I feel rotten, telling you this, because I really love these books. Although, in rereading them, I realized I prefer the sequel, and not just because it drops the “dozen” charade. Belles is a better book than its predecessor, in part because it loses the problematic Frank Gilbreth, who may make some readers wonder where motion study ends and child abuse begins.
As depicted by two of his children—Frank Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey—Frank Sr. is a benevolent dictator. Actually, he’s not that benevolent, although his kids appear to be crazy about him. He moves dinner discussion along by declaring that most topics are “not of general interest.” He teaches touch-typing while banging a pencil on the child-typist’s head hard enough to hurt. (“It’s meant to hurt,” he growls at the protesting daughter.) He doesn’t believe in illness and his good-sport progeny almost never see doctors except when another Gilbreth is arriving. In one of the book’s most memorable scenes, Gilbreth decides to use his children’s tonsillectomies as the basis for a motion-study film. I confess, I find this as funny as it is appalling.
As it turned out, Ernestine’s tonsils were recessed and bigger than the doctor expected. It was a little messy to get at them, and Mr. Coggin, the movie cameraman, was sick in the waste basket.
“Don’t stop cranking,” Dad shouted at him, “or your tonsils will be next. I’ll pull them out by the roots, myself. Crank, by jingo, crank.”
So, to be fair, he’s kind of a dick to everyone!
Frank Gilbreth learned that he had a bad heart before his last two children were born and discussed with his wife the very real possibility that she would be widowed long before their brood had reached maturity.
“But I don’t think the doctors know what they’re talking about,” Dad said. [Of course not! The stupid doctors didn’t even know how inefficiently they were performing surgery until Frank Gilbreth showed them his home movies of tonsillectomies.]
Mother knew the answer Dad wanted.
“I don’t see how twelve children would be much more trouble than ten,” she told him.
“Mother knew the answer Dad wanted.” Am I the only one whose heart plunges a little at that sentence? At any rate, this telepathic empathy seems to have been the signature gift of Lillian Moller Gilbreth, who had a psychology degree. (“Although a graduate of the University of California, the bride is nonetheless an extremely attractive young woman,” her own wedding announcement explained.) Frank Sr. first floats the “dozen” idea on their honeymoon, but she agrees readily. The single regret she voices is not insisting on hospital births until the delivery of her last child. She stays ten days. Can you blame her?
The chapters about Frank Gilbreth’s death are truly moving, but Cheaper is ultimately more a series of set pieces than a cohesive story. There’s just no larger narrative arc, which is why Belles is a more satisfying read. The Gilbreths were in real financial straits when their father died. Okay, they still had a fulltime handyman and a place in Nantucket, but the younger children were on the verge of being dispersed to various relatives. Although she had been her husband’s business partner and co-author, Lillian Gilbreth had to work hard to persuade their clients to stay with her. In turn, her oldest children—Anne, Ernestine, Martha, and Frank—took on enormous responsibilities within the household. Belles, like Godfather Part II, is that rare sequel that fulfills the original’s promise. You can’t understand the whole story unless you read both.
There was a change in Mother after Dad died. A change in looks and a change in manners. Before her marriage, all Mother’s decisions had been made by her parents. After the marriage, the decisions were made by Dad….
…While Dad lived, Mother was afraid of fast driving, of airplanes, of walking alone at night. When there was lightning, she went in a dark closet and held her ears. When things went wrong at dinner, she sometimes burst into tears and had to leave the table. She made public speeches, but she dreaded them.
Now, suddenly, she wasn’t afraid any more, because there was nothing to be afraid of. Now nothing could ever upset her because the thing that mattered most had been upset. None of us ever saw her weep again.
Well, I can’t speak for Lillian Moller Gilbreth, but I am bawling my eyes out right now. Maybe it’s hormones, which, come to think of it, are another reason women just can’t do certain things.
BOOK REPORT
A Little Princess
By Frances Hodgson Burnett 1905
What’s Mine Is Yours
Once on a dark winter’s day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfare.
There are very few works of modern literature that successfully manage to link the possession of a large fortune to an equally healthy moral compass—and fewer still that go ahead and make the correlation causative. Smoldering Mr. Darcy, whose just management of household wealth finally manages to earn the respect of Elizabeth Bennett (who then gets to live in that house…), is a rare standout amidst craven strivers like Becky Sharp or the hapless Hulots, who handle money about as skillfully as a greased hand negotiates an egg. It’s unworthy money-grubbers who esteem Darcy for his money. Wiser personages, from his housekeeper to his dearest friend, esteem him for his money management.
But in the wealthy, intense bookworm Sara Crewe, author Frances Hodgson Burnett—who earlier, we determined, had a rather poisonous view of the spoils of empire—creates a character whose goodness not only equals her good fortune, but brings her fortune itself.
Sara, like The Secret Garden’s Mary Lennox, is a young girl brought up in colonial India, but unlike Mary, she’s bright, inquisitive, and the daughter of a young, wealthy officer who adores her completely. (Her mother has been dead for many years.) As the novel commences, he’s bringing her to London to enroll her in a fancy girls’ school run by the odious, aptly named Miss Minchin, about whom we could write several essays alone. You will forgive me for turning immediately to the wardrobe her father provides Mary for her scholarly debut:
There were velvet dresses trimmed with costly furs, and lace dresses, and embroidered ones, and hats with great, soft ostrich feathers, and ermine coats and muffs, and boxes of tiny gloves and handkerchiefs and silk stockings in such abundant supplies that the polite young women behind the counters whispered to each other that the odd little girl with the big, solemn eyes must be at least some foreign princess—perhaps the little daughter of an Indian rajah.
Sigh…anyway. At the school, Sara is distinguished from the other well-to-do girls not only by trouncing whatever finery they have with her epic wardrobe, private playroom, and French maid, but also by subtler characteristics—her strange, compelling looks, her love of books, her ability to speak French, her warm, empathetic nature, and most of all, by her strong sense of fancy, which is regarded at turns as charming, immature, eccentric, and, to her likable, slightly thick friend Ermengarde, simply miraculous:
“Yes,” Sara answered. “…When I play I make up stories and tell them to myself….”
…Emengarde stopped short, staring, and quite losing her breath.
“You make up stories!” she gasped. “Can you do that—as well as speak French? Can you?”
Sara looked at her in simple surprise.
“Why, anyone can make up things,” she said….
Have you never pretended things?”
“No,” said Ermengarde. “Never. I—tell me about it.”
Sara’s ability to tell stories doesn’t only prove a powerful attraction to the other girls in the school, who love to gather around to hear her make things up by the fire. (That crackling, India-financed grate!) Her creative mind also encourages her to ruminate on her own circumstances, after which she concludes that much of her good nature may result only from private financing:
Sara was praised for her quickness at her lessons, for her
good manners, for her amiability to her fellow-pupils, for her generosity if she gave sixpence to a beggar out of her full little purse; the simplest thing she did was treated as if it were a virtue, and if she had not had a disposition and a clever little brain, she might have been a very self-satisfied young person. But the clever little brain told her a great many sensible and true things about herself and her circumstances, and now and then she talked these things over to Ermengarde as time went on:
“Things happen to people by accident,” she used to say. “A lot of nice accidents happened to me. It just happened that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. It just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice and clever, and could give me anything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? I don’t know”—looking quite serious—“how I shall ever find out whether I am really a nice child or a horrid one. Perhaps I’m a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials.”
Was that a dare? Poor child, let me introduce you to the whole “knock wood” thing! Sara will need that imagination, and the ability to be rather dispassionate, in just a moment. Unfortunately, smack in the midst of her lavish birthday party, where among her gifts there were “lace collars and silk stockings and handkerchiefs; there was a jewel-case containing a necklace and tiara which looked quite as if they were made of real diamond; there was a long sealskin and muff; there were ball dresses and walking dresses and visiting dresses; there were hats and tea-gowns and fans….” Where was I? Ah, yes. The terrible news, which is that not only is Captain Crewe dead of brain fever in the jungle, but that his entire fortune is gone, invested in a friend’s diamond-mine venture that’s gone smash.
Shockingly enough, this does not go over well with Miss Minchin:
“Where is Sara Crewe?”
Miss Amelia was bewildered.
“Sara!” she stammered. “Why, she’s with the children in your room, of course.”
“Has she a black frock in her sumptuous wardrobe?”—in bitter irony.
“A black frock?” Miss Amelia stammered again.
“A black one?”
“She has frocks of every other color. Has she a black one?”
Miss Amelia began to turn pale.
“No—ye-es!” she said. “But it is too short for her. She has only the black velvet, and she has outgrown it.”
“Go ahead and tell her to take off that preposterous pink silk gauze, and put the black one on, whether it is too short or not. She has done with finery!”
Then Miss Amelia began to wring her fat hands and cry.
“Oh, sister!” she sniffed. “Oh, sister! What can have happened?”
Miss Minchin wasted no words.
“Captain Crewe is dead,” she said. “He has died without a penny. That spoiled, pampered, fanciful child is left a pauper on my hands.”
So the same girl who, only weeks earlier, befriended the downtrodden housemaid Becky by telling her, “…We are just the same—I am only a little girl like you. It’s just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!” now finds that that is unfortunately this case. While Miss Minchin does not quite reduce Sara to Becky’s level of wretchedness (“Becky is the scullery-maid. Scullery-maids—er—are not little girls.”), she puts Sara to work immediately, banishing her to live in the attic along with Becky, where she too listens to rats scurry by night and by day, then heads off to tutor the children in French, runs horrible errands, and generally is plagued by anyone with the authority to plague her.
Fortunately, Sara finds that her ability to imagine, which once gave her the ability to be compassionate to people like Becky, now gives her the ability to muddle through her own troubles. Her bare quarters, she laughs bitterly to herself, are the ideal environment for flights of whimsy: “It’s a good place to imagine in.”
“You see,” she said, “there could be a thick, soft blue Indian rug on the floor; and in that corner there could be a soft little sofa, with cushions to curl up on; and just over it could be a shelf full of books so that one could reach them easily; and there could be a fur rug before the fire, and hangings on the wall to cover up the whitewash, and pictures. They would have to be little ones, but they could be beautiful; and there could be a lamp with a deep rose-colored shade; and a table in the middle, with things to have tea with; and a little fat copper kettle singing on the hob; and the bed could be quite different. It could be made soft and covered with a lovely silk coverlet. It could be beautiful. And perhaps we could coax the sparrows until we made such friends with them that they would come and peck at the window and ask to be let in.”
Some of Sara’s imaginings try to give dignity and drama to the squalor—like the routine she makes up to pretend she and Becky are prisoners in the Bastille, or the notion that, tromping through the mud to pick up meat for the cook, she’s in fact a soldier. But the one that endures is a fancy she’s brought from her salad days—that she’s a princess. Not the kind who lives among riches in a tower, but rather, the kind who labors quietly in disguise, brought down by some evil force, until she’s revealed to be the true heir to the throne and ascends to her rightful place.
That sounds like a good way to go! In addition to giving her something to look forward to, knowing she’s secretly a princess allows Sara to stand all of the abuse heaped on her by Miss Minchin and the other household help, who seem determined to grind her face in her fall from wealth as much as they can.
In fact, her imagination comes to mean life or death—because for the one brief moment, confiding in her doll, Emily, she drops her charade, she loses her faith in her future entirely:
“I can’t bear this,” said the poor child, trembling. “I know I shall die. I’m cold; I’m wet; I’m starving to death. I’ve walked a thousand miles today, and they have done nothing but scold me from morning until night. And because I could not find that last thing the cook sent me for, they would not give me any supper. Some men laughed at me because my old shoes made me slip down in the mud. I’m covered with mud now. And they laughed. Do you hear?”
“You are nothing but a doll!” she cried; “nothing but a doll-doll-doll! You care for nothing. You are stuffed with sawdust. You never had a heart. Nothing could make you feel. You are a doll!”
But in a stroke of luck, a man from India, very wealthy, and very ill, moves in next door, and Sara is swept up in another tide of “supposing” about the mysterious gentleman that distracts her entirely from her rough circumstances. In one of my favorite scenes in literature, Sara trudges through the winter night, aching with hunger, and finds fourpence. Though she’s starving herself, she stands by the princess code:
“Suppose I had dry clothes on,” she thought. “Suppose I had good shoes and a long thick coat and merino stockings and a whole umbrella. And suppose—suppose—just when I was near a baker’s where they sold hot buns, I should find sixpence—which belonged to nobody. Suppose, if I did, I should go into the shop and buy six of the hottest buns and eat them all without stopping.”
…It was actually a piece of silver—a tiny piece trodden upon by many feet, but still with spirit enough left to shine a little. Not quite a sixpence, but the next thing to it—a four-penny piece.
…And then if you believe me, she looked straight at the shop directly facing her. And it was a baker’s shop, and a cheerful, stout, motherly woman with rosy cheeks was putting into the window a tray of delicious newly baked hot buns, fresh from the oven—large, plump shiny buns, with currants in them.
Sigh! Okay:
“If I’m a princess,” she was saying—“if I’m a princess—when they were poor and driven from their thrones—they always shared—with the populace—if they met one poorer and hungrier than themselves. They always shared. Buns are a penny each. If it had been sixpence I could have eaten six….”
“…See,”
she said, putting the bun in the ragged lap, “this is nice and hot. Eat it, and you will not feel so hungry.”
The child started and stared up at her, as if such sudden, amazing good luck almost frightened her; then she snatched up the bun and began to cram it into her mouth with great wolfish bites.
“Oh, my! Oh, my!” Sara heard her say hoarsely, in wild delight. “Oh, my!”
Sara took out three more buns and put them down.
The sound in the hoarse, ravenous voice was awful.
“She is hungrier than I am,” she said to herself.
“She’s starving.” But her hand trembled when she put down the fourth bun. “I’m not starving,” she said—and she put down the fifth.
This small act—as readers know—changes the course of that girl’s life entirely. But it hasn’t wrought the titanic change because Sara has been good. Giving away the buns IS good, of course, but Sara has only been able to do it for two reasons. First, her imagination has allowed her spirits up, which keep her heart open to others. Second, her imagination allows her to envision the circumstances of others—to feel them so strongly that she knows, even though she is wild with hunger, that the girl is starving.
I’ve always disliked the title of this book, because it seems to evoke a girl swathed in cloying, mincing pink, as far from the intense, intelligent Sara as one can be. Princesses in fairy tales are saved from drudgery because of something “princess-y” in their essential natures that is revealed as their birthright, but Sara acting like a polite princess changes little in those who would seek to destroy her. (Obviously, it completely enrages Miss Minchin beyond belief.)
And that’s because being a princess is really only a vehicle for Sara. Although Miss Minchin thinks she puts on airs, Sara is not of the belief that she’s inherently better than anyone else. Even if she was, what matters is that she’s just able to imagine better than anyone else—which, in turn, makes her a better person. When a rat skitters out into her attic room, she doesn’t kill it—she understands it: “I dare say it is rather hard to be a rat,” she mused. “Nobody likes you. People jump and run away and scream out, ‘Oh, a horrid rat!’ I shouldn’t like people to scream and jump and say, ‘Oh, a horrid Sara!’”
Shelf Discovery Page 27