A Certain Slant of Light

My reading binge has continued! Sadly I did not stumble upon any gems of ancestral hilarity, although there was a certain amount of WTF?ness to be found.

First, I read Laura Elizabeth Richards Howe’s 1894 Marie, a slender book about the French fiddler Marie who, accompanied by her beloved violin, escapes from the evil circus master and wanders into a charming little Maine village. She is playing her violin, to the delight of the village children...only to be interrupted by the thundering rage of Jacques De’Arthenay (whose name, after centuries in the new world, has been mangled into “Jakes”), a man whose religious rejection of music is so hardcore that he “harbored in the depths of his soul thoughts about the probably frivolity of David.” (13)

You know. Because of the harping.

Of course Jacques falls madly in love with Marie. And Marie, of course, finds him terrifying. So naturally when the circus master shows up in town intent on dragging Marie away with the circus again, Jacques saves her - on the condition that she will marry him, and never play her devilish fiddle again!

By the end of the book Jacques has Seen the Light (or rather Heard the Birdsong) about music. But still, least romantic relationship ever, especially considering how very insistent the book is that Marie is still a child in her heart: “a child among children” (14); “not a fool, only a child” (63); “the child you wedded whether she would or no, and from whom you are taking the joy of childhood, the light of youth.” (84) Ooookay then.

On the other hand, Maria Thompson Daviess’ 1918 The Golden Bird is rather charming, although clearly suffering the early stages of war fever: Daviess has tucked into her novel an agricultural tract on the importance of growing enough food to feed ourselves and our troops in the upcoming struggle.

Following her feckless father’s loss of his fortune (because he was too distracted by Thucydides to keep track of his investments), Ann moves to her ancestral dwelling in the Harpeth Valley, accompanied by a bevy of chickens that she hopes will lay her a fortune. (The Golden Bird in question is the rooster.)

Ann’s beau Matthew is horrified by this turn into henwifery. Horrified. He attempts to talk her around - “ ‘Now, Ann,’ began Matthew, in the soothing tone of the voice he had seen fail on me many times” (33) - but of course it is all for naught.

Poor Matthew. He is so completely ineffectual at bossing Ann around, he was clearly doomed as a romantic prospect from the start. (Naturally I liked him better than the man Ann does end up with.)

But never fear! The author has a consolation prize for Matthew. As Matthew helps Ann set up her chicken boxes in the barn, “an apple blossom in the shape of a girl drifted into the late afternoon sunlight from the direction of the feed-room.” (35) This apparition with eyes “as shy and blue as violets were before they became a large commercial product,” (35) and she is so enchanting that Ann cannot resist temptation: Ann’s “lips met the rosy ones that were held up to me. I felt sorry for Matthew, and I couldn’t restrain a glance of mischief at him that crossed his that were fixed on the yellow braids.” (36)

Yes. Ann just snogged the apple-blossom to tease Matthew. Like you do!

I am so excited about all my free Kindle books from the days of yore that I could not restrain myself and made a whole post about them. I did my undergrad thesis project about girls’ books from 1890-1915, and I’ve simply had marvellous luck finding books I like in that time period. Recently I even branched out and read a boys’ book from the time period, William Heyliger’s Don Strong, Patrol Leader, which I all but live-blogged at sineala as I read it.

IT IS SO EARNEST. SO EARNEST. It is about boy scouts and it shimmers and shines with earnest, upright scoutliness. “The patrol leader, [Don] thought, should be a fellow who was heart and soul in scouting - a fellow who could encourage, and urge, and lend a willing hand; not a fellow who wanted to drive and show authority.” It’s as if Steve Rogers committed mitosis and became an entire boy scout troop.

Except! Except there is one bad scout, Tim, who is always destroying unit cohesion because he yearns to impress his authority on everyone rather than working as part of the team. Obviously it is Don’s duty as patrol leader to help Tim get in touch with his best self, so he can contribute to the troop! Naturally it ends with a treasure hunt in the woods where they beat each other up and then finally begin to work together.

None of Heyliger’s other books are on Kindle for free. I am so sad about this.

But it’s not like I’m going to run out of reading material. I’ve got like fifteen books stocked, and I have particularly high hopes for these three:

1. Rose of Old Harpeth, by Maria Thompson Daviess. I loved her book Phyllis (you have to scroll down past the Lost Prince review to get to Phyllis), and all Daviess' books, evidently, are set in the same imaginary southern town - a precursor to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpa County, except infinitely kinder and gentler and with much more emphasis on female friendship and lovely nature descriptions.

2. Georgina’s Service Stars, by Annie Fellows Johnston. I keep meaning to write something about Johnston’s Little Colonel books - suffice it to say that I am sufficiently invested that my mom and I got into a shipping debate about the Little Colonel’s romantic prospects - so I have high hopes for Johnston’s later Georgina duology. Especially because I am pretty sure that Georgina’s Service Stars is a World War I book, and I am so curious to see how Johnson will handle it.

And by curious, I mean that I hope Georgina has ridiculous adventures being a nurse on the Western Front or something like that. In the Little Colonel books Johnston made a twelve-year-old a captain in the American army in the Philippines during the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, otherwise known as pretty much the worst war for a twelve-year-old to join the American army ever. Mostly he spends the books standing around silently. I think Johnson meant his silence to show how manly and stoic he was, but in fact I’m pretty sure he was just way too traumatized to speak ever again.

(The Little Colonel herself, I feel compelled to add, is not actually colonel of anything. Her nickname comes from the fact that she’s just as stubborn and temperamental as her grandfather, a crotchety Confederate colonel who lost an arm in the Civil War. They make friends when she hurls mud on his suit.)

3. I’ve also acquired a couple of Margaret Vandercook’s Red Cross Girls books, although sadly not the direct sequel to The Red Cross Girls on the French Firing Line, so probably I will still be unable to fulfill my desire to learn about the further adventures of Eugenia and the dashing young French captain Castaigne. Eugenia saved his life when they got stuck behind enemy lines together because of his dire wounds.

This book was like crack, crack for me. The hurt/comfort! The delirium! The scene where Eugenia hides Captain Castaigne under a pile of clothes when showing the German troopers through the house. (Captain Castaigne is kind of shrimpy. This is one of his many charms.)

They get rescued! He reveals that he is in love with her! She is all, “What you really feel is gratitude, you’ll get over it and realize you never really loved me, I totally love you but I will never never say it because I don’t believe you really love me back, because how could you when you are so awesome in every way and I am me?”

WILL THESE CRAZY KIDS WORK OUT THEIR FEELINGS? Of course they will, it is that kind of book. BUT I WANT TO SEE IT HAPPEN. I WANT THE GLORIOUS MOMENT WHEN EUGENIA REALIZES CAPTAIN CASTAIGNE’S FEELINGS ARE TRUE.

...Anyway. Vandercook also wrote series about the Camp Fire Girls, the Girl Scouts, and the Ranch Girls, all of which sound like things I need to check out. I can only hope her girl scouts are half as earnest as Heyliger’s boy scouts!

A few memes ago, ladyherenya asked me which characters I wanted to save from their narratives, a question that it took me basically forever to answer because I kept getting distracted and writing BASICALLY AN ESSAY about Elsie Dinsmore. So I decided that I should share, because when I read this book for my nineteenth-century girls' literature project it basically exploded my brain.

Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore books are a series about an evangelical Protestant girl, first written in the 1870s. They basically focus on her relationship with her terrible, terrible father, who is simultaneously antagonist and hero, which is screamingly painful.

So Elsie’s mom died soon after Elsie was born, and in his grief Elsie’s father (who incidentally was super young and hot, the book informs us repeatedly) ran away to Europe and didn’t see his daughter till his return when she was eight. Eight-year-old Elsie, as Finley likes to remind us, is “not yet perfect,” because she does terrible things like allowing “her friend to accuse her [Elsie’s] father of cruelty and injustice without offering any remonstrance.”

You know, because he does little things like give her bread and water for lunch, and then, when she’s crying too hard to eat it, force her to choke it down because he thinks she’s refusing to eat out of stubbornness. Not cruel or unjust at all, am I right?

Poor abused Elsie spends the first few books yearning hopelessly for her father’s love, which he keeps withdrawing whenever she disobeys him. In Mr. Dinsmore’s mind, anything less than cheerful and instantaneous submission to his will is disobedience, so even saintly and self-effacing Elsie can’t please him.

And that’s before he asks her to flout her Calvinist convictions. Not, you know, because he doesn’t know about her convictions, but because he thinks that her convictions are ridiclous and wants to break them once and for all. So he gets sick, and he takes the opportunity to be all, "Elsie, I know it's the Sabbath, but you should read me this secular book."

Elsie refuses! Mr. Dinsmore is so vexed by her disobedience that he almost dies. Elsie’s hitherto kindly aunt tells her, “we all know that it is nothing but your misconduct that has caused this relapse.” Go ahead, Aunt Adelaide, twist that knife.

But then! But then! He gets better! NOOOOO. And Mr. Dinsmore is SUPER MAD. His daughter disobeyed him, and clearly the only proper response to this is SHUNNING. He tells her, “Elsie, I expect from my daughter entire, unquestioning obedience, and until you are ready to render it, I shall cease to treat you as my child. I shall banish you from my presence, and my affections.”

Elsie of course feels no anger about that. She tells him, “I know you have a right to do it, papa; I know I belong to you, and you have a right to do as you will with me, and I will try to submit without murmuring, but I cannot help feeling sad.”

(Is this the proper time to comment on the creepy incestuous vibes from their relationship? Lest you think this is my twenty-first century perversity talking, no, the other characters comment on it too: “Really, if a body didn’t know your relationship, he or she might almost imagine you a pair of lovers,” Elsie’s Aunt Enna scoffs.

And in a later book, after Elsie almost got engaged to a vile speculator Elsie’s father is all “DID HE KISS YOU?” Elsie assures her father that he did not, and Elsie’s father reacts thus: “ ‘I am truly thankful for that!’ he exclaimed in a tone of relief; ‘to know that he had – that these sweet lips had been polluted by contact with his – would be worse to me than the loss of half my fortune.’ And lifting her face as he spoke, he pressed his own to them again and again.”

People in the nineteenth century had different standards about physical contact than we do, but I am pretty sure that a father basically making out with his daughter was never okay.)

BUT BACK TO THE SHUNNING. Elsie’s father shuns her for six months. He convinces most of the extended family to shun her too. He takes away her nanny, who is basically her mother figure. Elsie begins to pine away and die. He builds a giant plantation house that they can live in together, if only Elsie will give up on her whole wicked “having a conscience” thing and apologize, and tells her that “all your friends will soon cease to love you, if you continue to show such a willful temper.”

Because apparently Mr. Dinsmore’s main goal in life is to destroy the last ragged shreds of Elsie’s self-esteem. The narrative is forever noting Elsie’s self-loathing with great approval: “I don’t deserve that he should love me or be kind and indulgent, when I am so rebellious,” she tells herself sorrowfully.

(This is, incidentally, the part of the book where Elsie begins to fantasize about dying. “I am afraid it isn’t right, but sometimes I am so sad and weary that I cannot help longing very much to die, and go to be with her [mother] and with Jesus; for they would always love me, and I should never be lonely any more,” she says wistfully.)

But despite her self-hatred, Elsie refuses to apologize! Her father, baffled and infuriated, is all, "If you don't obey me I will send you to a CONVENT SCHOOL." Elsie has been raised on terrible stories about wicked Papists torturing Protestants, and therefore promptly falls into a fatal decline, which so alarms her father that he comes to see her. Elsie, who is delirious, sees him and is like, “IT IS THE INQUISITOR AAAAAAH.”

I cannot disagree with you there, Elsie.

And then Elsie dies! Except not really, because there are going to be twenty-something more books about her. But her father thinks she dies, and is Saved, and then he never asks her to go against her conscience again, and they live together happily ever after despite the fact that he is a terrible, terrible man.

And these books have been recently reprinted. What is this I don’t even WHAT WERE THEY THINKING.

Yesterday, after I completed my list of favorite child characters, I realized that all the characters I’d listed were girls. It’s not that I avoided male protagonists as a child - I read pretty much everything - but clearly I imprinted on the girls.

Every so often I’ll stumble on someone bemoaning the fact that there’s nothing for girls to read that has good role models, and, okay, have you looked at children’s literature recently? And by recently I mean “within the last two decades.” Because for most of my childhood I did nothing but read and I never had a problem finding books with heroines I enjoyed.

If you’re looking specifically for books about Girls Who Fight, then yes, the pickings are rather slim. There’s all of Tamora Pierce’s books. And Crown Duel. And The Hunger Games and Graceling and, oh, the Narnia books, and the Fearless series which is admittedly a bit out of date, and the Gallagher Girls series - they spy, I’m assuming they fight? - and the Samurai Girl books and, oh wait, I lied, there are PILES of books about girls who can probably beat you into the floor.

Which is great! But frankly, if Girl with Sword is the only kind of character who falls under your “good role model” rubric, then you - and I say this as someone who loves Girls Who Kick Ass books! - are doing this wrong.

There’s a huge selection of awesome girl characters, and moreover, there has been basically since Jo March in Little Women proved that awesomeness sold. Early twentieth century fiction teems with amazing heroines! I am an expert in the field. Brave girls (with swords and without!), smart girls, funny girls, artsy girls, imaginative dreamy shy girls, and any one of these characters can be a good role model.

Which is not to say that girls’ fiction is totally perfect in every way and we ought to stop fretting about it; but we should fret about things that are actually problems. Sheer quantity is not an issue in Anglophone fiction and hasn’t been for over a century.

I got a Kindle for my birthday! Which means I finally get to read the last two Molly Brown books!

I've written about the Molly Brown stories before: they were written in the 1910s and feature the exciting adventures of Molly Brown and her multitudinous college friends, of whom my favorite is Judy Keane, a dashing young artist whose "greatest fear was to appear commonplace." And the book I'm reading now, Molly Brown of Kentucky, is all about Judy and her awesome World War I adventures!

Judy is in Giverny, studying art in the company of a short-haired female painter Jo Bill and her long-haired cubist husband Polly Perkins. (I wrote about these books in my honors project and it killed me that there wasn't more space to talk about Jo and Polly.) But then! World War I breaks out! Polly enlists! Jo decides to disguise herself as a man and become a pilot!

I was hoping Judy would also disguise herself and become a pilot, but alas after brief consideration of the prospect she decides against it. She figures that her family is in enough trouble at the moment, as her mother and father are stuck in Berlin because her father was designing a road in Turkey. (Naturally, designing a road in Turkey meant he needed to be in Germany.) The Prussian authorities are concerned that he might know military secrets so he can't leave Berlin.

I WANT JUDY TO SMUGGLE OUT MILITARY SECRETS SO BAD, YOU GUYS. And she might! At the moment, she's in Paris, where she befriended a French family that runs a delicatessen. Judy has become a sort of delicatessen apprentice, the way you do in wartime.

Meanwhile, Judy's paramour Kent is stuck in Kentucky, fretting about her endlessly. "Judy always lands on her feet, like a cat," his sister Molly points out soothingly. But Kent decides that he must sail for France. He will rescue Judy from the Hun! Except! His ship sinks! Taking most of the passengers with it, except for two who are taken prisoner on a German U-boat! Exclamation points times a thousand!

I'm not even sure being taken prisoner on a U-boat makes sense - what, did the U-boat surface just to pick them up? - but OH WELL, who cares about plausibility when there's high drama to be had!

MAYBE WHILE JUDY IS SMUGGLING MILITARY SECRETS OUT OF BERLIN SHE WILL RESCUE KENT.

Since last June I’ve been meaning to write some mini-reviews of books I used for my honors project ("The New Girl: Reconciling Femininity and Independence in American Girls' Fiction, 1895-1915"). But better late than never!

1. Shirley Marchalonis’s College Girls: A Century in Fiction, which is about fiction written about women’s colleges between the 1870s and 1940s or so and must have been the most fun EVER to research. I actually ended up reading two of the series she mentioned. The Betty Wales books were clear winners in terms of quality, but the Molly Brown books blew them out of the water for sheer cracktasticness.

Aside from Molly, a red-headed Kentucky belle with a talent for poetry and occasional bursts of telepathy, they feature:

• A Japanese exchange student (in 1914! This may be surprising but it’s historically plausible; the first female Japanese exchange student attended college in the US, at I believe Bryn Mawr, in the 1870s)
• A famous suffragette’s daughter
• A mean rich girl who is eventually saved by the love of a good woman (I am so not making that up)
• A Florentine kleptomaniac classmate who works silver. (Kleptomania was apparently the hot new mental disorder. The Betty Wales books, generally much soberer than the Molly Brown, also contain one.)
• An Appalachian mountain girl who is attending college because all her male relations were killed in a mountain feud
• A female painter named Jo, who lives in Paris and wears Turkish trousers
• And Jo’s buddy/boyfriend/whatever, Polly, a long-haired Cubist painter.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I could write a whole paper purely on the Molly Brown books and their epic weirdnesses.

2. My favorite favorite FAVORITE book from my project is Christine Stansell’s American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century, which I loved so much that I’m applying to U Chicago purely because she works there.

The research is exhaustive and broad-ranging, and the subjects encompassed – bohemians! Emma Goldman! modern art! the invention of heterosexuality as we know it! – are fascinating But more than anything, the writing is phenomenal: clear but nuanced, possessed of the narrative drive of a good novel, but never taking liberties with history. If I wrote a book like this I could die happy.

Damn, I miss being a student.

Forty-one pages.

Forty-four references.

12,075 words.

And the draft of my history capstone is complete!

(For now. I need a mere twenty more pages to make it an honors project. Piece of cake, y/y?)

And for your delectation, a quote from the immortal Josephine Preston Peabody. (In the introduction to JPP's diary, the editor notes that "In this book...emphasis has been put upon the growth of a creative artist, in the hope that young artists may here find a companion." I may feel this with a certain over-literalness.)

"The reason why I never read anything in the Athenaeum is because I have too many books around me and I’m so greedy and so disquieted by the look of all the unread, and the vague summons of the two floors above and the two galleries to a floor, that my mind is incapacitated and I flutter helplessly between destiny and free will and get nothing from either; only lose a train or two and come home late to tea."

A few weeks ago asakiyume posted a link to this article about Barbara Newhall Follett. Follett published her first novel, the tale of Eepersip who ran away to live in the woods, dance with the butterflies, and become a wood nymph, when she was twelve in 1927.

In 1939, Follett herself disappeared.

So of course I had to find out more about her. In the sixties her mother and a researcher published Barbara; the unconscious autobiography of a child genius, which tells the story of her life largely through excerpts of her writing: her letters but mainly her stories, some of which are reproduced in full and all of which, even the one she wrote at six, are marvelously lucid.

I think this is a dubious method, quite frankly. I think you can understand general themes of a person's thinking through their stories - Barbara was clearly obsessed with escape, for instance - but they draw specific parallels which are, to my mind, unwarranted.

And the novel itself - The House without Windows? Well...

I might have loved it if I read it at eleven. But, reading it at twenty-two, it has two strikes against it.

First, it's so very repetitious. Every few pages Eepersip crowns herself in flowers and dances "as she had never danced before" with the butterflies, birds, other assorted animal friends, the waves, or the snow. She spends an enormous amount of time reveling in Nature, which seems to be what most people like about the book, but I would like a little more incident and a little less description.

Unfortunately most of the book's incidents involve Eepersip's parents trying to catch her, which brings me to my second problem: Eepersip is so very solipsistic. It's hard to enjoy her reveling in nature and making friends with chipmunks and kidnapping her little sister (but don't worry, Eepersip takes her home when she realizes Fleuriss would cramp her style) when I felt so bad for her poor parents.

Nonetheless I'm curious to read the other books she wrote, especially the two novels that remain unpublished. All of Barbara's papers, including those novels, are stored in a box at Columbia - and you have no idea how I want to hop on a bus and go read them...

(I think I need to put off all further Barbara research until after I've graduated. I'm antsy enough as it is; my escape fantasies need no encouragement!)

I've been reading a whole lot of turn of the century girls literature recently, and some of the criticism thereof, and am quite annoyed at the efforts of some critics to shove that literature model vis a vis boys literature of the time.

The two main problems (for "problem" read "way in which girls literature differs from boys literature"), it seems, are that (a) turn of the century girls literature often ends with the heroine growing up, and (b) its heroines generally don't have sword fights.

(a) is bad because it means these books are really part of the grand patriarchal scheme to make sure that women grow up to be Happy Housewives types, whereas boys literature is part of the grand scheme to... make sure boys want to remain ten forever? I realize that white guys at the turn of the century were beyond privileged, but I was unaware that even the rules of time bowed to their wills.

That may be a cheap shot. Perhaps more to the point, these books generally don't end with the heroine drifting into a life of Happy Housewifery; almost always, they end with a heroine who is looking toward the massive potentialities of the future, calmly certain that her brains, bravery, and beauty will get her through.

(I suspect the reason heroines so often grow up is that Louisa May Alcott wrote about her heroines growing up, and she bestrode the field of girls literature much as Tolkien bestrode that of fantasy.)

(b) is bad because sword fights are the highest form of literature ever invented, and any book that doesn't involve it is inferior. Thus, the basest pulp novels are better than Anne of Green Gables.

Right, that's a cheap shot again. However, there seems to be a...distaste...for the loosely plotted meandering of many of these books and their general lack of sword fights and blood and pirates, as if there's something intrinsically wrong with quiet books - and not just wrong in terms of quality, but wrong in a "girls hate quiet books and want nothing more than sword fights" sort of way. Because... girls read the quiet books only because the iron hand of the patriarchy will smack them down if they don't. Or something.

And if girls don't hate quiet books and want nothing more than sword fights, it's because their brains have been Coopted by the Patriarchy. (Surely one could make just as strong a case that liking only books about sword fights is a sign of Cooptation - because those are the books the Patriarchy values.) Or maybe - here's a thought - girls like different books because they're different people, and many of them enjoy sword fight books and quiet books.

Because - and here's the thing - so many of these turn of the century books are beloved. Anne of Green Gables, A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, all those Louisa May Alcott books - they still have piles of fans who adore them and have since childhood. Which boys books have survived so long, or are loved so well? - So why is it the turn of the century girls literature that is considered lacking?