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evelyn_bThe death of the swamp in A Girl of the Limberlost is emotionally unobtrusive, part of the background albeit always part of the background, and no one laments it or tries to stop it from happening – it’s just a fact of the setting. Elnora looks up from her busy schedule one day and realizes it's almost gone. She needs money for college, but she can no longer count on finding moths to sell:
After high school, Elnora gets a job teaching supplemental natural history courses for grade schools around the region. There’s an ecstatic scene in which she and her mother work out lesson plans, figuring out the best form of life to focus on for each month. It’s delightfully odd, like all the best parts of this book, and it’s also sad: this new program will teach children about the local ecosystem just as it’s being changed into something else entirely. The Limberlost swamp was a real place and it really did vanish, drained and cleared and smoothed over into a broad green and yellow patchwork of farmland and oil wells.
It feels strange for the book not to be “about” this just as it feels strange for it not to be “about” Elnora at high school or Elnora the traveling supplementary teacher. The things it is about – Christian forgiveness, good and bad blood, the value of Hard Knocks, and Living the Golden Rule – are not only less compelling than the swamp; they’re downright shadowy by comparison – smudgy sketches and half-filled outlines of stories. But it’s always been hard to write about the present when it’s falling away beneath you. I can’t blame Stratton-Porter for that.
In the final half of the book, once high school and the graduation ceremonies have been put to bed and Kate has had her day or two of painful revelation, Philip Ammon comes to town and the tale of the Straw Fiancee begins.
Philip Ammon is a young Chicago lawyer, ordered outdoors to recover from a long illness, who joins Elnora moth-hunting because he likes moths and because he finds Elnora fascinating. He brings some moth-catching knowledge of his own to the table, and together with Kate they have a jolly time of it. Philip also has a fiancée in Chicago, a charming society girl with “slated for demolition” written all over her.
Philip goes on being in love with both Elnora and Edith for a little while, a situation he handles rather badly. He tries to kiss Elnora before returning to Chicago, which offends and worries her, after all his talk of Edith, whom she guesses “would not want your lips to-morrow if she knew they had touched mine to-day.”
She also flatly refuses his request for “just one message from you to lock in my desk, and keep always.” Elnora’s a little bit of a prig, but I find her concern for Edith really likable here.
Philip gets back to Chicago with a splendid idea: Edith should have a dress made inspired by one of the beautiful moths he collected on his trip to Indiana! How romantic and original! She wears the dress to a dance celebrating the public announcement of their engagement. Everyone is impressed: what a lovely couple, what a clever idea! How admirable of Philip to have been thinking of Edith even in the wilds of Indiana!
Then, in the middle of a dance, Philip spots the big yellow moth that Elnora needs to complete her collection, and runs after it, shouting for a net and chloroform and making a big scene of rushing after it. Everyone thinks the moth is for Edith – how sweet! But Edith, who has been pointedly ignoring Philip’s rhapsodies about Elnora all summer, realizes the truth right away. The moth is for Elnora, and the dress is also for Elnora. Philip is in love with Elnora! She’s paralyzed with fury and humiliation, and responds by throwing Philip’s ring on the ground and refusing to speak to him. Meanwhile Philip pretends not to know, or maybe really doesn’t know, what the big deal is. Because Philip, at his very best, is an idiot. Philip! Maybe this plan to create a fashion tribute to your swamp crush at your own engagement party wasn’t so clever and romantic of you after all! Maybe you could have anticipated that it might cause some hard feelings! Or maybe not; people think and fail to think all kinds of things.
Philip and his dad consider Edith’s outburst to be completely damning of her character, and Philip declares that his love for Edith is dead. “If she can act like that at a ball," Philip says, "before hundreds, over a thing of which I thought nothing at all, she would go into actual physical fits and spasms over some of the household crises I've seen the mater meet with a smile."
The italics are mine. Presumably this is not the first “scene” that Philip has witnessed from Edith, but it seems disingenuous to pretend it’s one of the petty ones. Not that they ought to get back together - Edith and Philip aren’t really compatible; it’s clear from his conversations with Elnora that he thinks she’s going to change from social butterfly into his very different ideal wife the minute they get back from their honeymoon, an assumption he has no evidence for whatsoever and doesn’t seem to have discussed with her in any way. They don’t seem very interested in each other in general except as flattering mirrors; that Philip never tries to find out why Edith was upset in the first place is just a symptom.
What's interesting is that Stratton-Porter invents this devastatingly intimate public putdown for Edith and then makes her "sympathetic" characters totally fail to understand it. Everyone at the party is in ecstasies over the moth dress and Philip's moth and how sickeningly happy he and Edith must be. Edith knows the truth and can’t hide that she knows the truth, but she can’t explain why she’s so upset without embarrassing herself further. She's trapped inside her wounded ego like a Cassandra of humiliation. It’s as brilliantly painful a scenario as Kate Comstock is a character. Does Stratton-Porter realize how good it is? She seems to think this is just what Edith deserves for being a shallow society brat and for taking Philip’s love for granted.
Philip and Edith are both a little awful and I’m sorry for them both, but I’m sorrier for Edith, who gets dozens of pages on how awful she is and how little she has to offer anyone. Edith's eventual redemption requires her acknowledging the superiority of Elnora and all of Elnora’s values, some of which are pretty subjective. Even the spaniel best friend character who never opens his mouth except to pledge fealty to Edith in all things is made to admit that what he really wants is “the smaller home of comfort, the furtherance of your ambitions, the palatable meals regularly served, and little children around you. [. . . ] You find out what you want to do, and be, that is a man’s work in the world, and I will plan our home, with no thought save your comfort.”
It's all very Tolstoyan. I don’t care about fashion or smart sets at all in real life, but every time a fictional character gets excoriated for “selfishly” preferring tailors to children I get defensive. Children are people, not cures for selfishness! What’s the difference between Elnora needing three new dresses for graduation and Edith needing to look her best at the engagement party? Have you considered that parties can be fun?
Philip gets zero redemption because he never notices that he did anything wrong, but he does get to marry Elnora, which is what they both think they want, so all’s well that ends well, I guess. I wish Elnora wouldn’t haul off and marry the first self-righteous rando who shows up to wring his hands over her “perfection” in an off-putting way. Or the second, if we count Pete the Peeping Tom from the first half of the book – but Pete’s “breeding” was insufficient and his spelling was bad, so he was never really in the running. Elnora, maybe you should do your supplementary teaching round and a year of college before you get engaged; there’s something to be said for having met more than five people your entire life.
There are a few other things to note: there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it temperance lesson (Billy feeds some old wine to pigs; it makes them drunk; Wes is horrified and makes Maggie throw it all out for the sake of Billy's soul!). I liked Philip’s sister Polly and her determination to be kind to whichever one of Phil’s fiancées he ended up with. Elnora gives an oddly eugenic explanation of the ethics of moth-catching:
“Sometimes I think it is cruel to take such creatures from freedom, even for an hour, but it is the only way to teach the masses of people how to distinguish the pests they should destroy from the harmless ones of great beauty, and secure propagation privileges for them.”
Oh, and the much-lauded Freckles and the Swamp Angel show up in the flesh, and are just as uninteresting as they were when they were stories.
One thousand thanks toosprey_archer for sponsoring this wonderfully weird, flawed but fascinating book! I might never have gotten around to reading it otherwise, and my life would have been a little poorer for it, like all those benighted suckers who smash moths in ignorance and/or leave creepy notes in other people’s sheds.
Men all around were clearing available land. The trees fell wherever corn would grow. The swamp was broken by several gravel roads, dotted in places around the edge with little frame houses, and the machinery of oil wells; one especially low place around the region of Freckles’ room was nearly all that remained of the original. Wherever the tress fell the moisture dried, the creeks ceased to flow, the river ran low and at times the bed was dry. With unbroken sweep the winds of the west came, gathering force with every mile and howled and raved, threatening to tear the shingles from the roof, blowing the surface from the soil in clouds of fine dust, and rapidly changing everything. From coming in with two or three rare moths in a day, in three years’ time Elnora had grown to be delighted with finding two or three. Big pursy caterpillars could not be picked from their favorite bushes, when there were no bushes. Dragon-flies would not hover over dry places. . .
After high school, Elnora gets a job teaching supplemental natural history courses for grade schools around the region. There’s an ecstatic scene in which she and her mother work out lesson plans, figuring out the best form of life to focus on for each month. It’s delightfully odd, like all the best parts of this book, and it’s also sad: this new program will teach children about the local ecosystem just as it’s being changed into something else entirely. The Limberlost swamp was a real place and it really did vanish, drained and cleared and smoothed over into a broad green and yellow patchwork of farmland and oil wells.
It feels strange for the book not to be “about” this just as it feels strange for it not to be “about” Elnora at high school or Elnora the traveling supplementary teacher. The things it is about – Christian forgiveness, good and bad blood, the value of Hard Knocks, and Living the Golden Rule – are not only less compelling than the swamp; they’re downright shadowy by comparison – smudgy sketches and half-filled outlines of stories. But it’s always been hard to write about the present when it’s falling away beneath you. I can’t blame Stratton-Porter for that.
In the final half of the book, once high school and the graduation ceremonies have been put to bed and Kate has had her day or two of painful revelation, Philip Ammon comes to town and the tale of the Straw Fiancee begins.
Philip Ammon is a young Chicago lawyer, ordered outdoors to recover from a long illness, who joins Elnora moth-hunting because he likes moths and because he finds Elnora fascinating. He brings some moth-catching knowledge of his own to the table, and together with Kate they have a jolly time of it. Philip also has a fiancée in Chicago, a charming society girl with “slated for demolition” written all over her.
“What interests Edith Carr? Let me think! First, I believe she takes pride in being just a little handsomer and better dressed than any girl of her set. She is interested in having a beautiful home, fine appointments about her, in being petted, praised, and the acknowledged leader of society. She likes to find new things which amuse her, and to always and in all circumstances have her own way about everything.”
“Good gracious!” cried Elnora, staring at him. “But what does she do? How does she spend her time?”
“Spend her time!” repeated Ammon. “Well, she would call that a joke. Her days are never long enough. There is endless shopping, to find the pretty things; regular visits to the dressmakers, calls, parties, theatres, entertainments. She is always rushed. I never get to see half as much of her as I would like.”
“But I mean work,” persisted Elnora. “In what is she interested that is useful to the world?”
“Me!” cried Ammon promptly.
Philip goes on being in love with both Elnora and Edith for a little while, a situation he handles rather badly. He tries to kiss Elnora before returning to Chicago, which offends and worries her, after all his talk of Edith, whom she guesses “would not want your lips to-morrow if she knew they had touched mine to-day.”
Elnora drew back and stared at him with wide eyes. “I’d strike you sooner!” she said. “Have I ever said or done anything in your presence that made you feel free to ask that, Philip Ammon?”
She also flatly refuses his request for “just one message from you to lock in my desk, and keep always.” Elnora’s a little bit of a prig, but I find her concern for Edith really likable here.
Philip gets back to Chicago with a splendid idea: Edith should have a dress made inspired by one of the beautiful moths he collected on his trip to Indiana! How romantic and original! She wears the dress to a dance celebrating the public announcement of their engagement. Everyone is impressed: what a lovely couple, what a clever idea! How admirable of Philip to have been thinking of Edith even in the wilds of Indiana!
Then, in the middle of a dance, Philip spots the big yellow moth that Elnora needs to complete her collection, and runs after it, shouting for a net and chloroform and making a big scene of rushing after it. Everyone thinks the moth is for Edith – how sweet! But Edith, who has been pointedly ignoring Philip’s rhapsodies about Elnora all summer, realizes the truth right away. The moth is for Elnora, and the dress is also for Elnora. Philip is in love with Elnora! She’s paralyzed with fury and humiliation, and responds by throwing Philip’s ring on the ground and refusing to speak to him. Meanwhile Philip pretends not to know, or maybe really doesn’t know, what the big deal is. Because Philip, at his very best, is an idiot. Philip! Maybe this plan to create a fashion tribute to your swamp crush at your own engagement party wasn’t so clever and romantic of you after all! Maybe you could have anticipated that it might cause some hard feelings! Or maybe not; people think and fail to think all kinds of things.
Philip and his dad consider Edith’s outburst to be completely damning of her character, and Philip declares that his love for Edith is dead. “If she can act like that at a ball," Philip says, "before hundreds, over a thing of which I thought nothing at all, she would go into actual physical fits and spasms over some of the household crises I've seen the mater meet with a smile."
The italics are mine. Presumably this is not the first “scene” that Philip has witnessed from Edith, but it seems disingenuous to pretend it’s one of the petty ones. Not that they ought to get back together - Edith and Philip aren’t really compatible; it’s clear from his conversations with Elnora that he thinks she’s going to change from social butterfly into his very different ideal wife the minute they get back from their honeymoon, an assumption he has no evidence for whatsoever and doesn’t seem to have discussed with her in any way. They don’t seem very interested in each other in general except as flattering mirrors; that Philip never tries to find out why Edith was upset in the first place is just a symptom.
What's interesting is that Stratton-Porter invents this devastatingly intimate public putdown for Edith and then makes her "sympathetic" characters totally fail to understand it. Everyone at the party is in ecstasies over the moth dress and Philip's moth and how sickeningly happy he and Edith must be. Edith knows the truth and can’t hide that she knows the truth, but she can’t explain why she’s so upset without embarrassing herself further. She's trapped inside her wounded ego like a Cassandra of humiliation. It’s as brilliantly painful a scenario as Kate Comstock is a character. Does Stratton-Porter realize how good it is? She seems to think this is just what Edith deserves for being a shallow society brat and for taking Philip’s love for granted.
Philip and Edith are both a little awful and I’m sorry for them both, but I’m sorrier for Edith, who gets dozens of pages on how awful she is and how little she has to offer anyone. Edith's eventual redemption requires her acknowledging the superiority of Elnora and all of Elnora’s values, some of which are pretty subjective. Even the spaniel best friend character who never opens his mouth except to pledge fealty to Edith in all things is made to admit that what he really wants is “the smaller home of comfort, the furtherance of your ambitions, the palatable meals regularly served, and little children around you. [. . . ] You find out what you want to do, and be, that is a man’s work in the world, and I will plan our home, with no thought save your comfort.”
It's all very Tolstoyan. I don’t care about fashion or smart sets at all in real life, but every time a fictional character gets excoriated for “selfishly” preferring tailors to children I get defensive. Children are people, not cures for selfishness! What’s the difference between Elnora needing three new dresses for graduation and Edith needing to look her best at the engagement party? Have you considered that parties can be fun?
Philip gets zero redemption because he never notices that he did anything wrong, but he does get to marry Elnora, which is what they both think they want, so all’s well that ends well, I guess. I wish Elnora wouldn’t haul off and marry the first self-righteous rando who shows up to wring his hands over her “perfection” in an off-putting way. Or the second, if we count Pete the Peeping Tom from the first half of the book – but Pete’s “breeding” was insufficient and his spelling was bad, so he was never really in the running. Elnora, maybe you should do your supplementary teaching round and a year of college before you get engaged; there’s something to be said for having met more than five people your entire life.
There are a few other things to note: there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it temperance lesson (Billy feeds some old wine to pigs; it makes them drunk; Wes is horrified and makes Maggie throw it all out for the sake of Billy's soul!). I liked Philip’s sister Polly and her determination to be kind to whichever one of Phil’s fiancées he ended up with. Elnora gives an oddly eugenic explanation of the ethics of moth-catching:
“Sometimes I think it is cruel to take such creatures from freedom, even for an hour, but it is the only way to teach the masses of people how to distinguish the pests they should destroy from the harmless ones of great beauty, and secure propagation privileges for them.”
Oh, and the much-lauded Freckles and the Swamp Angel show up in the flesh, and are just as uninteresting as they were when they were stories.
One thousand thanks to
osprey_archer for sponsoring this wonderfully weird, flawed but fascinating book! I might never have gotten around to reading it otherwise, and my life would have been a little poorer for it, like all those benighted suckers who smash moths in ignorance and/or leave creepy notes in other people’s sheds.
no subject
Date: 2017-05-19 06:56 pm (UTC)I'm not sure I would say the book isn't about the swamp, though - it's right there in the title, after all. But it's about a lot of other things as well and many of them are not as successful as the swamp, and the swamp does get pushed to the background by the end - there's Elnora and Philip's sunny summer idyll, and then most there's very little swamp after that.
GOSH THOUGH, isn't Philip the worst? He'd have to be far more compelling to justify taking all that time away from the swamp. I never understood how he got engaged to Edith in the first place when he thinks so little of her: his description of her to Elnora is so dismissive. Is it just that he likes having a fiancee who is "just a little handsomer and better dressed than any girl of her set," never mind if he actually likes her as a person? Because if so, then he's just as shallow as he accuses Edith of being.
The scene would have worked better IMO if he at least tried to talk her up and floundered as he realized that the things Edith liked were not things that would impress Elnora or even things that really interested him much. It still wouldn't make him admirable, but "got engaged in a haze of romantic attraction that hid the basic unsuitability of the match" is still better than "engaged to an unsuitable girl in full knowledge of that fact."
Also his insistence that Edith is making mountains of out molehills when Philip chases a moth through their engagement party to send to this other girl who knows - a girl he tried to kiss! A girl he has every reason to know he's in love with! Of course Edith is upset; it's disingenuous of Philip to pretend to be shocked and baffled as to why.
Polly is delightful, though, with her determination to get on well with whoever Philip ends up marrying. And the temperance homily with the pigs will never cease to be hilarious.
And I did love that scene where Elnora and her mother work out Elnora's natural history lesson plans. I would have happily read chapters of that, and no Philip in sight.
no subject
Date: 2017-05-19 11:10 pm (UTC)You're right, it is about the swamp - it's just that the death of the swamp is so quiet and inevitable for all the characters that I don't know how to take it. My 90s wetlands activist mind keeps expecting someone to try to stop it, and no one does - at least not in this story.
(when I met an environmental historian a couple of weeks ago, I IMMEDIATELY recommended this book).
I never understood how he got engaged to Edith in the first place when he thinks so little of her: his description of her to Elnora is so dismissive.
I don't get the impression that Philip completely grasps that women are people. He's got a sister, presumably he has female friends, but "love" is different. Edith's his magazine-romance ideal of a high-society sweetheart; he's got another largely unrelated wife-and-mother ideal based on his own mother, and seems to think that because Edith has been excellent arm candy in the season of arm candy, she will naturally be an excellent wife when the time comes to be a wife. Because her main interest outside herself is him! So of course she'll adjust seamlessly to her new role in the Great Epic of Philip. The idea of having ordinary human conversations and interests in common with The Love Interest really seems to be a new one for him.
Philip's so awful it's fascinating. He's not a compelling character, you're right - except for being the worst fiance, he's kind of a nonentity - but in the one area where he's memorably awful, he's SO AWFUL. I find his pigheaded false innocence about his feelings for Elnora so believable - that flat refusal to let his right hand know what his left is doing, congratulating himself on the exquisite self-control with which he plans to pine for Elnora after he's married to Edith. . . It's very human. I could sympathize if he ever noticed he was doing it, but of course if he noticed he was doing it it would spoil the illusion of blamelessness and WE CAN'T HAVE THAT. Self-awareness is for shallow bitches only; Philip can't have any. :(
If the second half of this book had been all about Kate learning to appreciate nature and be a better person, instead of Philip failing to learn anything except maybe "consider marrying someone you actually like," I would have been so much happier. Not that I'm unhappy! But a little Philip goes a long way.
no subject
Date: 2017-05-20 08:50 pm (UTC)Gosh, though, it's still so sad that the original Limberlost is gone. Although I guess with a name like Limberlost that may have been almost inevitable.
If Philip's marriage to Edith had gone through, he would have been utterly baffled by her continued social butterfly flitting around. But she's supposed to transform... into another kind of butterfly! What has happened? He sits at his desk and pines for his lost
LenoreElnora, gazing through the window at the mothless wilds of Chicago, while Edith flits out of the house to yet another party.Anyway, thank you for reviewing this for me! Ten dollars v. well spent on my part. If you're still interested in doing reviews for donations in the future I will def. take you up on it again.
no subject
Date: 2017-05-21 03:15 pm (UTC)Limberlost is such a magical name, and the story behind it is so prosaic (a dude called "Limber" got lost).
"The Mothless Wilds" would be a good title for the earnestly depressing Modern Novel about Philip and Edith's marriage. The grim yellow bulbs of his law office make firefly ghosts in the window glass as he smooths Elnora's dismissive last letter against his knee. The nights are too still on his well-appointed street. In Onabasha, the wild night noises have also been silenced, the countryside as mothless as this city block. Progress! Progress and Success! Bright words in youth, in middle age so bitter! Almost as bitter. . . as Love!
no subject
Date: 2017-05-22 01:17 pm (UTC)I don't think I would read "The Mothless Wilds," but I would def. read your review of it if only the book existed. Does Elnora eventually succumb to Philip's charms (such as they are), or does she resist until the end and then look back ruefully as an old lady, sure that she allowed her stringent morality to snatch for her the one chance at happiness she had in life?
Personally I think Elnora could be quite happy as a Roving Naturalist Instructor, but I don't think characters are allowed that sort of happiness in this kind of Modern Novel.