I listened to the conclusion of Pollyanna Grows Up. It is very much of its era, not entirely in a bad way. It is also understandably an American classic. I do want to go back and reread or listen to Pollyanna. I say it is “of its era” because it betrays the worries of that time, the beginning of the twentieth century, of blood, genetics, and poverty. It does so in the most natural sort of way—attitudes and conversations rather than narration of the concerns. For example, in Ivanhoe, the author observes things in the “in those days people thought this or that” sort of mode. That is not the case here.
In Pollyanna Grows Up, it is simply noted that surely that person has good blood. It is also an objection to getting married that nothing is known of the family, they could be anyone and what of hereditary disease or such? Pollyanna herself as a girl of twelve first encountering poverty in the city, wonders how some can be so rich while others are so poor? She is jokingly called a little socialist by an adult. The way the conversation goes kind of makes me wonder if the author had socialist sympathies?
Early on and throughout is expressed the opinion of many that “you could not understand, because you never experienced it” or the corollary, “she understands, because she has experienced”. The assumption is a little belied by one of the proponents of the belief in that he knows the stories of Arthur’s Knights and feels the need for heroic deeds and glory, though they seem unobtainable in his current circumstances and he is able to relate the stories and some of his own with such vividness and detail that it is described in at least one point like weaving a spell on his listeners. Nevertheless, the assumption is made throughout—if you have not experienced it, you cannot understand it. I have heard this assumption expressed throughout my life. I disagree. Much can be learned through reading and observation and imagination. I grant that observation is not identical to experience, but I also observe that experience can blind a person to the fullness of what a thing is. For example, a man and a woman may be very much enamored of each other and inclined to act upon their passions. An observer might sympathize with the feeling, but nonetheless be able to see that in no wise should they act upon their passions because one of them is married, so no matter how they feel, that would simply be adultery and betrayal, which they have already begun to enter into by letting their passions—lust—go so far. Someone else who has experienced adultery by participation may have a harder time seeing the error, unless he had already repented and worked towards reconciliation if possible. Of course, now our whole moral landscape is so corrupted that no one seems to accurately the gravity of most any sin. I guess they had to experience them for themselves in order to understand? Just had to take a bite of the fruit...Anyway.
Going to Church is
treated as customary, but for most of the story you would have no
idea that these people believe in God or an after-life. They are all
oriented to earthly, material happiness. This is especially evident
in the attitudes towards poverty and death. As for poverty, Pollyanna cannot figure out
anything to be glad about it other than, she doesn’t have that
poverty, which makes her sorry for those who do, or she could be glad to help them
materially, except that at first she can’t. Aunt Polly is a striking exemplar of their reactions towards death. It
is all grief, pride, bitterness, and anger. No one speaks of heaven.
No one speaks of God connected to this loss. It is just-he died.
Now, how are we going to pay for this and that? How are we to live? It does not seem that any know how to deal well with the pain of loss.
There is a focus on being happy, but the happiness is material. This leads to a moral dilemma which should not have been a dilemma in the way that it was. Some of the story focuses on the question of a missing boy Jamie Kent. His father was not approved of by the mother’s family, and when she died, father and son had disappeared. There is a Jamie and a Jimmy who are about the right age, one of them adopted by the aunt of the lost boy. He believes he is Jamie, or at least desires to be him in point of fact. When conclusive proof of who Jamie Kent is surfaces, it is decided not to tell Jamie, others may know, but not Jamie, because that would kill him, or something. His emotional belief or desire is more important than the truth. They would rather lie to him and let him believe a lie, but so would he. This is vicious. I cannot approve of such a moral. It darkened the end of the book for me.
All of these attitudes have only metastasized in American culture. We are obsessed with indicators of worldly success and comfort. We push away thoughts of death except to give respect to those who take death into their own hands or deal out death for their own perceived good. We value lived experience more than truth.
I say “we” but it is a culture that has never felt like home to me. Is it that I loved hearing and reading Aesop, Grimm, & Anderson? Is it that we read the Bible regularly at home and I read it personally before I could understand much beyond the broadest strokes? Is it that I read more British literature than American? Is it that my melancholy disposition inclined me to relate more to Jeremiah and love books like Ecclesiastes? Is it that in traveling across the country to a place I knew not before I was ten prompted me to look more earnestly at Abram’s wanderings and apply that to the Christian life? Who knows. But at least since we traveled across the states when I was a child, I have had the sense of being a stranger in a strange land.
It still takes me by surprise when I hear the same tones of disdain towards religion in newspapers from a century ago that can be heard even today. It still catches me a bit off guard when I hear of people worried about bloodlines today as they did at the heights of the eugenics movement. It shouldn’t; I know well enough that there is nothing new under the sun, what has been will be and every new thing has already happened, still, I would have thought we could have learned from our past.
