:: [read in mr. darcy's apologetic voice] ::

I was talking to my bestest friend yesterday (no names mentioned, or anything, but kelsey you know who you are) and she said, considering my over-sensitivity to rebecca dew's ridiculous comment, that I was giving myself too hard a time and really being a fathead about it all. I mean, not in those exact words or even in that tone of voice, but her point was that I just seriously needed to get over myself because I'm being ridiculous.

most of that was the voice in my head combined with her (loving) words of common sense (I was exaggerating your message, kels. I know you didn't mean it that way x) ). so I'm here to apologize really loudly and clearly and… apologetically.

so, guys: I know I have an ego problem, and I know I was overreacting to l. m. montgomery's point -- which, if she really meant that beautiful people don't work, was wrong (I take no credit here! kelsey's words!) -- and I am so sorry for saddling you with my emotional, after-midnight issues.

yeah, I really did write that post after midnight. not smart at all. I'll stop that. and I'll also give myself a few whacks upside the head to clear it a little. and then I'll go read something uplifting, like northanger abbey. (haha, that one's just for my awesomest friend ever. meaning kelsey. obvs.)

woo, henry tilney!! on a new topic, who is the best hero in all of jane austen? …ha. just kidding. I don't think I want to go there. I have a hard enough time picking my favorite ice cream flavor.

:: poetry - love and death ::

something about the last line of "keen" (edna st. vincent millay) haunts me. it's a beautiful poem, and on first read, it sounds sad. but I wonder. is it really describing a tragedy?

Weep him dead and mourn as you may,

Me, I sing as I must:

Blessèd be Death, that cuts in marble

What would have sunk to dust!

Blessèd be Death, that took my love

And buried him in the sea,

Where never a lie nor a bitter word

Will out of his mouth at me.

This I have to hold to my heart,

This to take by the hand:

Sweet we were for a summer month

As the sun on the dry white sand;

Mild we were for a summer month

As the wind from over the weirs.

And blessèd be Death, that hushed with salt

The harsh and slovenly years!

Who builds her house with love for timber

Builds her a house of foam.

And I'd liefer be bride to a lad gone down

Than widow to one safe home.

   except for the lines "sweet we were for a summer month" and "mild we were for a summer month", this young woman might seem pessimistic and cynical -- but she obviously loved the man who drowned. 

   that might be what makes the poem sad, except that I wonder if she really did. first they were "sweet", then they were "mild" (as if their love was waning already); all the descriptions of how they loved each other are transient. seasons are almost always symbols of change (especially with millay: "road to avrille" or this or this) -- summer turns to fall and feelings die -- and the wind and the foam are appropriately momentary to resemble temporary love. 

   her reaction, too, is more relieved than sorrowful. she is glad that death took him, before their love could dissolve into nothing, before she would have to live with his rejection and dislike. her sorrow over his death can be real: she can remember and mourn him truly, while she actually has something to mourn. she'd "built her a house of foam", a relationship based on nothing but momentary feeling. so she is thankful to have the dreams, the memories, without the heartbreak and disillusionment of reality.

   this girl would rather the man she loved dead: had he lived, their love would have died, and she is glad to remember him without pain. true love is selfless, serving, lasting until old age (even if that means undergoing "the harsh and slovenly years"). their love wasn't.

   and that, I think, is the true tragedy of the poem.  

:: over-sensitivity is the dumbest thing ::

anne of green gables and all its sequels have always had a soft spot in my heart. to be pride-squashingly honest, I think it might be that I like imagining myself as anne, and, you know. being beautiful and well-liked and having everything work out and marrying some adorable, adoring guy while all my enemies look on jealously, and, you know.

you know too much, then.

anyway, something that has driven me nuts thinking about it over the past few weeks is one particular quote of rebecca dew's. I used to like rebecca dew; I still do, when I'm reading the book. but this bugs me partially because of what it says about me (and I'll get to that in a minute). 

so rebecca dew says, "'but if we were all beauties, who would do the work?'" -- "rather wistfully", I'll admit, but it's still philosophical and irritating. when I first read it, I thought it slightly humorous, in-character, and endearing. the more I think about it, the more I realize I'm over-sensitive and stupid. 

    I plow ahead anyway.

    it bothers me because, 1: how convenient for the un-beautiful to recognize their proper place in the world, accept it, and not burden the beautiful with their petty wishes to be better people (obviously not an option, since their faces just aren't as pleasant to look at). we're supposed to like rebecca dew for this. what, is she an example to the rest of us? guys, if you're not beautiful, be like rebecca dew and let the beautiful people have a chance to be all fake-humble while really on the inside being thankful they don't look like you. 

    2: I feel like I'm anne all through the book, so I'm everything anne is -- or, everything I'm not. reading this brings me crashing back down to reality and HEY PRESTO, it's me! the ordinary! the one for work, apparently. UGH.

I understand that's not what l. m. montgomery was (probably) trying to say, and that I have baggage (ha, just how much baggage you never quite realized!). the thing is, I don't think I'm pretty; I think I'm average, at best. ordinary. plain. I hate that this quote makes me feel at first all patronizing and, "oh, you're not so bad!" just because I of course have it so much better. and I hate that then I feel all awful that I'll never be the one someone looks at and wishes to be. 

…did that last sentence make any sense at all?

neither side works for me. I don't want to be the beautiful, looked-wistfully-up-to, but I don't want to be the wistful looker-upper, either. (IRONY: I'M A HYPOCRITE. of course I want to be wistfully admired! what I don't want is the patronizing attitude that I immediately feel upon reading this quote. and I really am a wistful looker-upper. which I dislike. because I want to be looked up to -- and we're roight back wheh we stahted! do you feel me, here?)

the anne series is kind of like meth for me. real life hurts when viewed through a WWAD lens -- even when merely contrasted with the anne life. it hurts so badly that the only way to escape is to go into the anne world and forget about real life for a while. 

    and you have to take more and more. and you hallucinate, and your friends leave you, and you commit crimes to keep up your habit and you starve to death focusing on your addiction and it's horrible so STOP READING ANNE BOOKS!!!!! 

I'm afraid my little comparison got slightly muddled somewhere in there. probably I'm just not beautiful enough for things to go smoothly. right.

:: spooky short story time ::

yesterday morning, I read washington irving's the spectre bridegroom.

if you have any experience with washington irving,

um.

I don't know how to end that sentence. especially since my entire experience has been the legend of sleepy hollow (but of course) and rip van winkle (no duh). I really have nothing to say about irving, except that I found sleepy hollow appropriately thrilling (and there's a really long, rambling story about it from my childhood which I will not relate); and also that for school a few years ago, I got a big-kid illustrated-for-coloring version of rip and enjoyed it immensely.

spectre bridegroom… I really liked it. it's similar to sleepy hollow in its satirical, slightly sarcastic "this is a ghost story, be frightened. ha, what a dummy" way, and it was obviously supposed to be predictable, which added to the charm. also the last line made me crack up, and that is always a good thing in a story. …unless it's, you know, not supposed to.

this, however, is supposed to be sarcastic, and therefore I quite enjoyed it. heh :)

:: oh the humanity ::

we all can agree that sir walter scott wrote good books, right? and that he was the author of several classics? and that his books could rightly be called "literature"? okay.

can we come to a common consensus about debbie macomber, too -- that she writes cheap romances? can we agree that none of her books will be remembered in fifty years (at least not for their quality)? and that what she writes cannot be called "literature"*? okay.

this makes me want to punch someone.

… and they call themselves "the literature network"?!

the irony is killing me.

*by "literature", I mean "good". "of quality", "worthwhile", "improving". not "words on a page that you can read if you have the ability and inclination". 

:: a damp symbolic interlude ::

today is snowy and blowy and cold. I feel compelled to read great works about spring.

...okay, so it's not exactly about spring. but it is about amory blaine, and that works, too.

- - -

The night mist fell. From the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires and towers, and then settled below them, so that the dreaming peaks were still in lofty aspiration toward the sky. Figures that dotted the day like ants now brushed along as shadowy ghosts, in and out of the foreground. The Gothic halls and cloisters were infinitely more mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by myriad faint squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell boomed the quarter-hour, and Amory, pausing by the sun-dial, stretched himself out full-length on the damp grass. The cool bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time -- time that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights. Evening after evening the senior singing had drifted over the campus in melancholy beauty, and through the shell of his undergraduate consciousness had broken a deep and reverent devotion to the gray walls and Gothic peaks and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages.

- - -

:: woman in white ::

back in december I bought the woman in white at barnes & noble because I remembered really liking it. it took me a while to get around to ACTUALLY reading it because, y'know, life, but I managed to get a chapter in here and there and I have finally finished it. WOO.

first impression: I liked it just as much as I did the first time. maybe more. 

second impression: I really don't like laura fairlie.

the woman in white is a huge, sprawling novel that takes several narrators and lots of explanations to convey the plot. the story is basically this: walter hartright, a struggling painter, takes a situation in the country -- teaching two young women to draw -- that promises good pay. the night before he leaves london, he meets with a mysterious woman who needs his help. the incidence would have been forgotten, except for some chance happenings (and a striking resemblance) once he's installed in his position that make him wonder if there was more to her than a poor mental patient -- and if there is more to this family's history than they know. 

    so walter, with the aid of the older sister, sets out to discover what this woman's story is, finding more questions along the way (and, in all honesty, more answers than he'd bargained for). oh, and if you didn't guess it, he falls hopelessly in love, but of course you guessed it. what would a victorian story be without a little star-crossed romance??

it's pretty thrilling, and it's a sort-of gothic-but-actually-not drama. as the introduction says, "a novel we may have thought, given its evocative, potentially spooky title, would be a Gothic tale of supernatural terrors and pale wraiths turns out to be a novel simply of sensational plotting, family treachery, and absolutely nothing paranormal."
   what I really incredibly enjoy about this story is the unpredictability. sure, there are some more or less predictable characters or occurrences (guess what? marian is the strong woman character, and she is all the way through the book), but the pith of the story -- what is sir percival's secret?! -- isn't your run-of-the-mill petty scandal. when I first read woman in white, I assumed that his secret was an affair or something like that; oh, he embezzled some money, and now he's afraid he'll go to jail. the twist was fresh and pretty inventive; that's what I really appreciated.

on to laura fairlie. let's begin with walter hartright's description of her.

Mingling with the vivid impression produced by the charm of her fair face and head, her sweet expression, and her winning simplicity of manner, was another impression, which, in a shadowy way, suggested to me the idea of something wanting. At one time it seemed like something wanting in her; at another, like something wanting in myself, which hindered me from understanding her as I ought. … Something wanting, something wanting -- and where it was, and what it was, I could not say.  

 that's it? that's IT?? what is this woman, a puppet?? again, the introduction.

For Laura, of course, the incompleteness rests in in her lack of control over her own destiny; for the reader, however, it lies in the partial development of her character, a lack of volition, a lifeless complicity to play pawn in others' plans for her, no matter what they may be. 

TRUTH. she spends the entire book vapid and lifeless, making no decisions, having no opinions of her own. she relies solely on her half-sister (and walter, later on), apathetically submitting to injustice and essentially enabling her victimization. the one time she shows any spark of life is when… a character... tries to force her to sign something. 

'Scruples!' he repeated. 'Your scruples! It is rather late in the day for you to be scrupulous. I should have thought you had got over all weakness of that sort, when you made a virtue of necessity by marrying me.'
      The instant he spoke these words, Laura threw down the pen -- looked at him with an expression in her eyes, which throughout all my experience of her, I had never seen in them before -- and turned her back on him in dead silence.

the rest of the book, she is a passive, obedient observer, with few emotions and really no character. she is the exact opposite of marian halcombe, who has all the resolve and resolution of a man, and whom I actually like. in fact, marian is my favorite character in the whole book, and her distinct unlikeness to laura might say something about the kind of characters I like. ones who do something.
    
    laura fairlie is a small complaint, though. as I consider the rest of the book, it might turn out to be a positive thing; a symbol and a layer of meaning I've missed in a shallow overview. like, anne catherick's insanity gives her resolution; her foil laura is technically sane (though she can't even prove that) and cannot make her own decisions. laura and marian are opposites in everything: looks, money, personality, character. marian is more masculine, laura is more feminine, to the point where one marries and the other does not. 
    …you know, this is fascinating. I'll keep thinking about it.

the rest of the characters -- count fosco, his wife, sir percival, mrs. catherick, marian halcombe, even pesca -- are complex and fascinating. the different narrators are interesting (although some pose a believability problem: how the heck did you get him to write this?), and the varied points of view drive the story on. 
    I might be coming back with more on woman in white. for now, all I can say is -- it's a great story. read it.