The Past is a Foreign Country

Ye werken womman c. 1387

I was going to call this post "Hotel Living," but I spent some of my flight back to Scotland and most of today reading L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, whence cometh the famous remark.

The Go-Between, written in 1952 about 1900, is absolutely stunning and near the end made me think of Wuthering Heights. (I discovered afterwards, while reading the Penguin Modern Classics' introduction, that I was right to do so.) As good novels do, it both debunks and promotes myths, here of a "golden age." 

I am glad of the promotion, for civilizational health relies on myth. When Americans stop weeping over "The Star-Spangled Banner" and thanking veterans for their service, the USA is toast. But fortunately for my American readers, the USA is likely to survive Old Canada, which will die with the last Canadians to learn "The Maple Leaf Forever" at school. L.M. Montgomery's Avonlea may have been fiction, but I'd rather be a Canadian with Avonlea in her heart than a corrosive hatred for her ancestors. 

Interestingly, on my flight back to Canada I read Johann Strauss: Father and Son and Their Era by Hans Fantel (1971), which is also very good and also debunks and promotes the myth of a golden age. It also speaks in the same accent as the traditionalist Catholic Austrians I know, who both rejoice in Vienna's glorious past and seethe over what has happened to it since. 

I read the latter to try to understand the waltz. My poor parents plunked down up to $15  a week for me to take piano lessons for years and years without succeeding in making me musical. I much prefer silence to music, but I have committed to the waltz, so I should like to know more about it. It is also a "traditional" ballroom dance--although of course it was at one point considered revolutionary and immoral--and I am as interested in living traditions as in healthy myths.   

Incidentally, the idea that women didn't work for money before Ms. magazine rolled off the presses on July 1, 1972 is not a healthy myth. For one thing, there have been female paid domestic servants and farmers for millennia. As for the lettered, English-speaking women have openly written for money since 1688. Unmarried women survived as paid governesses from the 17th century into the 20th century, and as schoolteachers from the late 19th century. My Canadian grandmother was a teacher until she married; my American grandmother (born 1904) was a bookkeeper. 

There have also been, probably since the beginning of commerce, women in trades that don't rely on brute strength or in family businesses. The New Testament records that (in Acts 13) a certain Lydia of Thyatira was a dye saleswoman. Over 1300 years later, Chaucer characterized the Wife of Bath as a wealthy woman in the textile industry. 

That large numbers of European and North American women of quite humble origins did not go out to work in the19th and 20th centuries--not even in fields--strikes me not as "traditional" but as a historical anomaly. And as we have seen, it has proved to be unsustainable for all but the rich or the very determined. It is very difficult for men today to command the kind of wages commensurate with running a middle-class household according to the expectations of 1900.

And so I work and try to get along with men who think I shouldn't. When, at my work event this week, a man recommended that I read Mrs. Timothy Gordon's Ask your Husband: A Wife's Guide to True Femininity, I affably promised to do so because I want to see what she brings to the debate. 

One of the perks of this work event was staying in a business-class hotel with a a splendid gym; there I did bicep curls and other activities I do not expect to find in Mrs. Tim's opus. I very much enjoyed looking at the Canadian sky while running on the treadmill and travelling from this gym to my suite without having to go outdoors. There were lots of fluffy white towels that renewed themselves daily and apparently the bed remade itself. The breakfast buffet was bounteous and delicious.  It crossed my mind that it might be nice to live permanently in a hotel, if one could afford to do so. However, now it escapes my mind how I thought I would get a whole post out of that fanciful notion.  

UPDATE: Benedict Ambrose says he's going to write a book, too. He will call it either Make Me A Sandwich or How Interesting. Where's My Dinner? He's currently in the kitchen washing the dishes, so I am not taking this pronouncement very seriously.