New Century Reading

Jell-O Girls

Author Allie Rowbottom is a descendant of the family that purchased the Jell-O company from its founders and made a fortune on it. But as her book Jell-O Girls shows, not surprisingly, money doesn't necessarily make for happy lives. Her ancestry is plagued with mental illness, alcoholism, and abuse. If that makes you feel kind of "so what," I get it--do we need more books about privileged white people behaving badly and ending up in terrible places?

Maybe we do, when it comes to this story. Rowbottom smartly doesn't take a "feel sorry for poor pitiful us" approach, but more of a larger historical and anthropological approach. Along with the stories of her mother and grandmother, she includes much of Jello-O's history and how it was altered for the better and worse by different periods of American history, particularly during the 50s, when women were expected to be good homemakers, and the contrasting 60s and 70s, when feminism began to take hold. I personally never had thought much about Jell-O and women's roles in society, but this book gives a fascinating look at how the two compare and contrast. 

But another thing this book does is take a hard look at something that's still a problem today: How the medical field treats women. Rowbottom's mother knew something was wrong in her own body, but it took years before she could get a doctor to take her seriously. Her daughter experienced that too. I've seen people on Goodreads complaining about how this is a book about privileged people being sick, but they're missing the context that Rowbottom is pretty blunt about: Yes, her family is white and privileged. But even white, privileged women can be blown off by medical people, or even told the problem is all in their head, or they're hysterical, when in reality, there are truly physical medical conditions. If these women can't get doctors to take them seriously, how do the rest of us females manage?

Rowbottom ties that to a mysterious outbreak in the town where Jell-O was manufactured for many years, of mostly teenage girls who began exhibiting various symptoms that couldn't easily be explained. She wonders if the ingredients in Jell-O might have been at the root of it, while noting that experts thought it was a kind of mass hysteria, not unlike the teenage girls in the Salem witch trials. 

My one complaint about this book is the graphic, gory descriptions of various medical conditions and treatments. They really add nothing to the book--it's clear the people with the conditions are suffering without us having to be given such vivid detail. I skimmed some of that, and found the rest of the book fascinating. 

Red Comet

My review of this (spoiler alert: excellent) book is over on Sylvia Plath Info. 

The Equivalents

This was a fascinating book, a look at a very specific time and place. In the early 1960s, Radcliffe College came up with the idea of giving women a second chance at a career. The idea was that they'd have women who had been to college, to grad school even, but who had become sucked into the life of housewives and mothers and had not progressed in their career, come to a two-year institute. They would be paid a stipend to be used however they liked--largely for things like childcare and house cleaning--and the women could then re-immerse themselves in their fields. When you think about the early 1960s, coming off the 1950s when women who had worked during WWII found themselves ousted back to the home front, this does seem revolutionary.

Among the first set of women to be accepted were the poets Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton, writer Tillie Olsen, and visual artists Barbara Swan and Marianna Pineda. These five were admitted under a clause that said members had to have graduate-level work, or the equivalent. None of them had graduate work, but all had had some success in their field. They quickly bonded and started calling themselves the Equivalents.

Author Doherty takes a close look at the women's relationships and artistic development during their time at the institute and afterward. But--and this makes for a deeper, more meaningful book--she also looks closely at who wasn't part of the institute: women of color and, except for Tillie Olsen, working class women. Doherty explores the way that most of the institute's first class were actually fairly privileged. This is not to say that it still didn't make a difference in their lives; Sexton's mother-in-law was already helping provide childcare, but Sexton used her stipend to build a home office where she could work in private and not have her writing materials disturbed by things like setting the table for dinner. But for Olsen, this experience, along with teaching at Amherst after years of blue-collar jobs, radicalized her:

"It wasn't that she begrudged the Amherst students and faculty their good jackets or their nice houses. Indeed, she formed warm relationships with her students, who forgave her scatter-brained nature because she was so fervent in her belief that reading and writing matter. 'There's nothing wrong with privilege,' she used to say, 'except that everybody doesn't have it.'" Still relevant today.

It was a transitional time, where women like Kumin and Sexton were fighting to earn their rightful places in the world of poetry, which was heavily male-dominated then. Doherty takes a close look at the times and what was changing. She also includes some later time, when Alice Walker came to the institute to begin ground-breaking work of bringing Black authors the attention they deserved, and hadn't gotten.

It's also a look at how women formed relationships. Interestingly, Doherty demonstrates how women, particularly in poetry, tended to be competitive, no doubt due to the overall difficulty of gaining attention in a man's world. But at the institute, the writers bonded. Kumin and Sexton were already close friends, but they welcomed Olsen to their ranks. Yet all was not idyllic. Sexton's mental health was precarious in the best of times, and she was demanding of Kumin's support. Olsen had a flighty, passive-aggressive approach. Over the years, there were hard feelings and outbursts, and of course, Sexton eventually committed suicide.

I found this book fascinating. Lucky for me, I was primarily interested in the writers. Readers who are more interested in Swan and Pineda are possibly going to be disappointed in that they don't get nearly as much coverage as the writers did. That said, I hadn't realized the extent to which Sexton and Swan collaborated, and it makes me wish I'd kept my old copies of her books rather than donating them once I bought her collected poems. Doherty makes the case that Sexton's book Transformations anticipated the work of Angela Carter, which makes a lot of sense: "both writers used the genre [of retelling fairy tales] to explode myths about virtuous women and the conduct that is required of them."

 

 

 

The Last Days of Sylvia Plath

I'm not quite sure where to start with this book. I'm very interested in Plath and have read many books about her. Writing books about Plath has turned into a bit of an industry unto itself. 

This is not one of the better additions to the oeuvre. For starters, the title is deceptive. A rather large chunk of the book is devoted to much of the rest of Plath's life, not her final weeks. People looking for a deep dive of those last weeks--like me--are going to be disappointed. 

Worst, though, was the sheer amount of animosity the author shows to anyone who dares to suggest that Plath wasn't perfect. This narrative is entirely, "Plath was perfect and her detractors are all despicable demons." That doesn't lead to much of a complex discussion of what was an exceedingly complex woman. The hatred he seems to feel for Ted Hughes is incendiary. Let me hasten to add that Hughes behaved despicably to Plath (and to the women who followed her). But this book presents a nearly 100% view of Plath as innocent victim and Hughes as horrendous monster. It's an all-or-nothing approach that doesn't seem likely to be true. Even people who loved Plath have written that she was intense and had times of being difficult. Again, I don't condone Hughes' cheating on her and running out on her for another woman (who, later, killed herself and their young daughter). But is it at all possible that she wasn't necessarily easy to live with? No, being difficult doesn't justify cheating. But maybe it's better to look at how these things happened and at the actual personalities of all parties involved before proclaiming sentences. He seems to reject utterly the possibility that there were non-Hughes-related aspects of her suicide, include continued illness, trying to raise two young children on her own, a once-in-a-century miserable winter in London, the inability to get a telephone, having started some new anti-depressants that may have lifted her depression enough to give her the energy to plan her suicide--these are just some of the factors that could have played a role. 

Again, I'm not saying Hughes is not a factor. I'm saying that the vitriol the author doles out to him makes for a lopsided biography that's extremely one-note.

There are some interesting things. Author Susan Fromberg Schaeffer came to know Hughes and his family quite well, and ended up writing a fictionalized account of the aftermath of Plath's death. Her involvement with the Hughes family is brought to light here, and it's interesting. Rollyson also took the risk of doing a speculative chapter at the end, a "what if" looking at how Hughes could have handled Plath's estate differently, including how he taught his children about it, and proposes that Hughes shouldn't have been so restrictive around Plath's biographers. That's ruined when he ends the chapter by suggesting Hughes should have invited a biographer to be more deeply involved. He then invokes Patrick Bronte inviting Elizabeth Gaskell to the Haworth Parsonage to learn about the Bronte sisters. But recent Bronte scholarship (old enough that Rollyson could have read it) has taken the turn of thinking Gaskell did as much harm as anything. She portrayed the Brontes as stuck in this rural parish and cut off from all life, and thus their books were miracles. She also represented Charlotte as incredibly religious and godly, a patient saint when anyone who's read her letters (and her novels!) can see that's not fully the case. There's lots of work out there now showing that Gaskell's romanticization and simplification of the Bronte sisters is a serious disservice to the sisters themselves, and to their work. Suggesting Hughes should have taken such a route was a bad way to end this book.

I'm hoping that someone is working on an updated Plath bio that will be much more complex. The recently published collections of letters provided biographers with new insights and findings. It's helpful that Hughes and his sister, Olwyn (who was literary executor after Hughes' death), are not here to stymie this kind of work. The current literary executor, the couple's daughter Frieda, seems more inclined to be open with biographers. It was she who greenlighted the inclusion of several letters from her mother to her mother's therapist, including one of the final letters Plath ever wrote (that's known to exist, anyway). These letters were heartrending, and it had to be difficult to let them into the public, but they shed so much light on the complex Plath. Frieda's willingness to do so should be a signal to biographers to consider doing deeper work. 

The Bronte Cabinet

Yes, I'm still on a bit of a Bronte bender. This is another worthy look at the storied (pun intended) family, with a twist: The author has researched not only the family, but objects they used or things that were part of their everyday lives, and then researched the context behind those objects to see why they were important. It sound frivolous, but it ends up being a fascinating take on their lives. 

Using existing biographies and archives, Lutz looks at things as disparate as women's household work, (especially those in the middle classes), lap desks, hair jewelry (usually for mourning, but also to signify friendship or romantic intentions), even the family pets and how pets were viewed in those days. This sounds entirely random, but as the book moves on, it adds to the overall portrait of the Brontes, and usually goes hand-in-hand with Lucasta Miller's The Bronte Myth in dispelling some of the myths around the women. The chapter on lap desks is especially informative, as I had no idea of the importance of those objects. Not just for writing; they were also repositories for deep secrets, and the worst thing someone could do was sneak around in someone else's lap desk--something Charlotte did to Emily.

If you're interested in the Brontes, this is a good contextual piece that adds much to existing biographies.

Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life

Wow, did I love this book. It's less of a traditional biography and more of a look at the cultural context that Anne Bronte's literary works are situated in. Admittedly, there's not much known about Anne; for decades, she's been considered the "lesser" Bronte. Author Ellis argues, successfully, that that's a shame, and that Anne deserves more attention and respect. Drawing on her own research, as well as those who have come before, she paints a picture of Anne as not meek or timid, not unquestioningly religious, but a questioner, someone whose eyes were wide open, who had her own frustrations and concerns, and someone willing to stand up to the criticism of her book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as being far too coarse--especially for a woman writer.

Ellis uses a wide range of contextual materials, many from Anne's time, including magazines and books of the era, as well as visual art, court cases, politics, and the various preceding biographies in their varied accuracy and viewpoints. She also uses contemporary references, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dr. Who, which makes for entertaining reading. She's thoughtful, but also capable of being acidic and funny:

"It's impossible to say exactly what Anne's illness was. In Edward Chitham's 1991 biography, he suggests that it was 'a psychic crisis during which Anne subconsciously understood her feminine role as producer of children, and was both attracted and paralysed by it.' His evidence is that...Anne made, he says 'several' drawings of babies' heads in 1837. Actually, she made three. She also drew an oak, an elm and some wooded landscapes, but no one has suggested she was having a psychic crisis about trees."

Aside from Ellis' humor, though, is righteous indignation at Anne's lack of renown and respect:

"As I sit in the cold Parsonage library, reading in mounting fury, the staff tell me no visitors ever ask about Anne except, sometimes, vague questions such as 'What was the name of the "other" sister?' or 'What did Anne write?' but it's rare for a day to go by without someone asking where Heathcliff is buried. Anne is less solid, less known, than even her sister's fictional characters. She has become a byword for underachievement, neglect and exclusion."

She brings up interesting propositions, including the possibility that Charlotte and Anne were not that close and that, in fact, Charlotte was not exactly a stellar sister, and she makes a persuasive case. I also learned that Anne' scandalous Wildfell novel is today still being published in an abridged form that a scurrilous publisher had done not long after Anne's death, weakening the overall book and diluting its strength. Ellis helpfully notes which editions today have the full text as Anne intended: There's a 1996 edition edited by Stevie Davies and a 2017 edition published by Vintage Classics. This is a lot of indignity for what appears to have been a thoughtful, ethical author who wanted the truth to be told as she saw it.

But Ellis takes some major steps in fixing these indignities. Her passion for her subject shines through from beginning to end. She's making assumptions--a no no normally--but she backs them up as best she can. Even if she's wrong, she makes a compelling case to restore Anne to equal footing with her sisters.

All this is to say: I loved this book, and now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go acquire one of the accurate Tenant editions. I'm long overdue for a reread.

The Bronte Myth

This book has been sitting on my shelf for far too long. But in one sense, that's OK; I've read a number of biographies of the various Bronte sisters, and that served me well before reading this one. Author Lucasta Miller takes a deep critical dive into the world of Bronte biography, and lordy, what a big hot mess she's uncovered. Starting with that pre-eminent Victorian, Elizabeth Gaskell, whose biography of Charlotte had overarching motives of portraying Charlotte in the most saintly way possible, to how Emily was initially suppressed, then became the poster child for everything from mysticism to lesbianism, and how their books were viewed by different generations.

For people with some familiarity with their work, this look at the critical and biographical reception of the Bronte sisters (mostly leaving out poor Anne, who at the time of this book had had precious little scholarship devoted to her--that has changed a bit since then) is a valuable examination of the tropes that were accidentally or, worse, deliberately developed to appease and appeal to scandalized readers. The author quotes Virginia Woolf on the nature of biography: "A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand." 

Miller also dug deeply into the lack of, or incorrect, contexts used to analyze their work. Most grievous was the long-standing assumption that the Brontes were uneducated and ignorant. In fact, they were educated, if somewhat haphazardly, but most of all had plenty of access to reading material other than the Bible. Little research has been done to show what literary influences these women operated under, and it appears that those influences were extensive. Instead, the women are reduced to being a product of their environment--and that environment has often been reduced to being a ridiculously remote, minuscule village high on a hill, when in fact, while they lived there, Haworth was a booming industrial town. 

It's a book that makes it clear how fraught writing biographies of writers can be, especially writers who left behind little to document their lives. If this is of interest to you--and I found it really interesting--a good companion book would be Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman, about Sylvia Plath's biographers.

Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart

Claire Harman does a great service to Charlotte Bronte here by dispelling the old myth that Charlotte Bronte was a timid, mild-mannered parson's daughter who just happened to write one of the world's most beloved novels (and I'd argue that as much as I love Jane Eyre, I might love Villette slightly more--but they're such different books that it doesn't feel right to compare them). Charlotte was anything but timid. She was, however, someone keenly aware of prejudices against women, especially women authors, in her day and age. She wanted to keep her identity hidden primarily for that reason, but also she was aware that celebrity could make her daily life difficult, even if she was viewed positively. 

Reading her life's story from this vantage point is insightful and challenges previously held ideas. That said, sometimes author Harman is quick to say "Charlotte felt this way" without providing concrete proof (such as a letter expressing that emotion, etc.). There's a danger in assuming we know for sure what she felt or thought. The ending puzzled me, focused more on Constantin Heger, a man Charlotte adored (and who was married), and with whom she frankly pursued in an inappropriate, stalker-y way. 

But Harman's examination of how Charlotte came to marry her husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls, is entertaining and insightful. I also learned that the Bronte sisters' first book, a book of their poetry, did not sell many copies--but was owned and read by none other than Florence Nightingale. Overall, a worthy addition to Bronte scholarship.

 

Five Days Gone

Author Laura Cumming wrote this book about her mother, who has an eerie and fascinating childhood. At the age of 3, she was kidnapped and turned up, 5 days later, in different clothes, but unharmed. Her mother didn't remember this later, but it came out, as family secrets tend to do. 

But that wasn't the only family secret, as it turned out. She'd been adopted, something that wasn't explained to her until she was in her early teens. Even then, most of that story wasn't revealed to her, and she ended up piecing it together over many years, eventually with the help of her daughter (the author). It's a heartbreaker of a story, with twists and turns and unexpected (at least to me) revelations. It's also about what constitutes a family, and how small communities often close ranks to help families keep their secrets. Sadly, it's also the story of an only child, adopted fairly late in life by people perhaps not best suited to raising children. 

The heart of the book is a fascinating exploration of what happened and who was involved, as well as the discussions of families and community. However, the book is longer than it needed to be; it might have been better as a long New Yorker piece. The author is an art critic, and both of her parents turned out to be artists, so she brings in repeated stories of different artworks that she uses to compare her mother's situation to. These become a digression from the main story, and end up feeling overwritten and unnecessary, when the main story itself was so compelling. It slows the book down in places in a way that's unfortunate.

Still, I finished the book and found myself thinking about the author's mother and her strange, often sad, life. I don't regret finishing it.

The Barefoot Woman

The Barefoot Woman is a short, spare memoir of the author's childhood in Rwanda, just prior to the devastating genocide in the 1990s. But even prior to that, her life as a Tutsi made her family and neighbors outcasts, refugees who were uprooted from their mountain home and forced to move to an area of the country that was inhospitable. Yet, thanks to the tenacity of her mother, Stefania, the family survived and rebuilt new lives while never forgetting both what they'd lost and the threat that still existed. 

This book doesn't go into the details of the actual genocide, other than brief references to it. The author left Rwanda in 1992, just two years before the killing began, and she ended up in France. But she lost 27 family members to that devastation. 

But what she does in this book is show us what life was like before the killing, in all its beauty, fear, and daily routines and beliefs. Some of her anecdotes are funny, some are moving, and on occasion, after telling us of some event, she notes who ended up dead. Instead of showing us all the killing, she shows us what was lost. And that gives the book its emotional depth. Why were these people killed? These people, who loved their children and wanted the best for them. People who cared for and watched out for their neighbors, and yes, gossiped about them behind their backs (let he who is without sin throw the first stone...). People who toiled at brutally hard labor to earn a living. People who brewed beer out of sorghum and celebrated when good things happened. People who took pride in their rituals and way of life. People who ended up dead.

I've read other books about the Rwandan genocide, and it's always hard to read about. But this book seemed even more devastating. In the nonprofit world, there's a train of thought that telling a story about specific people and places is far more effective than giving statistics that don't have a face on them. You can read that somewhere between half a million and a million Rwandans were slaughtered. Or you can read about Scholastique Mukasonga's mother, toiling in the fields to be able to send her children to school, carefully allotting bread to be sure all her children got a bit of that treat while eating none herself, acting as the village matchmaker, telling stories to her children by firelight each night, and then know that this tough, shrewd, loving mother died in the genocide. This book is her daughter's loving memorial to her mother. Which is the more moving story?