And now for something a little bit different. I had a feeling I wouldn't manage to read a whole novella this weekend, though I have started it and hope to be able to get back on schedule with it next weekend. So, setting Francis Wyndham aside today, I had to read a short story and decided it was finally time to choose a Library of America story. Did you know there is a weekly freebie story that you can get delivered in your email inbox if you subscribe? Of course you can always visit here for the whole list to dip into at your leisure, too. I know it is a promotional thing to tempt you to buy their books, but how cool is it that they offer a story or excerpt from those books? They've been doing it for a while as they are up to 280 short stories. No excuses--there is always a short story just a click away. They are not all short stories, some are sketches, there are plays, and nonfiction even.
I opted for a story by Louisa May Alcott. I always mean to read more of her writing, and she was a perfect choice. "Anna's Whim" is #246 and is found in Alcott: Work, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Stories & Other Writing. I like Alcott for her subversive themes that she often used in her writing. Little Women may be a classic with a strong sense of moral rightness and goodness, but if you look at her other works, she was quite a feminist. She wrote "Anna's Whim" shortly after her 1873 novel Work: A Story of Experience. As reviewers of the time noted, the book focuses on that "troublesome theme: what shall women do". Indeed. Anna's whim is not such a strange one. A beauty, Anna wants to be accepted and appreciated on her own terms--not as a fragile woman without an independent thought in her head but treated as a man would treat a fellow man.
Anna and her friend Clara are at the seaside and watch how the young gentlemen speak with the ladies--and how the ladies respond--like simpering fools.
"Why don't men treat me like a reasonable being?--talk sense to me, give me their best ideas, tell me their plans and ambitions, let me enjoy the real man in them, and know what they honestly are? I don't want to be a goddess stuck on a pedestal. I want to be a women down among them, to help and be helped by our acquaintance."
And then comes the real test. A friend of her youth, Frank, shows up at the same resort. A young man she has not seen for a long time, but a friend she was very close to as a girl. No matter the difference of their sexes they could then talk of anything and everything. In her independent ways, she one day is rowing and when he offers to help she tells him no, she can handle herself just fine. The tone is set and he treats her just as any other friend, not as a "lady friend".
It's with the tiniest bit of resentment that she sees Frank act with gallantry with all the other ladies yet with Anna he lets her take the initiative and let's her help herself.
"She presently discovered that he treated other women in the usual way; and at first it annoyed her that she was the only one whom he allowed to pick up her fan, walk without an arm, row, ride, and take care of herself as if she was a man. But she also discovered that she was the only woman to whom he walked to as an equal, in whom he seemed to find sympathy, inspiration, and help, and for whom he frankly showed not admiration alone, but respect, confidence and affection."
"This made the loss of a little surface courtesy too trifling for complaint or reproof; this stimulated and delighted her; and in striving to deserve and secure it, she forgot everything else, prouder to be one man's true friend than the idol of a dozen lovers."
This is a marvelous story, with (of course) a twist at the end. What I find most fascinating is that this isn't a contemporary writer writing a set piece, but this is Louisa May Alcott, a 19th century woman not just feeling this way, but writing about it. How many women would have read it and been able to not just relate but wish the same thing?
Reading her puts me in mind of Harriet Reisen's book about Alcott that I read more than five years ago. I would happily pick it up again to reread or maybe something else about Alcott as a refresher. And if nothing else maybe one of her thrillers? I have a few books somewhere on my shelves . . .
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As for this week's hefty New Yorker, I have read Zadie Smith's "Escape from New York" and a few other shorter pieces. This is a quirky story set on September 11, 2001 based on an urban legend. Smith heard somewhere that Marlon Brando, Michael Jackson and Liz Taylor had been in NY on the day of the World Trade Center attacks and had left the city together. The story is narrated by Michael and he leaves NY taking along and Marlon (Marlon being a rather massive man in need of numerous stops out of the city at various fast food restaurants) and Liz (and a huge pile of Louis Vuitton luggage). It is all very tongue in cheek and she never explicitly says who the characters are meant to be. It was only in the Q&A that she mentions her inspiration being this urban legend. I'm not sure what I think of the story to be honest. Apparently she wrote the story as a distraction from another piece of writing she was meant to be making progress but wasn't in the mood for. I think I am a little tired of dystopian/post-apocalyptic short stories, of which there seem to be many in the New Yorker these days. (Sometimes a little bit goes a very long way with me). I'll be curious what the other longer stories are like--next up should be a story by Jonathan Franzen.