Girls Dreaming

 

Anne’s House of Dreams is the fourth in L. M. Montgomery’s beloved Anne books. The first, of course, was Anne of Green Gables, the story of the young red-haired orphan girl coming to live on Prince Edward Island with unmarried brother and sister Matthew and Marilla. In that first book Matthew goes to pick up the boy they are taking in, to help with farm chores, and comes home with a girl instead, much to Marilla’s initial dismay. Anne wakes up the next morning desolate at the thought of being returned to the orphanage, unwanted, but shy Matthew surprisingly champions her acceptance, and Anne is launched into a new life. 

 

My opening image today is of my mother’s wedding announcement in the newspaper, with her orchid corsage pressed beneath the glass of the frame 76 years ago. My copy of Anne’s House of Dreams, copyright 1917, no better than what dealers in used books call a “reading copy,” meaning it’s battered and falling apart but there are no missing pages, bears an inscription written in 1936 on the front-facing endpaper to my mother before she was my mother, before she was even a bride:

 

To Nora – May she be as nice a big girl as she is a little one.

Helen Garner

Hayward Librarian

 

“Little girl” Nora would have been 14 in 1936, just the right age – back then, anyway, in what can’t help but seem like simpler times – to begin dreaming of having a wedding and a house of dreams for herself one day.

 

I wonder if the “Anne of Red Hair” craze is still going strong in Japan. At one time, it seems, not all that long ago, every young Japanese girl had read the Anne books and dreamed of honeymooning on Prince Edward Island, and the very lucky ones actually did so, little P.E.I. coming behind only New York City and Paris, France, as the top dream destination for Japanese brides. All thanks to a series of simple stories for girls written a century ago!

(Well, now I see a serious research paper has been written on the subject. Something else for us to read.)

 

How many girls from poor Japanese fishing villages on coastal islands were ever able to make such an elaborate honeymoon voyage? After Anne marries Gilbert Blythe, which happens early in the House of Dreams book, the newlyweds spend their first month of marriage right there in their first house, rather than travel anywhere at all.

 

“I’m so glad we decided to spend our honeymoon here. Our memories of it will always belong here, in our home of dreams, instead of being scattered about in strange places.” 

 

I can’t help but think, though, how those girls on faraway Japan's coast would have felt the atmosphere of Anne’s first married home as something familiar. Much more than it ever had in Matthew and Marilla’s home in Avonlea, the sea so near to the house in Four Winds Harbour

 

…surrounded her and called to her constantly. From every window of her new home she saw some varying aspect of it. Its haunting murmur was ever in her ears. Vessels sailed up the harbour every day to the wharf at the Glen, or sailed out again through the sunset, bound for ports that might be halfway around the globe. Fishing boats went white-winged down the channel in the mornings, and returned laden in the evenings. Sailors and fisher-folk travelled the red, winding harbour roads, light-hearted and content. There was always a certain sense of things about to happen….

 

There were memories that my mother carried to the first home I knew but kept tucked away, hidden from her daughters’ curious eyes for decades. Even the scrapbook started before her marriage and continued for a time afterward was a treasure my sisters and I saw for the first time after only our mother died and we were going through the house and all her things. But Anne’s House of Dreams, now – the reason my copy is so battered and worn is that all three of Nora’s daughters read and re-read it over the years. (I don’t doubt that one of those girls probably took it up into her hiding place in the backyard apple tree more than once.) Despite not-always-gentle handling, however, it survives.

 

And because I had been looking at my mother’s wedding picture in our tiny upstairs guest bedroom only the day before, last night when I began turning the soft, worn pages of the old volume, I thought of my mother as a young bride – the dreams she would have had and her first married home out in South Dakota. For me, this old book holds all of that.

 

Little Women: The Book and the Movie

“Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. 

"It's so dreadful to be poor!" sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress. 

"I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all," added little Amy, with an injured sniff. 

"We've got Father and Mother, and each other," said Beth contentedly from her corner.” 

- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Alcott's novel is very formulaic, and the formula repeats over and over — when the four sisters are together, whatever the topic, each takes a turn speaking: 1, 2, 3, 4. Yet the overall effect somehow works, at least it did, when we were young, for those of us who grew up with the book. And while I don’t know what the experience would be for a sophisticated reader coming to the book for the first time as an older adult, I find I can re-read it now and be seduced all over again by the March family, even as I am aware of that repetitious, somewhat stilted formula. It’s because Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, for lifetime fans of Little Women, are real girls — always were and always will be. Where the magic comes from, I cannot say.

Why is it, though, that every girl who reads the book identifies herself as Jo? A recent NPR segment began by asking callers to say which girl they identified with and why, but the question had to be quickly discarded, as no one ever saw her girlhood self as conventional Meg, vain Amy, or shy, stay-at-home Beth. No, every girl-reader-become-woman claimed to have been, in her mind, as she read the book, tomboy-writer Jo, whether or not she’d been a tomboy (or even wished to be a boy) or hoped to be a writer when she grew up. Why?

I had occasion to reflect on this question some years ago, when one of my sisters and I had an exchange on the topic. I’d been amazed that she saw herself as Jo! Who, then, pray tell, did she imagine I would be? I was the oldest, but I was no Meg! Puzzling, I have come up at last with a two-pronged explanation: 

(1) Jo was the bookish sister. An aspiring writer, she was naturally a voracious reader. Girls who read Little Women were, obviously, readers themselves. In my family, three sisters (as were our parents) were all readers! Ipso facto, we were all Jo!

(2) Readers see an author’s fictional world through the author’s eyes, even when that author isn’t one of the characters. Little Women is written in the third person, but Jo is clearly the author’s alter ego. So it’s Jo’s head and heart we inhabit as we read the story. How could it be otherwise?

Moving from page to screen, there have been more than twelve adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s classic girls’ story, beginning with silent film versions in 1917 and 1918. I’ll have to watch Katherine Hepburn again as Jo (1933), but just thinking of Hepburn you can see why she would be a natural in the role. By contrast, whoever saw June Allyson as Jo (1949) ought to have had his (and I’m sure it was ‘his’) head examined. 

As for Winona Ryder (1994), sorry, I did not care for that version at all, though I realize it introduced a whole generation to the story. I became near-apoplectic at Jo and Professor Baer kissing in the balcony of a theatre! So wrong, so very wrong! Nineteenth-century PDA among the genteel, aspirational, theatre-going poor? Hardly! Besides that, the chapter in which the kiss takes place is called “Under the Umbrella”! Jo and the professor kiss under the umbrella after he tells her that all he has to offer are “these empty hands,” and she puts her hands in his and replies, “Not empty now.” I seem to recall I didn’t care for Susan Sarandon as Marmee, either, but as I’ve never wanted to see that film version a second time I cannot give a detailed critique. 

Because of my feelings about the 1994 film, I was nervous at first about seeing yet another adaptation. Now, after only my first viewing of Greta Gerwig’s version (which I’m sure I will see again many times in the future), I find myself agreeing with another audience member I overheard telling companions on the way out of the theatre, “I’ve seen three different movies made of ‘Little Women,’ but this is my favorite.” 

The dialogue at the top of this post opens the story of Alcott’s Little Women. In the new adaptation, the pre-Christmas complaint scene is moved and solutions the sisters find in making and/or purchasing modest gifts are omitted, but Gerwig does what she does so gracefully that I cannot object. The all-important introductory visit to the Hummels is there, intact. And that brings me to something the film adds that a book cannot: strong, big-screen visuals that put the viewer not only in the heart of the family but also in a geographical/historical context. I found myself devouring outdoor and street scenes and interiors of houses, as their world became as real to me as the sisters themselves. 

I did wonder, early on while watching, if someone unfamiliar with the story would find the time shifts confusing (there is nothing faintly like that in the strictly chronological presentation of the written book) and have difficulty catching all the dialogue when many voices were speaking together. My own movie-going companion, the Artist, never having read the book, was that very person: unfamiliar with the story, he did have difficulty catching everything that was said and making sense of all the time shifts. Well, I told him, I was completely lost the first time I saw (never having read) the film version of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, but I certainly wouldn’t change it. And I wouldn’t change Gerwig’s “Little Women,” either.

So many of the scenes from the book were there, just as L.M. Alcott wrote them, such as Amy falling through the ice when she follows Jo and Laurie after having burned Jo’s manuscript. Laurie’s proposal and Jo’s refusal: that scene, too, was straight from the book. I know the written story so well that I was aware of every addition or subtraction or substitution, but they were masterfully done, and I felt the story flowed along seamlessly. 

I’m still thinking about the ages of two characters, however: Laurie and Professor Bhaer (the latter generally referred to by his first name in the film). Both appeared much younger to me than I would have made them. I am coming around to accepting boyish Laurie, but Friedrich I can’t help wishing older and maybe not so handsome, more as he was in the book — though the actor’s very winsomeness makes it hard to complain about his looks!

The Artist asked me if the mother had been as much a background figure in the book as she was in the movie. I hadn’t thought about that before, but I think the answer is yes. She appears from time to time to offer sympathy and guidance, but it is the sisters themselves who form their own world, as young people always do, as each generation does.

In the car on the way home, I found myself telling the Artist about parts of the book that hadn’t made it to the screen. For instance, I loved the way they reminisced about the childhood game they played when small. “Backstory?” Yes. They played at being pilgrims, from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and as children would carry little bags of “burdens” that tumbled down the stairs when they reached the “Celestial City” at the top. Approaching womanhood, their burdens change: Meg hates being poor, Jo’s patience is tried by her work with demanding Aunt March, Beth struggles with near-crippling shyness, and Amy can’t help envying “girls with nice noses.” She so wants a classical nose!

They are so real to me, the March girls. Do you know them, too? What do you remember most? Or did you not care for them at all?

Girl on Horseback

Laurie reined in her horse at the place where the hill dropped away. She sat quietly for a moment looking down at the ghost town that was her home. 

Barbara Corcoran, The Long Journey

As you can see by the cover, the little paperback book shows a girl on horseback, so it merited a closer look. Published in 1970, it said inside. Then the first two sentences pulled me in, and the next paragraph began in a similarly promising way:

Off to the right on another hillside were a dozen little shacks where the miners had lived, and to the left was the long building they had used for a dining and reception hall. 

Really! Well, the little ghost town in the book is in Montana, so there are many differences between the settings of Hawkins Dry Diggings, Montana, and Dos Cabezas, Arizona. No adobe in Montana, of course. Instead, summer snow on the high mountaintops, trees on the slopes and across the land, and creeks running with clear water as Laurie heads south to find her Uncle Arthur to let him know that her grandfather, growing blind, needs medical attention.

If she were to make the journey by bus, her grandfather reasons, someone might question a girl that young traveling alone, and authorities would be called in, authorities who might think Laurie shouldn’t be living in a ghost town with an old man, even if he was her grandfather, who would probably think she would be better off in an orphanage. So travel by bus is out. 

Couldn’t he just go into their own nearest town and telephone Arthur? 

“No, no,” he said impatiently. “Telephones are no good. Can’t half the time hear what the other fellow is saying. You’d never be able to explain everything like it’s got to be explained. No, there’s nothing to do, but go there.” He sighed. “I hate to send you on such a long journey and you so young.”

Laurie reminds him that he had plenty of independence and adventures when he was a boy, and her grandfather is reassured. And so he gives Laurie her uncle’s address in Butte, a map, a compass, three gold nuggets, three silver dollars, and sends her off on her horse. 

Laurie has never been to school, never known any society at all other than what she has read in books and in National Geographic magazines, but she knows how to shoot and hunt and live off the land, and she and her grandfather are confident that she can find her way to Butte, no matter how many days the long journey takes. Neither of them anticipated that she would be shot for trespassing while trying to free a colt from barbed wire or that she might meet the devil along the way! Well, maybe not the devil, exactly, but a dangerous and frightening man, all the same, determined to steal her gold nuggets! 

It was confusing to meet so many people, all different kinds of people. Her grandfather taught her that the world was bad, but she finds good people, too — Kicking Horses, the boy who guides her to the trail she needs; Miss Emily, the retired schoolteacher who gives her shelter from the storm; Doc Ashe who tends to her gunshot wound. There is even a much younger girl, lost in the forest, needing Laurie to rescue her. Throughout the book, however, a lurking threat appears and reappears in the form of the crazy man on the mule, devil or not, and the song he mindlessly sings, its refrain disturbing Laurie’s peace of mind even when the man is out of sight. Keeping out of his clutches along her way is essential to reaching her primary goal.

Whatever age the reader, there is something exhilarating and inspiring about a young person setting out alone in the world, and as a female reader I find a girl’s adventures bring me added satisfaction. Among adult novels, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River satisfies in a similar way. Even the dystopic YA novel Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, with the unforgettable Katniss Everdeen, gives 21st-century readers hope that even in the most horrible future society, wild nature beyond towns might offer salvation for young people willing to learn and live its ways. 

But The Long Journey is a simpler story, the motivation for the girl’s setting off on her adventure uncomplicated.

And I needed the uplift of The Long Journey because I’ve been reading a very different kind of book, another difficult book, taking it in small doses but still feeling overwhelmed. The first words of the title, Amity and Prosperity, don’t sound bleak, but the subtitle, One Family and the Fracturing of America, gives a pretty clear warning. Amity and Prosperity, you see, are not what the family will find at the end of the story. They are the names of two desperate towns, and the author of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, Eliza Griswold, tells the story of one family’s experiences when they and their neighbors sign contracts to allow fracking wells built on their land. I can only read a few pages at a time. What was done to these people — what continues to be done in countries that still allow the process — fills me with rage. I’d love to have people with “Drill, Baby, Drill” bumper stickers trade places with the Appalachian residents who thought their lives would be changed for the better by fracking. People were lied to, deceived, taken advantage of, made horribly ill, wells and land and livestock and children poisoned. What is the hope for the future of these people and their land?

So even while I was enjoying The Long Journey, I couldn’t help having intrusive, skeptical thoughts whenever Laurie and her horse drank from wild Montana creeks. Mining has never been an environmentally friendly way of life, and extraction industries in general rely on dangerously polluting chemical processes. How many rivers and streams in North America are clean enough that one could drink their water even after boiling (which Laurie does only once) or purifying it? What if Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Margo Crane had been on the Kalamazoo River after the oil spill of 2010? Even Katniss Everdeen had only society to fear, not poisoned nature. 

Such a beautiful world! More wondrous than anything ever built by mankind! How can we mistreat it so, fouling our precious, irreplaceable nest?

Blue flag, wetland, Leelanau Township

Postscript, Tuesday afternoon: We were walking around the marina in Suttons Bay on Sunday evening when we happened upon two little girls catching frogs. None of us knew what kind of frogs they were, but now I think maybe these. Anyway, it made me very happy to see little girls catching frogs. They had a big black net and were putting the frogs in a little see-through plastic carrying case. "Do you want to touch one?" I asked if I could pick one up. Very slippery! It tried to escape, but I got it back in the case and asked the girls what they planned to do with the frogs. "Let them go again," they told me. And that made me happy, too. Girls need adventure and freedom in the great outdoors every bit as much as do boys.