Veronica

My sister called for my Little Women book review. I am going to get to that, but I want to talk about Literary Women first.

Jane Austen was 41 when she died in 1817. Charlotte Bronte was born just one year before Jane’s death, in 1816. Louisa May Alcott was born (1832) 16 years after Charlotte, and Laura Ingalls Wilder 35 years after Louisa May (1867). ASIDE: Frontiers’ people lived crazy hard lives. Laura Ingalls grew up with basically none of the amenities that these other women, all born before her, enjoyed. End aside. 

There are many literary women, some I have read and some I have not. Please add to my list of names and birthdates. I love this sort of comparrison history.

Well, I enjoyed Little Women in very much the same way that I enjoyed Little House on the Prairie. The concept is similar. Both are ficticious tales based on the lives of their authoresses. Both treat domestic themes and glorify parental figures. This in rigid contrast to Jane Eyre and Jane Austen’s works. These works also treat domestic themes, but in a drastically different light. Parents and guardians in these stories are at best stupid and selfish, and at worst evil, cruel, neglectful, sinister, etc. Little Women and Little House portray family fidelity and love in its best possible light and say what it can truly be with hard work, faith and solid values at its core. It is unfortunate that our British sisters lived among so much familial injustice to be capable of writing such domestic tragedies, whether amusing or not. I am not lamenting that Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre exist, I am lamenting what their authoresses may have had to endure in their lives in order to write such things.

Does that mean that Louisa May Alcott’s family really was idillic or that her life was as perfect as it is in her story? Of course not. It also doesn’t mean that Charlotte Bronte was unhappy. I do think it interesting that the American literary contributions we are discussing deal with such similar themes as their British contemporaries and yet see things in such a different way. Is this due to the differnece in values between Britain and America at the time? Is it a result of the two groups’ very different views of poverty and social hierarchy? It does seem that class distinctions are accepted as givens in British society, while in the new world, hard work and perseverance will bring success and dignity, even if it fails to bring financial gain. Poverty is not brushed aside as meaningless in Little House or Little Women. These heroines felt their needs very keenly, but they didn’t accept that their physical prosperity refelcted in any way their character nor that they could not hope to become successful through effort. Poverty was looked on as the end of hope in Jane Eyre. She had no option for working besides the very lowest: near servant status as a governess. Jane’s heroines are normally a little more well-to-do, but still suffer from arbitrary membership in a lower sphere of social distinction (except Emma). It is this bleak determinism that I have begun to observe in the works of Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen, and it makes me a little sad.

More on this when it occurs to me. I have been sitting on this partially completed post for some time now, and I wanted to get it out there.

I just finished a biogrpahy about Jane Austen. It was highly enjoyable, but I found myself doing an odd thing at the end of the book. I immediately turned again to the first page and re-read the first chapter. It was as if something had illuded me. I felt, what was it, not betrayed… I guess I felt that I had gotten to know an interesting person, that I knew there was so much more to know and that I might never know it. It is similar to meeting someone at a weekend event, feeling a bond with them quickly and then never seeing them again. I felt the same way when there were no more Little House books to read. I actually remember crying when I saw an old photograph of Ma and Pa Ingalls because they were dead and I would never meet them.

Well, a movie based on the life of Jane Austen, but starring American Anne Hathaway, is set to be in theaters this fall, and I am expecting it to further frustrate my desire to know what the real Jane Austen was like. According to the one biography (which seemed authoritative enough) I have read, she was not as kind as her relatives would have had people believe after her death.

Anyway, this book (probably, in part, for the effect of sensation) suggests there was something of a cover-up, that her sister burned some of her correspondence after she died, that her brothers emphasized her good qualities and supressed the bad, that she hated children even though her family recorded her as a beloved aunt, and so on. I admit, I am less enamored of her having read this account. I do not believe I am any less enamored of her fiction, though I may see some of it in a different light from now forward. I doubt very much if this new film will be as ready to show her as a pessimistic, back-stabbing, bitter old maid as the biography was. Those qualities don’t make good heroines. She will probably be a watered-down copy of Elizabeth Bennet, and I am positive they will drastically over-emphasize her “feminism” and independence. She seems to have enjoyed her “independence” only when she finally earned enough money from writing to be independent. She will be cast as one who hated relying on the “charity” of others, but very late in her life, she was made very cross by her brother’s exclusion of her and the other husband-less women in her family from his will. At this moment in her life, at least, she seemed to feel entitled to some part of an inheritance and regretted receiving nothing. Her attitudes play out as “sense of humor” in her books, but if you take a step back and apply those attitudes to real life, she was most likely not always very generous when it came the the faults of others. That being said, I do not think she was nearly as bad as the book suggests, nor nearly so good as the movie will no doubt suggest.

In short, this is the problem I have with all biographical history. It is impossible to know a person through another person’s experience or through another person’s research. Even the Bible, God’s word and all, sometimes leaves things out that I would like to know. Do I need to know these things? No. They would be there if I did, and I do not think God meant us to experience Him entirely in reading the Bible, so there is that. I like reading biographies despite the fact that they usually create more mystery than they solve and leave me more hungry at the end of a meal than when the meal began. I want to know what actually happened. I want to know how the person actually felt, thought, spoke. I want to have solid facts, not my impression of someone else’s impression. I want the truth, but I will never have it, not in the case of Jane Austen. We are separated by an abyss of time, and I will never know her.

Well, I am really starting to feel like this train I am on is going somewhere. I felt the baby move last week. It has been moving since very early on, but I couldn’t feel it until now. It was so pronounced the other night that Scott felt it when I put his hand on my stomach. Everything you care about and feel worried about seems so stupid in moments such as these. I have something in my moving around. It is my baby, and I will get to meet ”it” in just about 4 months!

This all started a while ago. What, the Beattitudes you say? Of course that started a while ago. No, my encounter with the Beattitudes.

I had a phone interview before being hired as a camp counselor in college. During this interview, the camp director asked me if I had a favorite Bible passage. I said the first thing that came to mind, The Beattitudes, even though it was a bit of a lie if I really had time to think through my answer. I was familiar enough with the Bible from my years in Lutheran school mandatory religion classes and because I had earlier that year “rededicated” my life to God - I don’t particularly love the word “rededicated”, but cannot think of another that explains what I mean quickly enough. What I am not saying is that I wasn’t a Christian before. What I am saying is that my life did not reflect Christ in a way that could possibly be pleasing to Him, and I recognized a need for this to change and was - through God’s grace - obedient - meaning I was reading my Bible actively again. At any rate, I was not intentionally lying in order to score a job, I just am not very good at thinking on my toes in situations like these, and the Beattitudes were as fine an answer as any I could quickly think of, since I like the whole Bible.

Recently (over the past two years) the Beattitudes keep creeping into my sub (and not so sub) conscious. I attended a women’s bible study before we moved to Cincinnati, and the series we were in the middle of when I left was an in-depth look at the Beattitudes and the Sermon on the Mount. Supplemental to this study, I purchased a book of sermons entirely devoted to the Sermon on the Mount, in which the pastor giving the sermons breaks each beattitude down in detail. For the first time, through the study and very much through the book, I began to see the Beattitudes not as some mystical and incomprehensible teaching of Christ, but as a very accessible set of standards that should apply and in fact be indicative of the Christian life. I began to see the amazing things Jesus was telling his disciples about what their lives following him were to look like and what they could expect from Him and from the world. I haven’t finished the book yet (I sort of accidentally set it aside when we moved to Cincy and have yet to pick it back up; maybe I am trying to save the best for last). It is a magnificent, scholarly and yet very readable book, and I want to be sure I am in the correct mindset when I continue on with it. Also, other books of equal value have crowded in for the time being as we will soon see.

At the urging of my Father-in-law, I picked up Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. I am fascinated on many levels. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a lutheran pastor who was imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II and eventually executed in a concentration camp. He has been linked with a group who were actively plotting to assassinate Hitler. Well, needless to say, he writes a meaty book, and it has taken me months to get even half way through, mostly because I keep going back and re-reading things that are just blowing my mind.

So, at the beginning of lent this year, I had this book with me at the Ash Wednesday service, and I began reading a new chapter right before the service began when low and behold, old Dietrich was reminding me of the Beattitudes and in writing that could only lead me back to thinking about the Sermon on the Mount book (by Martyn Lloyd-Jones). I thought it was cool that these interpretations of the Beattitudes were not the fancy of one man, but were prevalent in the Christian thought of the time (that time being the 1930s, 40s and 50s). Well, what do you think the pastor gave his Ash Wednesday sermon on and had chosen for the entire Wednesday Lenten service series? The Beattitudes. Well, as a result of the Pastor’s series, we decided to center the youth presentation at Easter breakfast on the Beattitudes, and I don’t think it is a coincidence that I have been asking God to look at my life and tell me hard truths.

When I look at the Beattitudes I can easily see that they are not reflected in me. I do not treat others mercifully in the sense of truly loving my enemies and wanting what is best for all those around me even at the cost of my own desires or even safety. I fail in so many ways to be meek, poor in spirit (read the books, I don’t have time to explain that this isn’t physical poverty we’re talking about) and joyful in persecution.

So, everyone. I am challenging you to dig into the Beattitudes and try to find something there you didn’t see before. Let me know how it goes.