Book Review: Her Father's Daughter
Aug. 4th, 2014 08:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerIn the course of reading girls’ books published between 1890 and 1915 for my project, I developed a sort of “How racist is this book?” one to ten scale.
A score of one would go to a possibly mythical book that at least attempts to be anti-racist (and doesn’t fail too badly); the closest I have found to this is Kate Douglas Wiggins’ Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, wherein the heroine might have a Spanish foremother, a few generations back, which would be totally weaksauce in a modern book but is strikingly weird in the sea of WASP heroines.
(The heroines are always white, but occasionally allowed to diverge from Anglo-Saxon to such exotic backgrounds as Dutch, German, Scandinavian, or even French - provided that the author can think of a way to make her French but not Catholic. It is very important that the heroine be Protestant. I am reading Alice of Old Vincennes right now and the author has tied himself into pretzels to achieve Alice’s Protestantism.)
A score of ten goes to anything that resembles Gene Stratton Porter’s Her Father’s Daughter, which is so pervasively racist that the narrative occasionally pauses for paragraphs-long screeds on the superiority of white people and the necessity for white people to breed more assiduously in order to save America from the FOREIGN HORDES.
Except these rants don’t even interrupt the narrative, because they fit so neatly with the story: every single subplot is set up around forwarding these points. It’s like Porter thought she was writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin for eugenics.
The book kicks off with high school senior Donald twitting Linda about her sensible shoes. Linda fires back: her shoes may not be like what the other girls wear, but at least she’s the head of her class - unlike Donald, who is allowing himself to be beaten by Oka Sayye, a Japanese student!
Over the course of several arguments, Linda wins Donald over to the idea that he must prove the superiority of white people by defeating Oka Sayye in scholarship, because to do anything less would be a shame on the entire state of California. A girl with convictions! Donald swoons.
But can Donald win Linda’s heart in return? There are two strikes against him in this department.
1) He’s going to spend the next six to eight years going through college and law school, which will put him and Linda six to eight years behind in their quest to raise “at least six sturdy boys and girls...with the proper love of country and the proper realization of the white man’s right to supremacy” (149), which (Linda assures the reader) is the proper goal of all right-thinking, red-blooded, (it goes without saying, white) Americans.
2) But would Donald really raise his children with “the proper realization of the white man’s right to supremacy”? I mean, if Linda hadn’t awakened him to the danger, he might have let Oka Sayye become valedictorian! Clearly he’s untrustworthy. Even if his last name is Whiting.
Enter Peter! He’s nearly thirty, professionally established as a journalist, and looking to build a home, so clearly he is in a position to start propagating his half-dozen patriots at any time.
And unlike Donald, Peter is quite strong and secure in his own racism without needing any help from Linda. Early in their courtship, he reads to her an article in which he puts forth “a vision of his country threatened on one side by the red menace of the Bolshevik, on the other by the yellow menace of the Jap, and yet on another by the treachery of the Mexican and the slowly uprising might of the black man, and presently he was thundering his best-considered arguments at Linda until she imperceptibly drew back from him on the packing case, and with parted lips and wide eyes she listened in utter absorption.” (247-248)
Poor Donald. How can he compete with Peter when Peter and Linda are so clearly a marriage of true minds?
Meanwhile! Donald’s plans to wrestle the highest GPA back from Oka Sayye are meeting success! (Also, Oka Sayye is not only an unrepentant attempted murderer, but also he graduated from college in Japan before coming to an American high school, either for further education or to prove a nefarious point about the scholastic abilities of the Japanese, it is not clear which. It clearly doesn’t matter which. Possibly both?) Oka Sayye decides that the appropriate way to respond to this defeat is to push a boulder off a cliff to squash Donald flat.
But Linda is there to warn Donald of the danger! And she, accompanied by her trusty servant Katy, scales the canyon, where Katy pushes Oka Sayye off the cliff with an ax that she just happens to be wearing around her neck. And then everyone covers up the murder because, well, he’s just Japanese, why should Katy have to suffer through a day in court for doing the just and proper thing?
These are just the highlights, mind you. (Lowlights? Lowlights might be the more appropriate word here.) Her Father’s Daughter is kind of a bottomless pit.
A score of one would go to a possibly mythical book that at least attempts to be anti-racist (and doesn’t fail too badly); the closest I have found to this is Kate Douglas Wiggins’ Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, wherein the heroine might have a Spanish foremother, a few generations back, which would be totally weaksauce in a modern book but is strikingly weird in the sea of WASP heroines.
(The heroines are always white, but occasionally allowed to diverge from Anglo-Saxon to such exotic backgrounds as Dutch, German, Scandinavian, or even French - provided that the author can think of a way to make her French but not Catholic. It is very important that the heroine be Protestant. I am reading Alice of Old Vincennes right now and the author has tied himself into pretzels to achieve Alice’s Protestantism.)
A score of ten goes to anything that resembles Gene Stratton Porter’s Her Father’s Daughter, which is so pervasively racist that the narrative occasionally pauses for paragraphs-long screeds on the superiority of white people and the necessity for white people to breed more assiduously in order to save America from the FOREIGN HORDES.
Except these rants don’t even interrupt the narrative, because they fit so neatly with the story: every single subplot is set up around forwarding these points. It’s like Porter thought she was writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin for eugenics.
The book kicks off with high school senior Donald twitting Linda about her sensible shoes. Linda fires back: her shoes may not be like what the other girls wear, but at least she’s the head of her class - unlike Donald, who is allowing himself to be beaten by Oka Sayye, a Japanese student!
Over the course of several arguments, Linda wins Donald over to the idea that he must prove the superiority of white people by defeating Oka Sayye in scholarship, because to do anything less would be a shame on the entire state of California. A girl with convictions! Donald swoons.
But can Donald win Linda’s heart in return? There are two strikes against him in this department.
1) He’s going to spend the next six to eight years going through college and law school, which will put him and Linda six to eight years behind in their quest to raise “at least six sturdy boys and girls...with the proper love of country and the proper realization of the white man’s right to supremacy” (149), which (Linda assures the reader) is the proper goal of all right-thinking, red-blooded, (it goes without saying, white) Americans.
2) But would Donald really raise his children with “the proper realization of the white man’s right to supremacy”? I mean, if Linda hadn’t awakened him to the danger, he might have let Oka Sayye become valedictorian! Clearly he’s untrustworthy. Even if his last name is Whiting.
Enter Peter! He’s nearly thirty, professionally established as a journalist, and looking to build a home, so clearly he is in a position to start propagating his half-dozen patriots at any time.
And unlike Donald, Peter is quite strong and secure in his own racism without needing any help from Linda. Early in their courtship, he reads to her an article in which he puts forth “a vision of his country threatened on one side by the red menace of the Bolshevik, on the other by the yellow menace of the Jap, and yet on another by the treachery of the Mexican and the slowly uprising might of the black man, and presently he was thundering his best-considered arguments at Linda until she imperceptibly drew back from him on the packing case, and with parted lips and wide eyes she listened in utter absorption.” (247-248)
Poor Donald. How can he compete with Peter when Peter and Linda are so clearly a marriage of true minds?
Meanwhile! Donald’s plans to wrestle the highest GPA back from Oka Sayye are meeting success! (Also, Oka Sayye is not only an unrepentant attempted murderer, but also he graduated from college in Japan before coming to an American high school, either for further education or to prove a nefarious point about the scholastic abilities of the Japanese, it is not clear which. It clearly doesn’t matter which. Possibly both?) Oka Sayye decides that the appropriate way to respond to this defeat is to push a boulder off a cliff to squash Donald flat.
But Linda is there to warn Donald of the danger! And she, accompanied by her trusty servant Katy, scales the canyon, where Katy pushes Oka Sayye off the cliff with an ax that she just happens to be wearing around her neck. And then everyone covers up the murder because, well, he’s just Japanese, why should Katy have to suffer through a day in court for doing the just and proper thing?
These are just the highlights, mind you. (Lowlights? Lowlights might be the more appropriate word here.) Her Father’s Daughter is kind of a bottomless pit.
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no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 02:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 02:23 pm (UTC)Porter's earlier books - Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost - still have fans, and I really ought to have read them for my honors project because they were so popular at the time. But I just couldn't do it. Her Father's Daughter left me too twitchy about Porter's work.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 03:33 pm (UTC)Also, I didn't make it plain, your review is indeed amazeballs as goldjadeocean says below.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 07:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 03:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 03:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 05:44 pm (UTC)Is your project academic or personal?
no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 07:28 pm (UTC)My project actually started as my senior thesis in college, "The New Girl: Reconciling Femininity and Independence in Girls' Literature, 1890-1915." But I got hooked on the various weirdnesses of the literature of the time period (most of these weirdnesses are less O.o than Porter's decision to write a eugenics tract in children's book form), so I've kept reading the books as they cross my path.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 07:34 pm (UTC)I had a bit of free association regarding moth colors which I will share for your amusement. There is a famous (possibly apocryphal) case of speedy natural selection in which a type of moth which naturally occurs in white (common) and black (rare) colors suddenly had the frequency of colors switch. It turned out that the moths perch on birch trees, which have white bark. Black moths were quickly spotted and eaten by birds, often before they could pass on the black gene. But then a factory started spewing pollution, coloring the white trees black. Suddenly the white moths were getting gobbled up, and the black moths survived to propagate.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 09:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-05 02:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 09:20 pm (UTC)Still more interesting than Teddy, though.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-05 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-05 03:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-05 02:33 pm (UTC)And unlike Donald, Peter is quite strong and secure in his own racism without needing any help from Linda.
That was where I laughed, but mainly I felt kind of sick.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-07 05:59 pm (UTC)And then Oka Sayye tried to kill Donald and I realized that no, no, it really was just that bad. It was rather eye-opening.