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Book Report
Sep. 22nd, 2007 09:59 pmI've been moping about all day wanting to finish Helen Beaton, College Women. It was actually quite okay, for something of this sort. I found myself caring about the outcome of the love-pentagram. Granted, the characters were entirely standard: beautiful, intelligent, sensitive main character, her jolly chum, a brother who is all that one could wish an upstanding brother to be, a nice, if perhaps a little flat, love interest, and a hard-working scholarship friend.
But it was pervaded by that weird 19th Century American we-can't-decide-whether-class-matters-or-not business, of which the stories in St. Nicholas were such masters. On the one hand, our heroines are clearly in the right when they want to help the less-fortunate mill girls by exposing them to high culture and broadening their horizens, while their acquaintances who disdain to help while spouting platitudes about "the poor always being with us" are in the wrong. And let us not forget that our dear Helen ends up engaged to the engineer of her father's mill, of all people, although this gentleman is "above his station in birth and education" -- he, like all the worthy men in the novel, has a shelf of "well-worn volumes of Greek" above his desk.* And Cecily Saxton, the cheerfully poor charity student friend of Helen's with an upwardly mobile marriage to Helen's brother. But on the other hand, although class is repeatedly transcended (and education is always the means by which it can be), it is very definitely there, and to be respected. Those mill girls and boys whose lives Helen and her friends improve will never be equals -- the suggestion that there could be a relationship beyond largesse on one side and respectful gratitude on the other is never even floated. The closest we get to any discussion of this is to be told in the very first chapter that "it is often the case that the barrier between the rich and the poor is erected by the poor."
There was also a great deal of entertaining anxiety about women with higher education. I suspect that Adelaide L. Rouse was a "College Woman" herself, and Helen and her friends firmly prove that their liberal arts degrees have only improved them. But, there are again all of the classic St. Nicholas patterns: the plot has Helen sacrifice her plans in order to be a "stay-at-home daughter" -- helping her family through a period of distressed finances, and nursing her severely depressed sister back to health. By the end of the book, a year later, she and two of her three good college friends are married or engaged to be and all set to start their own households. The girl who was brilliant in mathematics now finds "cookery much more fascinating" and so on. In other words, we can take this story as reassurance that college doesn't spoil girls for their proper roles in life.
And therefore, we see that it's no accident that Dear Daddy Long-Legs has remained popular pretty much exclusively out of this genre of novel.
Helen Beaton, College Woman seems to have been published in 1900. It is inscribed in the frontleaf: "Presented to Helen Dauner by the Board of Education for being neither absent nor tardy during year 1919-1920." Wouldn't that be a bit like giving Are You There, God, It's Me Margaret or some such as a prize in a modern high school?
In the back, in different writing (maybe earlier?)
"Hope is like a slender hairbell [sic]
All atremble from its birth
Love is like a fragrant rose
Cheering, blessing all the earth
Faith is like a lily white
High uplifted into light."
It seems to be from Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song Poems, except it isn't. This is Rossetti:
Hope is like a harebell trembling from its birth,
Love is like a rose the joy of all the earth;
Faith is like a lily lifted high and white,
Love is like a lovely rose the world's delight;
Harebells and sweet lilies show a thornless growth,
But the rose with all its thorns excels them both.
I wonder if whoever wrote it in my book made up the variation, or if she found it somewhere else. Google turns up nothing.
*Growing up reading this kind of thing is the real reason that I am majoring in Classics, I suspect
But it was pervaded by that weird 19th Century American we-can't-decide-whether-class-matters-or-not business, of which the stories in St. Nicholas were such masters. On the one hand, our heroines are clearly in the right when they want to help the less-fortunate mill girls by exposing them to high culture and broadening their horizens, while their acquaintances who disdain to help while spouting platitudes about "the poor always being with us" are in the wrong. And let us not forget that our dear Helen ends up engaged to the engineer of her father's mill, of all people, although this gentleman is "above his station in birth and education" -- he, like all the worthy men in the novel, has a shelf of "well-worn volumes of Greek" above his desk.* And Cecily Saxton, the cheerfully poor charity student friend of Helen's with an upwardly mobile marriage to Helen's brother. But on the other hand, although class is repeatedly transcended (and education is always the means by which it can be), it is very definitely there, and to be respected. Those mill girls and boys whose lives Helen and her friends improve will never be equals -- the suggestion that there could be a relationship beyond largesse on one side and respectful gratitude on the other is never even floated. The closest we get to any discussion of this is to be told in the very first chapter that "it is often the case that the barrier between the rich and the poor is erected by the poor."
There was also a great deal of entertaining anxiety about women with higher education. I suspect that Adelaide L. Rouse was a "College Woman" herself, and Helen and her friends firmly prove that their liberal arts degrees have only improved them. But, there are again all of the classic St. Nicholas patterns: the plot has Helen sacrifice her plans in order to be a "stay-at-home daughter" -- helping her family through a period of distressed finances, and nursing her severely depressed sister back to health. By the end of the book, a year later, she and two of her three good college friends are married or engaged to be and all set to start their own households. The girl who was brilliant in mathematics now finds "cookery much more fascinating" and so on. In other words, we can take this story as reassurance that college doesn't spoil girls for their proper roles in life.
And therefore, we see that it's no accident that Dear Daddy Long-Legs has remained popular pretty much exclusively out of this genre of novel.
Helen Beaton, College Woman seems to have been published in 1900. It is inscribed in the frontleaf: "Presented to Helen Dauner by the Board of Education for being neither absent nor tardy during year 1919-1920." Wouldn't that be a bit like giving Are You There, God, It's Me Margaret or some such as a prize in a modern high school?
In the back, in different writing (maybe earlier?)
"Hope is like a slender hairbell [sic]
All atremble from its birth
Love is like a fragrant rose
Cheering, blessing all the earth
Faith is like a lily white
High uplifted into light."
It seems to be from Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song Poems, except it isn't. This is Rossetti:
Hope is like a harebell trembling from its birth,
Love is like a rose the joy of all the earth;
Faith is like a lily lifted high and white,
Love is like a lovely rose the world's delight;
Harebells and sweet lilies show a thornless growth,
But the rose with all its thorns excels them both.
I wonder if whoever wrote it in my book made up the variation, or if she found it somewhere else. Google turns up nothing.
*Growing up reading this kind of thing is the real reason that I am majoring in Classics, I suspect
