A quick time-out from working to complain about feminism

This is what my book says:

But students are likely to differ in their reactions to Jane's position at the novel's end: Has Bronte reduced her intelligent, passionate, and courageous heroine to an ordinary wife and mother? Has Jane achieved nothing but a woman's traditional place?

OH MY GOD. There just hardly aren't any words for how angry this makes me. In the first place, nobody's asking whether Rochester has been reduced to anything by becoming an ordinary husband and father. It's not like anybody thinks Mr. Rochester is going to do anything surprising with his life from here on out; looks to me like Mr. Rochester has pretty much devoted himself to his wife, whom he adores, and their sweet little baby with the big black eyes, and that's all he's going to be getting up to from now on.

Sidebar: Hey, look. Four out of the five last words of that sentence are prepositions.

In the second place, really? Reduced the many-good-adjectives heroine to an ordinary wife and mother? I'm sorry, but don't all the good adjectives seem to imply to you that she's amazing forever no matter what job she takes? How is becoming a wife and mother going to make her unintelligent and unpassionate and uncourageous? And also, is this woman implying that most wives and mothers out there are unintelligent and unpassionate and uncourageous? Like, they all started out without the benefit of these good adjectives and that is why they achieved "nothing but a woman's traditional place"?

And not to go back over already-covered ground, but reduced? Reduced? Indeed, reduced? That's what happens when a woman marries and has kids, she's reduced to ordinariness? Seriously, what the hell? This is why I get cross. It seems like there are all these feminist thinkers who are of the opinion that any woman who decides to get married and have kids and stay home to raise them is settling for some pathetic male-dominated life. Because of course there's no way anyone could actually make an intelligent informed choice to be a full-time parent. Nooooo. It's oppression that makes you think it's your choice when really all along you're just giving in to The Man.

Barbara Thaden who wrote this article, I don't want to be friends with you. You're a big insulting jerk. This is like the reasonablest crankiness there has ever been since I started this blog.

Silly things that I feel vaguely guilty about, Part IV

Yesterday I was printing out a scholarship application, and the online one was in color, so when I printed it, it was meant to come out in a darkish purple color. But because my color ink cartridge is running out, it printed out in this very pretty light green. Rendering it, sadly, unusable, because I did not feel confident that the scholarship committee's sense of whimsy would stretch to the applicants' turning in Easter-colored applications. I tossed it on the floor to put in the recycled-paper bag the next time I went into the kitchen, and carried on working.

Such a mistake. It sat on the floor in its spring-time-y green print and stared up at me reproachfully all the time I was filling out the sober black-ink application. It looked so pretty and green. I think it was saying: Am I not good enough? I thought I would please you. Why have you rejected me this way?

It made me too sad. I had to get up right then and put it in the recycling, and it's been haunting me ever since.

Giving my half-heart BFF necklace to the Lord

I'm getting confirmed tomorrow!

...Just wanted to let everyone know.

P.S. I have a very cute dress with a yellow belt to get confirmed in. Yay.

Living in a strange alternate universe

This is too backwards for me not to make note of it. Today my sister Bonnie called and woke me up from sleeping. I was sleeping, and Bonnie called and woke me up. At ten in the morning on a Saturday. I didn't even know Bonnie knew about ten in the morning on a Saturday.

Actually very fortunate she did wake me up because I have work to do. But still. This is weird. My brain is not sure it believes it.

I both like these quizzy things and feel guilty about them

The original authors of this exercise are Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, and Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright. (via imani)

Bold the true statements. You can explain further if you wish.

1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
9. Were read children’s books by a parent
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
I had gymnastics when I was tiny, and then ballet when I was still tiny, and then I decided I'd rather do choir, so that happened instead. And I had violin lessons at school (briefly because I was awful at it), and then when I was a bit older I had piano lessons. Wow. That is many. (But serial!)
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
I guess?
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18.
Not necessarily by my parents, but pretty much yes.
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
25. You had your own room as a child
For a brief period as a toddler, and then one year after my older sister left home. I don't know if that really counts.
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school
Now this I actually don't remember. There is currently a TV in Robyn's and my bedroom – the old living room TV after our neighbor gave us her larger TV when she moved – but I don't actually remember when it got there. I think it was before I left high school. Maybe? Anyway it's a piece of crap and the sound's always going out and we're always having to get up from the bed and flick the headphone jack, for some reason, to make the sound come back.
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college
....I don't even know what those things are. Probably shouldn't confess to that.
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
Yes. When we moved, and then one California vacation.
31. Went on a cruise with your family
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.

Damn, that's a lot of bolding.

I like the books question the best. When my sisters and I were little, we would sometimes ask my parents if we were rich. My father used to say we were rich in love, and my mother used to say we were rich in books. Come to think of it, those two responses sum up my parents perfectly.

Also, we are rich in books. We have something like, I don't know, sixteen bookshelves in my house, of which six are really massive floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Part of me started laughing at that fifty books question (we have more than fifty books in the living room), and part of me discovered that my brain could not even comprehend owning fewer than fifty books.

I am way smart

I am wasting myself not going into academia.

Sidebar: Today in class I was reminded of another reason for me not to ever go into academia. We were discussing critical essays on Jane Eyre, and this one girl was criticizing an essay she was reading, saying it was flimsy and not backed up by the book and she didn't believe it for one second. And our professor said: You should write an article proving that author completely wrong. And I said: But then the author of the original essay will be so crushed. And as soon as the words were out of my mouth I felt like a humongous idiot, which, let's face it, I sort of was, because what? should we let them carry on being wrong just so we don't hurt their feelings? Since my answer to that is sort of yes, it would be definitely very bad for me to go into academia because I'd feel too guilty to make fun of anyone else's stupid arguments of which there are many.

But whatever. I am writing a paper on "Ligeia" that I think makes several excellent points. I am really pleased with myself about this latest point I just came up with ten minutes ago. It's clever, all about her last words and Jesus's last words, and how they are similar but also very, very different, because what I'm arguing is that she is a figure of Christ but she's a corruption of Christ. (I'm saying it more eloquently in the actual paper.) I wrote that last-words paragraph just this minute, in a period of six minutes, even though I was planning to write like one sentence and then go to bed. I am cool. I'm going to reward myself by going to bed early. Yay for sleep.

You know who I'm glad I'm not?

Tim Minear. (I just wrote Tun Nubear because my fingers got moved over one space.) Boy, am I ever glad not to be Tim Minear.

I know I know. There are worse people to be like struggling producers no one's ever heard of or the people who produce that show where people win money for telling the truth about a lot of mean things, and who (I can only assume) go home every day and hate themselves. I'd rather be Tim Minear than those people. Of course. But still, I'm way glad not to be Tim Minear. It must be so, so sad to produce brilliant show after brilliant show, which then get canceled immediately because FOX hates joy. If I were Tim Minear, I would be just about ready to give up. If I were Tim Minear I would be stomping into my room and slamming the door and yelling I AM GOING TO BE A DOCTOR INSTEAD.

But Tim Minear doesn't seem to be doing this. I'm wondering if we need to get Tim Minear into a battered producers' shelter. Could he still produce Dollhouse from there?

I only bring this up because of Drive. Drive is like a way more good car-racing version of Lost, in that no one knows why they are there and there's all this complicity and you are always finding out new and interesting and creepy things about all the characters. It is GREAT. Mal has a truck and kicks Jubal Early's ass (again) (it really is Jubal Early but Mal only figuratively kicks his ass in that he is better than him in every way. But the guy really is called Detective Early). Muffin Buffalo lady is ominous and incites unstable mothers to murder. I have love for it. But! But, but, but – guess what? IT GOT CANCELED.

I know. You're shocked. A Tim Minear show got canceled. It's like saying, An Elizabeth Peters book made reference to The Prisoner of Zenda, or, A Frances Hodgson Burnett character is orphaned.

There isn't even a full season. Wonderfalls got canceled after three episodes, but they made ten other episodes and had closure. Drive got canceled after four and hey, turns out they only ever made six. Grrrr.

Whatever. This is why books are better. They don't suck me in and then break my heart. I'm going back to reading Robin.

I am amazing!

I for sure deserve a sparkly present. Which is good because on Friday night I bought myself a present I didn't even remotely deserve. Two actually. I bought myself the fourth season of Angel because I had to, because whatever rat bastard had it out of the library wasn't returning it and they had had it for like a week, and you may not know but CONNOR SUNK ANGEL TO THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN IN A BOX at the end of the third season, so I really couldn't wait for the lazy loser to return it to the library before discovering whether Angel still loved Connor or not. And I got myself a discount card at FYE also, which makes me feel mad excited, and also extremely benevolent. I informed all my family members about this discount card business at once, and with a careless flap of my hand I assured them graciously that they must feel perfectly free to make use of it as often as they chose, and then I returned to my book feeling smug and philanthropic, and thinking angelic Sara-Crewe-like thoughts.

Anyway, very fortunate I did this over the weekend, because now I have definitely earned it. This evening I have done two impressive things, not counting all the Moby Dick reading I have done. First I invented a really good title for my American literature paper, and then I wrote my entire thesis paragraph. This was Disciplined of me, as I would have preferred to be reading The Head of the House of Coombe or Jane Eyre; and Jane Eyre wouldn't even have been procrastinating as I am writing a paper on it. And then, having accomplished that magnificent feat, I proceeded to fix something around the house.

Yes! I am handy! I fixed a thing! I did it using only my genius! (And a chair for added height, and my car key as a crude lever.) I am a handy fixing-things-up-around-the-apartment kind of girl now! I can plunge toilets and I can fix doors! I fixed a door! With my EXTREME BRILLIANCE.

As a prize for myself I will go to bed early, which may not sound like a prize but oh my God it is. And tomorrow I'm going to exercise at the rec center again in my very authentic exercise trousers, which by now have probably forgotten who I am because it's been weeks since I could be bothered to trot down to the rec center and do virtuous exercising. And every day I will work on papers for one and a half hours, minimum, so that I will not be overwhelmed and tearful when it is my birthday time.

Hahahahah

This is my imitation of Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester and their married life:

Mr. Rochester: Oh my God I just had the best idea ever! Jane, let's buy you a diamond as BIG AS YOUR HEAD.
Jane: Neg.
Mr. Rochester: But I love you SO MUCH.
Jane: I love you too.
Mr. Rochester: So I think it would be a really good idea to buy you a diamond as BIG AS YOUR HEAD.
Jane: Honey, no.
Mr. Rochester: YES. WONDROUS.
Jane: All the diamonds as big as my head are cursed Indian diamonds. Why don't we get a sensible brown dress instead?

Bad news

W.H. Auden, you know him? The guy I used to really, really love (sometimes)? The guy who wrote "Musee de Beaux Arts", which I read a dozen times during my boring-ass senior English class and copied in its entirety into my commonplace book? The guy on whose behalf I got all persnickety at Lord Alfred Douglas, one of several poets I always look for in the poetry section at the bookstore so that I can point out mentally to Bosie down in hell the fact that these people he dismissed so cavalierly and thought he was so much better than had managed to survive the test of time whereas nobody had even heard of him and his lame loser poetry?

(God, I sound so mean, so filled with rage at Alfred Douglas, so lacking in perspective that I continue to feel hatred for a dead guy I never met. But I don't do this bookshop thing anymore. I'm over that phase. At least until I read Salome's Last Veil or Oscar Wilde and Myself again, which will definitely get me riled up.)

Well, anyway, that W.H. Auden. He's not dead to me, but I'm really, really cross with him. He's going to have to do something pretty magnificent to make it up to me. He can be thinking about that while I finish up my essays for this semester, and I'm going to read a biography of him after exams are done, and if I don't find anything that consoles me, I'm putting him in the section of my brain reserved for writers who irritate me as people so I wish I didn't like any of their books or poems, ever. I will sandwich him right between Robert Frost and Orson Scott Card.

Basically this is what happened. I was reading Tipping the Velvet (not as spare and elegant as The Night Watch (it wasn't intended to be, of course), but I'm enjoying it), and the main character's begun dressing as a boy, and she's just about to become a renter, and the guy, her prospective client, says this:

He said, 'A sovereign, for a suck or for a Robert' – he meant, of course, a Robert Browning. 'Half a guinea for a dubbing.'

I was reading this and I was like "WHAT? Wait, wait, wait, Sarah Waters, there's no "of course" here. What could this possibly mean?" I was so confused that I seriously went to her website to see if I could email her and find out the meaning of this bizarre phrase. But it was all publishery and I was too embarrassed, and I haven't given up hope that the book will eventually tell me. I'm also kind of thinking that if I were slightly less naive it would be obvious. And probably once someone (hi, Bonnie!) with a dirtier mind reads this and comments, I will feel silly for not getting it straight away. But anyway, there's the excerpt. Figure it out. I couldn't.

I did a bunch of Google searches trying to work out what this meant, and nothing turned up, except for this blog post of writers saying mean things about each other. Mostly unremarkable, but W.H. Auden, man, he was fucking ruthless. He said that Poe was an "unmanly sort of man whose love-life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse." Which, okay, seemed really harsh, but fair enough, Edgar Allan Poe had such a messed-up sex life that I doubt I'd say anything even if the Marquis de Sade started getting on Edgar Allan Poe's case. But then I scrolled down a little bit and you know what else W.H. Auden said, DO YOU KNOW?

I don't think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn't care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.

Said W.H. Auden! Of whom I used to be very, very fond! Granted, my fondness peaked during that period when I was spending my senior English class time reading his poems instead saying a lot of rude things to my classmates as they tried to decide amongst themselves whether Hamlet was really contemplating suicide or just pretending to (because he was faking the crazy thing! we can't trust him!), but still, I was very fond of W.H. Auden! Why would he say such a thing, why, why, why, why? Why would anyone say such a thing about dear, sweet, darling Robert Browning? He was such a sweet darling dear! Why would you?

And also, don't say his wife in that manner! She's not just some nobody nothing, she's Elizabeth Barrett Browning!

I was going to try and stop myself from making personal comments about W.H. Auden but he's driving me to it. I can no longer contain my feelings of anger because this is one of those times at which speaking one's mind ceases to be a moral duty and becomes a pleasure. Because unlike SOME PEOPLE who make MARRIAGES OF CONVENIENCE and have NO STABLE RELATIONSHIPS EVER, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning were happily married for ages and ages and did not PERPETUALLY break off relationships all the time always like a BIG DUMB LOSER. Besides which neither of them were named WYSTAN or HUGH.

Excuse me while I go take some Valium.

Okay, some of that was unfair. He married for convenience, but he didn't marry some nobody nothing either, she was Thomas Mann's daughter and literary executor (I think), and he married her so she could have a British passport and escape from the Nazis. And yes, he didn't have any stable relationships, but also it would have been trickier for a gay couple to swing that than a straight couple (though of course the Brownings did not have the easiest path to bliss that has ever existed in the world). And Wystan Hugh is not his fault and maybe neither was his apparent relationship dysfunction because maybe his parents were awful and messed him up for life.

So I think W.H. Auden was just jealous, which means the above-quoted remark is much more sad than it is nasty, but that doesn't mean I'm going to forgive him for trash-talking dear, sweet, darling, lovely Robert Browning. JUST SHUT UP, W.H. Auden. Nobody asked YOU.