Looking out for the Ladies -- Jacqueline Kelly's The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly is a timeless ode to girls, especially those with an interest in science.  Needless to say, I loved it.  As the daughter of a science teacher (and the sibling of an honest-to-God rocket scientist), I have spent my life surrounded by the joys of discovery.  While I can’t say that I know all the elements listed on the periodic table or understand all of what Stephen Hawking writes, I get the appeal of the scientific method – to discover something completely new and life-changing would be the greatest moment of one’s career. 

Kelly frames each chapter with a brief excerpt from Darwin’s The Origin of Species to connect the action of the story – a look into the year of a twelve-year old girl named Calpurnia (or Callie) Tate at the turn of the 20^th Century.  Faced with a decision whether to follow her parents’ desires to be a typical lady or to learn from her eccentric grandfather – Civil War hero, retired pecan farmer, and naturalist – Calpurnia struggles to balance all of her family’s expectations.  However, even in the midst of all the adventures with moth specimens, wine-making, and the discovery of what may be a new plant species, the book really isn’t just about science.

            Instead, the story gently tries to reassure all girls who differ from society’s vision of femininity that, someday, they too may eventually be accepted with a little effort on their part.  From Callie’s studies of the natural world, she sees everything has a role to play, no matter how odd or different from the other animals they may be.  For Callie, her difference comes in the form of her tomboyish, nerdy scientific nature, which her mother, her girly best friend, and her other female mentors are painstakingly trying to eliminate from her personality.  As much as Calpurnia’s grandfather encourages her to keep him company while traipsing around rural Texas backcountry, even he isn’t too confident she will make it as a scientist.  By the end of the novel, the girl is starting to be deeply troubled about her future.  To this reader, Callie would be well-placed in any time period – she’s a feminist waking up to the world.   

Finally, to Kelly’s credit, she does not sugar-coat the ending, with Callie striding off into the sunset with a future clear of difficulty for the budding naturalist.  Instead, the novel ends relatively soon after she gets a Christmas gift of the ironically titled nightmare The Science of Housewifery, making Callie feel as if she is condemned to knitting, cooking, and piano lessons for eternity.  While I won’t give away much about the semi-ambiguous final chapter about New Year’s Day in 1900, I will say I was left thinking about a quotation offered a bit earlier by Calpurnia’s grandfather, “The lesson for today is this: It is better to travel with hope in one’s heart than to arrive in safety.  Do you understand?” (233). Yes, we women do understand, and that’s what makes this novel a great example of historical fiction.  

Happy Birthday America!

I could post some Whitman, Sandburg, Emerson, Muir, or some other great American thinkers, but somehow I always go back to music for today.

So here's one of the greatest voices of America:

 

My life in books...

It’s been almost two months since I last posted, and my blog silence can mostly be attributed to the fact that I've been reading...and working and just too tired to write. I’ve read about eight since my last post: I am the Messenger by Markus Zusak (the author of The Book Thief), One of our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde, The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, and several young adult books. I am a devoted fan to the first two authors in this list, and my high expectations were, unfortunately, not met.

For those, like myself, who were transformed after reading Zusak’s The Book Thief, Messenger comes across shallow. Although the premise is interesting and different, the book’s progression felt unnatural. The story begins with the narrator, Ed an unmotivated 20-something, stopping a robbery, which he admits is out of his character. Then, he starts to receive playing cards with mysterious instructions. Ultimately, the different cards lead him to people throughout his community whom he must help in some way--from a woman who is raped by her alcoholic husband every night to an old woman who just needs company.  The book progresses in much the same tone, and through much overdone self-reflection and many statements like “I just knew what I had to do,” the narrator calls the reader to question what we would do for a stranger in need. Although this “moral of the story” may sound cheesy, the book and it’s characters are in no way sentimental, which saves the book from being unenjoyable. Most of the book’s attraction lies with the outlying characters, the strangers in need. They are drawn with life, and as they are each saved in their own way, the reader is pulled into the main character’s mission. It’s an easy read if you like Zusak’s style.

Next, for those who were anxiously waiting those two years for the newest installment of the Thursday series, you may be a little disappointed. The book works more like an illustration of the workings of the Bookworld rather than a development in Thursday’s story. It’s clever and full of fun booky allusions just as his other books are fun and clever, but the story never develops into anything.  Most of it seems to set up the groundwork for the next book’s major mystery.  My favorite parts were when he makes fun of literary tropes. To Fforde’s credit though, he really tries to liven up our impression of books, and he explore what it means to create--to create characters, to create worlds, to create ourselves. And, if nothing else his books always inspire me to read and write more.

Finally, I get to my favorite: The Paris Wife. Let me begin by admitting that I am in no way a Hemingway scholar. In fact, despite many attempts, I just don’t like reading Hemingway. I have read several of his novels and have really tried to like his books, but most of the time I end up rolling my eyes at many of his characters...Despite this, I’ve always found his life and his persona fascinating. I’ve visited his childhood home in Chicago, I’ve sat in the back booth at Les Deux Magots in Paris (though it seems much changed since Hemingway was there), and I’ve watched the bulls run in Pampelona. My favorite read of his is A Moveable Feast. I’m drawn to the time period so often romanticized: the smoky cafes in Paris stuffed with struggling artists, the crowded bull fighting arenas in Pamplona.

The Paris Wife chronicles the relationship between him and his first wife, Hadley, and captures that time in Paris. However, more than that, the book focuses more on the creation of Hemingway’s persona through the eyes of a woman. At the book’s beginning  Hemingway is no more than a romantic, lonely young man come back from war. He’s desperate to write and desperate to be in love.  As the story progresses, he slowly creates the myth behind the man, and we meet Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound as we watch him struggle to place himself amongst the literary elite. It is very easy to hate him because he is really such an ass, but somehow the reader cannot help but be drawn to him, just as Hadley and every other woman in his life. It is hard not to admire his success and his talent and the way he gives himself to his art and life.

The book is also, probably even more so, about Hadley, and her struggle to find a place in the literary world, one that is much quicker and tumultuous than she ever wanted. Although at times the book threatens to become a book clubby book, I think it’s saved by its intelligent and unique portrayal of this famous couple. It is not over-stuffed with romance but a simple and realistic portrayal of a marriage the reader know is doomed from the beginning. It’s about the woman who is behind the myth that is behind the man...

There you have it...my past few months in books.

Just Give Me That Ol' Time America....

I've always had a deep fascination with what is quintessentially "American" -- that pull yourself up by your bootstraps, god-fearing, adventuring spirit that used to be represented so frequently in pop culture.  (In my opinion, today's American spirit is a little harder to define as we have become so fragmented in our views / beliefs).  I also wonder why the appeal of this American image – a lone cowboy standing tall in his dusty jeans and boots, his hat at a rakish angle as he squints off into a distant horizon – has lasted so long.  After all, didn’t we create a world of office buildings and air conditioning to prevent all that effort?  While I’ve talked before about probably not being able to make the grade in frontier agrarian society, I still find the whole concept wildly appealing and so do the writers Jeannette Walls and Wendy McClure.

Jeannette Walls, more famous for her memoir The Glass Castle, also wrote a true-life novel about her grandmother called Half-Broke Horses.  Lily Casey Smith had a wild ride in the American frontier, from living in a mud dugout in Texas and learning to break horses, teaching in rural schools, and working a big ranch with her second husband in Arizona.  She was not a woman to look back at her mistakes or to whine about her situation – Lily just packed up her stuff when the going got impossible and got back on her horse thinking of new ways to make her life work, no matter what the effort required.  It is obvious that Walls deeply respects her grandmother and sets up her story as a model for what Americans could achieve with a lot more elbow grease. 

And yet, rather than make Lily seem like a grunt suited only for work, Walls also gives in to the chance to romanticize the time, to the point where I felt about ready to join in on the long range rides.  When Lily does briefly move to town, Walls specifically emphasizes her distaste of the confined world of the ‘burbs and the dissatisfaction that comes from an office job that leaves a worker without a worn body or a satisfied mind at the end of the day.   

To get a real sense of Walls’ interpretation and glorification of her forbearers, you need go no further than a reflection “Big Jim” (Lily’s second husband) has about the water he’s collected in his manmade pond:

The water you kids were playing in, he said, had probably been to Africa and the North Pole.  Genghis Khan or Saint Peter or even Jesus himself might have drunk it.  Cleopatra might have bathed in it.  Crazy Horse might have watered his pony with it. Sometimes water was liquid.  Sometimes it was rock hard - ice.  Sometimes it was soft - snow.  Sometimes it was visible but weightless - clouds.  And sometimes it was completely invisible - vapor - floating up into the sky like the souls of dead people. There was nothing like water in the world, Jim said.  It made the desert bloom but also turned rich bottomland into swamp.  Without it we'd die, but it could also kill us, and that was why we loved it, even craved it, but also feared it.  Never take water for granted, Jim said.  Always cherish it.  Always beware of it. (148-9)

Now, granted, I’ve never known a real “cowboy” but somehow I think at the end of a long day they aren’t exactly waxing poetic about their water supply.  However, for Walls in a way, that’s the point.  Looking back, we can see the beauty of a simpler life where people focused only on the literal “big picture” – survival and sustenance – and found it to be enough.

This “back to the basics” approach is certainly attracting interest in our time.  Granted, going green in America has been more about lining the pockets of savvy companies who know how to confuse consumers with all sorts of hippie-sounding labels, but this longing for a simpler lifestyle certainly comes from somewhere. 

And that’s where Wendy McClure steps in.  Her book, The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, explores her utter obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life, books, and the world that her writing represents.  McClure, along with her incredibly patient husband, spend a year travelling around in “Laura World” and seeing what insights can be culled from seeing the places Wilder lived.  Along the way, McClure churns butter, stays in a covered wagon, and buys enough prairie bonnets to show a fresh accessory every day for at least a month. 

As McClure sees it, her longing is not necessarily for Laura’s situation itself, but more of what it represents.  As she explains:     

Sometimes, Laura's World wasn't a realm of log cabins or prairies, it was a way of being.  Really, a way of being happy.  I wasn't into the flowery sayings, but I was nonetheless in love with the idea of serene rooms full of endless quiet and time, of sky in the windows, of a life comfortably cluttered and yet in some kind of perfect feng shui equilibrium, where all the day were capacious enough to bake bread and write novels and perambulate the wooded hills deep in thought (though truthfully, I'd allow for the occasional Rose - [Wilder’s daughter] style cocktail party as well).  All of it was the stuff of my imaginary Laura lifestyle magazine, my own rendition of sweet and simple. 

Probably most people who came to visit Mansfield had some version in mind, too.  While we could all certainly appreciate the pioneer ordeals, the covered wagons, and the long winters, somehow Sweet and Simple had become our own dream frontier, our Oregon that we'd like to reach someday, always just beyond the horizon.  We were looking for it wherever we could.  Most of us had no use for someone like Rose, whose Bitter and Complicated life was at least as imperfect as our own. (172)

In the end, McClure experiences a sort of emotional exhaustion from chasing after this lifestyle.  She searches so deeply to find meaning in these houses out in the middle of nowhere that she leaves the last few frontier festivals early because she is simply overwhelmed.  However, as in all good books about journeys, in the end she feels Laura has provided her a taste of her own “sweeter” world.  

For me, these dreams of a different life, become just that: dreams.  We may be able to change our external situation to match the description of the book, but the real “pioneer spirit” is something that must be found not in a historical reproduction or bought off a shelf.  Instead, it is discovered, as McClure realizes, in an evaluation of what the American spirit means to each one of us, even if those thoughts are not written out longhand in a cramped little cabin, but typed in a condo in a big city.  Both of these books gave me something to think about, but maybe that’s not the point either.  To find that spirit, one doesn’t need to analyze or evaluate, but just look with fresh eyes, over yet another horizon confident that a different (perhaps better) life will always be out there.