{"id":1075,"date":"2015-08-06T12:42:15","date_gmt":"2015-08-06T10:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=1075"},"modified":"2015-08-06T12:42:15","modified_gmt":"2015-08-06T10:42:15","slug":"all-those-girls-from-the-past-and-their-narrow-choices-from-alice-to-sybylla","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2015\/08\/06\/all-those-girls-from-the-past-and-their-narrow-choices-from-alice-to-sybylla\/","title":{"rendered":"ALL THOSE GIRLS FROM THE PAST AND THEIR NARROW CHOICES: FROM ALICE TO SYBYLLA\u2026 <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Warning: plenty of spoilers here, novels\u2019 endings discussed]<\/p>\n

I am not sure whether I have really taken a break from writing this blog as I realize that I seem to have been preparing today\u2019s post all along in my free time. What is a summer break for if not for reading widely and wildly in between outings? Yet, as you will see, I have been reading less wildly than I assumed, and quite focusedly at least as regards one topic: young women\u2019s agency between the 1890s and the 1920s. Blame this on my Kindle, which demands fuel all the time. Legal downloads go back now to authors who died before 1945 (books are \u2018liberated\u2019 for free circulation following 70 years from the author\u2019s demise, a total scandal of you ask me\u2026 copyright should never be inherited). This explains, I think, the accidental coherence of my summer reading.<\/p>\n

Re-reading some of the papers I wrote for my doctoral courses, I notice I focused much of my work on the tension between the women who did and those who didn\u2019t\u2026 survive. I absolutely hated then and still hate middle-class novels in which the heroines commit suicide rather than work: Edith Wharton\u2019s Lily Bart in House of Mirth<\/em> (1905) and, ugh, that Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin\u2019s absurdly overvalued The Awakening<\/em> (1899). Being myself a working-class student, my heart went 25 years ago to Theodore Dreiser\u2019s spunky Sister Carrie<\/em> (1900). This summer it has gone again to Booth Tarkington\u2019s Alice Adams<\/em> (1921), the story of a cheerful low middle-class girl who, losing her chance to contract the upper middle-class marriage which her mother so frantically wishes to secure for her, decides to train herself for useful work and financial independence.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I am misreading Alice\u2019s ending and contemporary readers saw her condemned to spinsterhood, I don\u2019t know, yet I was glad that she makes a sensible decision. Tarkington, who had already won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919 for The Magnificent Ambersons<\/em> won it again in this novel in 1922. In between, Edith Wharton became the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer for The Age of Innocence<\/em> (1920), a story set in the 1870s in upper-class New York. Wharton\u2019s story is indeed a failed love story but I like to read it as the story of Ellen Olenska\u2019s refusal to submit to pressure and return to her abusive husband. In Tarkington\u2019s novel, set in the aftermath of WWI, Alice finds herself falling out of the marriage market aged 20, for being too poor to catch an upper-class husband. At 16 she is pretty enough to have the nicest boys in town crowding \u201cthe Adamses’ small veranda and steps\u201d; by 18 she is only attracting \u00abthe older men\u201d. Without a chance to attend a finishing school or get a college education, by 20 she can no longer compete: \u201cShe had been a belle too soon\u201d.<\/p>\n

Stephen Crane\u2019s bleak, naturalist tale Maggie, a Girl of the Streets<\/em> (1893), in which the downward spiral of a poor girl can be chronicled but not stopped, has reminded me that Sister Carrie<\/em> was scandalous precisely because Dreiser refused to condemn his proletarian girl, giving her instead a career on the stage, no matter how dubious. Again, I might be idealizing Carrie\u2019s ending as I idealize Alice\u2019s but work seems in both cases a pragmatic solution. In contrast, I have been much irritated by the endings of H.G. Wells Ann Veronica<\/em> (1909) and of Australian Miles Franklin\u2019s My Brilliant Career<\/em> (1901), though they are as antithetical as they can be.<\/p>\n

Ann Veronica<\/em>, which was quite a scandal at the time of publication, focuses on the New Woman\u2019s predicament. As Hetty, a friend of Ann Veronica\u2019s, explains: \u201cThe practical trouble is our ages. They used to marry us off at seventeen, rush us into things before we had time to protest. They don’t now. Heaven knows why! They don’t marry most of us off now until high up in the twenties. And the age gets higher. We have to hang about in the interval. There’s a great gulf opened, and nobody’s got any plans what to do with us. So the world is choked with waste and waiting daughters. Hanging about! And they start thinking and asking questions, and begin to be neither one thing nor the other. We’re partly human beings and partly females in suspense.\u201d Already 22, Ann Veronica decides to leave her father\u2019s home and support herself, taking as her inspiration G.B. Shaw\u2019s Vivie Warren from Mrs Warren\u2019s Profession<\/em> (1893, first performed 1902), a young college graduate who earns a living as an accountant (if I remember correctly). Ann Veronica, however, concludes that Vivie is just a fiction and finding no work decides to give herself an education (borrowing money from a man, wilfully ignoring in what position of dependence this leaves her). I had hopes for her as she chooses Biology but, guess what?, her biology teacher, Capes, a man married but separated, ends up providing all she needs\u2013the couple may be unconventional but the ending is as conventional as they come. Ann Veronica seemingly learns nothing from the suffragettes surrounding her and abandons her scientific career as soon as she can. Argh.<\/p>\n

Like many other readers I originally supposed that Miles Franklin, author of My Brilliant Career<\/em> (1901) was a man, until I learned this was Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, Australia\u2019s best-known female writer. Also a fierce feminist and, like Jane Austen, a woman who never married despite her diverse suitors. I am not mentioning Austen by accident, as My Brilliant Career<\/em> is not the story of young Sybylla Melvyn\u2019s writing career but of how she rejects the best possible suitor since Darcy for the sake of starting this career. Sybylla is stranded between the dire poverty of her own family, blamed on the incapacitating alcoholism of the father, and the middle-class background of her mother\u2019s family. She is, so to speak, working-class by professional situation but middle-class in her cultural training (she reads voraciously, plays the piano, etc.). <\/p>\n

The novel, written by a still teenage Franklin, has us believe that the tomboyish heroine attracts, for no clear reason, the Darcyesque Harold Beecham. This young man is said to possess a horrid temper, which is certainly a gigantic obstacle for a happy marriage, yet throughout the story he is as self-possessed as a man can be. There is a horrifying moment in which, right after Sybylla accepts his marriage proposal, he stoops to kiss her (this would be their first kiss). She, \u201chysterical\u201d and offended by Harold\u2019s \u201ccalm air of ownership\u201d, takes his riding-whip and brings it \u201cwith all my strength right across his face\u201d, drawing blood and almost blinding him in one eye. She expects he\u2019ll strike her but instead he forgives her and pretends he has had a domestic accident. Gosh. You may read this as a feminist attack against patriarchal man but I was very much disgusted, as disgusted as with Charlotte Bront\u00eb\u2019s decision to maim Rochester\u2013which is why I refuse to teach Jane Eyre<\/em>, much to my students\u2019 amusement.<\/p>\n

In a later scene, in which masochistic Hal insists on marrying this idiot girl who clearly does not love him, she confesses she\u2019s \u201cqueer\u201d and is \u201cgiven to something which a man never pardons in a woman\u201d. Just when poor Hal must be thinking she is secretly the most promiscuous woman in Australia, Sybylla blurts out \u201cI am given to writing stories, and literary people predict I will yet be an authoress\u201d. Hal, to Franklin\u2019s credit, laughs. Here\u2019s his offer: \u201c(\u2026) if you will give me a hand occasionally, you can write as many yarns as you like. I\u2019ll give you a study, and send for a truck-load of writing-gear at once, if you like\u201d. This, she rejects. <\/p>\n

Considering her own mother\u2019s very unhappy marriage and her obvious reluctance to having children, Sybylla\u2019s decision might make sense. Still, as a 21st century woman who wants to have it all, the loving partner and the successful career, I very much wanted to use the whip on her as she did on Hal. Funnily, I was thinking all the time not of Austen\u2019s Darcy, whom Beecham so much recalls, but of Leonard Woolf, who married Virginia in 1912, and became the main support of her own brilliant career. Um, yes, she committed suicide but it was in spite<\/em> of Leonard and her success and not because of<\/em> them\u2026<\/p>\n

Reading about all these girls and their narrow choices and marvelling at how different their 21st counterparts are, I wonder whether their dilemmas are over. Harold Beecham is now Christian Grey and as for the Leonard Woolfs of today, is there any? The anxiety to be a \u2018belle too soon\u2019 somehow persists and so does Sybylla\u2019s fear of losing control over her body and life if she marries. <\/p>\n

This is why their stories are still so appealing\u2026<\/p>\n

Comments are very welcome! (Thanks!) Just remember that I check them for spam; it might take a few days for yours to be available. Follow on Twitter the blog updates: @SaraMartinUAB. See my publications and activities on my personal web http:\/\/gent.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Warning: plenty of spoilers here, novels\u2019 endings discussed] I am not sure whether I have really taken a break from writing this blog as I realize that I seem to have been preparing today\u2019s post all along in my free time. What is a summer break for if not for reading widely and wildly in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-1075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sin-categoria","tag-gender-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}