August 29, 2019 Arts & Culture The Real Tragedy of Beth March By Carmen Maria Machado Illustration from Little Women, 1869. Courtesy of Houghton Library at Harvard University. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. In the first chapter of Little Women, when Louisa May Alcott is doling out archetypes to the siblings, Beth asks, “If Jo is a tomboy and Amy a goose, what am I, please?” “You’re a dear,” Meg answers, “and nothing else.” People who have studied anything about Little Women know that the novel is based, roughly, on Louisa’s family, a clan of thinkers, artists, and transcendentalists who rubbed elbows with some of the premier minds of their time: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller. Beth is no exception; she is based on Alcott’s second-youngest sister, Lizzie. Lizzie, like Beth, was stricken with scarlet fever. (During this initial illness, her family—vegans and believers in alternative medicine—did not send for a doctor.) Like Beth, she recovered from the illness but, her heart weakened, never regained full health. Like Beth, she died tragically young, though not quite as young as her literary counterpart. But while Beth bore her suffering gladly, with unconscionable cheer and resolution, Lizzie was enraged at the fact of her own mortality. “In Little Women,” writes Alcott biographer Susan Cheever, “Beth has a quiet, dignified death, a fictional death. Although young Lizzie Alcott was a graceful, quiet woman, she was not so lucky. A twenty-two-year-old whose disease had wasted her body so that she looked like a middle-aged woman, she lashed out at her family and her fate with an anger that she had never before expressed.” Louisa and the others caring for Lizzie plied her with morphine, ether, and opium, though eventually the drugs lost any effect they once had on her. “[The] pain,” writes Cheever in American Bloomsbury, “seemed to drive her mad … even on large doses of opium, Lizzie attacked her sisters and asked to be left in peace.” Read More
August 28, 2019 First Person Portrait of Our White Mother Sitting at a Chinese Men’s Table By Jennifer Tseng Image courtesy Jennifer Tseng, photographer unknown. February 1982 It’s night. The curtains are closed, which gives the room a claustrophobic look. The men are all wearing brown or black, with white. Our mother is wearing blue, which both complements the oranges on the table and is the color that, as a child, I thought of as a white person’s color. When asked what their favorite color was, white kids almost always said “blue.” It’s our mother’s favorite color, too. Mine is red, the Chinese color of happiness. The men match the room, its fixtures and decor. Our mother and the oranges stand out as things that have come in from the outside; things that, like imports or immigrants, have come from elsewhere. Though the oranges agree with the orange chairs, one of the men’s shirt collars, the painting on the wall, our mother is the only blue thing. This photograph, taken when I was thirteen, always provokes mixed feelings in me. I spent much of my childhood observing the ways in which our Chinese father didn’t belong in the mostly white, English-speaking town where we lived. Chinese parties (sponsored by the small Chinese association of which he was president) were both the one place where our father could speak his native language and a place where our mother was usually miserable. She was shy. She dreaded these parties. They meant stepping out of her comfort zone. Our father stepped out of his comfort zone every day. He moved through the streets of our California town because he had to in order to survive. Relatively speaking, our mother had the luxury of choosing when (or whether) to step outside her comfort zone and into an all-Chinese situation. But our home—most people’s primary comfort zone—was a place where she felt distinctly uncomfortable. Under our father’s strict rule, she lived on tenterhooks. So it’s complicated. Read More
August 28, 2019 First Person I Was Dilapidated By Mary-Kay Wilmers Émile Bernard, Mother and Child, 1898, oil on canvas, 15″ x 18″. Public domain. “What did you have?” “A boy.” “Congratulations.” If your first child is a girl I’m told people say: “How nice.” How nice. My child is of course wonderful but I am also—embarrassingly—slightly proud that he’s a boy. Childbirth is full of such pitfalls, where the wish to be congratulated overrules common sense. I don’t find the standard notion of the good wife very compelling. But the pressure to be “a good mother” according to the prevailing definitions is practically irresistible. I can keep my head when David Holbrook, in his most recent outburst against “art, thought and life in our time,” warns that it is a failure in mothering that produces intellectuals and other pornographers: it’s less easy to steer a clear course through all the varied strictures of the psychoanalysts themselves. Worse still, it’s by no means adequate to try to behave like a good mother, because that involves an act of will: goodness itself is supposed to emerge. Before Bowlby, you had only to keep your children clean and set a decent moral example. Now ordinary selfishness is thought somehow to be expelled in the moment of delivery, or sooner: it’s selfish, you’re told by the masked figures gathered expectantly around you, if you can’t manage without forceps. Better mothers don’t need them. Read More
August 28, 2019 Literary Paper Dolls Literary Paper Dolls: Rebecca By Julia Berick and Jenny Kroik illustrations © Jenny Kroik You see her sometimes on the way to work. On the train, or on line at the coffee shop where, though you are late, you have stopped for coffee. She is wearing what you ought to have chosen that morning: something much more cool or much more practical or much more elegant than you. Her bag is from a shop you’ve heard about but haven’t gotten to yet or can’t afford. She is in Boston or San Francisco or Atlanta or L.A., but she is perhaps most indigenous to New York City. She is real and she is also a figment of your imagination. As I carried a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca into a coffee shop recently, a woman stopped me to say it was one of her “favourites.” We spoke about it in a way that caught the attention of another woman in line, and the second woman explained the plot to the third. She told her that the book was about a lot of things, but that it was really about a house. As someone who has worked as a bookseller, I have gotten good at describing books I’ve read, and those I haven’t, to customers in four to nine words (which is as long as a person is willing to spend hearing about a book they probably aren’t going to read). To say that Rebecca was about a house seemed like the kind of stretch it would be to say Hamlet is about a marriage, and yet it is. It is about inhabiting a role you can’t quite play—the more I think about and read about Rebecca, the more I think this woman was right. It is about a house, only the house is a metaphor for a woman. Really, it’s a book about imposter syndrome. Read More
August 27, 2019 Redux Redux: A Heat That Hung Like Rain By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Don DeLillo, ca. 2011. Photo: Thousandrobots. This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating that most late-August phenomenon: humidity, and the ensuing sweat. Read on for Don DeLillo’s Art of Fiction interview, Sheila Kohler’s short story “Cracks,” and Andrew Klavan’s poem “The Pond.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Read More
August 27, 2019 Arts & Culture Natalia Ginzburg’s Broken Mirror By Tim Parks Francesco Hayez, Portrait of Alessandro Manzoni, 1841, oil on canvas, 46″ x 36″. Public domain. The Manzoni Family is a meeting between two authors who at first glance could hardly seem more different. Alessandro Manzoni is simply the most celebrated figure in modern Italian literature. His great novel The Betrothed, published in quite different editions in 1827 and 1840, is the first modern novel in Italian, the later edition marking a milestone in the consolidation of Tuscan Italian as the language for a potentially united Italy. Profoundly Catholic in inspiration, the book was placed at the core of the Italian school syllabus after the country achieved unification in 1861 and still offers a linguistic and moral example to generation after generation of Italian children. Natalia Ginzburg, on the other hand, was a Jewish novelist and a Communist, whose husband Leone Ginzburg died in a Fascist prison during World War II. While Manzoni’s prose now seems elaborate, sometimes magniloquent, Ginzburg’s is as spare, droll, and laconic as Italian writing ever gets. While he narrated grandiose drama in one eight-hundred-page tome, she chronicled the intimacy of the humdrum in eight rather slender novels and novellas. He was a lifelong phobic who suffered frequent panic attacks and found it impossible to leave the house without company and protection. She showed great courage and initiative during the war, saving her children and herself from the Nazi round-ups of the Jews in Rome after her husband’s death. But perhaps most of all, Manzoni was a profoundly religious man whose faith is very much at the center of his writing. Ginzburg was not religious at all and had nothing to say on the matter. Read More