Book: Rough-Hewn
Aug. 11th, 2012 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Details: (c) 1922 Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc, USA
Verdict: Rough-Hewn is a readable character study.
Reasons for reading it:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
papersky raved about it.
How it came into my hands: It's on Project Gutenberg, though according to Wikipedia Canfield Fisher died in 1958 so this is probably one of those funny things that are Public Domain the States but not yet over here.
Rough-Hewn is very much the kind of thing I like, mid 20th century litfic, with lots of psychological realism, most often written by blue-stocking women. I didn't love it as much aspapersky apparently did; to me it seemed very much of its time and I am not surprised it fell out of fashion. Still, it is well-written and thought-provoking, and I really cared about the characters.
It has an approach to what is essentially a love story that I'd like to see more often: there's three hundred pages of alternating chapters describing the two protagonists' childhood, youth and general character, and they meet and fall in love in the final quarter of the book. I suppose that's technically a spoiler, but it's hardly a major twist that there's eventually going to be a romance between these two previously unconnected characters! The real advantage of this approach is that you really get a sense of both him and her as real people, neither one is merely a prize for the other, and their romance doesn't just come out of nowhere, they're never reduced to just a generic couple. In fact one of the things that Canfield Fisher handles really well is her depiction of how falling in love is a mixture of mystery and rational, logical consequence of who the lovers are and the circumstances leading up to the coup de foudre.
papersky is of course right that
The contrasted backgrounds of the two characters are worked to the maximum to present ideas about the Old and New World, but RH stops short of being obviously didactic or allegorical. This part is certainly interesting to read, but it's somewhat of historical curiosity to a modern reader. In some ways it's covering some of the same themes explored in Stephenson's The Diamond Age: the Old World, represented by a sleepy village in the Basque bit of France in the early part of the book, and the expat community in Rome in the final section, is committed to real values such as doing a job well and appreciating beauty, but it's also very hidebound by rigid social rules and hierarchies of class and gender. The narrative seems to extremely shocked by the custom of keeping domestic servants in turn of the century Europe, and explicitly compares this to slavery, for example. The New World, represented by Neale's childhood in the New York suburbs, his education at Colombia, and various aspects of Business, is about innovation and modernity and gender equality and liberty, but it's also shallow and cares more about profit and efficiency than humanity. This is all very well, except that pretty much the New World has won the argument, nobody lives and few people even wish for the lifestyle of the pre WW1 European middle class!
The compromise presented in RH seems to be to live in America, but to choose a practical, physical trade and opt out of the capitalist ratrace to live the simple life in rural Vermont, which is another thing that really marks the book as being of its time; had Canfield Fisher known the Depression was awaiting her protagonists, she probably wouldn't have presented that happy ending. It's always weird reading coming-of-age books set at the turn of the 20th century, because as a reader you know that however well the story turns out, the future is bleak for everybody who was young then. Writing in 20s, I suppose Canfield Fisher knew about WW1, but that was perhaps less devastating to America than to Europe.
The place where I really disagreed with the narrative message of RH was in Neale's choice to dump a woman who was "merely" a close friend with loads of common interests, because it's morally wrong to marry someone you're not romantically In Love with. I've just realized that the spurned fiancée is called Martha and the heroine a Basque form of Mary... talk about personifications of ideas about relationships, blech. I particularly resent that now that I personally have chosen to marry my best friend rather than the love of my life, but I think I would always have disapproved. There's also a slightly weird thread about sexuality, I think, an intimation that it's something awful and a bit disgusting without True Love to sanctify it. There are probably other justified readings of the way it's handled, but conjunction with the Martha / Mary thing it bothered me a bit.
Anyway, if you're looking for recs of Gutenberg novels beyond the obvious classics, you could do a lot worse than Rough-Hewn.
Details: (c) 1922 Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc, USA
Verdict: Rough-Hewn is a readable character study.
Reasons for reading it:
papersky raved about it.How it came into my hands: It's on Project Gutenberg, though according to Wikipedia Canfield Fisher died in 1958 so this is probably one of those funny things that are Public Domain the States but not yet over here.
Rough-Hewn is very much the kind of thing I like, mid 20th century litfic, with lots of psychological realism, most often written by blue-stocking women. I didn't love it as much as
papersky apparently did; to me it seemed very much of its time and I am not surprised it fell out of fashion. Still, it is well-written and thought-provoking, and I really cared about the characters. It has an approach to what is essentially a love story that I'd like to see more often: there's three hundred pages of alternating chapters describing the two protagonists' childhood, youth and general character, and they meet and fall in love in the final quarter of the book. I suppose that's technically a spoiler, but it's hardly a major twist that there's eventually going to be a romance between these two previously unconnected characters! The real advantage of this approach is that you really get a sense of both him and her as real people, neither one is merely a prize for the other, and their romance doesn't just come out of nowhere, they're never reduced to just a generic couple. In fact one of the things that Canfield Fisher handles really well is her depiction of how falling in love is a mixture of mystery and rational, logical consequence of who the lovers are and the circumstances leading up to the coup de foudre.
papersky is of course right that it's about life and what makes it worth living, it's a lot more than just a boy-meets-girl story. I very much enjoyed the account of Neale and Marise navigating the world and learning to be adults. Canfield Fisher has a better than usual understanding of adolescents; there is occasional gentle mockery when they get emo or otherwise melodramatic, but it seems to come from a place of clear empathy. I was particularly impressed by the portrayal of Marise's reaction to adults sniggering about sex, and also of the way Neale tends somewhat taciturn as a way of finding emotional privacy from the adults around him.
The contrasted backgrounds of the two characters are worked to the maximum to present ideas about the Old and New World, but RH stops short of being obviously didactic or allegorical. This part is certainly interesting to read, but it's somewhat of historical curiosity to a modern reader. In some ways it's covering some of the same themes explored in Stephenson's The Diamond Age: the Old World, represented by a sleepy village in the Basque bit of France in the early part of the book, and the expat community in Rome in the final section, is committed to real values such as doing a job well and appreciating beauty, but it's also very hidebound by rigid social rules and hierarchies of class and gender. The narrative seems to extremely shocked by the custom of keeping domestic servants in turn of the century Europe, and explicitly compares this to slavery, for example. The New World, represented by Neale's childhood in the New York suburbs, his education at Colombia, and various aspects of Business, is about innovation and modernity and gender equality and liberty, but it's also shallow and cares more about profit and efficiency than humanity. This is all very well, except that pretty much the New World has won the argument, nobody lives and few people even wish for the lifestyle of the pre WW1 European middle class!
The compromise presented in RH seems to be to live in America, but to choose a practical, physical trade and opt out of the capitalist ratrace to live the simple life in rural Vermont, which is another thing that really marks the book as being of its time; had Canfield Fisher known the Depression was awaiting her protagonists, she probably wouldn't have presented that happy ending. It's always weird reading coming-of-age books set at the turn of the 20th century, because as a reader you know that however well the story turns out, the future is bleak for everybody who was young then. Writing in 20s, I suppose Canfield Fisher knew about WW1, but that was perhaps less devastating to America than to Europe.
The place where I really disagreed with the narrative message of RH was in Neale's choice to dump a woman who was "merely" a close friend with loads of common interests, because it's morally wrong to marry someone you're not romantically In Love with. I've just realized that the spurned fiancée is called Martha and the heroine a Basque form of Mary... talk about personifications of ideas about relationships, blech. I particularly resent that now that I personally have chosen to marry my best friend rather than the love of my life, but I think I would always have disapproved. There's also a slightly weird thread about sexuality, I think, an intimation that it's something awful and a bit disgusting without True Love to sanctify it. There are probably other justified readings of the way it's handled, but conjunction with the Martha / Mary thing it bothered me a bit.
Anyway, if you're looking for recs of Gutenberg novels beyond the obvious classics, you could do a lot worse than Rough-Hewn.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-04 06:15 pm (UTC)I haven't read or even heard of Rough-Hewn, but I have a copy of Canfield Fisher's The Brimming Cup, which is about a woman called Marise reassessing her marriage and the point of everything amid attraction for another man when her youngest child starts school. According to the Virago blurb, "First published in 1919 this intuitive novel explores the emotional turmoil one woman faces as she struggles to resurrect her own identity".
Clearly this is the sequel to Rough-Hewn, but I had no idea. I found Neale in The Brimming Cup a rather one-dimensional figure, and although it harks back to their once Great Love, I didn't find it that easy to believe in seen only with hindsight. If it's a sequel to a book that is all about that, it makes a lot more sense.
So thank you! I bought The Brimming Cup in a charity shop because I love The Homemaker, which I definitely recommend if you are into relationships and the subversion of stereotypical gender roles in 1920.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-04 06:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-11 01:41 pm (UTC)Perhaps she felt she had to go back and write a new book emphasising the Great Romantic Love bit afterwards, which is annoying. I'd rather read about the problems of independence and interdependence in marriage without having Romance as the justification for it, if that makes sense.