Book Review: Moll Flanders

It has always been my contention that while times change and the world does progress (even a sketchy analysis of history tells us that), human nature remains the same. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, written in 1722, supports that view.

In this novel, Moll (not her real name) tells her own difficult and sordid history that begins with her birth to a convicted thief in Newgate Prison. She becomes a ward of the state and after her early years with some gypsies, she is placed in the care of a kind and humane foster mother. The book follows her highs, which are quite lofty, and lows, which are quite sordid.

Despite her poor beginnings, though, many of her lows came of her own poor judgment. Defoe warns in his introduction not to glorify these choices, and the character herself often rails against her own decisions. Yet, through Moll, Defoe shows a fascination with the darker side of life and an understanding of this woman that fascinates me.

Defoe wrote the book at age sixty-two and had been imprisoned twice by that time, once for indebtedness and once for his politics. I imagine he met and spoke to many women like Moll since I’ve learned prisons in those days were not typically segregated by gender.

Moll Flanders as played by Alex
Kingston

Mainly, the book features a flawed character who nonetheless is admirable for her spunk and determination in a world where all the cards are stacked against her. Not only is she lowborn, but she is a woman. Moll makes clear the yoke she is under two hundred years before women were deemed worthy of the right to vote. She is a person of remarkable insight.

Some examples of Moll’s wisdom include “She is always married too soon who gets a bad husband, and she is never married too late who gets a good one” and “From hence ’tis evident to me, that when once we are hardened to crime, no fear can affect us, no example give us any warning.” That second one explains why theft was rampant in an England where the penalty for the crime was hanging. It also explains why the death penalty today is no real deterrent.

This book has captivated me and I will read it again. The language is a challenge since the wording and syntax are somewhat archaic. It took me a couple of chapters to get used to it and I skimmed some, making sure I at least had the gist of the passages.

This aspect did not keep me from understanding and enjoying the story at all. I highly recommend this classic.

Book Review: The Unfinished Garden

Through The Unfinished Garden, Barbara Claypole White brings an uncommon depth and elegance to a beautiful love story. The protagonist, Tilly, struggles to move past the death of her husband by throwing her energies into her son, Isaac, and her North Carolina gardening business.

When a wealthy and somewhat dashing James Nealy offers an exorbitant fee to landscape his new home, Tilly flatly refuses. But the quirky software developer shows a remarkable persistence, even following her to her childhood home in England when Tilly’s mother becomes ill. There, Tilly reconnects with Sebastian, her first love, who has also returned home.

Both men are attractive and vulnerable. James Nealy is a sweet man who confesses to Tilly his OCD which he hopes gardening can alleviate. Sebastian is struggling to find himself after a nasty divorce, still determined to be a great father to his young children.

When reading this book, I was engrossed by Tilly’s love interests because they were real, flawed human beings striving to overcome their weaknesses. Unlike many other novels in this genre, I was not sure whom Tilly should or would choose. I was sympathetic to both. To me, that’s how real life is. Nothing is ever so cut and dried.

Also, I found both settings—humid, somewhat dangerous North Carolina and the crisp gardens of the English countryside—to be characters of their own. Barbara Claypole White’s descriptions drew me in and have made me hungry for more.

I love this book. It is a tender story that has stayed with me, and has me praying for a sequel. 

Me with author, Barbara Claypole White, at the 2012 South
Carolina Writers Workshop Conference, Myrtle Beach, SC

 

"Un pour tous, tous pour un"

Translation: "All for one, one for all," the famous rallying cry of the three musketeers. Ironically, the phrase was introduced by the one character who was not part of the title trio--D'Artagnan. That's only one of the surprises I got when reading this classic.

A copy of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers had been patiently waiting for well over a year for me to pick it up. I kept reading other books because, let’s face it, it was written in 1844, meaning tediously verbose descriptions that I would have to skim or skip altogether.

Boy, was I thrilled to find instead lots of action and plenty of snappy dialogue—just my style. Even better, the stiff, macho musketeers I anticipated were superior swordsmen to be sure. But they were also flawed and funny players whose eccentricities were thoroughly endearing.

Set in France around 120 years before the story’s publication, the tale pits the soldiers loyal to the king against the guards of the royal advisor, Cardinal Richelieu. There is plenty of dueling—at the slightest provocation, actually—romance, and intrigue within the court of Louis XIII. The plot twists are fast-paced and fascinating, holding my attention all the way through. In fact, I read the entire book (635 pages) in three days.

We all know about a book's cover, but I'd also say you can't tell a book by your stereotypical preconceptions. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves a great story. And if you’re bothering to read this review, that would likely be you.

Back to the Classics Challenge 2013

Okay. So this past year, I attempted my very first reading challenge. I pledged to read and review nine classics by December 31st. I read five. Five books I wouldn't have read otherwise, though, which I found personally enriching. This year, thanks to the blog, Sarah Reads Too Much (http://www.sarahreadstoomuch.com/), I'm trying again. For the 2013 version, there are only six required books to read in predetermined categories, and five optional ones. The six main categories and my choices are below:

Nineteenth Century Classic: Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Twentieth Century Classic: Light in August by William Faulkner
Eighteenth Century Classic: Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
African-American related Classic: Beloved by Toni Morrison
Classic Adventure: Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
Animal-related Classic: Call of the Wild by Jack London

Thanks to Sarah for hosting this challenge. Stay tuned for my reviews throughout the year.

The Truth About the First Thanksgiving

This week millions of kindergarteners dressed in paper Pilgrim hats or Indian headdresses. They learned how these English adventurers came over on the Mayflower in search of religious freedom, and in 1620 at Plymouth Rock, gave birth to the American experiment. They also learned of friendly Native Americans like Squanto who cheerfully helped the settlers.

It’s all a nice story. But according to the research of James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, the facts may be a mite different.

For instance, the passengers of the Mayflower were not the first settlers in the New World. Obviously, people had lived here for about 12,000 years—likely much longer.

Yeah, but weren’t they the first non-Native group? Nope. In 1526, nearly 100 years before the Pilgrims set foot in Plymouth, Spaniard left African slaves in South Carolina when they abandoned a settlement.

Okay, then. The first European settlers.  Wrong again. You’ve heard of that group seeking religious freedom, right? The Spanish Jews who made their homes in what is now New Mexico in the late 1500s? Thanks to the Spanish, America now has horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs. None of these are native to the Western Hemisphere.

First English colonists? Remember Jamestown, Virginia, 1607? Sure, you do. But they don’t get much coverage in our history books. There, instead of friendly Squanto, the English took Indians prisoner, demanding they explain their farming techniques. Instead of a great shared feast, the Virginian English offered a toast to the friendship between them and two hundred Native Americans, only to have all the Indians drop dead from poisoning. These fools never farmed. They were too busy digging random holes in search of gold. They finally had to hire themselves out to the Native Americans as servants just to survive. Not exactly the story we want our five-year-olds re-enacting in November.

Okay, okay. So they weren’t actually the first. No. And they didn’t exactly carve a colony out of the wilderness. Likely due to European fisherman off the Massachusetts coast, diseases unfamiliar to the native population ravaged between 90 and 96 percent of them. Entire villages were deserted. According to Loewen,  the Pilgrims “chose Plymouth because of its beautiful cleared fields, recently planted in corn, and its useful harbor and ‘brook of fresh water.’ It was a lovely site for a town. Indeed, until the plague, it had been a town…”

 A few other misconceptions and I’ll finish with my myth-busting. First, out of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower, only 35 were actually Pilgrims. Most were seeking their fortunes like real Americans.

Also, the kindly Squanto, who “mysteriously” knew English, may have learned it when he was kidnapped by an English slave trader in 1614 and sold into slavery in Malaga, Spain.

And, as a final insult, the Indians thought the Pilgrims stank. Since they thought it was unhealthy and immodest, the Pilgrims rarely washed and resisted poor Squanto’s efforts to teach them the benefits of a bath.

Wonder if they’ll act that out in kindergarten.

Who You Calling a Paunchy Toad-Spotted Harpy?

In my book, Aroon, there’s a heck of a lot of animosity between the characters as there is in any self-respecting plot. Hence, I need tons of insults and they had to be current in 1750. You’d be surprised which of our libelous vocabulary is relatively recent.

A mild word like “jerk” has only been around since 1935. “Jackass,” meaning stupid person, only came to prominence in 1823. Can’t use it.  “Bastard” has been in use since the thirteenth century, but I need some variety in my abusive language.
 

Imagine my glee when I googled “Medieval insults” and found the Shakespeare Insult Kit at http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/shake_rule.html. Check it out. They give three columns with words in each taken from the Bard’s various plays. Start with the word “thou,” then choose one phrase from each column. It’s fun. Here are two I’ve put together:

 

Thou frothy flap-mouthed foot-licker. (I love alliteration.) OR

Thou yeasty onion-eyed pignut.  (Now I didn’t actually know what a pignut was, so I looked it up. It’s the tuber of some European plant. Which isn’t bad either: You yeasty onion-eyed tuber!)

If this isn’t fun enough—and it is—try the Shakespeare Insulter at http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Shaker/index.html. Here you hit a button that says “Insult me again” and a bonafide slight straight from one of Shakespeare’s plays comes up. And let me tell you, he was the master of mockery. Here are a couple I got:
 

“Thou loathed issue of thy father's loins!” compliments of Richard III
“We leak in your chimney.” from Henry IV, part I (Now I’m not positive what that means, but it certainly sounds gross and demeaning.)
“Thou wouldst eat thy dead vomit up, And howl’st to find it.” –Henry IV, part II (Ewww)

And you thought Shakespeare was too highfalutin for you. His plays have been around for four hundred years for a reason. Needless to say, our modern-day mud-slinging now seems mundane and repetitive. Where’s our flair? Where's our creativity?

As in all areas of life, when in doubt, turn to the master.

Mystery Mystically Unmasked

My favorite part about research is the unexpected discovery. This comes in many forms and is always exciting, but what happened last week was exceptional.

I lost my mother in September. I am not ready to write about this yet, except in the context of this ironic occurrence. While we are South Carolinians now, Mom spent her first fifty years in New Jersey. Last weekend (just days before the devastation to our home county by Superstorm Sandy) a memorial service was held there in her honor.

Although I did not make the trip, the very day before the service, I was connected to Mom through a distant cousin’s email who found me through Ancestry.com. This lovely woman wrote to ask me about my mother’s family and to see if I could identify the people in an old photo she had.

I certainly could. Front and center stood my six-year-old Mom making her First Communion. I have seen very few childhood photos of her, so this is a great treasure.

Beside her is her younger sister, Margie, my aunt and godmother. The taller girls are their cousins. My grandfather, Luke Pryor, is the dapper gentleman on the right and the tall man is his older brother, John Benjamin Pryor III. Both are grandsons of John Benjamin Pryor, the trainer of the legendary racehorse, Lexington, and his ex-slave wife, Frances Bingaman. The older woman is my great-grandmother, Luke and JB III's mother.

Long-time readers will know that I have been trying for some time to definitively determine the parentage of Frances Bingaman. That’s where the unexpected discovery comes in. This distant cousin, a genealogist extraordinaire, has copies of the death certificates of Frances and her sister, Cordelia. Both list their parents as Adam and Amelia Bingaman.

This answers two questions. Yes, I am the descendant of the colorful plantation owner, Adam Lewis Bingaman of Natchez, Mississippi, but not his New Orleans placee, Mary Ellen Williams. I had determined that Mary Ellen Williams was too young to be Frances’s mother, but another descendant found “Millie” listed in their family Bible. “Millie” is obviously short for Amelia, mother of Frances, Henrietta, Amelia, and Cordelia—all mixed-race daughters of Adam Bingaman.

Mystery solved in a remarkable way at a most significant moment.