19th c. American women in fiction
I know, I know, exciting subject line, huh? Well, it's either more Mika (he shot his next music video yesterday!) or this.
Anyway, even though I am primarily focused on British Victorian fiction (and we can see from my latest posts that I do so love the British--and why yes, I am comparing my fascination with British pop to my literary studies, because I am awesome, thankyouverymuch), sometimes I am reminded that there was rather neat stuff happening on this side of the Atlantic as well. While I still generally prefer the Brit scene, I have to admit that American authors often tended to be a bit more revolutionary, less tied to tradition, and thus often delivered works that, regardless of their technical merit, are really refreshing to read in the socio-cultural sense. Most of these authors, however, are almost completely unknown and not at all part of anything resembling "canon."
One such sadly underrated author is Fanny Fern aka Sara Willis Parton, a 19th century journalist, essayist, satirist, and novelist. She was extremely popular in her day, and was at one point the highest-paid columnist in the country, and yet is basically unknown now. This is sad, because she was quite the cool lady. I read her semi-autobiographical novel Ruth Hall in class last semester, and not only is it a compelling story and a fun read in its own right, but it is really admirable for the way she refuses to kowtow to expectations. For instance, the narrator is left widowed at the begininng of the book, and the "happy ending" finds her productively employed, successful in her career, reunited with her children, but still very much unmarried at the end. It's a bit of a Cinderella story, with her heroine being reduced to bitter poverty and having to struggle through a number of harrowing and humiliating situations until she can be helped out by a Prince Charming. However, the Prince here is not any sort of romantic prospect, and our princess catches his eye with her literary talent instead of any other charms, and he doesn't so much "rescue" her as simply gives her a chance to rescue herself (he's an editor at a newspaper who becomes a friend of hers). And yet in real-life, Sara Willis Parton did in fact marry one of the characters briefly introduced in the novel, so her choice to keep her heroine single was a very deliberate one.
Another thing I really enjoyed is how the heroine's relationship with her husband was portrayed. As a reader accustomed to novelistic cliches, when the naive heroine married her husband straight out of school, and blissfully moved in with him, I of course expected that this honeymoon happiness would not last. But instead, I was pleasantly surprised and a bit put back to encounter a depiction of a truly happy, functional marriage. It turned out that the husband's parents were extremely overbearing and bossy, and would often have the heroine in tears even as they doted on their son. What did the husband do? He saw that his wife was unhappy living in his parents' home, and so he bought a house in the country and moved away from them. When the parents followed them and bought a neighboring house and attempted to re-assert their influence, he told them off and informed them that his wife was the mistress of the house and they should thus give her the respect she deserves. It is true that all of this came to an end, but it was due to the husband taking sick and dying rather than any scandalous secrets.
And there were a number of interesting points in how she dealt with issues of class and women's rights, etc, in the book. (Interesting portrayals of mutual prejudice on the part of the black and Irish servants who populate it, too.) I am not so sure what to think of the heroine's continual insistence that she writes out of necessity rather than love, and that she would have been much happier living out the rest of her life in the idyllic housewife existence she had with her husband, but I do appreciate that at least this somewhat deflates the cliche of a Born Genius Whose Literary Gift Cannot Be Suppressed. Plus I think the point is that those idylls do not last, so using them as a base of what your life will be like is impractical.
Moving on from Fanny Fern, a while ago I got this book The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes at a used book store just for kicks, and it has some intriguing short stories from the turn of the century. They are... not very well written. But intriguing. The first story in that compilation, "Cinderella's Slipper," rather astounds me, because... wow. Again, it totally confounds my expectations of a turn of the century detective story. For one thing, even though this story is written by a male author, the detective in question is a woman. Second, the story is narrated by the detective's news-journalist friend, also a woman. Neither of them are married, and this is not at all an issue. The narrator finds her job fulfilling, if demanding, has a nice apartment to herself, and in general leads quite a pleasant bachelorette lifestyle. She often makes observations on the vagaries of being a newspaper woman--"And yet they say a New York newspaper woman has no nerves!", etc--but these observations tend to focus as much on annoyances with editors and the problems of accurate reporting as with gender expectations. She covers crime stories, but is not portrayed as either unfeminine or hyper-sensitive. Another little shocker: the suspect in the story is also ostensibly a woman (the only clue left after the murder is a woman's shoe, thus the title). The case that the narrator has just finished covering also involved a woman who was convicted of poisoning her husband, to everyone's surprise, since she was so frail and dainty to look upon. Our (maybe) murderess is no dainty posioner though--she stabbed her victim with remarkable accuracy, in broad daylight, and cut a clean escape (sans the shoe) in a matter of minutes. This would go back to cliches of femme-fatales if it weren't for our two heroines. As it is though, it creates a strange sense of a fairly female-dominated world that reads as somewhat strange to me even in this day and age--I would not blink an eye at a story where almost every character were male, but this still seems radical. In the end, of course there is a twist, but this does not change the initial set up presented by the story. So kudos to Mr. Hugh C. Weir. His women characters--both the detective and the journalist--are far more confident, independent, and effortlessly self-assured than most female characters in fiction now.
Kudos also to the editor of this volume, Hugh Greene, because his introduction is both informative and at times understatedly witty. That is all. I will likely return to Mika now.
Edit: In fact... oh heck, I can't not blog about Mika, I'm sorry. Thanks to the wonder of the internet, watch this little video of him taken earlier this morning! There's some sort of weekend radio festival thingie going on in London and he's performing there today.
The guy who's interviewing him is a radio host who rather thrashed him on his show before, so that's interesting.
And now they're broadcasting his concert live, and... apparently he now drums on a garbage can onstage? Maybe he's trying to take tips from the Patrick Wolf drummer disaster, heh. (Though his drummer is Cherisse and she's awesome and would never mess up a show like that.)
Anyway, even though I am primarily focused on British Victorian fiction (and we can see from my latest posts that I do so love the British--and why yes, I am comparing my fascination with British pop to my literary studies, because I am awesome, thankyouverymuch), sometimes I am reminded that there was rather neat stuff happening on this side of the Atlantic as well. While I still generally prefer the Brit scene, I have to admit that American authors often tended to be a bit more revolutionary, less tied to tradition, and thus often delivered works that, regardless of their technical merit, are really refreshing to read in the socio-cultural sense. Most of these authors, however, are almost completely unknown and not at all part of anything resembling "canon."
One such sadly underrated author is Fanny Fern aka Sara Willis Parton, a 19th century journalist, essayist, satirist, and novelist. She was extremely popular in her day, and was at one point the highest-paid columnist in the country, and yet is basically unknown now. This is sad, because she was quite the cool lady. I read her semi-autobiographical novel Ruth Hall in class last semester, and not only is it a compelling story and a fun read in its own right, but it is really admirable for the way she refuses to kowtow to expectations. For instance, the narrator is left widowed at the begininng of the book, and the "happy ending" finds her productively employed, successful in her career, reunited with her children, but still very much unmarried at the end. It's a bit of a Cinderella story, with her heroine being reduced to bitter poverty and having to struggle through a number of harrowing and humiliating situations until she can be helped out by a Prince Charming. However, the Prince here is not any sort of romantic prospect, and our princess catches his eye with her literary talent instead of any other charms, and he doesn't so much "rescue" her as simply gives her a chance to rescue herself (he's an editor at a newspaper who becomes a friend of hers). And yet in real-life, Sara Willis Parton did in fact marry one of the characters briefly introduced in the novel, so her choice to keep her heroine single was a very deliberate one.
Another thing I really enjoyed is how the heroine's relationship with her husband was portrayed. As a reader accustomed to novelistic cliches, when the naive heroine married her husband straight out of school, and blissfully moved in with him, I of course expected that this honeymoon happiness would not last. But instead, I was pleasantly surprised and a bit put back to encounter a depiction of a truly happy, functional marriage. It turned out that the husband's parents were extremely overbearing and bossy, and would often have the heroine in tears even as they doted on their son. What did the husband do? He saw that his wife was unhappy living in his parents' home, and so he bought a house in the country and moved away from them. When the parents followed them and bought a neighboring house and attempted to re-assert their influence, he told them off and informed them that his wife was the mistress of the house and they should thus give her the respect she deserves. It is true that all of this came to an end, but it was due to the husband taking sick and dying rather than any scandalous secrets.
And there were a number of interesting points in how she dealt with issues of class and women's rights, etc, in the book. (Interesting portrayals of mutual prejudice on the part of the black and Irish servants who populate it, too.) I am not so sure what to think of the heroine's continual insistence that she writes out of necessity rather than love, and that she would have been much happier living out the rest of her life in the idyllic housewife existence she had with her husband, but I do appreciate that at least this somewhat deflates the cliche of a Born Genius Whose Literary Gift Cannot Be Suppressed. Plus I think the point is that those idylls do not last, so using them as a base of what your life will be like is impractical.
Moving on from Fanny Fern, a while ago I got this book The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes at a used book store just for kicks, and it has some intriguing short stories from the turn of the century. They are... not very well written. But intriguing. The first story in that compilation, "Cinderella's Slipper," rather astounds me, because... wow. Again, it totally confounds my expectations of a turn of the century detective story. For one thing, even though this story is written by a male author, the detective in question is a woman. Second, the story is narrated by the detective's news-journalist friend, also a woman. Neither of them are married, and this is not at all an issue. The narrator finds her job fulfilling, if demanding, has a nice apartment to herself, and in general leads quite a pleasant bachelorette lifestyle. She often makes observations on the vagaries of being a newspaper woman--"And yet they say a New York newspaper woman has no nerves!", etc--but these observations tend to focus as much on annoyances with editors and the problems of accurate reporting as with gender expectations. She covers crime stories, but is not portrayed as either unfeminine or hyper-sensitive. Another little shocker: the suspect in the story is also ostensibly a woman (the only clue left after the murder is a woman's shoe, thus the title). The case that the narrator has just finished covering also involved a woman who was convicted of poisoning her husband, to everyone's surprise, since she was so frail and dainty to look upon. Our (maybe) murderess is no dainty posioner though--she stabbed her victim with remarkable accuracy, in broad daylight, and cut a clean escape (sans the shoe) in a matter of minutes. This would go back to cliches of femme-fatales if it weren't for our two heroines. As it is though, it creates a strange sense of a fairly female-dominated world that reads as somewhat strange to me even in this day and age--I would not blink an eye at a story where almost every character were male, but this still seems radical. In the end, of course there is a twist, but this does not change the initial set up presented by the story. So kudos to Mr. Hugh C. Weir. His women characters--both the detective and the journalist--are far more confident, independent, and effortlessly self-assured than most female characters in fiction now.
Kudos also to the editor of this volume, Hugh Greene, because his introduction is both informative and at times understatedly witty. That is all. I will likely return to Mika now.
Edit: In fact... oh heck, I can't not blog about Mika, I'm sorry. Thanks to the wonder of the internet, watch this little video of him taken earlier this morning! There's some sort of weekend radio festival thingie going on in London and he's performing there today.
Click to viewThe guy who's interviewing him is a radio host who rather thrashed him on his show before, so that's interesting.
And now they're broadcasting his concert live, and... apparently he now drums on a garbage can onstage? Maybe he's trying to take tips from the Patrick Wolf drummer disaster, heh. (Though his drummer is Cherisse and she's awesome and would never mess up a show like that.)