This is a piece about toilet business and literature of the late 18th and 19th centuries. It runneth over with crude words and unpleasant themes, but the underpinning sentiment of curiosity is sincere, and the overall intent is loftier than pooing alone would suggest. It was drafted in June 2010.
Listening to literary classics on in-car audio and latterly, longly, Hardy’s
Mayor of Casterbridge. I know this is drama; dramatic perhaps as the yelling largesse Enders and Corrie dishes up today; replete with hilarious flailing of limbs, swoons, wailing, growling and avowals… did folk really react to things thus? Oh, the women wailing, mainly: ‘She grabbed at her breast and flung her head from side to side; flailing her arms with wild gestures, and for nigh on ten minutes moaned and cried ‘I am finished! I am finished!’Which brings me to my thrust – for there are certain considerations which I find distract me greater than the vocal commotions; the connection of this distraction with our femme flappant above is that all the while she’s a-crowing and a-bothered, chances are she, the unfortunate distressee, stinks of shit - of that which must surely be caked about her poxéd arse and filthy drawers.
Thing is, these Georgians and early Victorians were no great shakes in the lavatory stakes. A quick glance at Wikipedia believed me (yes, that’s the word I choose) that paper was neither common nor favoured; and our near ancestor – elderly reader, your grandfather’s gramps - employed rags and cloths and straw and grass and hands (yes, and the hoity neck of a toity swan) to wipen the Gary – which itself must have produced a gloopy old confit apposite of a diet (Hardy’s folk) of meat and corn, mutton and barley, milk and ale.
The opening of one chapter of Casterbridge has the dour and darling Donald Farfrae at home with the frankly randy Jersey woman, recently his wife – curses, I can’t be stirred to trace her name – seated at a table by the window of their now-shared house; all is calm, it’s the evening, the tea things cleared away, a picture of bliss etcetera – at that very passage I would have this appointed to our personae:
“Oh, Donald” (says wifey to her sighing Scot) “what troubles you so?”
“Ah, Randy Lady” says he, “I fear these troosers of mine are fair glued to my arse with my shitty doings”
“Donny dearest, pray, have you done a big poo?”
“Aye that I have,” rejoins hubby, “in the upstairs corridor this afternoon – and wiped my Ronson on the curtains that hang there.”
And as for Elizabeth Jane… did nobody point out the matter on the back of her dress, or the smell coming off her in church?
I moved on to Wuthering Heights, and similarly wondered, at the start, how any grimly, fiendish character had the temerity, shameless and unaware, to present themself as a brute force, passionate and proud, when doubtless there are dizzy flies about the knickers; an unholy and visible stench, and a poo-stain the size of a plate at the back of Heathcliff’s trousers.
‘The devil – for I saw him as such - grabbed my hand in his. “Ew!” I cried, noting his swarthy claw, “let me free - there’s all cack up your wrist!”
So, I am distilling a thought; literature and pooing – shiterature, yes – weaving into classics the ‘natural breaks’ and the paying of visits – making them a part of the action, the narrative – every chapter ending or beginning with the call of the wild. Pride and Prejudice and Poo.
Chaucer, I understand, and Shakespeare too, liked a good old reference, a loo break – and biographing Ackroyd puts it out there for them; ‘flying pasties’ abound. But something happened elsetimes – a sanitisation about Queen Vicki, yes, lapped up by Hardy and Dickens et al; but afore that the genteel unshitting of Jane Austen – an entirety of post-Hogarthians dropped the droppings and mentions of motions.
But would not the Bennett sisters and mama be more of a hoot as demonstrative poopers?
Working titles:
Heathcliff’s Jobs – the Toilet’s Role in Literary Classics, or Pen and Ink – the Malodorous Truth Behind Literary Favourites
Extract: Bramwell Bronte stalks about the parsonage chiding his sisters.
“No-one takes a crap in your stories!” he barks, “Look at this!” He flings from a stack of novels and novellas, “Rochester! Heathcliff! and – Ann – whatever your lesser efforts are about! Not one urgent dash, nor languorous easings of parting cheeks. Charlotte – this dog of Rochester’s is enormous (or at least is will be in something called a film) – where’s he curling them out? Ach! I’m off back to the pub!”
As he leaves, Emily quacks one out, provoking her rattle-coughing siblings to chuck loaves and bibles at her.
When (romantically a-bed; I’m such a catch) I ran the unpleasant bones of the above past my B., she gifted me two acted-out vignettes thus:
Lizzie Bennett greeting Darcy, proffering a long-gloved hand to be kissed. But there is shit all around one finger and all up the side of the glove. Darcy discreetly twists her wrist for his lips to caress the non-soiled bit.
Elsewhere, a dainty lady of the same era is swoonily fainting, wiping the back of her hand across her pale brow, and leaving a wet trail, a smear of yellowing caca there, and into the powdered hairline.
Ooh… Darcy’s Arse!
