Edna Ferber (1885–1968)

This novel is about a middle-aged, divorced traveling saleswoman named Emma McChesney and the prejudice and hardship she faces. She earns “a man’s salary” and supports her teenaged son. The book was absolutely fascinating as a document of sexism in 1913. Thurber wanted to get into controversial topics but had to talk around them, so sometimes I was baffled as to what was going on, but eventually everything would become clear. (I think.) For example, there was one part where I thought show more the main character Emma was befriending a drag queen but it turned out instead the woman was a stripper. (This makes me sound really thick, but all the talk about “I’m not a real woman” and working in a special club for men only was confusing. And there’s a lot of mystifying period slang.)

I cannot tell if Edna Thurber really believed that housewifery and marriage were the only things that could fulfill a woman, or if she felt (perhaps rightly) that it was obligatory to throw that kind of sentiment over a book that’s about a strong single woman with a career. Reading this book was actually a bit painful because of the unending sexual harrassment Emma faced. It was of a very sanitized “let me take you out to dinner because you’re so beautiful” kind, but I still found it upsetting. Weirdly, this book reminded me of the Lad: A Dog series by Albert Payson Terhune because they both have the same thing happening over and over: Lad/Emma meets someone who is prejudiced against him/her, but then Lad/Emma proves him/herself through incredible heroism and nobleness, and the person realizes how wonderful s/he is. Couldn’t Emma just once meet someone who didn’t make all kinds of assumptions about her, and why did she have to educate these sleazebags over and over? It was just depressing, but I think hyper-realistic.

Here’s a description of Emma and her best friend. “Theirs was not a talking friendship. It was a thing of depth and understanding, like the friendship between two men.” Hate yourself much? But then, “They sat looking into each other’s eyes, and down beyond, where the soul holds forth. And because what each saw there was beautiful and sightly they were seized with shyness such as two men feel when they love each other, so they awkwardly endeavored to cover up their shyness with words.” Oh, I see, so it’s like that kind of friendship between men.

I looked at Edna Ferber’s Wikipedia page and it seems a lot of people think she was gay, but there’s no evidence she ever had a romantic or sexual relationship with anyone, so a lot of other people think there’s no basis for that assumption. I am equally compelled by both points of view, especially based on the passage above. On the one hand, it seems obvious that a woman who never had any attachment with a man was a lesbian and just kept it on the DL; practically everyone I know is gay so why not Edna Ferber? On the other hand, maybe she was ace and just wanted to gaze into someone’s eyes, but people can’t conceive of that as possible so they are unfairly stuffing her into the gay category. Either way, Edna Ferber was not your average bear, and this book reads as very “coded” but I can’t quite crack the code. show less

The title refers to a little boy named Dirk, and long known as "Sobig", after the ubiquitous game played with babies, but mostly this is the story of his mother, Selena Peake DeJong, whose life as a midwestern farmer's wife is not at all what she envisioned as a gay young thing. Selena had a rather bohemian upbringing with a gambling father who was always either flush or flat broke. Her outlook on life was persistently optimistic even when things were uncertain to the point of panic; her eye show more for beauty was keener than those that found it only in accepted presentations. While her unimaginative husband struggled to sustain a livelihood from their marginal farm, Selena envisioned improvements, innovations and expansions that would ease the future for their beloved son. Her positivity never wavered, even as "Sobig", failing to find a passion for any pursuit, settled into a successful but uninspiring career and an attachment to a married woman. I assume we are meant to see how a challenging life is more fulfilling than one in which all the seams are smoothed and gears well-oiled, but Dirk DeJong is so much less engaging than his mother that I nearly lost interest in the story when he became the center of it. Luckily, that did not happen until approximately the last third, and it's a relatively short novel. Definitely a worthwhile read, and deserving of its Pulitzer, but one that did not quite live up to its early promise, for me. show less

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2899947.html

Cimarron is a really good book, a feminist text (the words "feminist" and "feminism" are actually used) whose guts were torn out of it by Hollywood. The central character of the novel is Sabra Cravat, daughter of a Southern family who moved to Kansas after the Civil War; having married Yancey at a very young age, she is swept off to Oklahoma by him. She breaks away from the stereotypes of her Southern parents, and gets over many of her own hangups, show more to build a new version of society in the town of Osage, to the point where she herself is elected to Congress. Cimarron was the best-selling novel in America in 1930, and the film's popularity must surely have been a reward for its insipid reflection of the popular original text. I was struck that the opening titles featured the characters and actors playing each, which looked like an assumption that many viewers would already be familiar with them.

However, we are a long way from intersectionality, and the book is still pretty racist, if not quite as racist as the film. There is still only one named black character (who suffers an even more horrible end than his screen version), though it's also clear that there are lots of others in the town. While Sabra's view of the Indians is pretty bigoted, the unreliable Yancey is totally on their side, and preaches to her frequently about the disgrace of the Trail of Tears and the awful things that white men have done; this is somehow dropped from the film. (Also worth noting that the Vice-President of the United States at the time the film was made was actually descended from the Osage tribe, and remains the only Native American to have served at the top of the executive branch.) The one Jewish character is sympathetically treated in both book and film, but the nasty anti-Semitism of the baddies in the book doesn't make it to the screen.

The feminism of the book is completely erased by the film, in that Yancey is given much more screen time and better lines (though his defence of the Indians is removed), and we are cut off from Sabra's internal dialogue, which is the loudest voice in the novel; it is replaced by Turner’s sighs and meaningful glances. The sub-plot with the sex workers in the book is explicitly a dialogue about different visions of womanhood in the new society that is being built, but becomes just a humorous set of vignettes in the film (apart from Yancey's courtroom defence of Dixie Lee, which in fairness is actually done better on screen than on the page). I'm not especially well versed in the early twentieth century history of American feminism, but it seemed clear to me that the makers of a Hollywood blockbuster did not feel able to reflect the feminism of their source text.

I enjoyed the book much more than I had expected to, and the film's success was surely in large part a homage to the work it was based on. show less

On the surface, Giant is twenty-five years in the life of a Texas family from 1925 to 1950. In reality, Giant is a social commentary on the wealthy. Ferber writes, "We know about champagne and caviar but we talk hog and hominy" (p 17). Ferber's book was controversial because it revealed a stark truth about society in early twentieth century Texas. Take for example, Vashti Hake. As a daughter to a wealthy rancher, Vashti was shunned because she married a lowly cowhand, Pinky Snyth. There was show more class and there was Class.
The story opens with a group of wealthy and influential people coming together for the celebration of Jett Rink's new airport. This is a bitter pill to swallow for cattle owner Jordan "Bick" Benedict. Bick sold Jett a seemingly worthless sliver of land on his sprawling Reata Ranch. The meager land just happened to sit on an untapped oil field. Suddenly, there is competition. Who is the richest? But, the competition runs much deeper. In order to understand these important characters and their significance the story needs to first take a detour. We go twenty five years in the past to explain how Leslie the society girl from Virginia ended up marrying ruggedly handsome Bick, moving to big ole Texas, and creating drama with Mr. Rink. Using the differences between Leslie and Bick Ferber does a good job laying out the different conflicts within Giant:
Geographically - the west versus the northeast. Texas being sprawling, dry and much hotter than lush and green Virginia.
Racially - the treatment of people of color. Virginia's inclusion of African Americans while Mexicans in Texas are treated as invisible slaves.
Gender - a woman's role in the household. For example, Leslie doesn't understand why Bick wants his sister, Luz, to run the household while Leslie thinks, as woman of the house, she should assume the responsibility.
Economically - with the border of Mexico so close the socio-economic borders were bound to clash and blur.

As an aside, I really liked Leslie. She's smart, funny, and adventurous. In all aspects she truly is a fish out of water but she perseveres. show less