evelyn_b

The 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:

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.

( This is not a story about that. )

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.

osprey_archer gave me a list of books to read in exchange for a donation to the ACLU, and A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter was one of them. You can also sponsor a post with a $10 donation, if you would like to find out what I think of any book. This is Part 1 because I'm only four chapters into A Girl of the Limberlost. Part Two will happen next week.

Elnora Comstock lives in the swamp with her sad, mad, bad mother Kate, who doesn’t want Elnora going to high school and doesn’t mind withholding important information (like whether or not you have to pay for books) in order to ensure that Elnora is extra humiliated on her first day. But Elnora is determined, even though her clothes are all wrong and she has to walk three miles to town. What's three miles? She walks all over the back country anyway, collecting moths and things; she might as well walk to the big stone high school and get an education. Elnora has some hopes of becoming a schoolteacher and using her specimens in the classroom. But her mother, who was a teacher herself before she was married and widowed in quick succession, has no patience for Elnora or any of her dreams.

Elnora hides her lunch in a box under the bridge so she won't have to carry it in an unfashionable pail, but she looks so outlandish anyway with her thick shoes and her long skirt that she might as well have taken the pail, too, and saved her lunch from being stolen. Her first day at school could have been a lot more awful – almost no one openly taunts her for her clothes, for example, though someone does change her name on the board from Comstock to Cornstalk – but it’s hard to have a sense of perspective when you’re sixteen. She learns that textbooks have to be purchased and there is an additional tuition of twenty dollars, and almost gives up. It's not so much the cost as the betrayal. Why didn't her mother tell her? Why did she trust her mother enough not to find out for herself?

On her way home, she meets her neighbors, Wes and Maggie Sinton, who have looked after her for many years and would really like to buy her some things for school, especially since their own children died young of diphtheria. Elnora’s principled stance against charity is frustrating here, and a little inconsiderate of Wes and Maggie, who would get as much enjoyment out of buying nice clothes for Elnora as Elnora would out of having them, and probably a little more. I have to cut her some slack because of her upbringing, but I hope at least part of this book will be about Elnora learning to accept gifts. It might not, though.

( Then because she was a woman, she sat on a log and looked at her shoes. )

So far, so fascinating. I don’t particularly like Elnora – I feel bad for her and I feel impatient with her blanket refusal of “charity” (as a kid I would have accepted it as a virtue, but now I relate far more to the gift-givers) – but I don’t have much of a sense of her as a person. There are brief glimpses – when she sasses back to a high school student who is rude to her, then immediately reproves herself for making an enemy first thing, her aforementioned attempt to heap coals of fire on her mother’s head – but she’s not yet a vivid character. Nor, really, are Wes and Maggie – total sweethearts with sympathetic motives, yes, distinct people, not so much.

Kate stands out, mainly because she’s so unlike a book character, and so like an impossibly querulous person you might meet in real life: indifferent to your sympathy, impervious to life lessons or night-visiting ghosts, unbeautiful in her suffering except perhaps in her own mind. Will she learn to love again? Maybe, but I'm not sure how much it'll help. It's easy to embrace Ebeneezer Scrooge because he never had any children.

One thing I don’t know, because I’ve avoided looking at anything that might have spoilers in it: is this a sequel? We keep getting references to background characters and events that are not explained. “Across the fence and field, along the old trail once trodden by a boy’s bitter agony, now stumbled a white-faced girl, sick at heart.” What boy? There’s no further or previous mention of him, unless it’s the “Freckles” from whom Elnora inherited her shed and whose story “we all” are supposed to know, according to Elnora’s conversation – her dead father Robert? Maybe it will all be explained later, but that abrupt and mysterious “boy” suggests an ongoing series of Limberlost Adventures in Capitalism. We’ll see! (maybe).