Book Review: The Lady of the Decoration
Oct. 21st, 2017 03:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI must confess, I got Frances Little’s 1906 bestseller The Lady of the Decoration because I suspected it would be a racist trainwreck - it’s a novel by an American author! set in Japan! written in 1906! - and I could get a delightfully cutting review out of it.
Rarely have I been so pleased to have my expectations dashed. It isn’t perfect (and the moments of racism that really rocked me back were all against black people, and not the Japanese, which is quite a feat given that there aren’t any black characters in the novel) but neither is it a trainwreck, and in fact I liked it a lot. The descriptions of the Japanese landscape are gorgeous, and reminded me in a slantwise way of Natsume’s Book of Friends, which also has long loving landscape shots. And both stories have the same sense of the protagonist finding at last some precariously balanced happiness, after long difficult years.
The narrator in this case - I’m not sure she ever does get a name! This only just struck me. The novel is told as a one-sided stream of letters home, so it feels perfectly natural that her name never comes up. She’s a young widow, who lost an unlamented husband who made her life a misery - we get no details (presumably her correspondent knows all about it already), but he left her in a state of nervous exhaustion, and she went to Japan to teach at a missionary kindergarten (despite having no missionary leanings and little religious feeling) on the hope that a change of air and scenery combined with useful work might help her put herself back together.
And it does help, although it is also a struggle, right up to the end of the book. “The whole truth is I’m worsted! The fight has been too much. Days, weeks, months of homesickness have piled up on top of me until all my courage and my control, all my will seem paralysed. Night after night I lie awake and stare into the dark, and staring back at me is the one word ‘alone.’”
Then she heads out to mail the letter in a raging storm, after which she walks recklessly onto the sea wall, climbs the stone lantern, and lets the rain beat on her face and the thunder roar above her and the waves rush against the sea wall until the storm dies away, and the sun rises above the sea, and through some sort of meteorological transference, feels her own spirits rise within her as well.
I am continually astounded by how often characters in nineteenth & early twentieth century novels fall prey to their nerves - it might of course be selection bias, but then I usually select these books on the basis of “I know nothing about this book but it’s on Kindle for free!” which I think would rather mitigate against that. In any case it’s super useful: I’m working again on the book set after the Civil War, where the heroine has suffered what we would call depression (and they might also call it depression, but they would also call it “nerves”), and I definitely highlighted some stuff in here for reference.
This makes it sound super grim, which it is not. The “blue devils” (as the heroine calls these attacks of depression) are not always after her, and there are plenty of fun times, too: visits to Nagasaki, Kyoto, Vladivostok (which she does not like; this book was published fresh on the end of the Russo-Japanese War and America was solidly on Japan’s side). Even Shanghai! And she’s very funny, sometimes even when she’s in the depths of despair: she reminded me of a more worldly version of Judy from Daddy-Long-Legs in her gleeful but good-hearted irreverence. Witness this exchange she reports between a tract-bearing missionary and a seasick passenger:
“Brother, are you a Christian?”
“No, no,” he muttered impatiently. “I’m a Norwegian.
Now what that man needed was a cocktail, but it was not for me to suggest it.
Rarely have I been so pleased to have my expectations dashed. It isn’t perfect (and the moments of racism that really rocked me back were all against black people, and not the Japanese, which is quite a feat given that there aren’t any black characters in the novel) but neither is it a trainwreck, and in fact I liked it a lot. The descriptions of the Japanese landscape are gorgeous, and reminded me in a slantwise way of Natsume’s Book of Friends, which also has long loving landscape shots. And both stories have the same sense of the protagonist finding at last some precariously balanced happiness, after long difficult years.
The narrator in this case - I’m not sure she ever does get a name! This only just struck me. The novel is told as a one-sided stream of letters home, so it feels perfectly natural that her name never comes up. She’s a young widow, who lost an unlamented husband who made her life a misery - we get no details (presumably her correspondent knows all about it already), but he left her in a state of nervous exhaustion, and she went to Japan to teach at a missionary kindergarten (despite having no missionary leanings and little religious feeling) on the hope that a change of air and scenery combined with useful work might help her put herself back together.
And it does help, although it is also a struggle, right up to the end of the book. “The whole truth is I’m worsted! The fight has been too much. Days, weeks, months of homesickness have piled up on top of me until all my courage and my control, all my will seem paralysed. Night after night I lie awake and stare into the dark, and staring back at me is the one word ‘alone.’”
Then she heads out to mail the letter in a raging storm, after which she walks recklessly onto the sea wall, climbs the stone lantern, and lets the rain beat on her face and the thunder roar above her and the waves rush against the sea wall until the storm dies away, and the sun rises above the sea, and through some sort of meteorological transference, feels her own spirits rise within her as well.
I am continually astounded by how often characters in nineteenth & early twentieth century novels fall prey to their nerves - it might of course be selection bias, but then I usually select these books on the basis of “I know nothing about this book but it’s on Kindle for free!” which I think would rather mitigate against that. In any case it’s super useful: I’m working again on the book set after the Civil War, where the heroine has suffered what we would call depression (and they might also call it depression, but they would also call it “nerves”), and I definitely highlighted some stuff in here for reference.
This makes it sound super grim, which it is not. The “blue devils” (as the heroine calls these attacks of depression) are not always after her, and there are plenty of fun times, too: visits to Nagasaki, Kyoto, Vladivostok (which she does not like; this book was published fresh on the end of the Russo-Japanese War and America was solidly on Japan’s side). Even Shanghai! And she’s very funny, sometimes even when she’s in the depths of despair: she reminded me of a more worldly version of Judy from Daddy-Long-Legs in her gleeful but good-hearted irreverence. Witness this exchange she reports between a tract-bearing missionary and a seasick passenger:
“Brother, are you a Christian?”
“No, no,” he muttered impatiently. “I’m a Norwegian.
Now what that man needed was a cocktail, but it was not for me to suggest it.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-22 06:12 am (UTC)I've heard/read that phrase before, as well as "blue-deviled" meaning less clinically out of sorts, down, in a lousy mood.
Now what that man needed was a cocktail, but it was not for me to suggest it.
That's great.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-23 12:39 am (UTC)Oh, and I can think of two color terms for cowardice: being yellow, or showing the white feather - although I've also seen white used as a synonym for honest, brave, true, all the Boy Scout virtues (in a book about Boy Scouts, actually). (There's probably a racial subtext to that meaning, although I haven't chased down the etymology or anything.)
"Blue devils" - and the green-eyed monster, which is still somewhat in use - both portray emotions as something that come from outside to attack us, which maybe doesn't mesh with a modern (post-Freudian) popular understanding of psychology where emotions well up from within us. Or something. I need to give this more thought.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-23 12:57 am (UTC)I've seen that! I wonder if it mutated into "browned off," which is not so much gloomy as fed up, annoyed. (I always associated that with "brassed off" or "cheesed off" and assumed it was just one of the ways slang multiplies.)
and many of them seem so vivid and useful to me that I always find it sad that they've fallen out of fashion.
"Black dog" for depression has stuck around, possibly because it was popularized by Churchill.
Oh, and I can think of two color terms for cowardice: being yellow, or showing the white feather
Yes! "Yellow" is older than dirt; "white feather" is at least nineteenth century, although it really got a boost with A. E. W. Mason's The Four Feathers (1902) and then World War I. That one I'd have to look into.
although I've also seen white used as a synonym for honest, brave, true, all the Boy Scout virtues (in a book about Boy Scouts, actually). (There's probably a racial subtext to that meaning, although I haven't chased down the etymology or anything.)
I have encountered that before, most memorably in Frederick Nebel's MacBride and Kennedy stories (1928–36) and in RKO's Girl of the Port (1930). It is definitely racial and it always startles me.
both portray emotions as something that come from outside to attack us, which maybe doesn't mesh with a modern (post-Freudian) popular understanding of psychology where emotions well up from within us.
It's very classical, though—it's how madness happens to a person in Greek epic, or love.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-22 08:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-23 12:27 am (UTC)I'm just about to read the sequel. Hopefully it will be just as good!