Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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fandomsecrets2015-08-27 06:36 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2015-08-27 06:36 pm
[ SECRET POST #3158 ]
⌈ Secret Post #3158 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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[Raedus]
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[American Odyssey]
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 009 secrets from Secret Submission Post #451.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
The Penderwicks
(Anonymous) 2015-08-27 11:02 pm (UTC)(link)"These young girls could open a lemonade stand of feminism. In the imaginary world of the Penderwick sisters, this will, of course, have no negative consequences. For instance, none of them will be thirty-something career women with dusty ovaries desperately seeking a provider male whom they secretly despise as much as their father while supervising an ever growing herd of cats.
This book reminded me of a scene in C.S. Lewis's Perelandra, where Satan tempts Eve by telling her story after story of women who by rebelling saved families, friends, and the world. This is one of those pretty lies.
In typical Disney insta-drama, both families in this tale are broken. Here, the girls are raised by an absent minded professor. Having lost his wife four years earlier, he hasn't bothered to find a suitable replacement. Instead, he has pushed all motherly duties onto his girls. Having known girls who came from this exact situation, it is neither fun nor pretty. They are seriously messed up for life.
The father similarly can't be bothered to properly supervise his children. Just like he can't be bothered to train their dog. One small lie among so many, but a telling one is this -- in reality, an untrained, large dog is not a fun, cool pet but is a creature of wrath and woe.
Anyway, this sort of attack on males is typical. In this book the males are insipid, sneering, overbearing, or neutered.
As for the Penderwick girls, they are a complete wreck.
They speak to each other quite rudely.
The four year old does not obey. She wanders into a bull pen endangering herself and others. Of course, that's what happens when you leave a ten and eleven year old "supervising" a toddler. Later she wanders off again causing serious problems. Yet in neither case is there punishment either for the four year old or those entrusted with her supervision.
In fact, at no point in the book, despite numerous acts of misbehavior is punishment ever undertaken by the limp-wristed father. Instead gross malfeasance is ignored or justified.
The model of responsibility, the twelve year old Rosalind, gets a crush on an eighteen year old gardener and tries to spend as much time with him as possible. Of course, that's why parents don't let twelve year olds do whatever they want, because they do not have realistic concepts of risk and danger.
Yet, here Rosalind begins visiting his apartment daily. That's some good fathering. In the real world, that ends with your daughter pregnant and the boy a registered sex offender for the rest of his life.
The gardener is portrayed as a good guy who sits around conversing with the pre-teen. No normal eighteen year old boy acts this way. The book winks at the fruitlessness of such a romance, but at the end the gardener has broken up with his hot girlfriend because she's not as conversational as Rosalind. Yeah, right.
As for the other girls, Jane plays soccer and writes books about a heroine who rescues a boy. How nontraditional.
Skye wants to be a mathematician or astrophysicist. Neither area dominated by women. When the girls later decide they need to start acting like perfect little ladies, Skye disagrees saying she'll be a perfect gentleman. Blech.
As for the others' career aspirations, Rosalind is to be an international diplomat. Batty, the four year old, a renaissance woman, as opposed to a renaissance man.
Conspicuously absent is a career as wife and mother. They scoff at the idea of something girly like "fashion model."
Meanwhile, the only decent character in the book is portrayed as a real bitch. Mrs. Tifton cares about family and community. She wants her garden to win a prize. She wants her son, in following family tradition, to learn to golf and to go to a military academy. He doesn't want to. He wants to be a musician. You see, this is why responsible adults don't let eleven year olds run their lives, because adults have knowledge about the real world and foresight about what will prepare their children to cope with harsh reality.
She is understandably concerned that the girls are having a bad influence on her child. At one point she diagnoses the situation perfectly saying, "They're uncouth, rude, and conceited. This is what happens when parents don't do their jobs. The father's a pushover . . . And that Rosalind is always chasing after Cagney like a lovesick puppy. If she keeps up that kind of behavior, one of these days some man will allow himself to be caught, and that will be the end of her wide-eyed innocence."
All of this truth is dismissed as having come from Mrs. Tifton. I suppose this was the author's way of defraying this sort of criticism. Those who dissent are old fuddys like Mrs. Tifton.
So, Mrs. Tifton wants her son to go to military school rather than piano academy. The girls, having grown up in a house without rules and restrictions, think this positively awful and set out liberate the poor boy.
They succeed. He gets to go off to music school and, given his upbringing, will soon be well on his way to being a homosexual.
The only thing I can't understand in this book is why Mrs. Tifton rented the guest cottage in the first place. Big mistake.
A thirty-year reunion looks like this. Rosalind is barely scraping by as a forty-two year old single mother with a baby or two from different men who pumped and dumped her. Having played soccer into college, Jane is now a women's gym coach. Skye is a trial attorney riding herd to a slew of cats and married to a man who changed his last name to Penderwick during their alt mating ritual. Batty drowned in a swimming pool a few months after the story ended. Mr. Penderwick got put in an old folk's home.
If you want your daughters to end up like these girls, by all means let them read this book. If you don't, then you will either want to (1) skip this book or (2) use it as a teaching moment to discuss what happens when girls behave like disgusting, Godless heathens."
Re: The Penderwicks
(Anonymous) 2015-08-27 11:09 pm (UTC)(link)This is insane
Re: The Penderwicks
(Anonymous) 2015-08-27 11:09 pm (UTC)(link)Re: The Penderwicks
Re: The Penderwicks
(Anonymous) 2015-08-27 11:13 pm (UTC)(link)