Manipulation in “To Bed with Grand Music”

While I truly enjoyed the story of Marghanita Laski’s To Bed with Grand Music, I have to admit that I did not like the protagonist, Deborah. I felt pity for her, as well as anger and frustration at her. During the beginning of the novel, I felt that poor Deborah was manipulated by not only the men she slept with but also the members of her own household. Deborah’s mother, Mrs. Betts, and her mother’s helper, Mrs. Chalmers, seemed to fuel Deborah’s less than enthusiastic thoughts about being an essentially single mother rather than boost Deborah’s spirits and encourage her engagement with her young son.  I feel that even her husband, Graham, manipulated Deborah’s feelings from the beginning with his giving her permission to sleep around as long as she didn’t fall in love. After finishing the novel, however, I had to rethink if Deborah was manipulated at the beginning of the novel or if her stealthy role as manipulator began on the first page.

Had Graham not broached the subject of allowing Deborah to be physically unfaithful to him during the length of time he’d be gone, would she have sought the company of other men? Would she have had that niggling thought in the back of her mind that if Graham was going to sleep around, why shouldn’t she? Throughout their conversation, it seems as though Deborah is protesting a bit too much when after professing her faithfulness, “She stopped and wondered frantically, isn’t that enough to make him say the same, if I can do it, he can. But he remained silent, and she drooped a little” (2). Though she wishes to remain faithful to Graham, Deborah cannot even remain faithful to herself because she doesn’t know who she actually is.

Through Deborah’s lack of knowledge of her own mind and heart, she even appears to manipulate her own thinking. I think she wants to appear as though she wants what she’s supposed to, to be happy caring for her son and waiting patiently for the return of her husband, rather than actually wanting it. She manipulates herself into thinking that Mrs. Chalmers and her mother are better equipped to take care of her child simply because Deborah herself wants to be free of the responsibility. What angered me about Mrs. Betts agreeing that Deborah needed to move to London and take a job is that Mrs. Betts knows all along that Deborah is a manipulator and would twist the situation to her benefit. Mrs. Betts coddles Deborah and shows her own poor parenting skills when she tells Mrs. Chalmers that “I’m sorry she had the baby so soon. [. . .] it’s not doing her or the child any good, her staying here and feeling thwarted and unhappy” (14). Rather than telling her daughter to “buck up” and face the responsibilities of her own life, Mrs. Betts allows Deborah to go thinking that as a mother, Mrs. Betts still knows best, knows her daughter best, and how to keep her happy.

Though Deborah’s manipulation of others begins almost immediately, her skills greatly improve and her manipulative attempts are much clearer toward the end of the novel, especially in the manipulation of Mrs. Chalmers and Ken Matthews. Through a manipulation of her physical appearance, Deborah shows her own recognition of her skills. She knows that she cannot appear in her identity as the London mistress/burgeoning socialite and recrafts the simple girl she was prior to London for her meetings with Ken. By choosing to involve her son and his wellbeing in her manipulation of Mrs. Chalmers, Deborah reaches a new low.

Though I felt sorry for Deborah in that she was looking for purpose and companionship but not necessarily love, she looked for that companionship in the wrong places beginning with a rekindling of her school relationship with Madeline. Though Deborah recognizes the irresponsibility associated with this choice, she does nothing to repair the damage to her marriage and her soul, and instead chooses to relish in the lavish lifestyle associated with being the mistress.

Deborah degrades herself through her multitude of lovers (I had to make a list to keep them straight), and shows that she values herself through how she can manipulate her situation or her next lover into providing for her lavish lifestyle, and only continues to value her pre-London lifestyle, including her child and husband, by the financial freedoms it has granted her. Deborah no longer values her life and purpose as a mother and wife or even as a useful wartime worker; she only values her skills as a manipulator. Deborah started as a poor country woman whom the world felt sorry for, but ended up biding her time as she blossomed into the fashionable and manipulating mistress she always wanted to be.

 

Laski, Marghanita.  To Bed with Grand Music. Persephone Books, Ltd., 2012.

To Bed With Grand Music Annotated Bibliography -Samantha Hudspeth

eng-629-annotated-bibliography

“don’t criticize what you can’t understand” – Naomi

News broke early this morning that Bob Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” and I could not contain my excitement. As such, I’m hijacking this week’s blog post to discuss this incredible turn of events.

Bob Dylan is an incredible singer/songwriter whose career has spanned over 50 years. And he is so much more than “just” a musician. Dylan’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and his advocacy of moral issues through the 1960s is undeniable. Songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” were a part of the soundtrack of protest from events surrounding inclusion of black people in restaurant diners to the Cold War. Whether or not you enjoy his particular style of music, it is impossible to deny the impact he has had. But does this make him worth of a Nobel Prize? In literature? Yes. Yes, it does.

According to the Nobel Prize website, the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to a candidate who has been nominated by a member of one of the following categories:

1. Members of the Swedish Academy and of other academies, institutions and societies which are similar to it in construction and purpose;
2. Professors of literature and of linguistics at universities and university colleges;
3. Previous Nobel Prize Laureates in Literature;
4. Presidents of those societies of authors that are representative of the literary production in their respective countries.

This is quite a distinguished group to belong to. After the nomination process, months are spent in the process of narrowing to a winner who must receive more than 50% of the academy’s votes. This is quite the vetting process, but can it include a non-traditional artist such as Dylan?

Many songwriters have delicately straddled the lines between pop culture and poetry. Tupac Shakur is another artist whose lyrics sometimes doubled as poetry (in addition to the poems that he wrote and published). This lead to UC Berkeley offering a brief course in the late 90s focused on the life and writings of Tupac.

Ultimately, I can’t see a compelling argument as to why Bob Dylan should have been excluded from the nomination process, nor why he should not have been selected as the winner. My excitement comes from my hippy heart, and also from a place of legitimizing various artistic art forms. I love Shakespeare. And I love Dylan. And they are both artists who spoke to a wide swath of people and deserve to be celebrated.

Congratulations, Bob Dylan. I’ll see you Sunday night in Phoenix.

Thoughts on Wartime Infidelity

As I read this novel, I began to think of the recurring problem of wartime infidelity that is still going on. I decided to research this problem, and happened to come upon an article from 1945 in which the author discusses the problems with both “women chasing” soldiers overseas and unfaithful army wives. This article points out that both men and women may cheat on the other while overseas because they are “sure” that the other one is anyway. This presents the danger of reading things as a “single story” or single way of seeing something. The article itself, however, only sees one angle of this issue. There could be a number of reasons that something like this could happen, not limited to this one problem of “well she will cheat too.”

What I also found interesting was the lasting effect that this infidelity can cause, especially if it is one sided. I came upon a term called “Post Infidelity Stress Disorder” in which those who have been cheated on are compared to those who have PTSD. The results of the comparison were strikingly similar. War, it seems, can have similar effects on people even when they are nowhere near the battlefield. This may also be a reason for the suicides of soldiers who come home from combat. PTSD on top of infidelity is not something I would wish on anyone. Perhaps this is something the main character went through in this novel.

 

Pyschology and the Body as Currency in To Bed with Grand Music (Spoilers!)–Meghan

I found To Bed with Grand Music to be a delightfully disturbing read. Deborah’s character frustrated the heck out of me, but I could not stop turning the pages. I kept thinking to myself “what shitty thing is she going to do next?” At the end of the novel, I literally cringed because I felt so bad for the young woman that Deborah sunk her slutty claws into  to turn her into another man-hunter. I love books that evoke this kind of emotion in the reader!

There are many rich ideas to discuss about To Bed with Grand Music. For this blog post, I would like to touch on psychology and the idea of body as currency.

When I first started reading To Bed with Grand Music, postpartum depression crossed my mind, since Deborah didn’t show much interest in or was always frustrated with Timmy and she felt like she was not cut-out for motherhood. Then I realized this probably wouldn’t be the case since Timmy was about two years old when the novel started and, as far as I know, postpartum depression doesn’t last that long and is usually right after birth (though I could be wrong, I am not very familiar with the topic). So, then, I pondered other things that could be wrong with Deborah psychologically. In the beginning of the novel, Deborah spends time justifying her sexual relationships in her head and coming up with moral reasons why it is acceptable for her to sleep with men other than her husband. She appears to know her actions are wrong, but she justifies them with the need to be happy and avoid being “nervy.” So, the next psychological disorder that popped into my mind was borderline personality disorder, which is characterized by a multitude of episodes of mood swings, anxiety, changing self-image, etc. Deborah certainly has a varying self-image of herself and she goes from being extremely upset with herself to extremely happy with her exciting life. However, I am no psychologist and I will stop trying to diagnose Deborah. I just thought this could offer some interesting fodder for conversation.

Anyway, what I would really like to focus on is Deborah’s transactions with men. It appears that Deborah’s body becomes a currency to pay for her lifestyle. Let me tell you how…

At first, Deborah’s exchanges with men seemed to be fulfilling a physical need and a “husband replacement,” for lack of a better term. However, as the novel progresses, it is quite clear that Deborah becomes addicted to her lifestyle and manipulating men. The more and more she gets involved as a mistress, the less and less she is worried about justifying her actions. She also thinks less and less of Graham and Timmy because they are boring and “second best” to her life in London. Thus, her “mistressness” becomes her job in order to afford her expensive lifestyle. Deborah completely reduces her body to currency in exchange for fancy accouterments, drinks, and meals.

My initial inclination was to discuss the commodification of Deborah’s body. For example, she seems to be no more than a body–or object–to the men, a mere distraction. On the surface it may appear that Deborah’s body is the commodity that the men desire; or, it may appear that Deborah makes herself a commodity through her appearance and desirability. However, upon closer examination, it is really Deborah who is objectifying herself (and even men–but I am not going to discuss that in this post) and creating a currency out of her body. Deborah could have easily stayed in her country home and remained a faithful, domestic housewife, but she decided to move to London and make herself available to men. This was her choice in which she had full agency. Not only does she simply make herself available to men, but she creates a business of it and uses her body to pay the men for extravagant things. The transaction is simple: men buy her fancy food/things and give her attention and she gives them her body in return. In other words, Deborah’s body is simply the means in which she uses to get what she wants. The reason I think her body is the currency instead of the items she receives is because she puts more value on the fancy things than she does on herself/her body. Her body becomes easily exchangeable for her appearance and social status. In addition, her body is the only thing she has to exchange for the lifestyle that she desires.

I think this can easily be seen at the end of the novel when Deborah is walking home with Graham’s friend, Ken Matthews, and she points out the crocodile purse that she absolutely must have. After they sleep together, Ken sends her the crocodile purse with a note that says, “I hope I interpreted yours hints correctly. I have no experience of proper payment for this sort of thing” (176). To the men in the novel, their currency is the items that they give to Deborah, and their desired commodity is her body. However, from Deborah’s perspective, her body is the currency for the items the men give her, which are her desired commodities. Both sides of the spectrum (the men and Deborah) are more then willing to give up a seemingly small price for their desires.

Laski, Marghanita. To Bed with Grand Music. Persephone Books Ltd., 2012.