I have many thoughts
Mar. 26th, 2014 03:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scribal_goddessI really ought to be working on something that is not quite as extracurricular as an analysis of the portrayal of high intelligence and giftedness in books by Madeline L'Engle, which I clearly won't finish or post today, but damn it, that's what my brain is working on regardless of what else I'm doing. Hopefully I've got enough down that I can come back to it. Since 90% of my conception of spirituality came from L'Engle's books, this is going to be terribly complicated.
Anyhow, just a few thoughts I have: keep in mind that I first read A Wrinkle in Time when I was eight, and that it's largely responsible for my love of science-fantasy and time and space traveling heroes, and the series as a whole may have had an unacceptably broad influence on my worldview.
1) I really identify with Meg as a teenager. Meg is forced to become her youngest brother Charles Wallace's protector due to outside forces that her admittedly brilliant parents are unable to control. She's also existentially bored at school and disguises her intelligence to try and make herself more popular, which doesn't work, and is dismissed by her teachers due to her intelligence and her "uncooperative behavior." The town where she lives will not allow her to be true to herself in public, and as a result she barely has an existence outside of her family. She despises school, the town, her schoolmates, the lady at the post office who spreads smug rumors that her missing father has abandoned the family in order to have an affair, and society's expectation that as a plain and outspoken young woman, she'll never amount to anything.
2) It's extremely hard for me to identify with Meg as an adult. Once Meg is no longer needed in the story to be Charles Wallace's devoted guardian, keeping him safe until such time as he can save the world, she essentially disappears within the interconnected L'Engle world. This isn't just because she's no longer a main character, or because the books are generally YA and don't swing back to her family until her eldest daughter hits her teen years: Meg's powers of empathy and telepathic communication (Kything, in this continuity,) are second to no one besides Charles Wallace, but after A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Meg's identity is pretty much erased. Her only narrative purpose now is to support her husband (and to provide him with her family connections, which advance his research considerably,) and to raise the next heroine, her oldest daughter Polly. I suppose you could say that she becomes a spiritual anchor for her family, but the truth is that by An Acceptable Time, the last novel clearly set in the Time universe and the only novel after the Time Quartet to return to the Murray family habit of time and space traveling, all of Meg's character development in A Wrinkle in Time, and A Wind in the Door, has been completely undone, and she's developed an inferiority complex about her intelligence, and chosen to be a stay-at-home mother primarily because she "doesn't want to compete," with her mother, a Nobel Laureate. This is despite the fact that she has an unfinished PhD in math and her mother is a cellular biologist. Meanwhile her other brothers Sandy and Dennys, the "Merely" slightly gifted family members, have no problems becoming a lawyer and a surgeon, respectively.
The thing is, during the first two books of the Time Quartet, Meg receives comparable training to Charles Wallace, is offered equal or greater opportunities to travel through time and space, and formed the basis of her romance with her future husband Calvin by dragging him along to learn the secret spiritual mysteries of time and space along with her. Yet Meg's importance to the universe is thrown by the wayside as soon as she has a child, despite the fact that she's canonically of equal or greater intelligence to her father and shown to be capable of both kything (telepathic communication between souls) and tessering (teleportation via... string theory, sort of, which normal humans are not equipped to handle.)
Does Meg have the right to chose to become a housewife and spend most of the ten years after A Swiftly Tilting Planet homeschooling her seven children? Yes. Do I understand her choice? Not at all.
3) Whatever happened to Charles Wallace? All of the L'Engle books featuring the Murray/O'Keefes, the Austins, or their reaccurring family friends like Canon Talis or Zachary Gray are set in the same, continuous crossover universe. Time has been substantially altered only once, at the end of A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and altering time into it's current shape was the world-altering task that Charles Wallace, supergenius child savior, was born to do. He's mentioned once or twice in later books featuring Meg's daughter Polly, as Polly's favorite uncle who is almost never there. While it's implied (especially in Arm of the Starfish, where Polly is just a hair too young to be the only main character,) that he keeps in touch with Meg (and possibly their mother, from whom they inherited the ability to kythe in the first place, though hers is rudimentary and untrained,) over their long-established telepathic connection, and that he might not even spend much time at all on earth or in this time, since he's been trained in tessering and kything by the L'Engle universe's versions of angels, and it was mentioned several times that Earth wasn't the only planet he would save. Presumably, he's out fighting the Echeroi (a cosmic force of hate and destruction, made up of souls that achieved non-being through hating... it's complicated, okay?) one star or soul at a time, but since Meg is no longer the main character, I can only presume that. Maybe she's living a double life, with half her soul and consciousness helping out Charles Wallace, and that's why she's satisfied with her life on earth as a wife and mother.
4) I dislike Vicky Austin as a protagonist. She's too passive: the Austin books are not about Vicky, they happen near Vicky. She later writes poems about them. Her identity as a poet and the "soul" of the family is especially grating compared to Meg's more proactive role as the soul and the spiritual protector of the Murray family, and she doesn't come into her own as a narrator or a character until near the end of A Ring of Endless Light, the fourth book that she can really be considered a character in. Her social and intellectual identity as a teenager after The Young Unicorns revolves around her love interests, and her eventual ability to Kythe (also in A Ring of Endless Light,) with her love interest Adam is somewhat cheapened by the fact that it exists mostly to rescue her from a mental breakdown. The fact that Vicky is used during A Ring of Endless Light and The Moon by Night to build the basis of Zachary Gray's redemption by being his love interest is also annoying, especially since the job is "finished" by Polly O'Keefe, who is two years younger than her and most definitely a minor when she replaces Vicky as Zach's love interest. (Actually, I think Zach is older than Vicky too, but I don't think there was ever an underage problem there - he's in college when he's pursuing a relationship with Polly during the second to last book, A House Like a Lotus.)
5) Why are all the heroines defined by their support or spiritual rescue of their male family members and love interests?
Maybe it's L'Engle's background: she was born in 1918, which could explain why most of her major romances contain men in their early twenties pursuing relationships with sixteen and seventeen year old girls. (except for Meg and Calvin, who attend both high school and college together. Calvin is at most a year or two older than Meg.) Maybe it's the only way she could get science fantasy with female protagonists published in 1962. Maybe she wanted her protagonists - Meg and Vicky are both based on her childhood - to have the same accomplishments she did, namely a husband and children.
6) I'm ambivalent about the "othering" of high intelligence in the Kairos (Murray/O'Keefe) half of the continuum. While it's clear that Madeline L'Engle believed that high intelligence and high empathy were good things, and that she wrote ultimately sympathetic characters of more typical IQ, the fact remains that by writing Charles Wallace as a metahuman and the rest of the family as approaching the metahuman, she reduced the ability of the reader to identify with them, or to see them as ordinary human beings instead of mystical spiritual saviors.
7) Why am I still writing about this? I desperately don't want to do any more Spanish homework.
Anyhow, just a few thoughts I have: keep in mind that I first read A Wrinkle in Time when I was eight, and that it's largely responsible for my love of science-fantasy and time and space traveling heroes, and the series as a whole may have had an unacceptably broad influence on my worldview.
2) It's extremely hard for me to identify with Meg as an adult. Once Meg is no longer needed in the story to be Charles Wallace's devoted guardian, keeping him safe until such time as he can save the world, she essentially disappears within the interconnected L'Engle world. This isn't just because she's no longer a main character, or because the books are generally YA and don't swing back to her family until her eldest daughter hits her teen years: Meg's powers of empathy and telepathic communication (Kything, in this continuity,) are second to no one besides Charles Wallace, but after A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Meg's identity is pretty much erased. Her only narrative purpose now is to support her husband (and to provide him with her family connections, which advance his research considerably,) and to raise the next heroine, her oldest daughter Polly. I suppose you could say that she becomes a spiritual anchor for her family, but the truth is that by An Acceptable Time, the last novel clearly set in the Time universe and the only novel after the Time Quartet to return to the Murray family habit of time and space traveling, all of Meg's character development in A Wrinkle in Time, and A Wind in the Door, has been completely undone, and she's developed an inferiority complex about her intelligence, and chosen to be a stay-at-home mother primarily because she "doesn't want to compete," with her mother, a Nobel Laureate. This is despite the fact that she has an unfinished PhD in math and her mother is a cellular biologist. Meanwhile her other brothers Sandy and Dennys, the "Merely" slightly gifted family members, have no problems becoming a lawyer and a surgeon, respectively.
The thing is, during the first two books of the Time Quartet, Meg receives comparable training to Charles Wallace, is offered equal or greater opportunities to travel through time and space, and formed the basis of her romance with her future husband Calvin by dragging him along to learn the secret spiritual mysteries of time and space along with her. Yet Meg's importance to the universe is thrown by the wayside as soon as she has a child, despite the fact that she's canonically of equal or greater intelligence to her father and shown to be capable of both kything (telepathic communication between souls) and tessering (teleportation via... string theory, sort of, which normal humans are not equipped to handle.)
Does Meg have the right to chose to become a housewife and spend most of the ten years after A Swiftly Tilting Planet homeschooling her seven children? Yes. Do I understand her choice? Not at all.
3) Whatever happened to Charles Wallace? All of the L'Engle books featuring the Murray/O'Keefes, the Austins, or their reaccurring family friends like Canon Talis or Zachary Gray are set in the same, continuous crossover universe. Time has been substantially altered only once, at the end of A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and altering time into it's current shape was the world-altering task that Charles Wallace, supergenius child savior, was born to do. He's mentioned once or twice in later books featuring Meg's daughter Polly, as Polly's favorite uncle who is almost never there. While it's implied (especially in Arm of the Starfish, where Polly is just a hair too young to be the only main character,) that he keeps in touch with Meg (and possibly their mother, from whom they inherited the ability to kythe in the first place, though hers is rudimentary and untrained,) over their long-established telepathic connection, and that he might not even spend much time at all on earth or in this time, since he's been trained in tessering and kything by the L'Engle universe's versions of angels, and it was mentioned several times that Earth wasn't the only planet he would save. Presumably, he's out fighting the Echeroi (a cosmic force of hate and destruction, made up of souls that achieved non-being through hating... it's complicated, okay?) one star or soul at a time, but since Meg is no longer the main character, I can only presume that. Maybe she's living a double life, with half her soul and consciousness helping out Charles Wallace, and that's why she's satisfied with her life on earth as a wife and mother.
4) I dislike Vicky Austin as a protagonist. She's too passive: the Austin books are not about Vicky, they happen near Vicky. She later writes poems about them. Her identity as a poet and the "soul" of the family is especially grating compared to Meg's more proactive role as the soul and the spiritual protector of the Murray family, and she doesn't come into her own as a narrator or a character until near the end of A Ring of Endless Light, the fourth book that she can really be considered a character in. Her social and intellectual identity as a teenager after The Young Unicorns revolves around her love interests, and her eventual ability to Kythe (also in A Ring of Endless Light,) with her love interest Adam is somewhat cheapened by the fact that it exists mostly to rescue her from a mental breakdown. The fact that Vicky is used during A Ring of Endless Light and The Moon by Night to build the basis of Zachary Gray's redemption by being his love interest is also annoying, especially since the job is "finished" by Polly O'Keefe, who is two years younger than her and most definitely a minor when she replaces Vicky as Zach's love interest. (Actually, I think Zach is older than Vicky too, but I don't think there was ever an underage problem there - he's in college when he's pursuing a relationship with Polly during the second to last book, A House Like a Lotus.)
5) Why are all the heroines defined by their support or spiritual rescue of their male family members and love interests?
Maybe it's L'Engle's background: she was born in 1918, which could explain why most of her major romances contain men in their early twenties pursuing relationships with sixteen and seventeen year old girls. (except for Meg and Calvin, who attend both high school and college together. Calvin is at most a year or two older than Meg.) Maybe it's the only way she could get science fantasy with female protagonists published in 1962. Maybe she wanted her protagonists - Meg and Vicky are both based on her childhood - to have the same accomplishments she did, namely a husband and children.
6) I'm ambivalent about the "othering" of high intelligence in the Kairos (Murray/O'Keefe) half of the continuum. While it's clear that Madeline L'Engle believed that high intelligence and high empathy were good things, and that she wrote ultimately sympathetic characters of more typical IQ, the fact remains that by writing Charles Wallace as a metahuman and the rest of the family as approaching the metahuman, she reduced the ability of the reader to identify with them, or to see them as ordinary human beings instead of mystical spiritual saviors.
7) Why am I still writing about this? I desperately don't want to do any more Spanish homework.
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Date: 2014-03-26 10:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-26 11:08 pm (UTC)... I sort of grew up on this series. I may have been inappropriately young for some of the later books when I read them (A House Like a Lotus and A Circle of Quiet stand out to me there,) but I totally recommend the entire continuum, though as I say I'm less fond as a whole of the Austins than I am of the Murray/O'Keefes.
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Date: 2014-03-27 02:14 am (UTC)I think you might have inadvertently nailed the reason why I could never finish any of the Austin books.
I loved the Time Quartet when I was young. I think A Swiftly Tilting Planet was my favorite by far, though. I read An Acceptable Time and was mostly ambivalent toward it. It was so many years ago that I actually forgot it until reading this post.
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Date: 2014-03-27 01:46 pm (UTC)An Acceptable Time, is odd. I mean, I like Polly (less as a teen than as a kid, actually - most of Polly's books she's either an observer with a small but crucial role because she's so young, or there's multiple protagonists,) but since so much of the plot is not about Polly, it's about "saving Zachary Gray," (Who has probably run out of chances by now, at least with L'Engle's underage heroines,) it runs into problems.
Also, the Murray family home was completely alien to me at that point, which made everything weird. I did like Louise and her snaky namesake, though. And the Murrays must always have a paranormally intelligent large stray dog - I'm beginning to think the dogs are sent on purpose.
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Date: 2014-03-27 06:22 am (UTC)*sulks in corner*
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Date: 2014-03-27 01:52 pm (UTC)The Time Quartet, at least, are mostly kids books - I don't know whether you'd be willing to drag through them in English, but aside from a couple concepts I've already outlined (tessering, kything, echtheroi - all of which are absolutely littered with greek when they're explained, you can tell that L'Engle took greek in school,) they're not terribly long or complicated. The vocabulary might be a little old, though.
(Also, sorry, I don't have a judge of how much you'd like to read whole books in english yet - I mean, I know you speak write it pretty well, and hang out in the sporkings, so I think you'd probably do okay if you could find them and wanted to give it a go. Anyway, the shipping problem is worrisome.)
no subject
Date: 2014-03-27 02:15 pm (UTC)Those book sound like something I would enjoy and I don't know whether I like them if I haven't read them. :)
Off-topic a little, there's a publishing company in my country whose FRIKIN' TRADEMARK is that they translate the first book from a series and drop it. Anvil of Ice from the Winter of the World trilogy by Micheal Scott Rohan (?) and the Edgeworld chronicles I can recall from the top of my head. WE DON'T EVEN HAVE DRESDEN FILES! THEY'LL TRANSLATE THINGS LIKE TWILIGHT AND FSOG AND NOT DRESDEN FILES!? They should be fired.
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Date: 2014-03-27 03:07 pm (UTC)(Also, I hear translations are hard to come by if the series doesn't sell a certain amount in English? Not sure how that works, but that could explain the Twilight thing. I know Harry Potter was translated practically everywhere, but that a lot of adult fantasy and sci-fi novels don't sell enough initially to necessarily get translated by some companies, or something like that.)
no subject
Date: 2014-03-27 03:29 pm (UTC)For example, Gort Ashryn trilogy. It's a hard sci-fi, set in 2999. The worldbuiling is INCREDIBLE, it blew my mind; the characterization, not so much. The author is homophobic and misogyistic and has never, ever interacted with a teenage girl in his life. Or any women. He absolutely can't write female characters. BUT MY GOD, THE WORLDBUILING. THERE'S SO MUCH SPACE. *sciencegasm* Buuut he also dwelves - in a very Estonian way - into deeper meanings behind morale, life, sacrifice and some other vague stuff in a very vague and bizarre way and in the last book I couldn't understand anymore what the hell was he even trying to say.
I don't know about the selling limit, though. I mean, they translated a book called The Last Ringbearer from a Russian author, which was essentially a fanfic from the baddies POV. I haven't read it, I don't know if it's any good. I do remember that there was an OC involved.
Sorry about rambling. I have a love-hate relationship with Gort Ashryn. It's very awesome and very offensive.
no subject
Date: 2014-03-27 03:42 pm (UTC)Hmmm... I'm just going by what I know of what books tend to get translated into french and spanish so that I see copies turning up on Amazon all the time. (Search for Interview with A Vampire and then buy novels for your Spanish lit class, then boggle at the fact that Amazon next offers you Twilight in Spanish...) I really don't know anything about policies of which books get translated into english, except that as a kid it took forever for Inkheart and the other books by Cornelia Funke, to be translated out of German.
Hmmm... maybe somebody making the decisions really liked The Last Ringbearer?
And I know what you mean about sci-fi and old, mysogynistic authors whose works are scientifically complex and often technically brilliant: I get so, so mad at Heinlein that I want to throw something at him, every time he makes an otherwise reasonable female character and then suddenly derails to talk about her boobs or how she "knew she wasn't cut out for competing in a man's field," so she became the extremely competent secretary that saves the male main character's bacon. Asimov at least remembers when he actually has female characters to make them human beings and that there is more than one personality that he can give them.
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Date: 2014-03-27 04:08 pm (UTC)I don't know, at first he gives a female character (Aisha) a kickass background.
...
Let me tell you about it. She goes to a engineering academy and she and only one other woman (I can't remeber her name) are wearing hijabs, both to conceal their faces. One time, some immature dudebros try to take their hijabs off and the other woman KICKS THEIR ASS WITH HER AWESOME MARTIAL ART SKILLS. So the women relate to each other and turns out Aisha is concealing her ugliness and the other woman is concealing her drop-dead gorgeous supermodel (literally) looks. So they go on to become badass engineers, they program the very core of artificial humans, Aisha inventing the mathematical formula for artificial morality. So she requests her mind and personality be incarnated as an artificial human when she dies and when she wakes up, she discovers that her supermodel best friend has donated her her looks!
So, she becomes a policewoman and when she meets the protag SHE IS LITERALLY REDUCED TO A FUNCTIONING UTERUS.
*BLOODCURLING DEATH SCREAM*
THIS FUCKING DUDE JUST GETS A WOMAN IN EACH BOOK WITH WHOM HE ~*DEEPLY AND PROFOUNDLY*~ FALLS IN LOVE AND THEN FUCKING LEAVES. IT IS FUCKING INFURATING HOW THESE BRILLIANT, POWERFUL, LIKEABLE WOMEN GET SHUNTED ASIDE FOR THIS FUCKING ~*MORALLY SUPERIOR*~ MENTALLY CONTSTIPATED IDIOT'S DRAMA! KUNNAS THINKS HE'S JUST SO BRILLIANT FOR FRIDGING THOSE WOMEN.
I need to read those books again. I need to memorize these women. *fumes*
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Date: 2014-03-27 11:58 pm (UTC)I applaud you on a rant of das-sporkian proportions. :D
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Date: 2014-03-28 06:03 am (UTC)And thank you. :)
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Date: 2014-03-28 02:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-03-28 04:35 pm (UTC)1)It's in Estonian and as far as I know, it hasn't been translated to English.
2)Some of it is very political, so I won't be able to post it to Das Sporking.
But I read it like three years ago, I don't remember excactly how it was. Misogynism I remember quite vividly, the rest not so much.
I hope Das Sporking gets up soon. It's one of my favourite websites.
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Date: 2014-03-28 04:40 pm (UTC)I hope the sporkings get back up soon - I'm still trying to catch up to the Belgariad, and the last chapter of The Eye Of Argon should be ready when the gates are open again.
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Date: 2014-03-28 05:02 pm (UTC)US is earlier, righ? It like late morning/noon there, I looked it up. So if anything happens, I would be ... in school or doing yardwork, I guess.
I myself am looking for the next chapter of Eragon. That book still has a special place in my heart. It was the book that got me into fantasy/sci-fi.
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Date: 2014-03-28 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-07 02:42 pm (UTC)And I've got to go do work stuff now, so I can't say much else.
I just wanted to say though - I totally want to be Charles Wallace when I grow up, kicking Echeroi ass all over the universe!
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Date: 2014-05-07 04:01 pm (UTC)*Grabs time unicorn.* Point me towards the Echeroi, I'll come with you. :D