Thursday's
Apr. 30th, 2009 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrian_turtleIt took me a long time to stop despising Margaret Thursday for being so vain and obsessed with nice clothes. Sure, I recognized her virtues on first reading. She's brave, loyal, compassionate, protective of her friends, stubbornly independent. (30 years ago, it didn't seem strange to see those presented as admirable qualities in a little girl who was not especially pretty or clever. ) I thought her desire for nice clothes was shallow and petty at best, and her loyalty to her fancy underwear undercut her loyalty to her friends.
I think I was 8 or 9, the first time I read Thursday's Child, and I understood perfectly well how a person could sometimes be brave and loyal and heroic, and sometimes be so overcome with selfishness or arrogance as to do exactly the wrong thing. In the abstract, it made sense that vanity could be that kind of problem as well, but it was so far beyond my experience I couldn't really grasp it. Rereading it around 1990, I saw Margaret as a child in an adventure story, which is different from being a young woman in a romantic story (she doesn't even flirt.) So her obsession with embroidery on her underwear started to look implausible or creepy, and I didn't look back at the book for almost 20 years.
Then I read Rumer Goden's Episode of Sparrows.* Lovejoy is a less likable child than Margaret. Lovejoy comes across as quite a bit more damaged, either because she's not the protagonist of a children's book, or because she didn't start with ten years being cared for by somebody who loved her. Her clothes are pathetically inadequate, and she tries so hard to keep them as nice as possible. It doesn't look like vanity. It looks like Lovejoy is clinging to the symbols of her mother's care for her, and of her own status as a sophisticated child who danced on the stage. If she keeps up appearances well enough, maybe she won't have to acknowledge her mother abandoned her. I read it a few weeks ago, and was struck with sympathetic understanding for Margaret Thursday, who has no memory of her biological parents since she was abandoned as an infant. The baby clothes they left her with ("three of everything, all of the very best quality") are mainly valuable as tokens that they loved her. When she has to leave her childhood home, the old baby clothes get remade into underwear with elaborate trimmings**, because the woman who raised her can't bear to send her off with nothing.
Meanwhile, my mother expresses concern that I don't have the right summer clothes. She frets that I will spend all available money on books, and go around looking like a ragamuffin. I am learning to be more patient with her.
*Papersky spoke very well of something by Rumer Godden a few years ago. In the course of looking for the book about the house, I found this. And several other fascinating books, which are leading to paired readings so strange I want to post about each individually.
**Can't you just imagine doing that now? With all the velcro and elastic, and appliques of flowers or animals?
I think I was 8 or 9, the first time I read Thursday's Child, and I understood perfectly well how a person could sometimes be brave and loyal and heroic, and sometimes be so overcome with selfishness or arrogance as to do exactly the wrong thing. In the abstract, it made sense that vanity could be that kind of problem as well, but it was so far beyond my experience I couldn't really grasp it. Rereading it around 1990, I saw Margaret as a child in an adventure story, which is different from being a young woman in a romantic story (she doesn't even flirt.) So her obsession with embroidery on her underwear started to look implausible or creepy, and I didn't look back at the book for almost 20 years.
Then I read Rumer Goden's Episode of Sparrows.* Lovejoy is a less likable child than Margaret. Lovejoy comes across as quite a bit more damaged, either because she's not the protagonist of a children's book, or because she didn't start with ten years being cared for by somebody who loved her. Her clothes are pathetically inadequate, and she tries so hard to keep them as nice as possible. It doesn't look like vanity. It looks like Lovejoy is clinging to the symbols of her mother's care for her, and of her own status as a sophisticated child who danced on the stage. If she keeps up appearances well enough, maybe she won't have to acknowledge her mother abandoned her. I read it a few weeks ago, and was struck with sympathetic understanding for Margaret Thursday, who has no memory of her biological parents since she was abandoned as an infant. The baby clothes they left her with ("three of everything, all of the very best quality") are mainly valuable as tokens that they loved her. When she has to leave her childhood home, the old baby clothes get remade into underwear with elaborate trimmings**, because the woman who raised her can't bear to send her off with nothing.
Meanwhile, my mother expresses concern that I don't have the right summer clothes. She frets that I will spend all available money on books, and go around looking like a ragamuffin. I am learning to be more patient with her.
*Papersky spoke very well of something by Rumer Godden a few years ago. In the course of looking for the book about the house, I found this. And several other fascinating books, which are leading to paired readings so strange I want to post about each individually.
**Can't you just imagine doing that now? With all the velcro and elastic, and appliques of flowers or animals?
