Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books:
Further Chronicles of Avonlea
I find this to be one of Lucy Maud’s most emotionally creepy stories. And again – while we can look in and see: “Wow, these people have some SERIOUS psychological issues” – they are not analyzed to death, the truths about them are just stated – and it takes an actual physical event to wipe away all of the problems. Which so rarely happens in real life. Like – a freaky obsessive person usually stays a freaky obsessive person (uhm, I should know). Anyway, I find Thyra Carewe to be one of Lucy Maud’s strangest creations – and man, you just know this woman would totally benefit from major Prozac doses on a regular basis as well as deep deep psychoanalysis – but she lives in PEI at the beginning of the 20th century, so obviously these are not options for her. But: if Thyra were drugged up and made to be normal – then she wouldn’t be so memorable, and there would be no need to write a story about her. So there’s THAT.
Actually, there’s a lot in the story that I find psychologically interesting – and also … creeeepy. Thyra Carewe is an intense woman (uhm, that is putting it mildly) – who was widowed a year after her first (and only) child was born. So she and her son have been everything to each other through the years. Her son Chester. Her son Chester is EVERYTHING to her. The opening of the story makes it clear that there is – I don’t want to say an unnatural bond between them – but – on some level, the intensity with which Thyra loves her son (especially now that he has become a young man – and is trying to loosen the apron strings) is – unnatural. She will not let go. Chester and she will grow old together. The thought of any other woman having him drives her into a frenzy. But Chester – who has always been a good boy, kind and patient wiht his mother, is now “seeing” someone (in early 20th century fashion – he goes over to her house at twilight, and sits with her for an hour) – Her name is Damaris Garland (I love that name) – and Thyra Carewe would be RIPSHIT if she knew Chester was seeing ANYONE seriously, so the entire town basically hides the truth from her. She thinks Chester is bringing the cows home, or whatever, when really he is “sitting” with Damaris. Thyra, blithely ignorant (ignorant in more ways than one), confident that Chester will never marry (“he doesnt’ come from a marrying race” – Thyra was “old” when she had Chester – in her 40s – and her husband was even older than she was – Marrying is not in their DNA) – And Thyra is basically so rigid about Chester that she’s like a tree bough about to snap off. You worry for her. The opening scenes tell us all we need to do. Chester is late coming home, and the SECOND the time has come when Chester SHOULD have walked through the door, Thyra begins to slowly freak out. She paces. She stands at the window, staring out, like a statue. We see her through the eyes of her neighbors – who pity her. “Poor Thyra … if only she knew where Chester was right now … she’d flip out.” You want to slap Thyra. Chester is 18 years old – let the guy date somebody, Thyra. You are going to ruin your precious relationship wiht your son. He is already LYING to you about who he is, he is terrified to tell you he loves Damaris – you are being totally unreasonable, Thyra. But still: Lucy Maud writes her so well that you can’t stop reading. Thyra Carewe is a VERY convincing character portrait. You are glad she’s not your friend, you are glad she’s not your mother – but still. She’s interesting. (Reminds me of Tommy Lee Jones’ response to the question, “Do you have to like the character you are portraying?” Jones bluntly said, “Nope. But you do have to want to watch that character.”) You want to watch Thyra Carewe.
As she waits for Chester – this guy shows up at her door – he’s basically the PEI version of a homeless dude. He is the guy in town who can’t get his act together, he is also crippled and slouched over with rheumatism, and so – people in the town give him errands to do, to keep him occupied and employed. He is also quite a creation – and I have to say: Lucy Maud deals a lot in archetypes – so the same “type” show up in story after story, with little tweaks here and there. But August stands alone. I cannot think of another character even remotely like August in any one of her stories. August is the male version of a vicious gossip. Lucy Maud has written about female vicious gossips before – the kind of self-righteous moralistic bitches who glory in the suffering of another (“Well, I told her that it wouldn’t be right for her to blah blah blah … serves her right ….” Etc. THAT type shows up in Lucy Maud’s stuff quite a bit) – but August is a bored person, malicious – he knows he is despised and pitied – he knows people are disgusted by his twisted rheumatic appearance – and this has corrupted his soul. He is the essence of Corrupt. He loves to be the bearer of bad news. He loves to tell someone bad news and then watch them blanch and gasp. This is because August is so beyond the pale, in terms of his own humanity – so much bad has already happened to him – that he could never blanch and gasp again. He feels outside the human family. He doesn’t just resent this. That is too feeble a word. He hates all of humanity. And he is literally gleeful when he gets to watch a fellow human suffer. Horrible character.
Anyway, he shows up while Thyra is waiting for Chester – and ends up “breaking the news” to her that Chester is sitting at Damaris Garland’s. Actually, there is nothing accidental about August’s behavior. He comes to Thyra’s house on the pretense of an errand – but his main goal is to tell her the bad news, and to have the joy of watching the proud stern imperioud Thyra be shaken. What fun that will be!!
This story is, what, 20 pages long? Obviously it’s deep and powerful – look at how much I have written about it.
I highly recommend reading it – I think it’s some of Lucy Maud’s best work. It’s dark, man. Really dark. And the catharsis at the end is well-deserved. It doesn’t feel like a plot device – it takes your breath away the first time you read it.
Hard to choose an excerpt from this extraordinary little story – so I guess I’ll just choose the opening to excerpt. Notice the bit about how Thyra treats Chester’s dog. That’s when I realize: Oh. Thyra is kind of nuts, and I’m a little bit creeped out right now.
Excerpt from Further Chronicles of Avonlea
Thyra Carewe was waiting for Chester to come home. She sat by the west window of the kitchen, looking out into the gathering of the shadows with the expectant immovability that characterized her. She never twitched or fidgeted. Into whatever she did she put the whole force of her nature. If it was sitting still, she sat still.
“A stone image would be twitchedly beside Thyra,” said Mrs. Cynthia White, her neighbor across the lane. “It gets on my nerves, the way she sits at the window sometimes, with no more motion than a statue and her great eyes burning down the lane. When I read the commandment, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ I declare I always think of Thyra. She worships that son of hers far ahead of her Creator. She’ll be punished for it yet.”
Mrs. White was watching Thyra now, knitting furiously as she watched, in order to lose no time. Thyra’s hands were folded idly in her lap. She had not moved a muscle since she sat down. Mrs. White complained that it gave her the weeps.
“It doesn’t seem natural to see a woman sit so still,” she said. “Sometimes the thought comes to me, ‘what if she’s had a stroke, like her old Uncle Horatio, and is sitting there stone dead!'”
The evening was cold and autumnal. There was a fiery red spot out at sea, where the sun had set, and, above it, over a chill, clear, saffron sky, were reels of purple-black clouds. The river, below the Carewe homestead, was livid. Beyond it, the sea was dark and brooding. It was an evening to make most people shiver and forebode and early winter, but Thyra loved it, as she loved all stern, harshly beautiful things. She would not light a lamp because it would blot out the savage grandeur of sea and sky. It was better to wait in darkness until Chester came home.
He was late tonight. She thought he had been detained over time at the harbor, but she was not anxious. He would come straight home to her as soon as his business was completed – of that she felt sure. Her thoughts went out along the bleak harbor road to meet him. She could see him plainly, coming with his free stride through the sandy hollows and over the windy hills, in the harsh, cold light of that forbidding sunset, strong and handsome in his comely youth, with her own deeply cleft chin and his father’s dark gray, straightforward eyes. No other woman in Avonlea had a son like hers – her only one. In his brief absence she yearned after him with a maternal passion that had in it something of physical pain, so intense was it. She thought of Cynthia White, knitting across the road, with contemptuous pity. That woman had no son – nothing but pale-faced girls. Thyra had never wanted a daughter, but she pitied and despised all sonless women.
Chester’s dog whined suddenly and piercingly on the doorstep outside. He was tired of the cold stone and wanted his warm corner behind the stove. Thyra smiled grimly when she heard him. She had no intention of letting him in. She said she had always disliked dogs, but the truth, although she would not glance at it, was that she hated the animal because Chester loved him. She could not share his love even with a dumb brute. She loved no living creature in the world but her son, and fiercely demanded a like concentrated affection from him. Hence it pleased her to hear his dog whine.
It was now quite dark; the stars had begun to shine out over the shorn harvest fields, and Chester had not come. Across the lane, Cynthia White had pulled down her blind, in despair of out-watchig Thyra, and had lighted a lamp. Lively shadows of little girl-shapes passed and re-passed on the pale oblong of light. They made Thyra conscious of her exceeding loneliness.
