle” is expression itself, in the form of a sly, “sardonic glance.” 

In Domestic Peace, gestures are seldom automatic, looks are rarely without intention, and appearances both reveal and obfuscate.  As readers, we are called to be as mindful of the superficial – a furtive glance or a flushed cheek – as the characters themselves.  Literary scholar Peter Brooks argues that Balzac’s evocation of such social interactions “tend toward intense, excessive representations of life which strip the façade of manners to reveal the essential conflicts at work – moments of symbolic confrontation which fully articulate the terms of the drama” (3).  But we are only able to notice and then plumb the depths of these surfaces - to truly penetrate this “façade of manners” – because Balzac renders them so exaggeratedly, richly material in language.      

Ryan Dubnicek, Reflections on Medium in True Detective Season 1, Episode 1, “The Long Bright Dark”

Watching True Detective—especially the gripping first episode—it is easy to see literary realism conventions at play in both the narrative of the series as well as the two main characters. Both Rustin “Rust” Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin “Marty” Hart (Woody Harrelson) fit into the archetype of protagonists of believable agency and power, as well as flaws. Both have a trajectory toward a sort of “dynamic stasis,” where both characters shift and change methods of operation, perhaps, but hold fast to the same core characteristics at the conclusion of their arc as they had at the beginning.

But, while character and plot similarities are obvious links between realist works in different mediums—and the obvious and massive similarity between literature and television—how these conventions are portrayed in the given medium becomes the focus of attention. Specifically, is there a benefit to the way the genre conventions of realism are brought about via television as compared to literature? The answer is yes, but the explanation is less style and more utilitarian.

It’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but when a picture is only presented to an audience for a second, or less, it can seem to be worth considerably less. The source material for many films and television shows often amounts to far more reading time than it takes to run the film or episodes of the show, making time—a consideration not often given to a piece of print media, as it can be consumed at any rate and with little maintenance. A novel, for instance, can be started and stopped simply by diverting ones eyes. For television, though, the viewer must be forced to see certain things while viewing, as there will be pieces missed. While few readers only read two of every three words, a viewer is forced to shift visual focus to certain parts of the screen and necessitate losing focus of other parts of the frame. Further, a television episode is meant to be consumed at a set rate—60 frames per second. Given the limitation of scope, True Detective uses techniques to aid the viewer in most effectively consuming each episode.

Foremost among these techniques for balancing efficiency and accuracy of the viewer’s reading is point of view. While literary realism often employs a third person, omniscient narrator that is able to shift point of view, television rarely does this in an explicit way. While True Detective does have two on-screen narrators—both Rust and Marty—neither is omniscient, and each is a narrator that is heavily biased in the telling of their own tale. This leaves the camera itself as the one omniscient narrator and the one that is without bias. Consistently, the camera uses the shot reverse shot structure that is often seen film and television. However, from the beginning, there is an intimacy of camera presence. The first, present-day shot is of the front of a camera lens as it zooms in to focus. The next thing we see is a medium shot of Marty as he mentions that “you don’t pick your parents and you don’t pick your partner.” This is a symbolic bonding with Marty, and a subtle hint at forced point of view. The viewer is not picking its “partners” in the series—the people whose point of view we will be asked to take.

Rust and Marty are both continually shot from eye level in close-up, creating a subtle visual cue of equality with the viewer. With this repetitive use of portrait-like shots, we, the audience, will naturally gravitate towards these characters, as they are shot with a visual intimacy often reserved only for oneself and perhaps their partner. It’s no mistake that the way in which Rust and Marty are shot in flashback is reminiscent of someone looking in a mirror. The director is forcing us to accept their points of view, and with it, each half of the series omniscience. The dichotomy created with Marty and Rust is a subject of immense interest, as they are quite often sitting at opposition in well-known paradigms—religion/secularism, rule-abiding/rule-breaking, light/dark, desirous of structure/rejection of structure. Even their seating positions within the same room in their present-day interviews with the two detectives are oppositely placed. However, this relationship is one that there is not room to explore in more detail at this point, but which is vital to the series.

This omniscience of the camera as narrator is further reinforced by the variety of shots interspersed with the point of view shots. Aerial shots, crane shots, long shots, medium shots, and close ups are all used with frequency in episode one and throughout the series. While doing this, the director is careful to limit camera movement, which often hints at something otherworldly or inhuman, and would perhaps frame the narrative away from the connection with the everyday that is often the marquee of realism. On the rare occasions that the camera makes any sort of substantial movement, it is most often used to reinforce the authority of the camera as the narrator, or to give more humanly characteristics to Rust and Marty. When the two men are discussing how best to give Rust a quick escape from the obligations of dinner with Marty’s family, a handheld camera is used to present vulnerability and grittiness in the flaws of Rust’s character. He is having a hard enough time standing, and the shaky wobble of the camera in the hands of its operator reinforces this. Other times, the camera will slowly move to assume the points of view of Rust or Marty, again giving the impression that the camera is a narrator floating from point of view to point of view in order to show the viewer everything.

Linearity is another inherently realist element—as all earthly life is linear from birth to death. But linearity also creates a connection with the mundanity that is a staple of realist literature. However, since there is a finite space in which a television series has to tell its tale, the feeling of linearity and the ensuing monotony of real life must be efficiently represented. Constantly this is being visually reinforced, but quickly, with numerous shots of Rust and Marty driving—visuals that are thinly veiled symbols for them advancing the series arc. There is a visual emphasis on roads and highways, both literal representations of the linearity of a journey and symbolic visual representations for the linearity of life. As Rust and Marty travel, the viewer perceives not only where they are going in that particular linear moment, but we also perceive, in absentia, where Rust and Marty have been, and are reminded that they operate in the same way as any real human. While off-screen space is often the domain of the uncanny and the superhuman, on screen is the realm in which the earthly operates. Rust even directly remarks that the interview in present-day still must fit into his linear schedule, as at noon on Thursdays, a day when he doesn’t work, he starts drinking. The series linearity must yield for a moment to Rust’s personal, unimpeded linearity.

Situated between the realm of viewing efficiency and largely uninterrupted linear plot movement is True Detective’s tendency to put an emphasis on still-frame shot composition. The first shot of the Dora Lange crime scene is visually suggestive of some of the frontier paintings of 1800s America, but with the unceasing movement of time accounted for in the shape of the relatively modern police cars. Further, doorways, windows, patterns and light are constantly framing Marty. In both instances, the attention to the composition of the still frame allows for further detail about each character as well as the plot arc to be gathered when pausing the episode and examining the shot. From a shot of the dinner at Marty’s that Rust attends and soldiers through after arriving very drunk, you can see, prior to being divulged later in the season, the difficulty of Marty’s marriage by his placement opposite his wife at the table, and Rust’s isolation from any characters other than Maggie. The framing of Marty on his way into the CID headquarters, and the debrief with the rest of the detectives, is a hint as to what tact of investigation Marty will endorse and the limitations of his approach to the case, as he is at the mercy of the rules and structures that he adopts and chooses to obey and operate within, yet is often at odds with. The use of rich visual shot composition yet again acts as a means for True Detective to provide information and present themes that they would not otherwise be able to do within the constraints of their medium.

As the series continues, and more plot threads are developed, these techniques should increase in frequency and become more elaborate. Though perhaps realist television, as compared to literary realism, will never be able to impart as much specific detail in theme, characterization and convention, the visual medium has adapted to be able to operate within this realm effectively and efficiently and does so through techniques unique to television, rather than lengthening episode run times or typical episode numbers for seasons. Because of this, televised serial realism, as a medium, has a stronger link to meta-historicity of the genre of realism. Cinematographic techniques, which are heavily based on technology, have been evolving in the past few decades at a staggering rate, and still have the potential to continue to do so. Meanwhile, literary techniques—though far from being perpetually static—have been explored for a much longer time. Serial realism delivered on television will become iconically entwined with its historical period simply due to the medium’s strong link to technology. Because of this, television very well could become the more effective, and authentic, medium for realism in the ensuing decades.