The Throaty Growl and the Trace of Yearning: On Glamor, Responsibility, and Teddy Bears

My grandfather and his bear: a parable of friendship and temptation, in his own words.

Early one evening shortly before Christmas Day [1925] Helen took him to a toy store in the area of shops up the street from the hospital. It was dark night in the street, but the shop was brilliantly lighted by many exposed filament light bulbs.  There was a low counter and shelves above it displaying dolls, Teddy bears, felt monkeys, and other toys.  Helen must have made a previous survey and wanted Grant to have a chance to approve his main gift.  Grant sensed that she was pushing him tactfully to select a particular Teddy bear, but at least initially his eye was taken by a felt monkey in a red jacket with bright brass buttons and a "bell-boy" cap.  Helen clearly didn't like the monkey, the bear did have a quiet, kindly charm, and the bear gave a throaty growl when you tipped him forward.  Grant saw he ought to vote for the bear, and so he did. Perhaps Helen believed it was a choice between a solid friend and a flashy acquaintance.  Probably she was right, but more than 50 years later Grant still had a trace of yearning for that red-jacketed monkey.  The toy is a symbol to him of all those touches of glamor which you give up a when you set your course for a steady, responsible life, as McC-----s in his time generally did.

More than fifty years later... (More than eighty years, in fact, when this picture was taken.)

The Teddy bear was a faithful companion of Grant's Assiut years.  His growl mechanism failed after a few years so that he only rattled inside when moved.  His feet and paws had to be patched with light khaki when the original cloth covering wore out.  Helen made him a suit of blue-gray material with a pocket in front and several red buttons below the neck.  After a year or two Grant once tried to shave Teddy with his father's straight-edge razor.  The cut was stitched together by Helen, and Grant was made to repent for his thoughtlessness by having Teddy put away in a drawer for many days.

So many things.  First, note that Grant wasn't reprimanded for playing with a straight razor at the age of five, but rather for thoughtlessness to Teddy, whose integrity as a faithful friend he had failed to honor. Secondly, and on a related note, I want to declare here and now that I am vindicated of personal responsibility for the oddity of my adult belief that stuffed animals have feelings, a belief that has, on occasion, led me to try to enlist D in massive stuffed-animal-liberation maneuvers in the gulags of FAO Schwartz.  Clearly, both the excess of anthropomorphizing empathy and the tendency towards allegorical melodrama are delightfully but inalterably genetic.


Thursday, 19 April 2012
Washington, DC

The Hollow Heroine and Epistolary Delights: Ranney's Till Next We Meet

Colonel Montcrief isn’t too clear about how he began writing to Catherine Dunnan from the Quebec front.  It probably was because her feckless husband was too busy whoring, beating his horses, and reveling in the French slaughter even to read Catherine’s letters, much less to reply to them. So write Montcrief did, in the other man’s name, and before he knows it, he’s been drawn deep into an epistolary love affair, the letters growing less dutiful and more intimate with every passing week.

I do love an epistolary novel, because it allows an opportunity for love to develop separately from physical desire, and with a gratifying incremental quality that is the opposite of the fated love, coup de foudre model I’m so tired of. (Laura Kinsale’s My Sweetest Folly has a brilliant beginning in this vein, even if I didn’t love the book that followed.) In Till Next We Meet, Karen Ranney combines this with the Cyrano trope (a man woos a woman behind the screen of another’s identity) to create some fascinating scenarios of dramatic irony.  

The unsympathetic husband Dunnan passes out of the picture almost immediately (shot in a lover’s bed), and Montcrief also learns that his own elder brother has died, making him the Duke of Lymond.  He resigns his commission, and makes his way back to Scotland, where it seems like the most natural thing in the world to seek out the young widow whose letters so fascinated him, and offer his condolences.  He has worried (or wondered, to be fair) whether this spectral figure he’s fallen in love with is remotedly attractive, but he never dared ask her husband for fear of drawing attention to his fascination.  Now when he meets her, she is a wraith, starved and battered by grief.  The predominant emotion she arouses is not longing but pity.  He can’t wait to be away from her.  But when he comes to take his leave of her, she has taken (wittingly? He doesn’t know.) an overdose of drugs, and the only feasible way (!!) to protect her from herself and the world is to marry her.  

What follows is a struggle of self-control: for him, they are already in a position of tremendous intimacy, and he has to restrain himself from acting on that familiarity and affection, because for her is an utter stranger, and an incomprehensible one.  She mourns a man who hasn’t died - the man who wrote the letters, but he can’t reveal that without tilting her already precarious mental state. 

Moncrief is fairly nuanced, compellingly ambivalent, and fully wrought. Catherine, on the other hand, feels like an Empty Romance Heroine Signifier. She is a shell of a human being for much of the novel, hollowed out by a grief we know is unwarranted.  Moncrief wishes that she would show the character he knew from the letters, and I couldn’t help but sympathize.   Even after she recovers, and is much more active, there was nothing about her to justify his fascination, apart from a cheery willingness to hike up her skirts against various pieces of furniture.  
Some romances hollow out their heroines as a mechanism of identification* (just as Scott McCloud speaks of visual abstraction as a trigger for identification in Understanding Comics, or Laura Mulvey speaks of the workings of identification, objectification, and scopophilia in film): the hero is fully wrought because he is the object of readerly desire, but the heroine is a blank so a diverse array of readerly experiences and personalities can align themselves empathetically with her subject position in the novel. Ranney has quite cleverly positioned her heroine so that there is a diegetic (generated within the plot itself) reason for this hollowness.  Nonetheless, as always with me, this blankness of the heroine generates not a feeling of identification, but one of alienation. I feel manipulated by formula when one of the characters is a blank canvas for my identification, rather than convinced that these are two real, compelling people carefully negotiating a difficult situation.  Her one nuanced quality as a personality - her extreme and sincere grief for her husband and correspondent - is necessarily undercut and delegitimized by the way the plot unfolds for us.  We know she is grieving 1) a man who didn’t ever deserve her love (her first husband), and 2) a man whom she is too blind to see is standing right in front of her (her correspondent, who happens to be her second husband).  Thus her most interesting and sympathetic feature - her ferocious loyalty and her searing grief - becomes a source of frustration, because it’s clear that her ignorance is acting as an impediment to the progress of the romance. The hero is impatient with her grief (the fact that this is an unreasonable impatience, given what she could conceivably understand, doesn’t matter, because our knowledge is aligned with his knowledge), and even though I thought he was making unfair emotional demands on a recent widow, I was impatient too.

There’s a fair amount of material of questionable historicity here, or at least elements that had plausibility problems to my eye, with its half-education in the period.  Would the heir to a dukedom (his brother has no children) be permitted to fight in the wars in Quebec?  How did Montcrief manage to marry Catherine without a license virtually immediately after their first meeting? How plausible is it really that her servants would allow her to wander into her first meeting with him half-dressed?

There’s also a major consent issue that was insufficiently addressed, and that troubled my acceptance of their marriage and the hero’s demands: he marries her when she is too drugged even to remember the ceremony, much less give her agreement to it.  Why doesn’t this cause more conflict between them, apart from a few gentle reminders that she is an “unwilling bride”?  He traps her into a lifelong contract in which he has possession of her body and control of her estate: this is a violation, no matter how altruistically motivated, and needed more - much more - acknowledgement to become an interesting interrogation, rather than an unsettling sense of violation in my readerly mind.

Till Next We Meet (2005)

Karen Ranney 

Finished Monday, April 9, 2012

6/10

*I’m quite sure an abundance of work has been done on this that I just haven’t read.

Wednesday, 18 April 2012

Washington, DC

Venomous Creatures and the Face that Launched a Single Ship

A Prelude to Chapter 1

My great-grandmother, the face that launched the Canopic

I've just come upon an account my grandfather, Grant, wrote in 1973 of the love story of his parents - the jovial Frank (a doctor) and gentle Helen (a schoolteacher).  I'm only part of the way through it right now, but already it's a tale filled with influenza epidemics, travel across war-torn oceans filled with torpedo boats, riotous Egyptian nationalism, and tremendous tenderness.  Every so often, Grant has left an open space in the typescript (no doubt prepared by my industrious, sometimes Bracknellian grandmother), which he has filled with hieroglyphs, phrases in Arabic, and tiny sketches of the difference between an Egyptian carriage and an American one.  It's enthralling.

Frank and Helen first came together because their siblings - his brother Paul and her sister Grace (who would herself become a great historian of the family) - were married, and Helen later describes him as "the same sweet, unselfish, gentle Frank that we all loved so well in those days when we learned to know him after Paul's death." Nonetheless, Frank's interest seems to have come as something of a shock to Helen and her family. I'll let Grant tell it:

Shortly before Christmas Frank wrote from Harvard to Helen at her home in Waverly, Ohio, proposing marriage. [...] Frank's message was a surprise, and when Helen told the household, her mother, Cora Barch Smith, in agitation threw the envelope into the flames of the living room fireplace. [...] Helen cherished this letter and once showed it to Grant in Assiut when he was about 12 years old.  He remembers being told then the explanation for its lack of an envelope.  She destroyed the letter with many other papers in 1951 in Egypt.

Helen and her childhood friends, in the same fit of riotous hilarity that virtually any afternoon with my high school friends dissolved into...

Frank remained in Cambridge during the Christmas holidays.  To make good use of this period without classes and to keep himself from brooding too much about what Helen's response might be he asked Dr. Strong to suggest a line of study.

Strong recommended that he read works on tropical poisonous reptiles.  Frank took his advice and became intensely interested in cobras, vipers, scorpions and other venomous creatures.  This knowledge proved to be of direct use to him later in Egypt, particularly in Luxor.

Helen's reply to Frank's letter was that he should come to Waverly for a talk.  He did so, and they became engaged.  Helen's engagement ring was of a simple design, and the diamond, though modest in size, was of the finest purity with a pale blue fire.

The cherished letter, only destroyed when they finally left Egypt! The supplicant lover so much on tenterhooks about the response to his proposal that he can only soothe himself with the study of vipers and scorpions! (Family lesson: sometimes the venomous can be the best source of solace.)  This is gothic stuff, and I adore it.

But Grant has (oddly enough) left out the best part.


After a Christmas spent in the anxious study of poisonous creatures, Frank received a letter from Helen in the new year saying that he should come to Waverly to discuss the matter further with her.  When he arrived at her parents' house, she suggested a walk, and as they wandered amidst bleak wintry gardens, she accepted his proposal.  As she did so, she reached out and plucked a thorn several inches long from a bush close at hand, and they made their happy way back to break the news to her family.

Helen amidst the thorn trees in Waverly (I find something moving in the fact that in these pictures, the people are blurred out of focus - as if moving too quickly through a fleeting time - but the thorn trees are static and precise.)

It was 1915, and they didn't yet know that within the next year they would not only be married, but also finished with his post-graduate studies in tropical medicine and her teaching, assigned to a hospital in Egypt, and making their way towards the Mediterranean in the ghoulishly named Canopic, a British liner carrying a hold full of ammunition through the submarine-patrolled Atlantic waters.   In fact, all they knew for certain was that they'd be married soon. They had photographs taken to commemorate the happy day, and in our albums, above those pictures, a single thorn, the length of my smallest finger, pierces the album's thick, dark paper.

Frank and the family emblem

Wednesday, 18 April 2012
Washington, DC