Dorothy Day and a good book on children's literature

I'm reading a good book on children's literature called American Children's Literature and the Construction of Childhood by Gail Schmunk Murray (1998).

What interests me about children's literature is the lifelong impact it has on readers: In other words, that it's formative. It colors how we view the world. As Murray argues, it's also conservative. Such literature is written by adults who have typically wanted to inculcate children with whatever they consider the prevailing "good" morality of their time period, be it Christian sentiment in the 19th century or acceptance of minorities in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I would add too, that because it is imagined by adults who, inevitably, transmit the values of their own era--essentially the era before the birth of the child reader--children who internalize these values are carrying forward and conserving older values. If they express these values as adults, they are expressing the values of their grandparents' generation, though, of course, influenced by the experiences and values of their own lives.

Dorothy Day, a founder of the Catholic Worker movement in the 1930s, was much influenced by the 19th century novels she read as a child. Two that impressed her were Wide, Wide World and Queechy by Susan Warner, both huge best sellers before the Civil War and an influence on a generation of literature to come. In these novels, which are sentimental by today's standards, young orphan girls survive in a cruel world through faith in God, patience, innocence, kindness, forgiveness and self sacrifice. Although these novels were written from an evangelical Christian perspective, Day was able to carry their values into the Catholic Worker movement. Along with other books, they gave her an inspiration and a touchstone. The Catholic Worker hospitality houses required huge amounts of patience, kindness and self sacrifice. They also ignited the popular imagination: the CW hospitality house movement spread quickly.

Books like Queechy and Wide, Wide World remind me of Shirley Temple films of the 1930s, often featuring Temple as a brave, innocent and virtuous orphan girl who makes her way in a cruel world. It interests me that such Victorian motifs carried into the 1930s, a time of great suffering, and that they manifested in both films and the Catholic Worker movement. One could argue that the compassion imagined in the 19th century is in many ways realized in the 20th century, especially during the New Deal of the 1930s, as many of the people who grew up reading 19th- century children's literature came of age. And it's surely possible that children's book like the Little House series, which, as Murray points out, promoted self help and implicitly critiqued government programs, have influenced the politics of our era in an individualist direction.

Questions that arise for me include: What values did I imbibe and have I carried forward as a child reading children's literature in the 1960s and early 70s? What values are today's young adults carrying forward? What impact have they had and will they have on how our society is structured?

In Richmond at ESR... with Jane Austen and literature

Here I am at Earlham School of Religion and ...

I'm fascinated and somewhat amazed--though not entirely surprised--at the extent to which literary approaches and literary theory are currently permeating religious studies. Given the view of Bible as narrative and all of us as part of a larger story or discourse, this makes sense--but I didn't fully realize the impact until I got here. For me, this merging of literary approach, literature and religion is more than a touch of miracle, as it connects my passions ... leaving me in a state of near swooning euphoria--and I can, in a sense, pick up my graduate studies in English from the 1980s where they left off.

Every Tuesday, the school has a community lunch with a speaker. This week, I had the good fortune to hear Emily Townes, who teaches at Yale Divinity school. She was questioned about evil and suffering--two subjects she's written about--and she talked about the relationship between imagination and evil. I was thrilled. She discussed how cultures can create fictions that become so widely repeated they are accepted as facts--and that these fictions can obscure evil. She used as her example "Aunt Jemima" and "Mammy," cultural icons of the fat, jolly slave woman. There was no real Aunt Jemima--I knew this--(she first emerged as a former slave hired by owners of a pancake mix to make pancakes during the Chicago World's Fair in the 1890s and became wildly popular). Also, while female slaves cared for white children, the Mammy figure is another fiction. Townes pointed out that slaves were underfed (thin), and that none were truly happy with their lots. In fact, most "house slaves," contrary to our pictures of them, were likely to be the products of interracial "pairings". From what Townes said, I picture the real slaves as skinny, light-skinned, harried, overworked and unhappy rather than brilliantly brown or black, fat, cheerful, jolly and laughingly contented.

Of course--and while Townes did not say this I can imagine--cultural icons or stereotypes such as the cheery Aunt Jemima flipping buckwheat cakes in the kitchen or Mammy happily bustling around organizing the children speak to our deep desire to believe that the people who do the dirty work in our culture actually enjoy the task. And I imagine it's probable that some slaves would pretend to cheerfulness, as we all need to survive.

I also have been pursuing--of course--Jane Austen at ESR. I mentioned being a Jane Austen fan in my introduction of myself to my on-line Old Testament class and am thrilled to have fellow fans among my classmates. Naturally, Townes's talk of imagination and evil immediately made me think of Jane Austen--Austen was a woman who didn't gloss over the everyday horrors of middle-class life, the petty cruelties which she understood were worse for defenseless lower class people. Also, a book I am reading introduced me to a British Quaker author--her name evades me right now-- who wrote a children's book about Jane Austen in 1977.

I'm settled into my apartment in Richmond as I deliberately travelled light--and Roger, of course, is a wonderful moving companion.

Internet access has been a problem all week, hence my "silence." I am now--at last-- part of the Earlham College system, so I can access the Internet on my laptop, a huge boon. I still can't pick up the wireless system in my apartment, however, although I am right across the street from the campus--Roger says an enhancer of some sort might help. It isn't ALL terrible to be denied 24/7 Internet access however--it forces me to do other things. But it does impede blogging.

Otherwise, all is fine. I had to switch my schedule so now I will be in Richmond Tuesday afternoon through Friday morning. I will taking Old Testament, New Testament, Quaker History and Literature, and a class on Bonhoeffer.

I ran into a genuinely cheerful Clare Gamble, an Olney graduate and now student at Earlham College.

I hope everyone is well.

My second blog

I have started a new blog at http://donnajanenancyemily.blogspot.com/, called" Donna Parker, Jane Austen Nancy Drew Emily Bronte." As I write there, that blog hopes to be "the place where great women literary writers and their creations meet with girls' series books and their authors on level ground."

I thought long and hard before starting a second blog. I considered having a section of this blog devoted to discussing literature or simply moving back and forth between the two topics on this blog as the spirit moved me, but in the end decided that faith/Quakerism and girls'/women's literature were too dissimilar to mash together into one blog. Not that one doesn't inform the other, but I saw different audiences and different emphases.

I struggled with having two blogs because part of the reason I came to Quakerism was to be intergrated--to live as one person with all the strands of my life pulled together. Somehow, that seemed to me to translate into one blog. Apparently not.

I'm in an odd position right now--I plan to attend Earlham School of Religion next year, to earn an Mdiv with a emphasis on writing ministry, while I find myself more and more drawn back to Jane Austen and the Brontes. How this will all merge, I don't know. Right now, I feel somewhat bifurcated. It's also interesting to be in a position in midlife when the career I'd come to belatedly --journalism--is collapsing, and the future has the quality of discovering a new world.

I imagine people to have lives all revolving around the sun of one interest. Then I think of figures like Dorothy Sayers and JRR Tolkien, who juggled a faith life and a literary life.

I know there are some Quakers, especially Conservative, who would question any interest in the arts. However, I was reading Nancy Drew and Jane Austen long before Quakerism became a part of my life. I was formed in the kiln of reading and the best thing I can do now is to try to understand how that influenced me and others. We can't escape that we live in a media- and image-saturated world. The only alternative is to try to become Amish (or join some similar group) and I know that I, for one, would still carry around with me a lifetime of media sounds and images, from the Addams Family theme to reproductions of Da Vinci's The Last Supper. In the end, I remember too that the Bible is a work of poetry, prose visions and music (if we see the Psalms, for example, as songs) and that we experience God's creative power, as people often point out, through the arts.

My question, however, is this: Do you balance or juggle diifferent interests or vocations that seem to mesh imperfectly, and how does that work for you and your faith life?

Happy Birthday Shakespeare

Today is, I believe, Shakespeare's birthday. Did you see the portrait of him that was recently authenticated? Do you have a favorite play or sonnet?

Because I was an English major in college and then working on a Phd. in English, I was exposed to quite a bit of Shakespeare in "the day." Some of my happiest memories are of being an card-carrying member of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. The librarians--underpaid and twentysomethings, just like me--would gleefully fill me in on gossip about the famous scholars. Also, every afternoon, the library served an English tea, an elegant event that a starving graduate student living in a bleak bauhaus apartment complex couldn't help but appreciate.

I have found that in recent years I am still especially fond of Hamlet and A Midsummer's Night Dream. My first exposure to Shakespeare was watching cartoon versions of these two plays performed on television by Mr. Magoo. I still remember Mr. Magoo talking to the ghost of his father in Hamlet and running around with an ass's head in A Midsummer's Night Dream.

In any case, I imagine the author of the love sonnets would appreciate my leaving graduate school for amore ... or so I hope!

On literature

I have read some good--or at least "interesting"-- books lately. They include:

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson

Run by Ann Patchett

Nickled and Dimed by Barbara Erhenreich

I am in the middle of Crime and Punishment by Dostyveosky

What good books are you reading?