A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My Christmas reading has continued with L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, which I found quaintly delightful. This surprised me, because I didn’t enjoy The Wizard of Oz as a book: I felt it rather splintered into a series of disconnected anecdotes about halfway through. However, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus has a strong throughline: the titular life and adventures provide a central thread to tie together Baum’s lively inventiveness.

Charles Dickens’ The Cricket on the Hearth is also supposedly a Christmas story, or so at least I had been led to believe; I can only assume this is a misconception fanned by the Rankin Bass adaptation. The book in fact takes place in January, and contains no mention of Christmas at all, although there is a lot of cozy sitting by the hearth so I suppose I can see how people got confused.

I also finished a non-Christmas book: Janice P. Nishimura’s Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back, research for the college girls books I’m working on (there are now two… one more and we can make it a hat trick?), but also delightful in its own right. In the 1870s, five Japanese girls (one only seven years old!) were sent to the United States to get American educations and bring back what they learned to Japan. Two were sent home early for ill health, but after an initial period of culture shock the other three thrived, and when they returned home to Japan, they eventually (again, after a period of culture shock) became instrumental in transforming Japanese women’s education. An absorbing, engagingly written history.

What I’m Reading Now

Judith Flanders’ Christmas: A Biography. This is not grabbing me like some of Flanders’ other books (Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England was more or less the book that got me hooked on the nineteenth century when I was a wee teenager, so it’s probably expecting too much for anything to live up to that), but I was intrigued to learn that people have been complaining that Christmas has lost touch with its earlier, pious roots, and now revolves around secular merry-making, essentially since Christmas was a thing.

I’m rushing to finish my final reading challenge for the year: for “a book by a local author,” I’m reading Gene Stratton-Porter’s Freckles, another book about Gene Stratton-Porter’s beloved Limberlost swamp, also (like A Girl of the Limberlost) featuring a lonely, neglected child whose life is transformed by a love of natural history.

What I Plan to Read Next

The library is clearly not going to bring me Betty MacDonald’s Nancy and Plum this Christmas (sulky about this; the library had plenty of copies last year, I know because I shelved them with my own two hands, so I don’t know why they have only two now), but I have one last Christmas book to succor me: a mystery, Mary Kelly’s The Christmas Egg.

In 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.