Gearshift! "Cloudy Jewel."
Another Grace Livingston Hill book, but a very different one.
The Angel of the House was a Victorian view of women that elevated ladies from the state of wild, untrustworthy, lewd creatures that dragged men down with their voracious sexual appetites to delicate moral guardians who instilled in those around them a sense of peace and refinery. For the bulk of Western history, women had been the sex more prone to straying. Social views flipped at this point. And women did not get leadership but they did get, at least in society's view, a kind of magical influence to go with their passivity.
This concept lives on in Western religion in general, because it supports complementarianism, which says that men and women have two different roles in marriage. Specifically, in Quiverfull fundamentalism especially but also in similarly patriarchal churches, the woman is not to take the lead in marriage or contradict the man, because her role is to follow and support him. This means that if a woman wants a man to do something, from taking the trash out to stop dropping his dirty underwear on the landing, she is to quash any negative feelings she has and just be a joyous patient loving influence until his underwear-littering trash-ignoring ways spontaneously mend themselves. Until they do, picking up after him is her responsibility. Nagging him is not. Manipulating him becomes ok and normal because there are literally no other avenues left and no one is really living with dirty underwear on the stairs day in, day out.
This book is interesting for several reasons:
1. A GLH heroine gets her hands on a gun. It is only a pity that lady cops did not exist in GLH's time. Everything gets better when her heroines are slinging pistols about.
2. I never read it, so this is all seen from my adult feminist perspective and not my vaguely feminist child's perspective.
3. We get to see an Angel of the House in action and inaction.
So by all means let's look into this. From the setup:
She could not understand her sister, in fact, never had. She had thought her proposition that Julia come to live in her home and earn her board by looking after the four children and being useful about the house was most generous. She had admired the open-handedness of Herbert, her husband, for suggesting it. Some husbands wouldn’t have wanted a poor relative about. Of course Julia always had been a hard worker; and it would relieve Ellen, and make it possible for her to go around with her husband more. It would save the wages of a servant, too, for Julia had always been a wonder at economy. It certainly was vexing to have Julia act in this way, calmly putting aside the proposition as if it were nothing and saying she hadn’t decided what she was going to do yet, for all the world as if she were a millionaire!
“I don’t know, Ellen. I haven’t had time to think. There have been so many things to think about since the funeral I haven’t got used yet to the idea that mother’s really gone.” Julia’s voice was quiet and controlled, in sharp contrast with Ellen’s high-pitched, nervous tones.
I actually like what GLH is doing here. I'm trimming a few paragraphs, and taking the heart of it, but look at all that. There's a sense of Herbert, Ellen, the fact of the kids, the unwed status of Julia, and a contrast of their innate ladinesses as expressed by voice. She gets a lot of ground out of this. She does throw subtlety out the window as she also conveys we are supposed to like Julia and not like Ellen, but otherwise that was a pretty dense block of information she just toured us through.
When Ellen says she should use her common sense and be a woman, Julia also gets to prove her passive Angel of the House credentials:
Ellen said this word “woman” as if her sister had already passed into the antique class and ought to realize it. It was one of the things that hurt Julia Cloud to realize that she was growing old apparently without the dignity that belonged to her years, for they all talked to her yet as if she were a little child and needed to be managed. She opened her lips to speak, but thought better of it, and shut them again, turning back to the window and the gray, sodden landscape.
Ellen tells Julia she never suggested her husband take on another mouth to feed, tells her the offer might not stand forever, and off she goes. Meanwhile, we are hammered over the head with the fact that an Angel of the House stands here with folded wings:
She was not above cooking and nursing and toiling forever if there were independence to be had. She would have given her life if love beckoned her. She would have gone to France as a nurse in a moment if she had not been needed at her mother’s bedside. Little children drew her powerfully, but to be a drudge for children who did not love her, in a home where love was the only condition that would make dependence possible, looked intolerable.
So she hangs out in her big, empty house, which is definitely described as all hers, considering her small income and ways to supplement it. Since all the women of the village already have cooking, sewing, child-minding, and nursing skills, she sees very few avenues. Then in the next paragraph she gets a telegram!
“Dear Cloudy Jewel: Leslie and I are on our way East for a visit, and will stop over Wednesday night to see you. Please make us some caraway cookies if not too much trouble.
“Your loving nephew,
“Allison Cloud.”
One of these is a boy, one a girl, and I will mix them up for the rest of the novel, but that's not important right now. what is important is that they are the children of her brother that moved to California, now adult...ish, college-aged, and probably twins. What kind of children were they?
Leslie and Allison! What round little warm bodies they had, and what delicate, refined faces! They had not seemed like Ellen’s blowsy, obstreperous youngsters, practical and grasping to the last extreme after the model of their father. They had starry eyes and hair like tangled sunbeams. Their laughter rippled like brooks in summer, and their hands were like bands that bound the heart.
Fantasy children.
The Angel of the House was a Victorian view of women that elevated ladies from the state of wild, untrustworthy, lewd creatures that dragged men down with their voracious sexual appetites to delicate moral guardians who instilled in those around them a sense of peace and refinery. For the bulk of Western history, women had been the sex more prone to straying. Social views flipped at this point. And women did not get leadership but they did get, at least in society's view, a kind of magical influence to go with their passivity.
This concept lives on in Western religion in general, because it supports complementarianism, which says that men and women have two different roles in marriage. Specifically, in Quiverfull fundamentalism especially but also in similarly patriarchal churches, the woman is not to take the lead in marriage or contradict the man, because her role is to follow and support him. This means that if a woman wants a man to do something, from taking the trash out to stop dropping his dirty underwear on the landing, she is to quash any negative feelings she has and just be a joyous patient loving influence until his underwear-littering trash-ignoring ways spontaneously mend themselves. Until they do, picking up after him is her responsibility. Nagging him is not. Manipulating him becomes ok and normal because there are literally no other avenues left and no one is really living with dirty underwear on the stairs day in, day out.
This book is interesting for several reasons:
1. A GLH heroine gets her hands on a gun. It is only a pity that lady cops did not exist in GLH's time. Everything gets better when her heroines are slinging pistols about.
2. I never read it, so this is all seen from my adult feminist perspective and not my vaguely feminist child's perspective.
3. We get to see an Angel of the House in action and inaction.
So by all means let's look into this. From the setup:
She could not understand her sister, in fact, never had. She had thought her proposition that Julia come to live in her home and earn her board by looking after the four children and being useful about the house was most generous. She had admired the open-handedness of Herbert, her husband, for suggesting it. Some husbands wouldn’t have wanted a poor relative about. Of course Julia always had been a hard worker; and it would relieve Ellen, and make it possible for her to go around with her husband more. It would save the wages of a servant, too, for Julia had always been a wonder at economy. It certainly was vexing to have Julia act in this way, calmly putting aside the proposition as if it were nothing and saying she hadn’t decided what she was going to do yet, for all the world as if she were a millionaire!
“I don’t know, Ellen. I haven’t had time to think. There have been so many things to think about since the funeral I haven’t got used yet to the idea that mother’s really gone.” Julia’s voice was quiet and controlled, in sharp contrast with Ellen’s high-pitched, nervous tones.
I actually like what GLH is doing here. I'm trimming a few paragraphs, and taking the heart of it, but look at all that. There's a sense of Herbert, Ellen, the fact of the kids, the unwed status of Julia, and a contrast of their innate ladinesses as expressed by voice. She gets a lot of ground out of this. She does throw subtlety out the window as she also conveys we are supposed to like Julia and not like Ellen, but otherwise that was a pretty dense block of information she just toured us through.
When Ellen says she should use her common sense and be a woman, Julia also gets to prove her passive Angel of the House credentials:
Ellen said this word “woman” as if her sister had already passed into the antique class and ought to realize it. It was one of the things that hurt Julia Cloud to realize that she was growing old apparently without the dignity that belonged to her years, for they all talked to her yet as if she were a little child and needed to be managed. She opened her lips to speak, but thought better of it, and shut them again, turning back to the window and the gray, sodden landscape.
Ellen tells Julia she never suggested her husband take on another mouth to feed, tells her the offer might not stand forever, and off she goes. Meanwhile, we are hammered over the head with the fact that an Angel of the House stands here with folded wings:
She was not above cooking and nursing and toiling forever if there were independence to be had. She would have given her life if love beckoned her. She would have gone to France as a nurse in a moment if she had not been needed at her mother’s bedside. Little children drew her powerfully, but to be a drudge for children who did not love her, in a home where love was the only condition that would make dependence possible, looked intolerable.
So she hangs out in her big, empty house, which is definitely described as all hers, considering her small income and ways to supplement it. Since all the women of the village already have cooking, sewing, child-minding, and nursing skills, she sees very few avenues. Then in the next paragraph she gets a telegram!
“Dear Cloudy Jewel: Leslie and I are on our way East for a visit, and will stop over Wednesday night to see you. Please make us some caraway cookies if not too much trouble.
“Your loving nephew,
“Allison Cloud.”
One of these is a boy, one a girl, and I will mix them up for the rest of the novel, but that's not important right now. what is important is that they are the children of her brother that moved to California, now adult...ish, college-aged, and probably twins. What kind of children were they?
Leslie and Allison! What round little warm bodies they had, and what delicate, refined faces! They had not seemed like Ellen’s blowsy, obstreperous youngsters, practical and grasping to the last extreme after the model of their father. They had starry eyes and hair like tangled sunbeams. Their laughter rippled like brooks in summer, and their hands were like bands that bound the heart.
Fantasy children.