October 26th, 2008
by
Liz Henry
A Wrinkle in Time was that book that otherwise sensible grownups would recommend to me with a special book-recommending face. I was a little girl, I liked science fiction, it was the 1970s, and so people told me to read L’Engle and Susan Cooper, and how much I’d love them. Ugh! I didn’t like them at all! I loathed them to pieces.
My memory is of hating Meg like poison for being soppy and especially soppy over Charles Wallace, her precocious, twee little brother. She was a glorified babysitter for the “real” genius, who of course was a boy. An annoying brat actually. And either in this book or in one of the sequels, Meg got mushy over her boyfriend. Just not what I wanted to be reading. I would have liked a science fiction book about a supergenius GIRL. A girl who was not always dutifully doing housework and babysitting, or tilting her head and crying out in alarm. In other words not Meg.
I do remember bits of the book being pretty cool, mostly the blathering about tesseracts and the pod-people Levittown run by a giant pulsating evil brain.
Here goes – I’m about to re-open this book for the first time in a couple of decades. Back in a little while with squawks of outrage OR rueful admission of how wrong I was…
***
Chapter 1. Meg sits in bed shivering during a scary thunderstorm, beating herself up mentally for being too sensitive. Her grades suck, her teachers think she’s stupid, she attacked a guy for saying her brother was dumb and got beat up, her younger twin brothers Sandy and Dennys condescendingly tell her that next time they’ll do the fighting for her, and her dad is missing. She has braces and “mousy” hair. Her little brother makes her and their mom cocoa and sandwiches. She complains to her mom that she is dumb and repulsive looking. Meg “wails” over and over that they are in a hurricane and is “nervous” about a rumored tramp who might be trying to break into the house. Mrs. Whatsit, a vague and endearingly creepy old lady, comes by to tell Meg’s mom that tesseracts exist. Meg’s mom predictably turns white as a sheet and just about faints. We might have passed the Bechdel test, though they are really talking about Charles Wallace and the absent dad.
Some feminist heroine to shove in front of a little girl who likes science fiction; so far this totally sucks rocks.
Chapter 2. Meg’s mom tries to explain what a tesseract is to Meg but is interrupted by her horrid brats.
If you’re going to let horrid tramps come into the house in the middle of the night, Mother, you ought to have me and Den around to protect you.”
“After all, Father would expect us to,” Dennys added.
“We know you have a great mind and all, Mother,” Sandy said, “but you don’t have much sense. And certainly Meg and Charles don’t.”
“I know. We’re morons.” Meg was bitter.
“I wish you wouldn’t be such a dope, Meg…
(It just continues like this for a while)
Meg= surly, school = horrid, Charles Wallace is a spooky mind reader. They meet Calvin who is awkward and tall and has obeyed a mysterious compulsion to meet them at the haunted house. They meet Mrs. Who, spooky, knitting, and quoting things from several languages. Nothing in particular happens.
Chapter 3. Calvin is now rather foully behaving like Meg’s boyfriend with no explanation.
Calvin walked with Meg, his fingers barely touching her arm in a protective gesture.
This has been the most impossible, the most confusing afternoon of my life, she thought, yet I don’t feel confused or upset anymore; I only feel happy. Why?”(the pukey romance novel crap continues on worse from there.)
THIS IS NOT MY SCIENCE FICTION HEROINE!
Mrs. Meg’s Mom is cooking delicious smelling stew over a bunsen burner in her lab while doing an experiment. Awwwwwww! Wait, I thought she was a physicist? Science, it’s all one big mysterious bunsen-burnery laboratorical thing.
Meg talks about Charles Wallace and her dad, then shows Calvinhow to convert 3/7 into decimals, demonstrating her startling mathematical genius. (She is 13 or 14, I think, so this is just embarrassing.) They all have a hugfest about how everyone learns differently and is good at different school subjects. Meg and her mom have more heart to heart talks about Charles Wallace and her dad, not quite being up on that whole Bechdel test concept. They send Calvin, a 15 year old who they have only just met, to put the 5 year old to bed. Then Calvin and Meg hold hands in the dewy apple orchard while Calvin talks about how his world is suddenly so much better, and about her dad. Meg cries a bunch. Her tear stained face is “unexpectedly beautiful” in the moonlight when she takes her glasses off. I am NOT making this up. BARF.
The Happy Medium shows them the Earth in a crystal ball. It’s shadowed with Evil! The light is… Jesus! Complete with Bible quote. And Leonardo da Vinci, and Einstein; Euclid, Buddha, Albert Schweitzer, and Madame Curie too!
Chapter 6: The angel centaur old ladies were stars who gave up their lives battling the Dark. I like this bit
Even though she was used to Mrs. Whatsit’s odd getup (and the very oddness of it was what made her seem so comforting), she realized with a fresh shock that it was not Mrs. Whatsit herself that she was seeing at all. The complete, the true Mrs. Whatsit, Meg realized, was beyond human understanding. What she saw was only the game Mrs. Whatsit was playing it was an amusing and charming game, a game full of both laughter and comfort, but it was only the tiniest facet of all the things Mrs. Whatsit could be.
Aha, now we see the insecure self-hating always-terrified girl realizing that pretty much any ditzy comforting old lady has or may have hidden depths and superpowers. That’s pretty cool. The Whatsits suddenly make me think of the good bit of Mary Poppins (the book not the movie) where Mary is at the Galactic Ball and is revealed to be the Goddess. I begin to have hope that Meg will not be whining on page 210.
The Medium in her crystal ball shows them all Calvin’s mom being ugly and incompetent and beating his little siblings.
If anyone had told her only the day before that she, Meg, the snaggle-toothed, the myopic, the clumsy, would be taking a boy’s hand to offer him comfort and strength, particularly a popular and important boy like Calvin, the idea would have been beyond her comprehension. But now it seemed as natural to want to help and protect Calvin as it did Charles Wallace.
She’s the ugly duckling!
They are taken to Camazotz to fight the darkness, given some magical gifts from the Whatsits. They give Calvin better communication skills and a poem, Meg gets “her faults” and Mrs. Who’s spectacles, Charles Wallace gets the resilience of childhood. This part is good. Meg continues, little by little, to feel less afraid.
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- More blogging by
Liz Henry at
http://liz-henry.blogspot.com
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Filed under Young Adult, female characters | Comments (47)
This makes me glad that I wasn’t properly introduced to the genre as a child…
Jesus. I’m a Feminist as much as anyone and wow, you’re really overreacting. Have you noticed that Meg is a math genius? Or that her mother is a famous microbiologist? I remember reading this as a little girl and being very much empowered by both of those facts.
It just really annoys me when anyone cherry-picks a text for anything that supports their predetermined conclusion.
I’d love to see her be a math genius if that’s what’s going to happen! Her being 13 years old and converting a fraction to a decimal hasn’t convinced me yet. Also, 80 pages into a 200 page book, and there was 1 paragraph about the fraction-converting, and about 50 about how insecure and scared she is.
It’s a book that means a lot to many people & is much beloved. I get that, and that lots of fans were inspired by it. It’s definitely got some poison in with the good stuff though. A book can be empowering or inspiring in some ways and still have really sucky messages in others!
Her being 13 years old and converting a fraction to a decimal hasn’t convinced me yet.
Well, I remember being very impressed that she could do this in her head when I first read it. Also I understood from my own experience what it’s like to be able to do something very well, to be required to do it the school’s way, and to end up with a mental block and not be able to do it at all. It had happened to me, though back when I was much younger, and not in maths – when I was six I temporarily forgot how to read and write, thanks to being in a class of 30+ children with no time for individual attention, where I was supposed to be learning how their way, when I already could.
I agree this is a poor depiction of “mathematical genius” when you actually know what a mathmo is like, but it does successfully portray “girl so good at maths she has trouble at school” to someone with similiar experiences in that area in another subject. (It did not occur to me that 14 was a bit old to be having this specific problem.)
I liked A Wrinkle In Time for the reasons you outline and for a few more: I empathised with Meg a lot, I liked it that she set out on a quest to rescue her father and succeeded, and I loved the tesseract travel.
The kneejerk Christianity annoyed me but I was kind of used to it, though it got worse in later novels, and Charles Wallace gets (if that’s possible) even more annoying.
I was insecure and scared when I was that age, too, which made it easy to relate to Meg; and again, I think you’re overstating those aspects. What about Meg bravely standing up to her high school principal, or bravely going after her father into the unknown, or bravely fighting against IT?
What is it you want? A supergirl who never has a moment of self-doubt, or somehow transcends all the things that many fourteen-year-olds think about (like new love and insecurity about looks)? Let Meg be Meg, and not just a subject for your Feminist-or-Not litmus test.
I always hated Meg for being soppy over her OTL. I read the whole damn series and it just got worse. Why didn’t she get brave BEFORE she became the object of Hot Boy’s affection? Why couldn’t she find self-worth until she was validated by a man (boy/brother/dad)?
Yes I was insecure at that age, but I was repulsed by this whole needing a male figure in her life. Granted I was raised by a single mother, so this emo missing dad thing did not resonate with me (why not a little anger that dad ditched you to go off on some experimental b.s. while your mother, also a science genius, somehow manages to do great work without abandoning/neglecting her children? oh wait, we expect that, because that’s what mothers do).
I read a lot at that age (still do) and there were far too many supposed ‘heroines’ or ‘female protagonists’ who, in the end, were wholly dependent on their relationship to men to succeed. Anne (from the Green Gables books) was also an insecure teenage girl – and she somehow managed to muddle through the first book without needing validation from The Boy. I think this was the only reason I made it through a book without any scifi themes….
Also agree with the dislike of the twins. They were always around to condescend to their mother and sister without ever actually helping out with the little brother.
I have never been able to read A Wrinkle in Time, whether as a kid, an adolescent or adult. Boring. Preachy.
Love, C.
I liked A Wrinkle in Time fine – I identified with Meg’s insecurity and bought her as a math genius – though I always felt a little uncomfortable with the Christianity in the books. About a year ago, though, I realized I had never read the third book in the series and picked it up. I ended up throwing it down in disgust after a chapter. Meg, who can’t be any more than 24, is married to Calvin, pregnant, and seems to have no career. It’s the holidays and he’s off at a medical conference somewhere (he’s a doctor or medical student) and so she’s sitting at home alone with her mother. This is what happened to my math genius? We get a couple of books stressing that she was always more brilliant than Calvin and he’s off with the scientific career while she sits at home? Give me a break.
Right. Because any woman who makes the choice to be a mother and a homemaker can’t possibly be a feminist.
Thanks, Gilraen.
That is not what I meant, Monica, and I’m sorry if it came out that way. What got me that was after two books in which Meg was considered brilliant and seemed to aspire after a scientific career, the third book picked up with her not only not having that career but with it not even being on the table. We don’t see her for seven or eight years and we’re told that she’s married and about to have a baby. We don’t hear what happened to her scientific genius or whether she went to college to pursue math or how she and Calvin decided that she’d stay home or anything. It felt like it was assumed that she married Calvin; of course that’s what she’d do. Which, given that her mother was a brilliant physicist, is not the assumption I’d guess the author wanted me to make, but I just didn’t see anything in there to contradict it!
Thank you for clarifying, Gilraen.
I’m actually wondering why I’m feeling so prickly about this topic. It’s true that I grew up with this series – my oldest sister read it to me at bedtime when I was four – but upon my own recent revisitation, I thought that though the imaginative aspects were splendid, the plotting was too conjured and convenient. I wasn’t nearly as impressed by the craft as I thought I’d be.
It’s true that this is a Feminist SF blog, so everything will naturally be viewed through that lens. I guess I just feel defensive of women who make choices – even in books, especially in books – that are true for them, rather than choices that satisfy our agendas as feminists. As I see Meg, not caring about a math career (at least at first) and having a baby feel really true for her. I imagine her happy that way. You may see the character differently, though, and that may not feel true for you.
Sorry about jumping the gun there, and thanks for making me clarify my own sh!t. :)
Meg’s mom was a bacteriologist not a physicist – I was wrong.
So, also I don’t mean to say that insecure mousy teenage girls with braces aren’t good feminist heroines… sure they can be!
Also, women who are super brilliant and who then are stay at home moms who save the world once in a while. (As L’Engle maybe was? Or… I think of Betty MacDonald and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, somehow.)
Well, onward to Chapter 6.
I re-read the first two books in the series recently and was appalled that I’d remembered the books fondly. The second book was especially atrocious. I can tell you why she never became a scientist. It’s because by book 2 she’s completely unable to make a decision without being constantly reassured by her betters. If someone is ever going to make something of themselves, it isn’t going to be through standing around whining that the tasks are too hard.
Awful awful books.
i read this the first time as an adult, it was recommended to me by a friend who found out i like sci fi kids books. i didn’t like it. i never told her that. it was mostly the christianity that irked me (not so much in itself, but that it was infused in this ridiculously revered and famous book aimed at and recommended constantly to children in a way that made christianity seem normal, as opposed to a religion. like, this is the theme of life, even when religion is absent (since there’s no overt religion that i remember). but it’s just nice in general to see someone else who doesn’t think it’s the cat’s pajamas because it’s so revered all the time.
and it just occured to me that the 2 books i’m reading now (quicksilver and jonathan strange…) totally fail the bechdel test (thus far).
This confirms my biases pleasingly… From what I recall, the L’Engle books suffered from that hideous 70s style, and what wasn’t boring was facile. But I think I only read them once or twice a long time ago when I was a kid, when they were given to me by someone who knew I liked SF and noted that the author had nearly the same name…
I enjoyed the books, and I sympathized with Meg, but I thought surely the whole point was that someday she’d be confident and secure, whether as a housewife or a Nobel Prize Winner or whatever. That just never happened. She got shoved aside so that Charles Wallace – the REAL object of L’Engle’s interest, it seemed – could take center stage.
From my perspective growing up in a strict Christian household, reading these books was beacon of hope for me that a girl could be a smart and a hero. L’Engle is a Christian writer in all her books and it affects all her characters and plots. For me as a child and as a young girl I remember being excited by these books that compared to other Christian influenced books I was allowed to read were far more feminist, not mention for the time, having a character such as the mom who was a scientist or even having a smart girl as the main character did not happen in literature, adult or childrens literature.
Of course when I read it now I cringe at how insecure Meg is or how much she want’s male approval but I cringe because it reminds me of myself as a young teen not because it is an unrealistic characterization.
It did always bother me how Meg choose marriage and family over science as we find in later books but that is very much in keeping with L’Engle’s own personal views as expressed in her Crosswick memoirs.
I don’t want my children’s literature to be filled with Pollyannas or Mary Janes. I want all characters male, female and other to be have all the weakness and strengths of any human being.
It is interesting to read her earlier books and then compare them to the later books such as A Ring of Endless Light to see how her female characters have changed and how they have stayed the same.
Wow, I’m really finding this interesting — to hear from other people who, like I did, felt annoyed (as kids or adults) by the books, and to hear from women who found it particularly empowering and who loved it (or still love it!) Turtle, now you have me curious to read some of her other work. I see from her Wikipedia entry that a lot of her novels intersect!
I find that I look at books like this from two perspectives. One is the person who lives in today, and the other is the young girl I was in the early 60s. That girl would have been empowered by reading about female characters who were smart and went on adventures, no matter how many boys went with them. That girl would have felt very familiar with Meg’s self-doubt and with the ways in which most people around her sabotage her attempts to be herself.
The woman of today sees a story that wouldn’t be empowering to a girl of today. But then, the world has come a long way since I was a girl.
Actually, I’m pretty sure Meg did study mathematics because in the other books when her children are older she considers getting her doctorate.
Btw, if as young girl you were reading “A Wrinkle in Time” which has a protagonist who was good at math you are at least doing better than my peers who were reading “Flowers in the Attic.”
One thing you say early is that you were a *science fiction* fan in the 70s (so was I — my condolences), rather than a fantasy fan. Cooper wrote fantasy, clearly framed as such, and L’Engle’s work is also a heavily metaphorical species of fantasy for all the present-day setting and sciency gloss of tesseracts and world-run-by-giant-brain. When I read _Wrinkle in Time_, it was the bogus science that bothered me. At best, it was science so advanced that Meg — and I — could only recognize it as miraculous: that is, not apparently following from the science known on Earth in the 20th century.
So, unthinking recommendation of SFF titles that were more F than SF could have been a bad fit, as well as leading to books containing Too Much Message. You don’t mention the Narnia series, but that would have been mentioned frequently to you as well, I’ll bet. Did you like principally hard SF (despite an endemic lack of female characters — sometimes none is better than stereotypes) or would non-Message fantasy with active women characters have been good? I liked Star Wars (the original) for a number of reasons, but the busy heroine in the center of the main trio was a big factor.
I liked both F & SF. And while I enjoyed reading Wrinkle in Time, and Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, and Tolkien, and Asimov, I didn’t like the way female characters *were*, in their books. I would re-imagine the books and put female characters in.
In contrast… Andre Norton, though her writing was so hacky, was completely awesome on the female characters — in her fantasy & her sf! they didn’t simper! They didn’t need rescuing! They weren’t all girly-girl, but they weren’t like superbutch, either!
Oh and Narnia? Enjoyed it, but it made me barf even before I was old enough to notice the Christian bits.
Out of Star Wars I identified most with either Chewbacca or R2D2. Leia left me completely cold.
I paused in my L’Engle-reading for a day – too much to do – And I wanted to think a bit. Stranger, what you say about it being heavily metaphorical also struck me. It fits more into political/utopian or metaphorical traditions than into anything hard sf or even fantasy. So it struck me as being way more like reading Blake’s endless otherworldly stuff or the Faerie Queene, than “SF”; on the other hand I think of Blake and Spenser as SF-in-retrospect, or at least spec fic, as far as it makes any sense to re-genre books in that way.
The intersecting is something I love. :)
Meg is at college during ‘Many Waters’, and during ‘A House Like a Lotus’ which is about Meg’s daughter Polly, we learn Meg intends to get her PhD once the children are older – and Polly’s older female friend points out to her that her mother is restless, and has actually considered walking out. In ‘An Acceptable Time’, Polly actually discusses Meg’s decisions about motherhood with her grandmother, in a way that makes a lot of sense of it all.
Of course, you don’t get all that from ‘A Wrinkle in Time’. Meg’s very human, but I can certainly see how she might make a frustrating heroine. And I never had the book pushed on me.
I love Madeleine L’Engle, but it is more for the later books, the ones that are focused on the girls or women themselves rather than on any adventure. (Although it does still annoy me how Polly and Vicky managed to have so many love interests despite not being the ‘popular’ girls in their family.) L’Engle’s feminism is a lot more evident in these, although ‘An Acceptable Time’ is the only one that’s at all SFnal.
Been lurking for a while and decided to venture out on this one. I think the different strong reactions to Meg as a heroine are interesting, because I can see both sides of the issue: Meg IS whiny and frequently incapable of making decisions, but she’s also able to overcome her weaknesses, learns some important lessons, blahblah, and saves the day.
I was a Meg fan as a child because I related to her. As an adult, I think Meg is a pretty “real” character whose flaws aren’t magicked away at the end of the novel. What has been identified as later failings (marrying Calvin and having a billion babies) is pretty true to her character: at her core, Meg just doesn’t believe in herself, and that doesn’t really change, even as an adult. In “An Acceptable Time,” in fact, Meg’s mother laments Meg’s choices to her daughter. It doesn’t make Meg someone to aspire to, but it does read true.
I need to go pick up a copy of An Acceptable Time. It just never really jived with her character for me that she didn’t want to pursue higher education or a career at all, but Swiftly Tilting Planet made me feel like that was the conclusion I had to draw from it. It seems completely realistic to me that it was related to her lack of self confidence* and I’m glad that the reasons for that decision (by Meg and by L’Engle) are explored in depth.
* I don’t mean that to say that she couldn’t have been happy as a young housewife and mother; there’s always more than one good path.
It’s interesting reading this criticism, because since I read the book when I was 10, in the mid-90s, I’ve completely forgotten what happened in this particular book, other than Meg going into other dimensions and saving the day in some way. And when I was that age, I thought it completely kicked ass. Whatever character flaws Meg had, I apparently ignored or forgot about. I loved the fact that Meg loved math and science, because I did too, and it was the first time I read a book where I could identify that way with the protagonist. Somehow, my school library contained practically no SF books. It was a liberal feminist girls’ school, but had a strong bias against math and science which I didn’t recognize until high school or later. Either way, Meg was one of my literary heroes and I’d count her as influential that way.
All the Christian stuff went over my head, too. I must have been a pretty oblivious reader back then. Only, when I think about it harder, I disliked the Narnia books because I thought they were too preachy. :|
I obviously need to re-read these books. I remember loving them in elementary school (when my class read Wrinkle) and later; I read right over the Christian/biblical stuff until I got to Many Waters, where the biblical aspect is completely impossible to miss (and that book, like The Last Battle in the Narnias, remains my least favourite of the series).
I saw a lot of myself in Meg. Still do. Nerdy, awkward, less successful than parents and/or siblings, difficult little brother. (My little brother isn’t a genius, but he was a very bright little boy who had some problems with authority and tended to get into fights and need rescuing.) And I can see how it would bother people that instead of pursuing a career in maths or science she decides to have six kids (is it six? a bunch, anyway), but it never bothered me, because although I did have career aspirations in science (nursing and then medicine, to be precise), having a bunch of kids was exactly what I wanted to do, too. It didn’t work out that way, but not because I stopped wanting to have a bunch of kids.
Sure, Meg has problems as a heroine. She does quiver and seek reassurance, and she does make some pretty poor choices. (And it’s entirely possible that the science in Wrinkle sucks and I just didn’t notice. Physics and I did not get along so well in those days.) But my memory of Meg is that she felt real to me in a way that lots of girls-in-books didn’t.
It’s also worth remembering that when I was in elementary school (I started school in 1979) there wasn’t a lot of kid-accessible SFF that had any girls in it at all. John Christopher? The only girls in them are preserved under glass. Narnia? Has some kick-ass girls in it, but apparently you get kicked out at puberty (and there’s the whole “pink people good, brown people bad” deal going on, too, which I didn’t much like). LOTR? Thousands of pages; three female characters (okay, five if you count Sam’s girlfriend and Tom Bombadil’s wife). Susan Cooper? Blodwen Rowlands, ick. (I mean, there’s Jane. But even as a kid I was irked by Jane. Even wimpy Anne in the Famous Five books gets more interesting stuff to do than Jane does.) I loved all these books, Wrinkle included … but it’s pretty clear to me why it didn’t occur to me, at age eleven-or-whatever, that Meg wasn’t very good at being a heroine.
As I said, I really need to re-read as well — it’s been years, possibly more than a decade. I may be remembering all wrong.
When I read these books as a child (in the early/mid-eighties) I found them really depressing, precisely because Meg was so soppy, because her mother always emphasizes that yes, she will grow up and become beautiful (dazzling good looks don’t run in my family; it would be nice if Meg could grow up and look average and get over her appearance anxiety rather than be reassured that she will one day be gorgeous)…but most of all because there’s no anger in the books. Every time Meg feels angry about an injustice she’s encouraged to choke it down and just love everything better. I have about twenty-million ideological reasons for disliking this approach, but most of all it just didn’t ring true to me as a kid. Love, love, love…and not even solidarity-love, love for your collective, love for your friends–but the same old recuperate-everything-under-the-sign-of-the-family boring routine.
I did like the scary-centaur-creatures…and in A Swiftly Tilting Planet I liked the story of Calvin’s mother a lot. She was the only one who was permitted anger, possibly because she was kind of a working-class stereotype.
Also, has anyone noticed that there’s something vaguely racially-creepy about that whole “South American Dictator” thing? I don’t have the book even remotely handy, but isn’t his transformation from crazy-guy-who-wants-to-destroy-the-world to happy-christian signalled by his developing blue eyes? That bothered me a bit even at the time.
It’s shocking to look back and realize how much fantasy and SF I read as a girl and how almost none of it had heroines I actually liked…and also how powerfully this affected me. (Weirdly, it was James Tiptree who did me the most harm–”The Girl Who Was Plugged In” and the story about Cold Pig I took as absolutely valid descriptions of how miserable my life would be because I wasn’t–couldn’t be–pretty. I thought about those stories a lot and they really informed my understanding of how to react to the world. Even though both stories critique sexism….Which I suppose illustrates the need for positive role models over and above the need for critique.)
I didn’t like that book as a kid. I found it rather confusing. I think maybe it was the mix of science fiction and fantasy and religion.. I couldn’t separate it all out. I mostly remembering having this messed-up picture of a ‘dragon’ in my head. Or was it an angel?
So.. yea.. my memory is mostly of confusion.
Though I remembered it well enough to later equate young Anakin and his midichlorians with Charles Wallace, and think less of George Lucas as a result.
but most of all because there’s no anger in the books. Every time Meg feels angry about an injustice she’s encouraged to choke it down and just love everything better.
Aha! I think you’ve just put your finger on something that left me deeply uncomfortable about those books (and again, I didn’t read the later ones with her children) that I could never quite vocalize. It felt like Meg was being groomed to be the perfect woman – beautiful, calm, motherly – and the aspects of her personality that didn’t fit with that were either criticized or, ultimately, igrnoed.
I agree with the analysis that L’Engle was really torn about women’s roles, and continued to be torn throughout her writing. She was a Smithie of the Friedan era, after all, and the questioning of the status quo in a ‘there has to be something more than this’ conflicted with faith and upbringing and society. Highly recommend An Acceptable Time for some insight into her feelings later on.
That said, I never got into Susan Cooper. Too much mythos for little Bene to follow.
It’s been a long time since I read any L’Engle, but I remember thinking even as a teen that A Wrinkle in Time was pretty silly. What really killed me was the villainous IT being shaped like a brain. Friendly little mitochondria, tesseracts, etc. — no problem! But a giant malevolent brain? Puh-lease!
I went on to read a lot of L’Engle’s books, and liked most of them a lot better than Wrinkle. So I would recommend trying some other ones, Liz. The ones that feature Meg’s daughter Polly are pretty interesting, and there is some crossover between these and the (generally) non-SFF Austin series. A House Like a Lotus has a lesbian as a main character; L’Engle’s treatment of her has problems, but the fact that she was there at all was pretty unusual for a YA book at the time.
sylvia_rachel wrote: LOTR? Thousands of pages; three female characters (okay, five if you count Sam’s girlfriend and Tom Bombadil’s wife).
Hey! I’ve just been re-reading that. You didn’t count Shelob, who doesn’t speak lines, but who has thoughts, a history and character nevertheless. I think she should count for as much of a character as Rosie.
…
Well, OK, your point still stands.
I don’t think I could stomach rereading A Wrinkle in Time again. It’s true that it was from several decades ago, but there are many children’s and YA books from earlier that have genuinely strong female characters, so I don’t think it’s an impossible standard.
Sylvia Rachel: Susan Cooper? Blodwen Rowlands, ick. (I mean, there’s Jane. But even as a kid I was irked by Jane. Even wimpy Anne in the Famous Five books gets more interesting stuff to do than Jane does.)
Hey! I liked Greenwitch! I liked it especially that the key to the whole plot turns out to be a decision/thought that Jane has. There’s a scene in Silver on the Tree (I think) where Jane gets an important plot point just on account of being female, and that bugged me – there was no reason for it, it was pure “women is magic, men do magic” stuff.
But in Greenwitch, Jane gets the important plot action partly because she’s female and therefore invited to a traditionally women-only event from which the other four questers are banned, but mostly because she is the kind of person she is – it’s a character-driven plot key. There’s a noticeable difference, though I’m possibly not explaining it very clearly.
Yonmei: OMG, I forgot Greenwitch! You’re completely right about that one. Yes, she is central to the plot and its resolution, and it’s because of her character, not (or not only) because of her gender. (I stand by my point about Blodwen Rowlands, though.)
John Kim: You’re right, I forgot Shelob. Time for another re-read of LOTR, too! The problem with all the new books I’ve been reading recently is that they use up the time available for re-reading …
Frowner: Why yes, I did happen to notice that having blue eyes automatically made you all that is good and awesome in that book. It’s not just the one guy: Meg travels through time fixing everyone’s situations so that the blue-eyed people survive instead of the brown-eyed ones. I loved that book; but I read it with an unhappy squirming in my stomach, and I always will. I guess Ms. L’Engle didn’t think there’d be any little Hispanic kids reading her books with their brown eyes, so why would anyone take it personally?
@Frowner & vito excalibur: I’m not L’Engle’s apologist and totally recognize that there are some (big) matters in her books to take issue with. But I respectfully disagree that the blue/brown eyes thing in “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” is one of them. Hear me out:
Remember that the whole point of the quest in ASTP is to stop a Castro stand-in from going nuclear on the world. We learn through Charles’ going “into” people that two brothers from Wales came to the Americas way back when and each intermarried with the indigenous people. The blue-eyed brother was the good guy and the brown-eyed brother was the bad guy, and their descendents followed suit. In the original history, the brown-eyed-brother’s descendents eventually create the nuclear dictator, and Charles/Meg have to tweak history to get the blue-eyed-brother’s descendents in the right place to birth a benevolent leader instead.
So, yes, there is a little squickiness with “blue” being better than “brown,” but it’s not intended to be “Europe good” and “Latin America bad.” Both the original “bad brown” and the replacement “good blue” are from Europeans.
That’s all I’ve got. Fire away as you like.
OMG Spoilers! I haven’t gotten to that part yet! Doesn’t sound very promising on the blue eyes good, brown eyes bad. I vaguely remember something about Wales and noticing later in reading North American history, in an oil painter’s travel narrative, that there was a whole incredibly bogus theory of the Mandans and a Welsh guy and the blue-eyed Indians, in Montana or North Dakota. Perhaps L’Engle’s Welsh plot is related.
El, I see the point you’re making (and I freely admit that I don’t remember a word of ASTP beyond something to do with angels), but the blue good/brown bad dynamic you describe still disturbs me.
Partly that’s because those eye colors come inscribed with cultural meaning. I don’t think you can get away from the association of blue eyes with white people–though certainly I’ve met people of color with blue or green eyes, the cultural association is too strong. (Your right, of course, that brown eyes don’t have the same strong association, because they’re so common among so many different groups, although I still think it plays on the dark=bad, light=good dynamic that mars a lot of the fantasy novels I loved most as a child.)
And personally, by blue eyes=good bothers me a lot more than brown eyes=bad. If both the problem and the solution comes from these Welsh brothers, there’s a privileging of that European bloodline. I have problems with the idea that one European ancestor hundreds of years ago is the critical turning point, and that that one drop of white blood is what determines not only character, but the fate of the world. None of the faceless generations of brown people in this family tree count? (And that’s not even getting at the gender implications.)
I get that L’Engle was probably looking for a cultural marker that would be different enough to be remarked upon, and that “blue-eyed Indian” stories are floating out there as legacies of imperialist fascination with racial markers and would be easy for her to latch onto. That still doesn’t change the fact that the marker she chose is racial, and privileges the genetic inheritance of two white men to an extraordinary degree. It seems like the non-white people in the story must were just a canvas for the white characters to write on….
And as a blue-eyed woman, I think there’s something squicky in that.
Hi El…this may ramble a tiny bit. It bugs me, though, that the good character has the eyes that are the most European, the eye color that reads as the most white. It’s like having the good character always be blond. Even though it’s not about whiteness as specifically racial thing, it reinforces the feeling that blue-eyes-blond-hair are good in and of themselves, sort of indirectly suggesting that whiteness is good because it makes you be blue-eyed, or whatever.
I haven’t read the book since my early twenties…but I reread it pretty regularly as a teen and parts of it made a big impression on me. (So I may be wrong, is what I’m saying!)
I have this idea about certain science fiction and fantasy (here is where the rambling begins…I’m not sure whether this applies to L’Engle but it seems not unrelated): sort of an invisible-people-of-color theory.
There’s this way of writing heavily “raced” stories and themes while also writing out people of color. The clearest example I can think of is Tanith Lee’s Flat Earth books (and I freely admit that I’m a total sucker for the cheesy delights of Delirium’s Mistress. Plus–the cover with the winged lion!) But all those books are basically set in a stereotypical “Orient” (fake “Persian” names), minarets, a vague cod-Middle Eastern “decadence”.)
The thing is, huge numbers of the main characters are described in ways that make them read as European-ishly white–lots of blonds, redheads, blue eyes, porcelain skin, etc.
It’s as if the whole point of those stories is to enjoy the fun, the pleasure of those stereotypes while totally forgetting any political content. It’s not even like a regular story set in a stereotypical “Orient” where you at least have to read about actual non-Europeans.
Honestly, I love that series for its clunky feminism, its gaudy OTT-ness, its persistent perversity of every stripe–but it’s troubling.
So what I’m working ’round to–there’s something in A Swiftly Tilting Planet that bothers me, the way the story is so relentlessly about white Europeans in South American, legendary white people in South America who marry into the native tribe and make history…history happens because of conflicts between white people, conflicts in which the family and the political are inextricable.
The thing is, I remember reading this book when I was maybe nine (the day I first got glasses) and even then disliking the blue eyes thing (and I have blue eyes). It just seemed unfair somehow. And I remember a couple of years later realizing that the evil-commie-dictator was really this whole anti-Castro-anti-Red kludgy fake and it really bothered me…This book was written, for crying out loud, when the United States was actively supporting truly murderous, evil regimes throughout South America for the direct profit of American firms and their allies in various SA oligarchies. And the political narrative this book espouses is “oh, because of family drama back in the year dot, the brown-eyed evil people are making evil political decisions”. If it weren’t a directly political book, I’d mind less; but this is a book that’s very specifically about political situations ongoing when it was written.
There are fantastic political stories for kids that have decent female characters, magic, ethics and (at the same time) a more realistic way of explaining things. (The Westmark trilogy; those Diana Wynne Jones books of which the first is Drowned Ammet…even The Ear, the Eye and the Arm, which I don’t quite like, has more explanatory power.
Oh, I don’t know…I just look back on my own political development and it’s been so very hard to come to an understanding that telling people “if you would just be good, then all our problems would be solved” doesn’t actually work…and this book (and others like it) really did strongly influence my moral development and understanding of the world.
Ooooh, Zahra said everything I was going to say, and faster!
I’m also not a big fan of the idea that heredity determines character so somehow that you have evil descendants of evil ancestors generations and generations after the fact squicks me a bit even without all the other connotations (which I agree are also disturbing).
I’ll cheerfully admit that I’m out of my depth here–I haven’t played with Foucault in a very long time. I do think that intent matters, and I think we can distinguish between writers who reinforce paradigms by failing to challenge them and writers who reinforce paradigms by actively supporting them. The blue/brown eyes issue seems more like the first to me, more like a writer making easy choices than one making conscious decisions. Still, those choices matter and I think the discussion here has been instructive.
This is fascinating. Makes me want to reread the book and see what I think of it now.
I didn’t exactly like Meg, but I did have some things in common with her (the total social insecurity, getting beat up by classmates, having a younger sib to take care of and protect, loving math). The character that I instantly recognized and identified with, however, was Mrs. Whatsit.
Not entirely sure what that says about me, but it did change the experience of reading the book.
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