An Inheritance of Books
Jul. 30th, 2017 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I finished reading A. T. Dudley’s At the Home Plate, which is one of a series of sports stories that I inherited from my great-great-uncles. (In fact I believe it’s the last of the series. I am not sure why I read it first.)
It’s moderately amusing if you’re interested in books from the early twentieth century, but in the end I think my great-great-aunts had better taste in literature: they received the Little Colonel series for their Christmas presents, and not only can I reliably tell all the characters apart (by no means an assured feat in A. T. Dudley), but I have strong feelings about many of them. My mother and I once got into a shipping argument about Lloyd’s eventual paramour, who is eminently suitable - I cannot argue that he’s not suitable - but it’s just so bloodless: she chooses him by gazing at him and totting up all his virtues that would make him a good husband.
But at the same time there is not really another contender - they have been knocked out by going on a gambling spree, falling in with Demon Alcohol, or being kind of controlling - and Lloyd’s vocation is clearly to be a great hostess and leader of society, for which one needs a husband, so there you are.
This idea of vocation is actually quite important in these books; the main characters discuss it seriously, and they end up with a wide range: Lloyd is a hostess, but there’s also an illustrator, a writer (Johnston’s readers seem to have identified her, semi-correctly, as a self-insert), a social worker, and a homemaker (which is a distinct calling from hostess: it implies less wider responsibility). I liked the range, and the fact that all these vocations are treated as fine and noble callings (not all women need to follow the same life path!), and the fact that many of them don’t get married and that’s just fine. In fact there are important single women throughout the books - and important married women - plenty of female mentors for these girls all round.
I could have written so much more about these books in my senior thesis had I but thought of it at the time.
I really think the Little Colonel series might have the same kind of continued popularity as the Anne of Green Gables books - except that they’re so darn racist. And not in the way where the author used a racial slur or two but the book would be fine if you cut a couple lines. The racism is baked into the premise: there are scenes and thematic points that revolve around it. The glowingly patriotic take on the Spanish-American War is irremovable.
It’s a crying shame that Johnston could be so thoughtful and compassionate about some things and so completely wrong on others, but so it goes, I suppose.
It’s moderately amusing if you’re interested in books from the early twentieth century, but in the end I think my great-great-aunts had better taste in literature: they received the Little Colonel series for their Christmas presents, and not only can I reliably tell all the characters apart (by no means an assured feat in A. T. Dudley), but I have strong feelings about many of them. My mother and I once got into a shipping argument about Lloyd’s eventual paramour, who is eminently suitable - I cannot argue that he’s not suitable - but it’s just so bloodless: she chooses him by gazing at him and totting up all his virtues that would make him a good husband.
But at the same time there is not really another contender - they have been knocked out by going on a gambling spree, falling in with Demon Alcohol, or being kind of controlling - and Lloyd’s vocation is clearly to be a great hostess and leader of society, for which one needs a husband, so there you are.
This idea of vocation is actually quite important in these books; the main characters discuss it seriously, and they end up with a wide range: Lloyd is a hostess, but there’s also an illustrator, a writer (Johnston’s readers seem to have identified her, semi-correctly, as a self-insert), a social worker, and a homemaker (which is a distinct calling from hostess: it implies less wider responsibility). I liked the range, and the fact that all these vocations are treated as fine and noble callings (not all women need to follow the same life path!), and the fact that many of them don’t get married and that’s just fine. In fact there are important single women throughout the books - and important married women - plenty of female mentors for these girls all round.
I could have written so much more about these books in my senior thesis had I but thought of it at the time.
I really think the Little Colonel series might have the same kind of continued popularity as the Anne of Green Gables books - except that they’re so darn racist. And not in the way where the author used a racial slur or two but the book would be fine if you cut a couple lines. The racism is baked into the premise: there are scenes and thematic points that revolve around it. The glowingly patriotic take on the Spanish-American War is irremovable.
It’s a crying shame that Johnston could be so thoughtful and compassionate about some things and so completely wrong on others, but so it goes, I suppose.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-30 03:24 pm (UTC)I'm just going to point to this sentence and nod sympathetically, I think.
The Little Colonel sounds really interesting, but I don't know how much I'm up for baked-in racism, or reading books I don't already own. Maybe next year!
I'm glad somebody saved those books so that you could read them! Not only do I not have anything belonging to a great-great-aunt or uncle, I don't even know who they were.
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Date: 2017-07-31 12:28 am (UTC)If you want to read some Johnston without the racism, I highly recommend her Georgina duet, Georgina of the Rainbows and Georgina's Service Stars. They have some of the same strengths (they don't have quite enough space to develop such a large cast) and they take place in Nantucket so Johnston has populated them entirely with white people, which is leaps and bounds better than her attempts at portraying anyone non-white.
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Date: 2017-07-31 01:24 pm (UTC)**to take a semi-trivial example, it's frustrating to hear so-called 80s throwback hours on the radio, because you hear the same handful of songs, but THERE WERE SO MANY MORE. Even so many more *popular* ones.
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Date: 2017-07-31 09:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-02 01:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-07-30 05:39 pm (UTC)Oh, that is always fascinating and headbangingly frustrating.
(I've never even heard of these books, so thanks for the gloss!)
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Date: 2017-07-31 12:34 am (UTC)They were super popular in the 1890-1920 era when they were first coming out; I still find them occasionally in used bookstores that have an older books section. Books like the Betsy-Tacy series, which is set during that era but written later, bring them up as a nostalgic reference. But they've fallen into total obscurity since then; I did my senior thesis in college about American girls' literature in that era and if I hadn't actually owned them I probably wouldn't have realized they were a thing I ought to know about, because I don't think any of the secondary sources I read referenced them.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-31 03:06 am (UTC)I was thinking of Girl of the Port as I was reading this post . . .
But they've fallen into total obscurity since then; I did my senior thesis in college about American girls' literature in that era and if I hadn't actually owned them I probably wouldn't have realized they were a thing I ought to know about, because I don't think any of the secondary sources I read referenced them.
Do you have any idea why they fell into total obscurity? (I feel like the racism would not, sadly, account for it alone.)
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Date: 2017-07-31 07:49 pm (UTC)It's also a bit preachier than Anne of Green Gables, but that certainly didn't keep Louisa May Alcott's works from continued popularity, so who knows really.
And of course there's always the possibility that the publisher dropped it for whatever reason and it faded because pre-internet it could be awfully hard to hung up books.
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Date: 2017-07-31 09:54 pm (UTC)This is a valid point. Good books fall off the map for that reason. I've spent years trying to track down things I encountered as a child in libraries that no longer have their copies.
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Date: 2017-07-31 11:14 pm (UTC)I'd be curious to know when those revisions took place. The timing of the last major editions (I also discovered there are reprints from small presses available today) coincides with the rise of the civil rights movement - so maybe a growing awareness of the book's racism did in fact contribute to the series' demise?
no subject
Date: 2017-07-31 01:31 pm (UTC)This selective blindness surely isn't a problem only of the past, so it makes me wonder how we can try to address it in the present. A thing you said when you were visiting sticks with me: that the direction in which people work hardest is often not the direction that needs the work.... so then, how do we find what does need the work?
One guideline that seems to be key is not allowing whole categories of people to be legitimate targets of derision and hate--probably derision and hate are actions/states that we're better off not lingering in--but I suspect we need more guidelines than just that.
That's cool about there being acceptable life roles for both married and unmarried women. Realistically speaking, there had to be a fair number of women who didn't get married--in any era, but especially coming out of a world war--and it's encouraging to realize that writers could write happy futures for them.
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Date: 2017-07-31 09:46 pm (UTC)Which seems fair enough, but then somehow the definition of "pedophiles and Nazis" seems to widen to include anyone the group doesn't like. I have seen shippers in fandom go through stunning mental contortions to argue that rival ships are pedophilic. Both characters in the ship might be thirty years old, but nonetheless, an argument will be found!
I'm not sure what lesson one should draw from this. I think there's something here about "sometimes you're going to dislike people and there will be no grand high moral reason for it, and that's okay as long as you don't try to make a grand high moral reason for it." You don't have to prove so-and-so's a Nazi to get out of having to hang out with them all the time.
The Littile Colonel books were published pre-WWI - I think the first one was 1890, and the last one perhaps 1912? So also too late for most of these single ladies to have lost their menfolk to the Civil War.
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Date: 2017-08-01 04:28 am (UTC)I feel very strongly about this. You can just not want to do something; it doesn't have to be because it will hurt you or because it's wrong. Maybe it's just not fun.
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Date: 2017-08-02 01:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-02 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-02 01:06 pm (UTC)And yeah, labels get stuck on people in order to make them dismissible and hatable, and it's (I'd argue) people assigned to the most disgusting categories that you have to be most careful not to apply automatic hatred to. (I mean, actually, people shouldn't be applying automatic hatred to anyone, but it's not something people are tempted to do about categories of people they feel benign to).
I don't think it's very good for people's souls (or psyches) to spend time thinking about who they're allowed to hate. It's like that whole Nazi-punching business. I always just scroll on by posts or tweets on that theme, but not without thinking to myself that the energy people are expending on arguing about who it's okay to punch would be better spent, oh, being a Big Brother or Big Sister to a kid, or picking up trash in a playground, or saying hello to an old guy walking his dog or whatever.
Re: the Little Colonel books being published pre WWI, all the better! Hurray for happy single women AND happy married women.
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Date: 2017-08-02 08:34 pm (UTC)I guess I think most of us have a higher standard of what "decent" looks like when it applies to how others are treating us, as opposed to how we treat other people. But as long as everyone is at least trying to be decent, that's better than some people chucking out the idea entirely.
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Date: 2017-08-02 04:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-02 08:39 pm (UTC)I'm mostly familiar with Christie from Poirot the TV show, which I suspect has prettied things up a bit, so I don't know much about her work.