Enoch Arden is a narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published in 1864 during his tenure as British poet laureate.[1] The story on which it was based was provided to Tennyson by Thomas Woolner.[citation needed] The poem lends its name to a principle in law that after being missing for a certain number of years (typically seven) a person may be declared dead for purposes of remarriage and inheritance of their survivors.[2]
Background
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Fisherman-turned-merchant sailor Enoch Arden leaves his wife Annie and three children to go to sea with his old captain, having lost his job due to an accident; reflective of a masculine mindset common in that era, Enoch sacrifices his comfort and the companionship of his family in order to better support them. During the voyage, Enoch is shipwrecked on a desert island with two companions who eventually die. (This part of the story is reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe.)[citation needed] Enoch remains lost for eleven and half years. Ten years after Enoch's disappearance, Phillip Ray asks Annie Arden to marry him, stating that it is obvious Enoch is dead. It was not unusual for 18th-century merchant ships to remain at sea for months or years, but there was always news of a ship's whereabouts by way of other ships that had communicated with it. Phillip reminds Annie that there has been no word of Enoch's ship. Annie asks Phillip to agree to wait a year. A year passes, and Phillip proposes to Annie again. She puts him off for another half-year. Annie reads her Bible and asks for a sign as to whether Enoch is dead or alive. She dreams of Enoch being on a desert island which she misinterprets as heaven. She marries Phillip and they have a child.
Enoch finds upon his return from the sea that his wife is married happily to his childhood friend and rival and has a child by him. Enoch's life remains unfulfilled, with one of his own children now dead and his wife and remaining children now being cared for by another man.
Enoch never reveals to his wife and children that he is really alive, as he loves her too much to spoil her new happiness. Enoch dies of a broken heart.
The use of the name Enoch for a man who disappears from the lives of his loved ones is surely[weasel words] inspired by the biblical character Enoch. In fact, also the entire chronological structure of the protagonist's life with its cycles related to the biblical symbolism of the "days of Creation" binds to the name of Enoch, as demonstrated by the analysis of an Italian thinker long interested in this work,[3] and denotes Tennyson's ability to insert theological intentions into simple elegiac mode with an unprecedented complexity in English literature.[4]
Musical settings
editIn 1897, Richard Strauss set the poem as a recitation for speaker and piano, published as his Op. 38. On 24 May 1962, Columbia Records released a recording of Enoch Arden (recorded 2–4 October 1961) with Glenn Gould on the piano and Claude Rains as the speaker. The LP was made at a cost of $1500, and only 2000 copies were released. It remains a collector's item.[5][6] In 2010, Chad Bowles and David Ripley released a CD, and in 2020 a recording was made in German by pianist Kirill Gerstein and Swiss actor Bruno Ganz.[7] Conductor Emil de Cou arranged a version for chamber orchestra and narrator. This was performed with the Virginia Chamber Orchestra and actor Gary Sloan in 2010.[8] The British actor Christopher Kent and pianist Gamal Khamis performed a semi-staged livestream performance during the 2020 lockdown and subsequently recorded a critically acclaimed CD for SOMM Recordings, which was released in 2022.[9]
The poem is also the basis of the opera of the same name by composer Ottmar Gerster and librettist Karl von Levetzow, which had its premiere in Düsseldorf on 15 November 1936.
In popular culture
edit- In Evelyn Sharp's 1897 children's novel The Making of a Schoolgirl, the girls put on a play of Enoch Arden for a student's birthday.[10]
- The Guy de Maupassant story "Le Retour" has a similar plot.[11]
- Enoch Arden, the 1911 film directed by D. W. Griffith, is based on this poem.[12]
- The 1915 film of the same name was directed by Christy Cabanne.[13]
- The 1925 Australian film The Bushwhackers is based on this poem.[13]
- Franklin Wescott in the 1936 novel Anne of Windy Poplars, the fourth book in the Anne of Green Gables series, says, "Those last two lines in Enoch Arden made me so mad one night, I did fire the book through the window. But I picked it up the next day for the sake of the Bugle Song."[14]
- The 1940 comedy film Too Many Husbands was based on the story, with Jean Arthur playing the wife of the returning husband, played by Fred MacMurray. It was remade in 1955 as Three for the Show, with Betty Grable, Jack Lemmon, Marge Champion and Gower Champion.[15]
- The 1940 screwball comedy film My Favorite Wife is a comic inversion of Enoch Arden.[16]
- Agatha Christie referenced the poem in three stories. "While the Light Lasts", a short story first published in The Novel Magazine in April 1924, has its protagonist Tim Nugent suffer the same chain of events as did Arden.[17] The same plot arc was used, to greater effect, as part of Giant's Bread (1930), the first of six novels written by Christie under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott.[18]. Finally, in the crime novel Taken at the Flood (1948), the character Robert Underhay is lost in the South African bush and presumed dead; A character uses the pseudonym "Enoch Arden" as he attempts to blackmail Underhay's wife Rosaleen and her new family.[19]
- The 1946 film Tomorrow Is Forever, starring Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles and George Brent, is based on the poem, although no writing or adaptation credit is given to Tennyson.[20]
- In the 1947 novel The Sleeping Sphinx by mystery writer John Dickson Carr, Major Sir Donald Holden is told to stop thinking of himself as Enoch Arden when he returns to London 15 months after being reported dead.
- Move Over, Darling is a 1963 remake of My Favorite Wife, starring Doris Day, James Garner and Polly Bergen. This project was undertaken after the 1962 Marilyn Monroe version, Something's Got to Give, was aborted upon Monroe's death.[20]
- The 1966 Konkani film Nirmon is based on this story.
- The 1967 Hindi film Taqdeer was a remake of the Konkani film Nirmon.
- The 2000 film Cast Away was loosely based on this story.[21]
See also
editReferences
edit- ^ Tennyson, Alfred (1864). Enoch Arden, etc. London: Edward Moxon & Co. pp. 1–51.
- ^ "Enoch Arden doctrine". Legal Information Institute. Cornell Law School. October 2022. Retrieved 7 February 2023.
- ^ Pietro De Luigi. Tracce per navigare nell'universo di Enoch Arden (2014 ed.). CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
- ^ Maria Serena Marchesi. Temi cristiani nell'opera poetica di Alfred Tennyson (2007 ed.). Congedo Editore.
- ^ Platt, Russell (25 November 2007). "Gould Standard". The New Yorker. Retrieved 15 August 2013.
- ^ Peter Vidani (2 June 2013). "Freezing Tumblr". Papyh.tumblr.com. Retrieved 15 August 2013.
- ^ "MYR025 Strauss: Enoch Arden". myriosmusic.com. Retrieved 7 February 2023.
- ^ Reinthaler, Joan (10 September 2010). "Emil de Cou conducts dramatic 'Enoch Arden' by Virginia Chamber Orchestra". The Washington Post. Retrieved 28 September 2010.
- ^ "Strauss: Enoch Arden; the Castle by the Sea | SOMM Recordings". 13 April 2022.
- ^ M. O. Grenby; Andrea Immel (10 December 2009). The Cambridge Companion to Children's Literature. Cambridge University Press. pp. 219–. ISBN 978-1-139-82804-8.
- ^ Leonee Ormond (17 November 2016). The Reception of Alfred Tennyson in Europe. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 52–. ISBN 978-1-350-01253-0.
- ^ James D. Bloom (2009). Hollywood Intellect. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 123–. ISBN 978-0-7391-2924-1.
- ^ a b Mikhail Iampolski (26 October 1998). The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film. University of California Press. pp. 93–. ISBN 978-0-520-08530-5.
Longford Lyell Productions and Charles Perry produce The Bushwackers. Lottie and Longford are credited with the screenplay and Arthur Higgins once again photographs. The film is loosely based on Tennyson's Enoch Arden.
- ^ "22 Anne of Windy Poplars / Anne of Windy Willows 1936", The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 334–339, 31 December 2014, doi:10.3138/9781442660861-026, ISBN 9781442660861, retrieved 12 August 2022
- ^ Newsweek. Vol. 45. Newsweek. 1955. pp. 104–.
This variation on Tennyson's Enoch Arden theme was a thin play when W. Somerset Maugham offered it as "Too Many Husbands" in 1919. It was just as thin, but passing good fun, when Jean Arthur played in a screen version under the same title in 1940. Now, by switching the story to a show-business background, Edward Hope and Leonard Stern get a springboard for a lively musical. This time Mrs. Arden is Betty Grable, a musical-comedy star whose husband. Jack Lemmon, goes ...
- ^ Time Inc (13 May 1940). LIFE. Time Inc. pp. 55–.
- ^ Mark Campbell (26 June 2015). Agatha Christie: The Books, the Films and the Television Shows featuring Poirot, Miss Marple and More. Oldcastle Books. pp. 27–. ISBN 978-1-84344-424-4.
- ^ Agatha Christie; Tony Medawar (1997). While the Light Lasts and Other Stories. HarperCollins. pp. 178–. ISBN 978-0-00-232643-8.
Afterword 'While the Light Lasts' was first published in the Novel Magazine in April 1924. To those familiar with the works of Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson, Arden's true identity will not have come as a surprise. Tennyson was among Christie's favourite poets, together with Yeats and T. S. Eliot, and his Enoch Arden also inspired the Poirot novel Taken at the Flood (1948). The plot of 'While the Light Lasts' was later used to greater effect as part of Giant's Bread (1930), the first of her six novels ...
- ^ Literary Onomastics Studies. Vol. 11–13. State University College. 1984. pp. 17–.
... Charles Trenton in Taken at the Flood uses Enoch Arden (from a Tennyson poem of 1864 in which a stranger does not reveal his identity) ...
- ^ a b Leslie Halliwell (November 1988). Halliwell's filmgoer's companion: incorporating The filmgoer's book of quotes and Halliwell's movie quiz. Grafton. pp. 236–. ISBN 978-0-246-13322-9.
Enoch Arden was a character in a Tennyson poem who came back to his family after having been long supposed dead. Films with an "Enoch Arden' theme include Tomorrow Is Forever (with Orson Welles), The Years Between (with Michael Redgrave), Too Many Husbands (with Fred MacMurray) and its remake Three for the Show (with Jack Lemmon), My Favorite Wife (with Irene Dunne) and its remake Move Over Darling (with Doris Day).
- ^ Greg M. Colón Semenza; Bob Hasenfratz (21 May 2015). The History of British Literature on Film, 1895-2015. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 332–. ISBN 978-1-62356-187-1.
External links
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The full text of Enoch Arden at Wikisource
Enoch Arden public domain audiobook at LibriVox
