Subject: Re: vocational guidance & Squalor
From: Lucy Pearson (lucy@ejpearson.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Wed Jan 05 2000 - 07:02:30 EST
----- Original Message -----
From: <AntiUtopia@aol.com>
To: <bananafish@lists.nyu.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2000 11:35 PM
Subject: Re: vocational guidance & Squalor
> In a message dated 1/4/00 5:27:04 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> lucy@ejpearson.freeserve.co.uk writes:
>
> >
> > Hear, hear. "Uncle Wiggily" is one of my favourites. The ending, when
> she
> > says "I was a nice girl, wasn't I" is one of the most beautiful things I
> have
> > ever read. I am also very fond of "Just Before the War WIth the
Eskimo's",
> > although I maybe wouldn't suggest it particularly for teaching.
> >
> > Love, (My two pence, since I'm English) Lucy-Ruth
>
> I'd love to hear you expand on this...why do you think it was so
beautiful?
>
> Jim
>
There are so many beautiful truths which really chime with me in "Uncle
Wiggily". I remember, at about age thirteen, writing tht particular line in
my diary. It is such a heartfelt cry, and one which I'm sure all of us have
felt at some time. At thirteen, is fitted with my general teenage angst
about whether I could ever get to be a worthwhile person. Looking at the
story now, it is even more powerful Eloise is a young woman in a marriage
she doesn't understand with a man she doesn't love. She struggles to
understand her own child. It seems to me that in her heart she knows which
way she wants to be going - that is the point of the story about Walt and
"Uncle Wiggily" - but she doesn't understand how to get there. Instead, she
tries to follow a depressing blueprint for the "hard-boiled suburban
housewife", picking on Ramona and on the housemaid. That is not enough for
Eloise. She has totally lost sight of what she ever was and, to use my own
phrase, never has succeeded in growing into "a worthwhile human being", or
at least that's how she feels. One of the nice thigs about this story is it
has the purity of spirit which the Glass family represents, but a lot more
clouded and poorly articulated, more how it usually is in the real world, in
fact. And those last few words represent, for me, a turning point for
Eloise, because in that one drunken afternoon she's examined, for the first
time, exactlywhat it is that's happening. Wow!
Also, there is that fantastic description of Mary-Jane as a girl "with
little or no wherewithal for being left alone in a room". That kills me.
Oh, I have't done justice to what I feel at all, and this story deserves a
much better thught out explanation. Maybe I will go away and do one (in
betweeen my essays on Colerige and on When or were does a text begin!) but I
had to answer now for fear i would never get around to it.
Lol,
Lucy-Ruth
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