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Series Intro: to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my FAVORITE BOOK EVER, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, I am filling 2012 with BLOG POSTS EXPLORING EVERY POSSIBLE ASPECT OF THIS BOOK IN GREAT DEPTH. I call it the Year of the Tesseract, and you can see what I've written already by clicking the year of the tesseract tag. There WILL be spoilers for Wrinkle and possibly other books throughout. So just go read it, already. Moving on:
Right, so originally when I was drawing up my calendar of Year of the Tesseract posts, I figured I'd devote the month of March, ie Women's History Month, to feminist issues involved with A Wrinkle In Time. And boy, is there a lot to talk about there! It was the first book they tried to tackle in the as-far-as-I-can-tell now-defunct YA Subscription blog devoted to What makes a feminist book. There's the fact that Meg was one of the few female protagonists in science fiction at the time of her creation. There's Mrs. Murry, an award-winning scientist who's also raising four children and working out of her home-- I totally wanted to be Mrs. Murry when I grew up (until I decided I didn't like math enough to go into science. I KNOW! But whatnot). There's, on the other side, people who complain about how Meg is babied compared to the males in the story (including her 5 year old brother), or how overprotective the males are of her-- but then, we've already discussed here how her GETTING PAST that is all part of her character arc. And then there's the rest of the kairos series (as Madeleine L'Engle referred to them), where we find out how Meg's future seems to go-- and most readers find themselves disappointed.
But there I'm going to get all personal on y'all for a minute. That's the only one of those essays that I came remotely close to posting IN March (and obviously missed), because I already had bits of it written, with things on my mind. And because I watched the documentary Being Elmo on PBS last night* (you'll see how that ties in in a minute), it did pop back in my mind again. So maybe I'll use this time to finally get this posted.
So let me share a moment of my life, a moment where I made a choice-- a lazy choice, but a choice that could have taken my life in a completely different direction.
It was the spring of 2000. I was student teaching, and absolutely sucking at it. I knew that my original idea-- get a job as a classroom teacher, then maybe work my way through library school-- was not going to work out, so I was considering going straight to library school after graduation after all. But for a moment I wondered if I should go a completely different route-- do something a little more drastic-- follow a vague, not very serious but definitely present dream. I was sitting in a campus computer lab and found myself looking up the website of the Sesame Workshop-- which at that time I'm pretty sure was still called Children's Television Workshop-- and checking out the careers page. And there it was-- they were accepting interns for writers.
GAH! My DREAM job was to work for Sesame Street! Why WOULDN'T I apply for an internship? Well... because I'd have to move to New York City. Away from my family. Away from my first serious boyfriend and DANG had it taken me a long time to land one of those, if I just dumped him to move to New York City-- well, how was I supposed to meet ANYONE, romantically or otherwise, in New York City? Or anywhere? I'm too shy to meet people. And where would I live? Would I be able to afford to live on whatever an Internship would pay (if it paid anything)? And what if I was just too lousy a writer to write for TV? It would be fun to build Muppets, but they were specifically NOT looking for puppet-builders or Muppeteers-- like I had a chance to be any good at that, either. No. One of the most renowned library schools in the country was less than an hour away from home. I was going the obvious route. I was staying home, and safe.
But what if I had gone? What if I had run off to New York City to pursue some wacky dream job? I would be working with a group of amazingly creative people on a project to make the world a better place. I would be in New York City, surrounded by culture and publishers and kidlit drink nights. And soon enough I WOULD have friends in the area-- one of my closest cousins works as an editor in NYC now. And heck, now I know how to make friends on the Internet.
But I didn't. I'm in a nowhere place, working part-time in a not-as-professional-as-it-could-be sort of position in an underfunded library, married to a man who has even worse luck finding work that isn't mind-numbing and physically exhausting and pays enough to let him not work EVERY SINGLE DAY, barely keeping up with two crazymaking small children (okay, I adore them, but they ARE crazymaking), popping antidepressants, and not writing. When you don't like where you are, you can't help looking back and saying "What if I had made a different choice?" But where does that get you? You didn't. You're stuck down this particular leg of the Trousers of Time and there's no climbing out of it. You have to make it work from here.
I say all this because I think, too often, people insist there IS a right or wrong answer to these sorts of life choices, when maybe there isn't. Maybe every choice comes with good points and bad points. Maybe I could have been really happy in New York City. Or maybe I would have just found something else to be depressed about, and I would have spent my life wondering what would have happened if I'd just stayed home, gone to library school, not dumped Jason.
Look, I was disappointed when I found out Meg had stepped to the background to let Calvin become the renowned scientist in her place, too. It didn't make any sense. HER parents were the great scientists. SHE tutored HIM in math. And apparently she's STILL tutoring him in the math parts of his Renowned Scientist career, now. Helping him. While she raises their ridiculously large family.
But I started to think differently about it when I read this passage in An Acceptable Time: Meg and Calvin's eldest, Polly, is talking to her grandmother about why her mother never pursued her own career. Mrs. (technically Dr.) Murry thinks it may be "probably partly because of me."
"You? Why?"
"I'm a scientist, Polly, and well known in my field."
"Well, but Mother--" She stopped. "You mean maybe she didn't want to compete with you?"
"That could be part of it."
"You mean, she was afraid she couldn't compete?"
"You mother's estimation of herself has always been low. Your father has been wonderful for her and so, in many ways, have you children. But..." Her voice drifted off.
"But you did your work and had kids."
"Not seven of them." (p.40)
I started to wonder, wait-- was it MEG who wanted to become a scientist? Or everyone else who just ASSUMED she would want to become a scientist? Meg's a math wiz, sure. Meg knows her science because she's been raised in a household of scientists. But does she CARE about it? Not as much as other things. She doesn't want to be renowned: she wants to be loved. She wants to be accepted. She wants to live quietly and contently. Family is the most important thing in her life, to the point that she's risked her own life to rescue her father and her brother (twice, counting the events of A Wind In the Door).
I have a theory that with all the fictional couples who go on to have buttloads of children, this is just author code for "and they also had a healthy and active sex life," because there's really no other way to get away with saying that in middle grade fiction. Anne and Gilbert were another famous fictional couple who didn't seem to know when to stop with the baby-making. But when you think about it, this actually makes sense for Meg and Calvin-- they both come from large families. Meg's four-child family is big by most modern standards, but it's got nothing on Calvin's eleven-kid one. The seven kids they finally go with in their own family seems like a pretty decent compromise.
So the choice makes sense for Meg. That's what she wanted-- love and family, not renown and heroism. She didn't want to be her mother. Was it the "right" choice? Wasn't she supposed to be a liberated woman and ... follow in her mother's footsteps? (Huh. Is that what "liberated" means?) Who knows. And we may not know. Maybe it WAS the wrong choice. Maybe Meg was depressed later, wondering what she could have done differently in her life. We only really see adult Meg-- after the honeymoon period at least-- through the eyes of other people: her daughter and Adam Eddington. We don't know about her dreams or regrets. We don't know if it came and went in phases-- if she had times when she loved her life and times she wished she'd done it all differently. But I'm willing to bet that's how it is for most people-- probably how it was for Meg, too.
I read an interview with Madeleine L'Engle sometime between 2002 and 2004 that I wish I could cite directly, but in it she said she was working on, thinking about, planning to write a book about middle-aged Meg. Maybe this would have answered our questions. But that book never happened, so all we can do is project our own dreams and values on Meg, and judge accordingly.
But why do we have to judge? Why can't we let people be with their own choices? I see people argue that, oh, of COURSE it's wrong to judge REAL people for their vocational choices, but Meg is fictional and, as such, why can't she and all those other fictional characters that settle down and, ick, HAVE BABIES have been WRITTEN to make a different choice, to have built a CAREER instead? But every time someone says something like this, they're still implying that the career would have been the BETTER choice, even if they claim to believe people should make their own choices. They're still holding up this ONE PARTICULAR lifestyle as being The Best Choice, The Choice that OUGHT to be shown in fiction, the Good Role Model option.
And, okay, I'm just going to get personal here again: I DON'T NEED TO HEAR THAT ANYMORE. My depression is already too much of a struggle without people who claim to be speaking for the intellectual progressive types constantly implying that I'm DOING IT WRONG, that I SHOULD have put my career dreams over the comfort of family, that I MADE THE WRONG CHOICE all those years ago when I was too chicken to run off to New York City. Regret is no good for me! I can't take it back! I can't run away to New York City anymore. I have a family, a responsibility. Leaving them to pursue a different sort of career dream is now THE WRONG CHOICE whether or not it was the right choice originally. So can't we accept it? Can't we accept that this was the choice Meg made in the place she was then, and let her live on wherever that choice leads her?
We're all projecting. I'm obviously projecting. But so's everybody who thinks the choices of fictional characters-- or real life people-- should have been different. We're all projecting our own dreams and values on other people, real or fictional, and judging them. But it doesn't help anybody. It just makes everyone you disagree with feel like crap or think you're a jerk, depending on whether they're the sort of person who is more inclined to blame others or themselves. And the people who know where the blame really lies don't need your advice, anyway. So let's agree to disagree. Let's stop judging others for their life choices and just let them keep moving forward down whatever path they take.
*("last night" as in, "last night when I started typing this again, which is actually last Friday, now, so don't attempt to find Being Elmo on LAST night's PBS schedule")
Right, so originally when I was drawing up my calendar of Year of the Tesseract posts, I figured I'd devote the month of March, ie Women's History Month, to feminist issues involved with A Wrinkle In Time. And boy, is there a lot to talk about there! It was the first book they tried to tackle in the as-far-as-I-can-tell now-defunct YA Subscription blog devoted to What makes a feminist book. There's the fact that Meg was one of the few female protagonists in science fiction at the time of her creation. There's Mrs. Murry, an award-winning scientist who's also raising four children and working out of her home-- I totally wanted to be Mrs. Murry when I grew up (until I decided I didn't like math enough to go into science. I KNOW! But whatnot). There's, on the other side, people who complain about how Meg is babied compared to the males in the story (including her 5 year old brother), or how overprotective the males are of her-- but then, we've already discussed here how her GETTING PAST that is all part of her character arc. And then there's the rest of the kairos series (as Madeleine L'Engle referred to them), where we find out how Meg's future seems to go-- and most readers find themselves disappointed.
But there I'm going to get all personal on y'all for a minute. That's the only one of those essays that I came remotely close to posting IN March (and obviously missed), because I already had bits of it written, with things on my mind. And because I watched the documentary Being Elmo on PBS last night* (you'll see how that ties in in a minute), it did pop back in my mind again. So maybe I'll use this time to finally get this posted.
So let me share a moment of my life, a moment where I made a choice-- a lazy choice, but a choice that could have taken my life in a completely different direction.
It was the spring of 2000. I was student teaching, and absolutely sucking at it. I knew that my original idea-- get a job as a classroom teacher, then maybe work my way through library school-- was not going to work out, so I was considering going straight to library school after graduation after all. But for a moment I wondered if I should go a completely different route-- do something a little more drastic-- follow a vague, not very serious but definitely present dream. I was sitting in a campus computer lab and found myself looking up the website of the Sesame Workshop-- which at that time I'm pretty sure was still called Children's Television Workshop-- and checking out the careers page. And there it was-- they were accepting interns for writers.
GAH! My DREAM job was to work for Sesame Street! Why WOULDN'T I apply for an internship? Well... because I'd have to move to New York City. Away from my family. Away from my first serious boyfriend and DANG had it taken me a long time to land one of those, if I just dumped him to move to New York City-- well, how was I supposed to meet ANYONE, romantically or otherwise, in New York City? Or anywhere? I'm too shy to meet people. And where would I live? Would I be able to afford to live on whatever an Internship would pay (if it paid anything)? And what if I was just too lousy a writer to write for TV? It would be fun to build Muppets, but they were specifically NOT looking for puppet-builders or Muppeteers-- like I had a chance to be any good at that, either. No. One of the most renowned library schools in the country was less than an hour away from home. I was going the obvious route. I was staying home, and safe.
But what if I had gone? What if I had run off to New York City to pursue some wacky dream job? I would be working with a group of amazingly creative people on a project to make the world a better place. I would be in New York City, surrounded by culture and publishers and kidlit drink nights. And soon enough I WOULD have friends in the area-- one of my closest cousins works as an editor in NYC now. And heck, now I know how to make friends on the Internet.
But I didn't. I'm in a nowhere place, working part-time in a not-as-professional-as-it-could-be sort of position in an underfunded library, married to a man who has even worse luck finding work that isn't mind-numbing and physically exhausting and pays enough to let him not work EVERY SINGLE DAY, barely keeping up with two crazymaking small children (okay, I adore them, but they ARE crazymaking), popping antidepressants, and not writing. When you don't like where you are, you can't help looking back and saying "What if I had made a different choice?" But where does that get you? You didn't. You're stuck down this particular leg of the Trousers of Time and there's no climbing out of it. You have to make it work from here.
I say all this because I think, too often, people insist there IS a right or wrong answer to these sorts of life choices, when maybe there isn't. Maybe every choice comes with good points and bad points. Maybe I could have been really happy in New York City. Or maybe I would have just found something else to be depressed about, and I would have spent my life wondering what would have happened if I'd just stayed home, gone to library school, not dumped Jason.
Look, I was disappointed when I found out Meg had stepped to the background to let Calvin become the renowned scientist in her place, too. It didn't make any sense. HER parents were the great scientists. SHE tutored HIM in math. And apparently she's STILL tutoring him in the math parts of his Renowned Scientist career, now. Helping him. While she raises their ridiculously large family.
But I started to think differently about it when I read this passage in An Acceptable Time: Meg and Calvin's eldest, Polly, is talking to her grandmother about why her mother never pursued her own career. Mrs. (technically Dr.) Murry thinks it may be "probably partly because of me."
"You? Why?"
"I'm a scientist, Polly, and well known in my field."
"Well, but Mother--" She stopped. "You mean maybe she didn't want to compete with you?"
"That could be part of it."
"You mean, she was afraid she couldn't compete?"
"You mother's estimation of herself has always been low. Your father has been wonderful for her and so, in many ways, have you children. But..." Her voice drifted off.
"But you did your work and had kids."
"Not seven of them." (p.40)
I started to wonder, wait-- was it MEG who wanted to become a scientist? Or everyone else who just ASSUMED she would want to become a scientist? Meg's a math wiz, sure. Meg knows her science because she's been raised in a household of scientists. But does she CARE about it? Not as much as other things. She doesn't want to be renowned: she wants to be loved. She wants to be accepted. She wants to live quietly and contently. Family is the most important thing in her life, to the point that she's risked her own life to rescue her father and her brother (twice, counting the events of A Wind In the Door).
I have a theory that with all the fictional couples who go on to have buttloads of children, this is just author code for "and they also had a healthy and active sex life," because there's really no other way to get away with saying that in middle grade fiction. Anne and Gilbert were another famous fictional couple who didn't seem to know when to stop with the baby-making. But when you think about it, this actually makes sense for Meg and Calvin-- they both come from large families. Meg's four-child family is big by most modern standards, but it's got nothing on Calvin's eleven-kid one. The seven kids they finally go with in their own family seems like a pretty decent compromise.
So the choice makes sense for Meg. That's what she wanted-- love and family, not renown and heroism. She didn't want to be her mother. Was it the "right" choice? Wasn't she supposed to be a liberated woman and ... follow in her mother's footsteps? (Huh. Is that what "liberated" means?) Who knows. And we may not know. Maybe it WAS the wrong choice. Maybe Meg was depressed later, wondering what she could have done differently in her life. We only really see adult Meg-- after the honeymoon period at least-- through the eyes of other people: her daughter and Adam Eddington. We don't know about her dreams or regrets. We don't know if it came and went in phases-- if she had times when she loved her life and times she wished she'd done it all differently. But I'm willing to bet that's how it is for most people-- probably how it was for Meg, too.
I read an interview with Madeleine L'Engle sometime between 2002 and 2004 that I wish I could cite directly, but in it she said she was working on, thinking about, planning to write a book about middle-aged Meg. Maybe this would have answered our questions. But that book never happened, so all we can do is project our own dreams and values on Meg, and judge accordingly.
But why do we have to judge? Why can't we let people be with their own choices? I see people argue that, oh, of COURSE it's wrong to judge REAL people for their vocational choices, but Meg is fictional and, as such, why can't she and all those other fictional characters that settle down and, ick, HAVE BABIES have been WRITTEN to make a different choice, to have built a CAREER instead? But every time someone says something like this, they're still implying that the career would have been the BETTER choice, even if they claim to believe people should make their own choices. They're still holding up this ONE PARTICULAR lifestyle as being The Best Choice, The Choice that OUGHT to be shown in fiction, the Good Role Model option.
And, okay, I'm just going to get personal here again: I DON'T NEED TO HEAR THAT ANYMORE. My depression is already too much of a struggle without people who claim to be speaking for the intellectual progressive types constantly implying that I'm DOING IT WRONG, that I SHOULD have put my career dreams over the comfort of family, that I MADE THE WRONG CHOICE all those years ago when I was too chicken to run off to New York City. Regret is no good for me! I can't take it back! I can't run away to New York City anymore. I have a family, a responsibility. Leaving them to pursue a different sort of career dream is now THE WRONG CHOICE whether or not it was the right choice originally. So can't we accept it? Can't we accept that this was the choice Meg made in the place she was then, and let her live on wherever that choice leads her?
We're all projecting. I'm obviously projecting. But so's everybody who thinks the choices of fictional characters-- or real life people-- should have been different. We're all projecting our own dreams and values on other people, real or fictional, and judging them. But it doesn't help anybody. It just makes everyone you disagree with feel like crap or think you're a jerk, depending on whether they're the sort of person who is more inclined to blame others or themselves. And the people who know where the blame really lies don't need your advice, anyway. So let's agree to disagree. Let's stop judging others for their life choices and just let them keep moving forward down whatever path they take.
*("last night" as in, "last night when I started typing this again, which is actually last Friday, now, so don't attempt to find Being Elmo on LAST night's PBS schedule")
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no subject
Date: 2012-04-10 05:00 am (UTC)From:Anyway, I think you've written about a great and difficult thing here and done it well--both the problematic gendered implications of what a woman's right choice should be and also the way our rose-colored glasses can make "there" seem SO much better than "here." I thought about this a lot while I was living in Florida for five fairly unhappy years. Baltimore--of all places!--suddenly was this hip, urban oasis full of things to do, people to know, arts organizations to transform. And, while it is/was sometimes those things, I also had to remind myself about the rats in the alleys and the poverty (both real, as in the neighborhoods my husband worked in, and also less significant, as in our family budget). I needed to ground myself with those things while I also tried to grapple with improving and/or rectifying my "here."
Eventually, yes, we did move back to Baltimore and, yes, there are lots of fun things to do here and I'm glad to be back. But what I forgot to consider during those miserable nights in Florida is what me-who-chose-differently would be feeling in Baltimore, how she would be evaluating and coming to terms with her choice to NOT move and take care of her mother and brother. And we can never know, for certain, how those things would play out, but imagining them more fully--as long as we include the good and the bad--helps us learn more about our choices. I guess, in part, what I've learned is that I am who I am regardless of location. Some places are more inspiring, can be more sustaining, but some core part of me would just be wrong if I had taken those other paths.
PS. I think good exploration of this topic is Carol Anshaw's Aquamarine, which is a book of lovely writing, three different stories/variations of one woman's life. A personal fave.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-10 07:41 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-04-10 10:54 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-04-10 07:37 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-04-10 08:50 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-04-10 12:30 pm (UTC)From:And it just occurred to me that maybe, for Meg, it wasn't just about not wanting to compete with HER mother, but about wanting to give her daughters something she herself never had. Mrs. Murry was always very sweet to Meg, but in practical terms of giving her daughter the needed tools to cope with her life, she sucked. "It will get better when you get older, you'll figure it all out for yourself" is all very well and good in terms of forcing a fictional heroine to be self-sufficient, but in parenting terms, that is the biggest copout ever. Maybe it wasn't low self-esteem that made Meg decide against a career, but a determination to be more helpful to her children, to be less distracted from their needs by her own concerns.
Which, ouch, now I'm convicting myself. I think maybe I SHOULD be more like Meg and less like Mrs. Murry.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-10 07:36 pm (UTC)From:And your first paragraph makes me want even more to turn the Paladin from my Pipeweed Mafia stories into a real character, because she's the only Adventuring Mommy I've ever written before.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-13 04:12 am (UTC)From:[giddy at the thought of Adventuring Mommy Paladin :) ]
no subject
Date: 2012-04-13 03:22 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-04-10 01:37 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-04-10 07:32 pm (UTC)From: