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A more valid creation.
Apr. 17th, 2011 08:22 pmMy thesis is about girls' books around 1900 - Anne of Green Gables and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and all their lovely sisters - so I've been reading those and also wading through the scholarly literature about this stuff, some of which is good and some of which -
- some of which is Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig's You’re a Brick, Angela!: A New Look at Girls’ Fiction, from 1839-1975. I spent a few pages in an earlier draft of my thesis whacking this book to death, but my advisor says (quite reasonably, but still irritatingly) that I need to set aside my personal animosity and make my own points rather than flagelating someone else's, no matter how stupid their points are.
Cadogan and Craig have an astounding gift for phrasing even things I agree with in terms that make me want to chuck the book at the wall. For instance! For instance! They compare Anne Shirley and Rebecca Randall, heroines of the aforementioned books, and comment that Anne is more skillfully portrayed than Rebecca, which is fair enough. But they can't rest content with this observation; no! they won't be happy till they inform us that "Anne [is] a more valid creation than the endlessly overpraised Rebecca."
Valid? Valid? Who died and made you the god of literature?
But fine! Fine! Rebecca is overpraised! (She almost lives up to it, though; surely that means the praise isn't over-?) But yes, fine, it's quite unnecessary to spend three paragraphs bloviating on the topic of Rebecca's eyes (which, in case you are wondering, are "like faith, - 'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.'" And so on for another half page.) Yes! It's overwrought! It's sentimental! But it's hardly the character's fault that her author was given to excess!
What Cadogan and Craig really want - I can't see them dirtying their hands with fandom, so doubtless they wouldn't know the term - but what they really want is to sing, operatically, "Mary SUUUUUUUUUUUUUE!" in the hopes that Anne and Rebecca will wither under the judgment and take their nasty perfectness and sentimentality somewhere else, where the authors need never smell it again.
Cadogan and Craig loathe and despise sentimentality. I can only wonder why they chose to study Victorian literature, as it was (and I say this with all possible love) the single most sentimental century ever. You'll be reading along in a perfectly sensible pamphlet and suddenly the author will stumble upon an opportunity to talk about SUNSETS! or FLOWERS! or JESUS! and out comes the sparkly adjective train.
Cadogan and Craig can't abide this sort of thing. They sneer at countless dozens of books; the only thing they seem to like is a series from the 1930s about a naughty little girl called Jane Turpin who doesn't get along with girls or women - but that's all right, you see, it's their "soppiness" she objects to, and it just so happens all the female persons she meets are soppy and none of the men.
It's FICTION. Things never "just so happen" in fiction. Or, actually, they totally do, but they "just so happen" the way they do because the author doesn't think anything through and therefore "just so happens" to reflect their default cultural prejudices, which means that "it just so happened to conform to this really insidious stereotype" is not a reasonable defense!
(And, okay. I get that they really like these books, and when you really like something you want it to be perfect, but it's really better to admit up front that it's flawed.)
- some of which is Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig's You’re a Brick, Angela!: A New Look at Girls’ Fiction, from 1839-1975. I spent a few pages in an earlier draft of my thesis whacking this book to death, but my advisor says (quite reasonably, but still irritatingly) that I need to set aside my personal animosity and make my own points rather than flagelating someone else's, no matter how stupid their points are.
Cadogan and Craig have an astounding gift for phrasing even things I agree with in terms that make me want to chuck the book at the wall. For instance! For instance! They compare Anne Shirley and Rebecca Randall, heroines of the aforementioned books, and comment that Anne is more skillfully portrayed than Rebecca, which is fair enough. But they can't rest content with this observation; no! they won't be happy till they inform us that "Anne [is] a more valid creation than the endlessly overpraised Rebecca."
Valid? Valid? Who died and made you the god of literature?
But fine! Fine! Rebecca is overpraised! (She almost lives up to it, though; surely that means the praise isn't over-?) But yes, fine, it's quite unnecessary to spend three paragraphs bloviating on the topic of Rebecca's eyes (which, in case you are wondering, are "like faith, - 'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.'" And so on for another half page.) Yes! It's overwrought! It's sentimental! But it's hardly the character's fault that her author was given to excess!
What Cadogan and Craig really want - I can't see them dirtying their hands with fandom, so doubtless they wouldn't know the term - but what they really want is to sing, operatically, "Mary SUUUUUUUUUUUUUE!" in the hopes that Anne and Rebecca will wither under the judgment and take their nasty perfectness and sentimentality somewhere else, where the authors need never smell it again.
Cadogan and Craig loathe and despise sentimentality. I can only wonder why they chose to study Victorian literature, as it was (and I say this with all possible love) the single most sentimental century ever. You'll be reading along in a perfectly sensible pamphlet and suddenly the author will stumble upon an opportunity to talk about SUNSETS! or FLOWERS! or JESUS! and out comes the sparkly adjective train.
Cadogan and Craig can't abide this sort of thing. They sneer at countless dozens of books; the only thing they seem to like is a series from the 1930s about a naughty little girl called Jane Turpin who doesn't get along with girls or women - but that's all right, you see, it's their "soppiness" she objects to, and it just so happens all the female persons she meets are soppy and none of the men.
It's FICTION. Things never "just so happen" in fiction. Or, actually, they totally do, but they "just so happen" the way they do because the author doesn't think anything through and therefore "just so happens" to reflect their default cultural prejudices, which means that "it just so happened to conform to this really insidious stereotype" is not a reasonable defense!
(And, okay. I get that they really like these books, and when you really like something you want it to be perfect, but it's really better to admit up front that it's flawed.)
