Thursday, October 05, 2006
the trouble with writing women
My daughter's great grandmother was named Marion. She had cancer and died shortly after I got engaged, and so, I met most of my husband's extended family for the first time at her funeral.
I met her once, days before her death. I was taken to her bedside in a private suite in Atlanta's most prestigious hospital. She was clearly dying, and the family had all gathered. Wasted by cancer and tiny in the hospital bed and robe, she reminded me of a baby bird. She kept repeating. I never saw the pyramids.
I have been told that she loved to travel. I also knew that she arranged flowers as a hobby. Her china pattern was bright and oriental with a style that each of her three daughters tried to copy, to some extent, in their own decor. My husband never liked her very much.
Gradually, I've been given a few things that were hers: I have the dressmaker's model that she had custom-built so that her gowns and dresses could be hand-tailored. I have a purple velvet gown and a velvet hooded cape the color of port wine. I have her Red Cross nurse's uniform from World War II. It is the color of butter, unstained and untorn.
I have a packet of her papers from her literature classes at an expensive private university. Literature 204: Milton with Miss Hawk and Literature 206: History of the Novel with Miss Tuelle. First and second semester 1934 to 1935.
There is a paper about light imagery and Satan inParadise Lost, a notebook filled with meticulous summaries of each book of The Aenead, and a thirty-two page paper titled "Jane Austen Through Her Letters".
Her writing is thorough and properly annotated, but dull and uninspired. She misspelled the word "dazzled", and Miss Hawk pointed out the mistake with a penciled note in the margin. In the notes on her Jane Austen paper, Miss Tuelle made the following observation: "I feel that your style is immensely wordy, and that the laxity of the sentence-grip is a real limitation, not only keeping your work in the class of immature writing, but blinding your meaning." She went on to criticize Marion for focusing her paper only on the trivial matters in Austen's correspondence.
I think that if these were my papers, I would have been upset by the remarks and would have thrown them out. Instead, my husband's grandmother labeled manilla envelopes in the same careful manuscript that she used to chronicle the destruction of Troy, placed her classwork inside, and kept the papers for the remainder of her life. I wonder about this. Did she keep them as a sort of a protest? Despite the harsh comments, did she not realize that they were not any good? Did she simply keep everything?
I'm drawn to these papers. Underneath Marion's label, my mother-in-law added "For Amy" in black Sharpie marker. I suppose it seemed like a shame to throw them away, and it seemed that I ought to inherit them since they dealt with books. I read and re-read them looking for some break, some spark of who Marion was - perhaps a doodle or a personal note on the margin of the notes - some insertion of what she about Dido. A question mark. There is nothing.
Marion grew up with money. Lots of money. She was an Episcopalian. She married a lawyer who was a non-practicing Jew, the only member of his family to abandon the faith of his fathers. He was from an appropriate social class despite his inappropriate religion, but she did not marry him for his money, as her family was wealthier.
She had four children, three girls and a boy. She named her oldest daughter after herself.
I attended Marion's funeral in 1991. She was buried, per her request, on the side of a mountain in North Carolina, where she had owned a summer house. She had asked for her burial to be accompanied by a single bagpipe player. She wanted him to play, "When The Saints Go Marching In". It was decided, later, that Dixieland jazz was inappropriate for a burial and instead, the bagpipe player played "Amazing Grace", and he walked down the mountainside in his kilt so that the mournful notes faded slowly away. It was hushing and beautiful. I do not think my own funeral will be as lovely.
I have fit what pieces I have together and I find that I do not like Marion very much. I am glad that, in the end, her blood is not my blood. Still, I am haunted by her papers.
I met her once, days before her death. I was taken to her bedside in a private suite in Atlanta's most prestigious hospital. She was clearly dying, and the family had all gathered. Wasted by cancer and tiny in the hospital bed and robe, she reminded me of a baby bird. She kept repeating. I never saw the pyramids.
I have been told that she loved to travel. I also knew that she arranged flowers as a hobby. Her china pattern was bright and oriental with a style that each of her three daughters tried to copy, to some extent, in their own decor. My husband never liked her very much.
Gradually, I've been given a few things that were hers: I have the dressmaker's model that she had custom-built so that her gowns and dresses could be hand-tailored. I have a purple velvet gown and a velvet hooded cape the color of port wine. I have her Red Cross nurse's uniform from World War II. It is the color of butter, unstained and untorn.
I have a packet of her papers from her literature classes at an expensive private university. Literature 204: Milton with Miss Hawk and Literature 206: History of the Novel with Miss Tuelle. First and second semester 1934 to 1935.
There is a paper about light imagery and Satan inParadise Lost, a notebook filled with meticulous summaries of each book of The Aenead, and a thirty-two page paper titled "Jane Austen Through Her Letters".
Her writing is thorough and properly annotated, but dull and uninspired. She misspelled the word "dazzled", and Miss Hawk pointed out the mistake with a penciled note in the margin. In the notes on her Jane Austen paper, Miss Tuelle made the following observation: "I feel that your style is immensely wordy, and that the laxity of the sentence-grip is a real limitation, not only keeping your work in the class of immature writing, but blinding your meaning." She went on to criticize Marion for focusing her paper only on the trivial matters in Austen's correspondence.
I think that if these were my papers, I would have been upset by the remarks and would have thrown them out. Instead, my husband's grandmother labeled manilla envelopes in the same careful manuscript that she used to chronicle the destruction of Troy, placed her classwork inside, and kept the papers for the remainder of her life. I wonder about this. Did she keep them as a sort of a protest? Despite the harsh comments, did she not realize that they were not any good? Did she simply keep everything?
I'm drawn to these papers. Underneath Marion's label, my mother-in-law added "For Amy" in black Sharpie marker. I suppose it seemed like a shame to throw them away, and it seemed that I ought to inherit them since they dealt with books. I read and re-read them looking for some break, some spark of who Marion was - perhaps a doodle or a personal note on the margin of the notes - some insertion of what she about Dido. A question mark. There is nothing.
Marion grew up with money. Lots of money. She was an Episcopalian. She married a lawyer who was a non-practicing Jew, the only member of his family to abandon the faith of his fathers. He was from an appropriate social class despite his inappropriate religion, but she did not marry him for his money, as her family was wealthier.
She had four children, three girls and a boy. She named her oldest daughter after herself.
I attended Marion's funeral in 1991. She was buried, per her request, on the side of a mountain in North Carolina, where she had owned a summer house. She had asked for her burial to be accompanied by a single bagpipe player. She wanted him to play, "When The Saints Go Marching In". It was decided, later, that Dixieland jazz was inappropriate for a burial and instead, the bagpipe player played "Amazing Grace", and he walked down the mountainside in his kilt so that the mournful notes faded slowly away. It was hushing and beautiful. I do not think my own funeral will be as lovely.
I have fit what pieces I have together and I find that I do not like Marion very much. I am glad that, in the end, her blood is not my blood. Still, I am haunted by her papers.
