A Certain Slant of Light

Episode 2 of the recent BBC adaptation of Little Women is not quite as mind-bogglingly bad as episode 1, although possibly just because most of the badness is more of the same instead of a shock and a surprise.

Marmee continues to seem vaguely incompetent and overwhelmed when she is supposed to be basically a domestic goddess.

Amy is not quite as Evil as in episode 1 (on the other hand, it’s hard to match “burning your sister’s handwritten manuscript and then gloating about it while slinking toward her like a supervillainess”), but I think you will all be happy to learn that when the episode ends, she’s drawing a self-portrait: clearly already at work at the Dorian Grey portrait that will keep her sweet-faced and innocent even as she builds up a criminal empire.

Actually, the miniseries is clearly moving toward reforming Amy, and it’s actually made Laurie/Amy seem like a viable pairing - partly just by giving them more scenes together, although also through HEAVY FORESHADOWING like the scene where Amy is looking through Aunt March’s jewelry box, and finds Aunt March’s wedding ring, which slips through her hand and drops to the floor… and Laurie picks it up and gives it back.

Okay fine then. I see what you did there.

Just in case we still weren’t on board, they’ve also given Jo & Laurie zero chemistry: their bantering friendship here feels purely combative, like they don’t really like each other that muh. There’s one scene where Laurie kisses Jo (while Beth lies upstairs, possibly on her deathbed!), and Jo just kind of lies on the couch, totally unresponsive as he touches his mouth to hers, and it is the least sexy thing ever.

Given that total passionlessness, I’m not convinced they’re going to be able to sell Jo/Bhaer, at least in any romantic sense, because it seems like Jo is just not into guys or maybe not into sex at all. But Bhaer hasn’t shown up yet, so we’ll see.

The pacing is a little odd, but honestly this was probably inevitable with a three-episode series. Little Women could be neatly broken into two episodes, or four episodes - but three means that the break between the two halves of the story much inevitably fall in an odd place. Caswill chooses to put it at the end of episode 2, which means that the entirety of Good Wives is going to be crammed into one hour.

Gillain Armstrong’s 1994 adaptation of Little Women is totally charming. It’s a wonderful bucolic romp full of family and fun and sisterhood. Who can blame Teddy Laurence for wanting to become part of the March family? Surely at least half the people watching the movie must feel that exact same impulse.

The acting is stellar. I particularly liked Winona Ryder as the effervescent Jo March, quick to anger but just as quick to laugh; Kirsten Dunst as little Amy, sweet-faced but self-absorbed (I didn’t think the actress playing older Amy was quite as good, alas); and Susan Sarandon as Marmee, probably the best mother ever, gentle and loving but fiery, too, when she needs to be. The scene where she goes off on her rant about corsets to the shocked Mr. Brooke!

The anti-corset stuff actually comes from a different Alcott book (Rose in Bloom, I think), but it’s absolutely typical of Alcott’s reforming zeal, and I thought the movie honored that spirit - not just with the corsets but in school reform (Marmee’s avenging angel side comes out most clearly when she withdraws Amy from school as a protest against corporal punishment), and in the scene where Jo explains to a group of men that women shouldn’t vote because women are good, anymore than men vote because men are good; women should vote because they’re citizens.

(A particularly nice touch in this scene: even fiery, forthright Jo feels awkward speaking in front of a group of men, and needs a little encouragement before she opens her mouth. It illustrates the strength of the social prohibition she’s breaking in debating men at all, even so politely.)

Armstrong also gently updates some of Alcott’s plot points for the modern viewer. In particular, the movie did a good job coping with the Problem of Professor Bhaer, which is that to modern readers his insistence that sensationalist fiction is trash and Jo shouldn’t write it makes him an unbearable romantic interest. In the film, Professor Bhaer still looks down on sensationalist fiction - but when he sees how his stance hurts Jo’s feelings, he rethinks his position and apologizes to Jo for interfering with her writing.

I love this way of dealing with the scene. Hitherto he’s been something of a mentor to Jo, and now he’s acknowledging that he was wrong and needs to apologize; it puts them on a more equal footing and makes the eventual romantic denouement more palatable.

...Although I will join generations of Little Women readers in thinking that it’s just too bad that Jo and Laurie didn’t get together. Would they argue all the time? Maybe! But we don’t actually see them arguing that much, so… also maybe not? It does seem possible that Laurie wouldn’t be mature enough to give Jo the space she need to succeed and grow as a writer. Professor Bhaer is far less needy.

A few other things I love about this film:

The beautiful food scenes. In particular, many of them are not just eating scenes but cooking scenes, and it gives a fuller sense of the girls’ lives and how hard they work to keep this house so lovely and home-like.

The sense of place - and of time, the turning of the seasons in the bucolic New England countryside. (The landscapes are completely different than the spare Australian outback in Armstrong’s earlier film My Brilliant Career, but both films have this strong sense of place.)

The lovingly detailed interior of the March house: the crowded attic, the rooms the girls share, the ever-busy kitchen. They even found a piano with real ivory keys for Beth.

A lovely, lovely film. I’m glad, after all, that the new BBC series isn’t available in the US yet; it wouldn’t be fair to it to watch it too soon after this movie.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I am still chewing over a few days after finishing it. There’s a lot of stuff in this book and I don’t think I can really do justice to all of it (I’m not even sure I could summarize all of it in a reasonably-sized post, let alone offer my opinions on it). But one thing it really drove home for me is the massive hypocrisy of federal healthy eating initiatives, given that the federal government’s approach to agricultural subsidies is pretty much the reason that American eating patterns are so completely messed up in the first place.

Like, seriously. If the government stopped subsidizing corn on such a massive scale, it might not solve the obesity/heart disease/type II diabetes/every other diet-linked health issue caused by the mainstream American diet. But it would help a lot more than nitpicking about school lunch guidelines and whether there ought to be soda machines in schools.

What I’m Reading Now

I asked one of my grad school friends for book recommendations about daily life during the Revolutionary War. Unfortunately I think something was lost in translation, because he recommended The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, which is interesting if you want to know something about the political motivations of the common man in Boston or the way that the public memory of the Revolutionary War changed in the later decades (did you know the Boston Tea Party wasn’t called that till the 1820s?), but not so useful if you were really hoping for something about, say, what people ate for breakfast in the years around the Revolution.

I’m also trundling along in Louisa May Alcott’s Moods, and have become unexpectedly caught up in it. Our heroine Sylvia married a man she likes but doesn’t love, because she thought the man she did love had married another… Only it turns out he didn’t! And never sent her a letter or anything, because they gazed deep into each other’s eyes one time and of course after that he was sure she could never even think of marrying someone else. He has been bitterly disabused of this illusion.

And now he’s paying a visit to Sylvia and her husband, because of course he is, and they’re all having an amiable chat about the morality of divorce in cases of marital incompatibility. (I feel kind of sorry for the husband here. He has no idea that he may be talking his lady love into leaving him.) Is Alcott going to end up writing an argument for divorce???

This seems so unlikely - I really think it’s more likely that Sylvia’s husband is going to conveniently die in battle or something - AND YET. I’ll keep you posted on how it all pans out!

What I Plan to Read Next

You guy, I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna read all the Caldecott winners. I found a printable list of Caldecott winners (it’s made to be colored in as you read each book! How cute is that?), and also I checked and the local library has all but two of the Caldecott winning books. So OBVIOUSLY I have to do it.

Plus, the 2016 winner is Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear, about the origins of Winnie the Pooh. Obviously I can’t pass that up!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Eva Ibbotson’s Madensky Square, and I enjoyed it so much that I nearly flung myself headlong into The Star of Kazan, which is the other Ibbotson book that I own, but then I decided to restrain myself and save The Star of Kazan for the next time I need a feel-good book. Most of Ibbotson’s books are quite reliable for that (except maybe The Morning Gift).

I highly recommend Madensky Square for the parts about creation, the description of Vienna, the musings on sadness and mortality and getting on with life (there’s a lot of sadness in it for such a happy book; but on balance it is a very happy book), and also because Ibbotson has the rare gift for writing child characters just as well in adult fiction as in her children’s books. They always feel like real people, not child-macguffins.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, a short book about her experiences as a nurse during the Civil War. The first quarter of it (and it’s not a very long book) is entirely taken up with her voyage to the hospital; I am thinking that perhaps it won’t have as many nursing details as I hoped.

Oh, and my hold on Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On FINALLY came in! I’m enjoying it so far, although it’s really surprisingly bleak - or maybe I shouldn’t say surprisingly. It’s riffing off Harry Potter, and it just brings the bleakness that’s mostly hidden by whimsy and sense of wonder in Harry Potter right up to the surface.

(I used to think that J. K. Rowling created the Wizarding World without realizing how astonishingly dark it was beneath the jokey exterior, but now that I’ve read her adult detective novels I’ve decided that she probably knew exactly what she was doing.)

I think I’m going to write a longer review once I’ve finished reading; Carry On is doing some interesting things in its riff off of Harry Potter’s world-building (in particular, I think it’s responding to a lot of criticisms of the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), and I’ll be able to articulate it better once I’m through.

What I Plan to Read Next

I also have Louisa May Alcott’s Moods on my Kindle, so I may read that once I’ve finished Hospital Sketches. Or maybe Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Gypsy’s Cousin Joy, which is a children’s book published about the same time as Little Women?

OH OH OH, also American Girl has a new historical character out! I feel leery, given how disappointing I found their last new series (Maryellen the 50s girl, who totally deserved better!), but this one is about the Civil Rights struggle in the sixties so I am cautiously optimistic that it might be good. At very least, it won’t be able to totally ignore the hard parts of history the way the Maryellen books did.

BUT THE LIBRARY DOESN’T HAVE IT YET, WOE. So I guess I won’t be reading it for a while.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

John Steinbeck’s ill-named The Red Pony. I can only assume he picked that title because he realized that the more accurate The Dead Horses might put people off. Yes, multiple dead horses! First the red pony catches the strangles and chokes to death on its own mucus, and then the ranch hand bashes a mare to death in order to extract her baby by Caesarean section.

Yeah. I think that tells you everything you need to know about this book.

What I’m Reading Now

Louisa May Alcott’s Jo’s Boys. There’s a whole chapter in this book about “how to behave around an author,” presumably because Alcott had no other platform on which to castigate her over-invested fans. Jo has become a famous author, and is beset on all sides by rapacious reporters and mooncalf fans. One girl flings herself into Jo’s arms, crying, “Darling, love me!” Oh, fans. Behaving badly since 1886!

I’ve also started Garth Nix’s A Confusion of Princes, which is a little too action-adventure for my taste. There are only so many times the hero can escape assassination before it starts to get repetitive. But perhaps soon he’ll start doing something else.

I haven’t gotten much farther in The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp, because I forgot to take it along when I visited my parents over the weekend. Tara and her sister Lucy have arrived in London! Tara has been swept off on a shopping trip by a woman named Clover.

Also, I feel that this book was not very well copy-edited, because I keep stumbling over small continuity errors.

What I Plan to Read Next

Charles Finch’s The Last Enchantments.

I ran out of time to read Richard Francis’s Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia when I was writing my utopias project, so I’m catching up now. It’s quite well-written - given how much I disliked Francis’s earlier book about Transcendentalist utopias, it represents a stunning improvement, because he’s stopped imposing his heavy-handed analysis on everything and is simply reporting what happened.

What happened, mainly, is Bronson Alcott being an ass. Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May) is the most maddening man, so self-centered, so incapable of seeing himself as in the wrong, even when he does things that are obviously beyond the pale like reading his fellow teacher’s private correspondence with her sister.

This is probably the inevitable outcome of his unforgiving creed. Here, for instance, is one of Bronson’s “Orphic Sayings”: “He who is tempted has sinned; temptation is impossible to the holy.”

So not only could he not believe that he had acted wrongly, he couldn’t even believe that he had been tempted to act wrongly, because that would make him unholy. All his thought is like this: it’s so high-falutin and impractical and rarified that it would be impossible to argue with him, because neither logic nor feeling nor practical considerations are ever going to reach him.

I feel so bad for Louisa May Alcott and her sisters, having Bronson Alcott for a father must have been terrible. The whole household revolved around shaping the girls’ souls, which must have been stifling. Bronson was in the habit of editing or outright censoring his children’s diaries in order to explain to them that the way they felt wasn’t really the way they felt.

To do him what little justice he deserves, many people in the nineteenth century didn’t see diaries the way we do today, as a place to sort out one’s private and personal self, but as a kind of moral accounting book. It makes perfect sense to share a moral accounting book with someone else. Without outside perspective you might very well beat yourself up unnecessarily for small sins or, alternatively, let yourself off the hook for everything on the grounds that you didn’t really mean to be bad.

HOWEVER. When you choose an auditor for your moral accounting book, it very definitely should not be someone as self-centered as Bronson Alcott.

There are two things I love about history: finding surprising or delightful people or events, notes of grace (all the lovelier because history, as a whole, is not graceful), and running across bits that don't fit - that point to lacunae in your own knowledge, or in received history, or in knowledge of history as a whole.

I had one of these experiences a few weeks ago, reading Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom. Eight Cousins is actually a bit dull, but Rose in Bloom is cracking good, with surprisingly well-developed and conflicted characters, a good clip on its plot, and a sweet romance (in which the hero proves his manliness by writing a book of poetry. Be still my heart!).

But what caught my attention in this instance is a minor secondary character, a Chinese immigrant named Fun See who moves in the social circles of our heroine, Rose, and -

"Oh, Mac! Annabel has just confided to me that she is engaged to Fun See! Think of her going to housekeeping in Canton someday and having to order rats, puppies, and bird's-nest soup for dinner," whispered Rose, too much amused to keep the news to herself.

"By Confucius! Isn't that a sweet prospect?" And Mac burst out laughing, to the great surprise of his neighbors, who wondered what there was amusing about the Chinese sage.

Okay, so it doesn't radiate racial sensitivity. But, while Rose and Mac think the engagement is entertaining, they aren't a bit shocked or offended by it; and there isn't any sense in the text that Alcott thinks she's doing anything daring, or that a white upper-class girl marrying a Chinese man would offend anyone.

And - why? The only thing I know about the history of the Chinese in 19th century America - the only thing I thought there was to know - is the history of the Chinese on the West coast, and I was distinctly under the impression that white people frowned on mixed marriages. So why, in an inoffensive children's book published in 1876, is it all right Annabel to marry Fun See?

And that's the lovely thing about studying history: because it shows you constantly that the world is much wider than you know.

(And when I figure out why the good ship Annabel/Fun See can sail, I'll be sure to let you know.)