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Kitty Calash

~ Confessions of a Known Bonnet-Wearer

Kitty Calash

Tag Archives: literature

Wicked Inspiration

28 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by kittycalash in Art Rant, History, Living History, personal, Philosophy, Reenacting

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

anarchist guide to historic house museums, Hamilton, historical reenactors, history, interpretation, literature, living history, passion, progressive reenacting, Reenacting

You know that musical? The one you can’t get tickets to unless they were willed to you by your grandmother because she was lucky enough to stumble out of the Tardis right at the box office on opening day, but had to buy them for, like, six years from now, and they’re actually for the Kansas City production? The one in which the founding fathers are, you know, brown? My friends and family assumed I’d hate the whole idea, but I don’t. Like so many people, I love it, and not just for the music, though my preferred method of psyching myself up for GeeDubs1790 or What Cheer Day is listening to the Stones or the Beastie Boys all the way up.

So, what then, interests me in “Hamilton,” and why do I think it relates to interpretation? This: the way that the show filters the concerns of the late eighteenth century through the lens of the twenty-first could make for enlightening listening.

My Shot gives me goosebumps: why? Is it because history and civics are finally sexy?

Maybe. But “Hamilton” as a whole, per Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker, “is a hymn to the allure that America promises the immigrant who aspires to reach its shores; it is also an argument for the invigorating power that this nation’s porous borders, and porous identity, have always offered.”

Porous identity. That’s part of why I’m fascinated. But just as “Sleep No More” and Occupy Providence (really really) were partial inspirations for What Cheer Day, “Hamilton” strikes me as the kind of production worth paying attention to. No, I am not suggesting that the paunchy reenactors start channeling their inner Biggie, though I might well pay to see that.

No, what I’m suggesting is that we reconsider what it is we’re doing out there on the field and in the historic houses, and not just what but how and why. Hamilton takes an unexpected approach to history and it’s going gangbusters, while Amazing Grace tanked. So it’s not about the costuming authenticity, though I implore you not to give that up. It’s about the passion. It’s about coming at things sideways.

What makes you love doing laundry, drilling with precision, telling local gossip, making soap, or whatever it is that you love best about your place in the past? Why does all this matter to you so much? What is it that we can learn about today as you teach us about the past? Let loose that love and passion, share those insights, and ten to one you’ll have more fun and excite more visitors.

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Longbourn: Book Review

19 Saturday Oct 2013

Posted by kittycalash in Book Review, Literature

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

18th century, book review, common dress, common people, common soldier, literature, servant girls, servants

The Chocolate Girl is adapted for the cover of Jo Baker’s new book

 On Sunday, I read the NYT review of Jo Baker’s new book, Longbourn. As soon as I finished the review, I ordered the book, which arrived Wednesday evening. By 2:00 AM Thursday, I had finished it.

I like Austen, but my favorite Austen novel is Mansfield Park, not Pride & Prejudice. The BBC and other adaptations sometimes make the world of her novels seem too cloistered, too precious, and too refined to me. (Mrs Hurst Dancing can be a helpful corrective.) So of course I was captivated by the premise of Longbourn: “The world of the people who laid the fires, cooked the meals and fetched the horses for Jane Austen’s Bennet family.”

The story was engaging–heck, I stayed up until 2:00AM  to find out how it ended–and while I found it slightly romantic for my taste, on the whole, the world was believable.

For one thing, there is plenty of mud. And Sarah the housemaid must clean the mud off the Bennett girls’ petticoats. The hauling of water, laying of fires, and the chill and exhaustion the maids feel is pretty well rendered. Baker addresses the question I’ve always had, How did servants tolerate servitude? by portraying Sarah’s struggle with resentment and resignation to her lot.

I thought, too, that the way Baker described women as “breeding” was also good; she referred as well to Elizabeth Bennett’s “dark, musky” armpits, and that seemed a nice way to slip in historical hygiene information. But women in English gentry were valued for their breeding capabilities: the need for a male heir didn’t die with Henry VIII, and it is much of what drives, or drove, the plot of Downton Abbey. For women, the past was a smaller world, and Sarah’s life is particularly small. Her carriage rides help define the very real confinement of her world.

There are a few slips: backpack instead of knapsack once or twice, but not many. It feels well-researched, well imagined, and believable. I don’t want to wreck it for you, so I won’t go into too much…there are some classic plot twists and devices that I put up with because they’re so typical of the literature of the period. I particularly enjoyed that Sarah reads from Mr Bennett’s library, including Pamela. It was a nice way to reinforce Wickham’s creepiness, and the echoes between the novel derived from a novel, in which  fictional characters read real novels, delighted me. (Being a fictional character myself.)

Jo Baker’s not Hilary Mantel-– this isn’t the kind of writing where the language stops you cold and sentences leave you breathless with awe, but for historical fiction derived from Jane Austen, Baker’s book is excellent and well-written.

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A Digression on Lofting

10 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by kittycalash in History, Literature

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Tags

Amanda Vickery, children's books, Hugh Lofting, illustration, literature

20121210-184656.jpg
You could blame the Doctor. It’s not entirely his fault, but at an early age I discovered the Dr. Dolittle books and was captivated: talking animals, quirky illustrations, an idyllic-mythical English past without dragons? I’m moving there, please write.

I was reminded of this when Amanda Vickery tweeted about favourite children’s book illustrators and the article in the Guardian, and I thought of how much my son’s drawings have lately reminded me of Lofting’s, and how much he and I love the books. Yes, they’re racist, and they are of their time. They’re mild fantasies, they’re anthropomorphic, they’re silly, and at a certain level, misogynistic (see the treatment of Sarah Dolittle, the doctor’s sister). But really, don’t you want a duck to be your housekeeper?

20121210-184422.jpgLofting, born in England in 1886, studied there before coming to America to study civil engineering at MIT in Cambridge, MA. The clear line of his Puddleby drawings are infused with the drafting he could have learned as an engineer. He served with the Irish Guards on the Western Front during World War I, and the Dr. Dolittle stories grew from the letters he wrote home to his children.

As a child, Dr. Dolittle had all the things I liked: talking animals, adventures, English villages and cities, and a wardrobe from the past.

My son likes Dr. Dolittle because the stories are about things he’d like to doing: “talking to animals, going on wild adventures, doing all this crazy stuff, and going with the flow.” He says the stories inspire him to learn about animals, and “to get out there and be with them..” (I assume he means at Coggeshall Farm). Dumber, beware.

Lofting moved his family to Connecticut after he was wounded in the war, and died there in 1947. Most of the books he wrote were published in the 1920s, though some anthologies of stories were published posthumously. An inveterate (congenital?) literary snob, I considered the posthumous works rather lesser, even as I read them several times.

Whether you approve of him or not, Lofting remains one of the gentle fabulists of the early 20th century, and the fact that my son reads him today is testament to the staying power of gentle, animal-centric fabulist fiction.

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