Current Reputation Research Articles

The great symphony orchestra--a relatively good place to grow old.

The retired musicians of one of America's great symphony orchestras were interviewed. Their careers, which began in the 1930s and 1940s, were long, with retirement sometimes occurring when they were well over seventy years old. Older players were valued for their excellence and experience and were difficult to replace. Obsolescence was not a problem, and the gradual deterioration of playing with age was generally not incompatible with working to an advanced age. Players of string instruments had longer careers than players of woodwind and brass instruments. The players liked their careers and usually cited artistic reasons and the current reputation of the orchestra for their satisfaction. Although the musicians continue to love music and listen to it after retirement, few continue to play seriously.

Rebecca West , and: The Literary Achievement of Rebecca West , and: Jean Rhys , and: Jean Rhys . (review)

Reviewed by: Rebecca West, and: The Literary Achievement of Rebecca West, and: Jean Rhys, and: Jean Rhys. Alice Crozier Fay Weldon . Rebecca West. The Lives of Modern Women Series. New York: Penguin, 1985. 96 pp. pb. $4.95. Harold Orel . The Literary Achievement of Rebecca West. New York: St. Martin's, 1986. 235 pp. $27.50. Carole Angier . Jean Rhys. The Lives of Modern Women Series. New York: Penguin, 1985. 113 pp. pb. $4.95. Arnold Davidson . Jean Rhys. New York: Ungar, 1985. 175 pp. $13.95. [Begin Page 672] An eminent (male) critic remarked to me several years ago and with a straight face: "If Edith Wharton were a man she would be a major figure." It was a recognition of the difficulty of that reassessment of women's literary achievement, and of the canon that selectively excluded it from major figurehood, that has been going on now for almost twenty years. The four books under review all participate in this effort to reevaluate women's literary work. Jean Rhys and Rebecca West are excellent subjects for such scrutiny. Rhys, since her reappearance from oblivion in 1957 with the BBC radio version of Good Morning, Midnight and the critical triumph in 1966 of Wide Sargasso Sea, has attracted a fervent group of admirers and a solid readership. Dame Rebecca West, an imposing presence among her contemporaries, has slipped badly as they have aged and is now widely unread and ripe for a rehabilitation effort. Although Rhys is far better established than West, there is still movement in critical judgments of Rhys and uncertainty about her final standing among modernist writers. The current reputation of West is in serious disrepair: we recall her association with famous men—the lover of H. G. Wells, the defender of Lady Chatterly's Lover caught by the photographer in mid firm stride on her way to the Old Bailey. But as a novelist? The literary instruments of these evaluations, like their subjects, come in pairs: a book of traditional academic criticism about each woman, and one each in a genre midway between criticism and popular biography, designed for the general reader. Orel and Davidson, the traditional scholars, both follow a chronological plan treating the major works of their authors in order and offering both interpretive readings of selected texts and evidence of such academic concerns as thematic unity (Orel) or development (Davidson); both press the case for the heretofore undervalued merits of this work. The more popular books are written for a new series by Penguin called Lives of Modern Women, described by the General Editor, Emma Tennant, as "a series of short biographies by distinguished writers of significant twentieth-century women whose lives, ideas, struggles, and creative talents contributed something new to a world in transition." Other publishers—Virago, Rutgers—are mounting similar series on women writers. Both biographies treat their subjects as exemplary "modern women." In the case of Rebecca West, the result is a pretty drastic reshaping of the material. Thus we have a woman who lived ninety years and wrote an immense lot of journalism, history, fiction, and criticism of all kinds presented by Fay Weldon as the Unwed Mother, the intellectually gifted unwed mother. Weldon's entire book is set in the furnished room of Cicily Fairfield in a boarding house in Hunstanton, Norfolk, whither she has retired to have her illegitimate baby. Weldon composes "letters from the future" to the young woman in this very model of a modern predicament, and in these letters she contemplates the state of society from the point of view of West's later feminist writings. West is seen to have been brave and ahead of her time, and a pleasant story develops, loosely based on the West biography, of how our heroine must feel, lying there with her extraordinary mind passing back and forth over the warp and woof of her very ordinary situation. It is gratifying to recall as we read that the "fallen woman" later rose to the heights of venerated moral authority. Completed by hindsight, it is a happy, over-simplified [End Page 672] tale, but it could almost be about any well-connected girl in the same situation...

Publication Frequencies of Departments Conferring the PhD in Special Education

The purposes of this study were to provide estimates of current research productivity of faculties in doctorate-granting special education programs and to compare them to previously reported reputational rankings. To these ends, the publication frequencies in 29 professional journals of 81 faculties were tallied over a 5-year period. The mean program and per capita publication frequencies over the 5-year period were 17.06 and 1.60; only 6 program faculties surpass a one publica tion per faculty member per year criterion. The 10 most productive faculties on total and per capita publication frequencies were presented along with three leaders in each of eight specializations. Both total and per capita frequencies correlated weakly but positively with reputational rankings, suggesting that current reputation is only modestly related to current productivity. Furthermore, the low mean program and per capita publication frequencies suggest that high productivity is the exception and not the rule among faculties in doctoral-granting programs.

The Plot against Bernard Maybeck

The case of the current reputation of the classicizing work of Bernard Maybeck is taken to demonstrate certain weaknesses in the present practice of architectural history. The weaknesses are identified as: an over-valuation of the traditions of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; an excessive esteem for accurate copying as a design-procedure; and a connected over-reliance on two-screen comparisons as an expository technique. Maybeck's Palace of Fine Arts is taken as an instance of the combined effect of these factors on his reputation; obliquely and erratically dependent on the Beaux-Arts tradition as currently understood, it yields little of easily explained significance to two-screen comparisons, and therefore tends to be overlooked, even in general histories of American architecture.

Who declines from antenatal serum alpha-fetoprotein screening--and why?

One hundred women who declined a voluntary alpha-fetoprotein screening test during early pregnancy and one hundred women who accepted the test were investigated by means of semistructured interviews with particular reference to background factors which could have influenced upon the decision making. Those who declined were, as expected, overrepresented among those opposed to legal abortion and they often showed an ambivalent or negative attitude towards prenatal diagnosis as such. These women were also more frequently legally married and active members of various religious denominations. Otherwise there were no socioeconomic, psychologic or other background factors specially associated with women who declined. The paramount individual reason given for abstaining from the test was the feeling that the test was 'unreliable'. The personal ethical attitude, together with the current reputation of the test in society, seem to be major factors affecting the rate of participation in an AFP-screening program.

Word and Image in Quarles' "Emblemes"

Given its current reputation, we might be surprised to learn that Francis Quarles' Emblemes (1635) came out in three editions during the author's life and long remained among the staple works of piety on seventeenthcentury English bookshelves from London and Little Gidding to the sugar plantations in Jamaica. According to Horace Walpole, even Milton to wait until the world had done admiring Quarles. Yet modern critics have been willing to grant Quarles and his fellow emblem writers only the distinction of the second-rate. Rosemary Freeman, for example, concludes that in the mechanical imposition of meaning upon a predetermined image lies the essential weakness of the emblem writer's method, while Mario Praz believes that Quarles's Emblemes supplied the wider public with a cheap substitute for that metaphysical wit which authors like George Chapman and John Donne provided for a more refined audience.' As Praz's comment suggests, in English studies we are likely to read Henry Hawkins or George Wither or Quarles, if at all, as a duty. We come to them for the raw material of the emblematic imagination so conspicuous in their work, but only to equip ourselves to recognize that material in a more finished or subtle form in the major dramatists and lyric poets. Indeed, George Herbert's achievement is measured by his ability to go beyond the merely emblematic, while the stuff of emblems may even be seen to clog the work of other writers. Alan B. Howard has

Guérin's Painting of Phèdre and the Post-Revolutionary Revival of Racine

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774–1833) is best known, if at all, for the painting of 1799 called The Return of Marcus Sextus from Exile, which was a deliberate allusion to the homecoming of French émigrés following the Revolution.1 Since Guérin's current reputation among non-specialists barely extends any further, it is remarkable that to his contemporaries he for a time appeared to be the only serious rival to Jacques-Louis David. Even E.J. Delécluze, whose monograph of 1855 on his former master was intended to revitalize a tarnished heritage, and was hardly predisposed toward Guérin, was forced to recall that the Marcus Sextus had been “accueilli par le public avec des applaudissements dont aucun succès obtenu depuis ne peut donner l'idée.”2 Another painting, however, less well-known today, was also central to Guérin's reputation and to the rivalry with David—the Phèdre et Hippolyte of 1802 (Fig. 1). The remarks of Stendhal, recorded in his diary in 1804, offer a preliminary suggestion of its critical success, which we shall look at more closely later: “Martial me mène chez D[ugazon]; nous disons chacun le récit de Cinna. Je ne conçois rien de mieux, rien de plus franc (de moins maniéré) que ce profond acteur nous a dit: il m'est rarement arrivé de ne concevoir rien de mieux. La Phèdre de Guérin est peut-être la seule chose qui ait produit cet effet sur moi.”3 The fact of these successes and the implications of these opinions should certainly earn Guérin the right to a total reassessment.4

The Hawthorne Centenary

A U HUNDRED YEARS AGO this May Nathaniel Hawthorne died quietly in a New Hampshire inn. As we go to press the extravagant barrage of birthday tributes to Shakespeare is slackening, on the academic front at least, and now that the air is clearing we may be able to discern the retiring shade of Hawthorne, patiently waiting his turn, consoled perhaps by the thought that his friend Melville once mentioned him in the same breath with Shakespeare and by the fact that in the annual May sweepstakes conducted by PMLA he is running a good fourth among the American entries, trailing Melville, James, and Faulkner, but holding his own with Twain and Hemingway. The renewed interest in Hawthorne cannot be explained simply by the inflationary trend in scholarly publication, by Matthiessens' influential essay in American Renaissance, or by the extraordinary current reputation of Faulkner which in some quarters has led to a redefinition of the great tradition of American fiction in terms of his peculiar genius. What also seems apparent is that both Hawthorne and Faulkner have profited from a deep change in the national psyche as reflected in our literature. Is it too much to say that it required a second world war within a quarter of a century, with all it revealed about that common human nature on which Hawthorne loved to muse, to precipitate the change and to make it possible for us to readmit into our literature the complex problems of guilt and responsibility that the determinism of the preceding decades had obscured or at best transferred to the collective level? There is no lack of testimony from contemporary writers as to what happened. To be reminded that war may be a permanent condition of human nature rather than a recurrent crisis and to contemplate Buchenwald and Dachau and the starving hordes of India and China is to reincur the guilt,