Stories & Soliloquies

Stories & Soliloquies
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    • Mini-Syllabus: Turn of the Century Girlhood in Anglo-American Society

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on May 14, 2015

      A little while ago I came down with a cold and ended up binging on Netflix for a couple of days, watching the entire series of The Paradise, and then following it up with A Room with a View. While both are billed as love stories, I think what I found most interesting about them was their completely unselfconscious treatments of femininity within the very self-aware political landscape the pre-suffrage Edwardian era. It was a time of transition: not yet progressive, but not complacent either.

      Though the stories were set at around the turn of the century and the heart of the “first wave” of feminism, the films were, of course, made by modern minds. My curiosity piqued, I decided to revisit some childhood books that took up the same theme and were written within the time period to see how femininity was treated by its contemporary authors. I decided to give myself some parameters to keep the focus tight; I wanted books that were written around the transitional mood of the turn of the century, focused mainly on girlhood (rather than adulthood), and took up the perspective of E.M. Forster’s England and its colonial off-shoots. The result is a miniature syllabus on how Western culture viewed femininity and, more specifically, girlhood, during the early stages of the feminist movement.

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      Part One: Fiction at the Turn of the Century

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      1) A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster – 1908: Since the movie adaptation of this novel inspired this quest, it seems appropriate to start with the novel itself. Set in both England and Italy, this story is about a young girl starching against the rules of society. This is such a great depiction of the Edwardian era in general; coming on the heels of the Victorian era, the Edwardians were the last great swell of the English aristocracy before it began its slow decline, and in this novel you can almost feel the characters coming to a boil.

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      2) A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett – 1905: This novel is about a little girl who grows up wealthy, but when her father dies is thrown into poverty. This gives us a view not just of the feminine ideal of the Edwardian period, but shows how that ideal was expected to hold up even under the harshest conditions.

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      3) The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett – 1911: One of my favorite books of all time, this book is an obvious follow up to A Little Princess. Though the story is generally cast as exploration of the joys and powers of nature, femininity is often characterized by interiority (the domestic space), the wildness of nature (nurturing, childbirth, etc.), and mystery (“women’s intuition” and the like). An unkempt, secret, interior garden is such an interesting image through which to cast a young girl’s growth and change over the course of the story.

      Part Two: On the Periphery

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      4) Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery – 1908: This story jumps us over the pond to Prince Edward Island and into a very different world. PEI was at this time about 40 years removed from British rule, and is in a unique position to tackle the notion of girlhood head on. Anne is notable both for simply being a girl (when the family had specifically requested a boy to work as a farmhand), and for being unusual for a girl – she’s loud and talkative, boisterous and bold.

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      5) Little Women, by Lousia May Alcott – 1868/1869: Because this story was written and set in the Civil War era of the United States, it shows us a different perspective. Little Women deals with girlhood directly, with each sister offering a different layer of compliance or resistance with the norms of the time.

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      6) Little House Books, by Laura Ingalls Wilder – 1932-1943: Although this series is set in the late 19th century American Mid-West, it is written in the voice of the post-suffrage 1930s. Laura Ingall’s hard life of homesteading serves as both a memory of the past and a foil for Depression in the Dust Bowl, effectively bookending feminism’s “first wave”.

      Part Three: Non-Fiction Historical Accounts

      If you’re looking for some broader historical background, these texts are all excellent places to start. The titles are all quite self-explanatory, so you can choose based on your own level of interest. I’ve kept the focus here to the 19th century, with the idea that it sets the stage for the turn of the century attitudes.

      7) Gender Roles in the 19th Century, by Kathryn Hughes

      8) Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of the Secret Garden, by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina

      9) Femininity to Feminism: Women and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Twayne’s Women and Literature Series) by Susan Rubinow Gorsky

      10) Frontiers of Femininity: A New Historical Geography of the Ninteenth-Century American West (Space, Place, and Society) by Karen M. Professor Morin

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      I know that there is quite a bit missing here, but I wanted to keep the focus as tightly around E.M. Forster’s world as possible. I left out the teens and the 20s, suffrage, anything overtly political, and most notably, non-white perspectives. I have plans for future iterations of this syllabus that will deal with girlhood in other groups, cultures, and time-periods, so if you have any suggestions to add to this list, or for future lists, please feel free to leave links in the comments. As always, be sure to describe your suggestions, as links alone will likely be filtered out as spam by the powers of WordPress.

      Posted in Series | 5 Comments | Tagged books, Edwardian Era, femininity, feminism, girlhood, history, mini-syllabus, reading
    • Machine Shops, Then and Now

      Posted at 1:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on April 29, 2015

      Last weekend I had the opportunity to tour a working 19th century machine shop. The Hagley Museum and Library in Delaware features an incredible display of mechanical engineering, including a restored water turbine from 1890 that once again churns in the banks of the Brandywine River to silently power some incredible metal work machines (for historic demonstration purposes, at least). I’m still not really sure how on earth the turbines work – something about gravity and water pressure creating a current in a chamber and I think there’s a wizard involved – but seeing it in action was very, very cool.

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      Above, the restored turbine in action, below, a drawing of what’s happening inside the machine.

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      And here are some great shots of drills, lathes, and more, all working machines from the 1800s, powered by nothing but water and mechanics – no electricity needed.

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      To contrast this experience, I also took a tour of a metal shop in a nearby maker-space, which has many machines that perform the same functions. I was impressed by both the differences and the similarities.

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      This is the way we use water to cut metal these days.

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      And we have a lot more safety features in shops now.

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      But the mechanisms are similar, even if the machines aren’t powered by water movement anymore.

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      The end!

      Posted in The Waste Book | 5 Comments | Tagged gears, history, levers, machine shops, machines, maker, maker space, mechanical engineering, metal work, photography, pulleys
    • Philosopher Fridays: Benjamin on Books and Stories

      Posted at 1:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on February 6, 2015

      Welcome back to Philosopher Fridays, a twice monthly series wherein I post my thoughts on various philosophers. Last time, I gave some background on Walter Benjamin, and this I’ll extend this analysis to two of his shorter essays. While I usually craft a larger narrative for entries like this, I’m going to take up the spirit of Benjamin’s ruins and present, without comment, only fragments of these pieces, both from the Schocken Books volume Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt.

      These quotes are not quite “favorites” per se, but instead haunting echoes that I cannot shake. Going back over them now, five years after I read them for the first time, I clearly see that I’ve inherited more than just my penchant for dashes from Benjamin’s essays on books, collections, storytelling, history, narrative, and nostalgia.

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      From Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting 

      “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?” -p. 60

      “To renew the old world – that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is drives to acquire new things, and that is why a collector of older books is closer to the wellsprings of collecting that the acquirer of luxury editions.” – p. 61

      “…one of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a thought, much less a wishful look, because he found it lonely and abandoned on the market place and bought it to give it is freedom… To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.” – p. 64

      “O bliss the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected, and no one has been able to carry on his disreputable existence in the mask of Spitzweg’s ‘Bookworm.’ For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector – and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be – ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” – p. 67

      From The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov

      “Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the course from which all storytellers have drawn. And among those who have written down the tales, it is the great ones whose written versions differ least from the speech of the many nameless storytellers.” – p. 84

      “The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. This, however, is a process that has been going on for the long time. And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see in it merely a ‘symptom of decay,’ let alone a ‘modern’ symptom. It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.” – p. 87

      “Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it… It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.” – p. 89

      “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places – the activities that are intimately associated with boredom – are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more saving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled. This is how today it is becoming unraveled at all its ends after being woven thousands of the years ago in the ambience of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.” – p. 91

      “…the difference between the writer of history, the historian, and the teller of it, the chronicler …[is that]… The historian is bound to explain in one way or another the happenings with which he deals; under no circumstances can he content himself with displaying them as models of the course of the world. But this is precisely what the chronicler does, especially in his classical representatives, the chroniclers of the Middle Ages, the precursors of the historians today. By basing their tales on a divine plan of salvation – an inscrutable one – they have from the very start lifted the burden of demonstrable explanation from their own shoulders. Its place is taken by interpretation, which is not concerned with an accurate concatenation of definite events, but with the way these events are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the world.” – p. 96

      “The liberating magic which the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man. A mature man feels this complicity only occasionally, that is, when he is happy; but the child first meets it in fairy tales, and it makes him happy.” – p. 102

      “The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story… The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.” – p. 108, 109

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      It feels a little strange to leave these quotes without any final word, but I think I’m still too caught up with some of these fragments to give any commentary that I wouldn’t immediately wish to rescind. I will be returning Benjamin one last time the week after next to tackle his most famous essay: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but until then I would love to hear your thoughts on, and impressions of, these quotes.

      Posted in Series | 10 Comments | Tagged benjamin, books, collecting, historicity, history, narrative, nostalgia, philosopher fridays, philosophy, stories, storytelling, walter benjamin
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