Anonymous

>good to be reminded of that excellent McLeod article! it should be reprinted every couple of years!

Posted : Jul 27, 2008 04:08

swarmofbeasts

>One wishes that the writers of these books would go back to the literature of Thailand, or medieval England, or wherever, where the stories aren't about 'Oh, my society, it's so repressive!" - and find other sources for conflict.

Posted : Jul 22, 2008 11:32

Anonymous

>lelac,

I was the first anonymous, and I've already been waay to pedantic on Roger's blog, but I have to say I disagree. Meg struggles to find happiness entirely within the limits of the choices available to a woman of her time. Yes, she's a woman writing, but historically, that's unusual, not preposterous. She's not throwing off the chains of her sex. On the contrary, she is soberly deciding who she will marry for the best advantage. She might be pushing the envelope by writing without her father's knowledge, but she always means to show her work to him. She sees him as the ultimate judge of the rightness or wrongness of her actions. Meg's father recognizes her talent and approves her writing because he's a good man and because Sturtevant *doesn't* take the line that anyone who actually believes in those old patriarchal principles must be either weak, as is Birdy's mother, or like a her father, a bastard.

Posted : Jul 21, 2008 12:07

Lelac

>And even in True and Faithful Narrative, we're meant to root for the heroine's liberation; we're there, really, in order to critique the contemporary values, not inhabit them for a while.

Posted : Jul 19, 2008 09:48

Monica Edinger

>I'm with you, anonymous, on the Sturtevant book. And with you, Roger, about Macleod's excellent essay.
I've noticed too the subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) ways some American stories about other cultures and/or people of other cultures emphasize particular American cultural attributes, say the individual over the group, that aren't part of the other cultures at all. In Sierra Leone I taught art for a year in a primary school. (Not my idea, but the head teacher thought it would make her school look more impressive.) I had one particularly talented 5th grader. However, when his parents came to see the teachers, they had absolutely no interest in seeing me. They cared about academics for their son. Talent in drawing and painting (what the head teacher insisted I teach) meant nothing to them. That he did well reading, writing, history, maths, etc did. There were no artists there as we think of them. Plenty of art being done among crafts folk, but the parents did not want that for their son. The whole concept of artist was very different there. Art functioned differently. This was thirty years ago, but I had a number of experiences to reinforced this impression.

Posted : Jul 19, 2008 12:31

Anonymous

>Roger,

Thank you for the link to the MacLeod essay. Brilliant indeed.

MacLeod points out the weaknesses in Cushman's Catherine Called Birdy--

"They evade the common realities of the societies they write about. In the case of novels about girls or women, authors want to give their heroines freer choices than their cultures would in fact have offered. To do that, they set aside the social mores of the past as though they were minor afflictions, small obstacles, easy — and painless — for an independent mind to overcome."

These books do get the period details correct and the historical events and so I think offer value to the reader--at a certain stage of development. I like to contrast Catherine Called Birdy with A True and Faithful Narrative by Katherine Sturtevant.

Sturtevant's Meg is a product of her time. She has all the sense of filial responsibility the Birdy does not. She struggles with her desire to do something she believes her father will not approve of and her prejudices are overcome slowly; they don't evaporate in a blaze of Enlightenment. She thinks very differently from a modern girl of her age.

But I am not sure that the reader who loves Birdy would understand Meg. "Why doesn't she just write if she wants to?" they might ask. The reader has to be able to understand that people in the past really were different and I think that is a developmental stage we need to move children towards. You can be able to read all the words in ATAFN and still not able to understand the story.

I wish every child who read Catherine Called Birdy at eleven, could be offered A True and Faithful Narrative at thirteen. I think Sturtevant proved that you can have a great story and historical integrity. I only wish it had gotten the Newbery recognition it deserved.

Posted : Jul 18, 2008 08:20

Anonymous

>GREAT MacLeod essay. Thanks for posting it.

Posted : Jul 18, 2008 07:27

M.F. Atkins

>Thanks for bringing this up. I grew up a few minutes from this umbrella village. I am anxious to read this book, and then maybe I can comment on your question.

Marcie
World of Words
http://marcieaf.blogspot.com

Posted : Jul 18, 2008 06:02