Sunday, January 09, 2011

Beata Ashley

"The Elms" may have been my favorite chapter of the book, with the delightful boardinghouse section. It made me wonder, though, about Beata Ashley. We never really got inside her head. Why do you think she refused to leave the house? She didn't strike me as the type to be ashamed.

There were a couple of sections that shed some light on her character. The first was Lily's insights to Roger in Chicago: Their mother adored their father, a self-centered, possessive love. An all-consuming love that kept her from having any friends or even paying her own children enough attention. Their father had a lot of friends, but he didn't tell their mother about them. "He simply didn't tell her because she wouldn't be interested. She was not a noticing woman and she was not a ... a sympathetic woman."

But Roger offered another picture: Beata worked hard every day, never let the children know they were poor, read them the best books and played the best music, was never short-tempered. And "there was nothing small about Mama." She held her head up and walked every day to their father's trial.

In the Hoboken chapter we see Beata's resemblance to her mother: "If her husband had entered the house one day and told her that he was bankrupt, she would have uttered no word of complaint. She would have moved to a slum and improved the tone of the neighborhood." She was taught never to demonstrate affection or tenderness and to develop "a spine of steel" and a "royal carriage."

Did you wish to know more about who Beata was and what she was thinking? Or was it not as important as her famous husband and children?
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10 comments:

cl said...

I found Beata frustrating. Her helplessness post-trial and the maternal indifference to her children put a terrible burden on them, Sofia especially. Her decisions about the boarding house, about schooling the girls at home, about Lily's exposure to men, seemed largely driven by propriety.

But I'm trying to recall that it was a different era and that Beata probably thought she was protecting her children the best she could. I think they were able to remain in Coaltown largely by an unspoken social contract -- the town would see and hear as little of them as possible, and they wouldn't be forced out. To an extent, the town had to "let" their boardinghouse work, whether sending clients over there or dropping off donations or consenting to bargain with Sofia, and the way in which Beata carried on post-trial made that an acceptable situation.

It did sound like she did a good job with their education and that their upbringing, whatever parts John, Beata or both, led them all to have a strong moral code and work ethic. That sounds stuffy, but I can't think of a better way to phrase it.

Roger's admiration for his mother was a little suspect, though. And the part later about how none of his lovers were tall and blonde, like her? I don't mean that in an unseemly way but rather that Roger's worshipful attitude made him a little suspect as a witness to her strengths.

In the end it sounded like she accepted that John Ashley was long gone after he could have returned and that she bonded with a grandchild at the end of her life. That would have been an interesting time to revisit her story in-depth, but like John Ashley's fate, we don't get to see how it played out.

10:23 AM, January 10, 2011
kc said...

I always felt on the verge of understanding Beata, but I never quite got there. Wilder is so great at creating characters and making us sympathetic to them that I wondered if he deliberately placed her beyond understanding — like how a lot of people in real life remain inscrutable. But then I think the aim of literature should be to elucidate the seemingly inscrutable, not to mimic real life, so maybe that's not what's going on. I did want to know more about her thoughts and feelings. I accepted that she had this kind of exclusive love for John, that it dominated her heart and soul, but it also seems like someone capable of such passion and devotion would be a little less steely.

Good call on Roger's weird mother-devotion. George had that, too. I think both young men felt a deep need to protect their mothers — George, especially, to protect her from what he perceived as physical harm — but it seemed kind of over-the-top in both cases, especially since these women were emotionally strong and resourceful in their own ways.

I was impressed by the panoply of women in this book! There were so many and with so many traits — all of the sisters and mothers, the Russian dressmaker, and all of Roger's love interests (I like the one who called him "newspaper boy"), and all the superb women John encounters on his South American odyssey. It seemed like Wilder was really interested in women's lives and in women as individuals, their resourcefulness and strength. That impressed me.

But I was also kind of disheartened by Eustacia's sticking by her worthless husband. What was the point of that when he made everyone so miserable? I just didn't buy that there was ANY virtue in riding out a bad relationship, that till-death-do-us-part nonsense that so many women martyred themselves to, especially one that was so potentially damaging to her children. I thought Wilder did a great job exposing her husband's worthlessness and explaining how he got away with it (his secretary at the mines and John Ashley constantly covered for his laziness and incompetence — and thereby enabled him — and his wife just perpetuated it). That was disappointing. I thought Wilder should have portrayed that as a weakness in Eustacia's otherwise admirable character, not as a virtue.

11:24 AM, January 10, 2011
kc said...

Oh, meant to say that was probably my favorite chapter, too — the "helpless" women discovering their strengths and banding together to make something out of nothing and learning the satisfaction of self-sufficiency. There's a whole undercurrent in the novel of women making their own way — from Roger's enterprising sisters, especially the single-mother opera singer, to the Russian, to the hotel proprietress in Chile. (Some interesting parallels, too, between the boardinghouse in Coalville and the hotel in Chile).

Maybe Beata didn't leave the house because going out and about would kind of be an admission to herself that her life as she had known it was over. I also think she didn't derive much satisfaction from interacting with other people. Maybe that's why she put such a premium on educating her children, so that they could learn to be self-entertaining, could be happy spending an evening reading Shakespeare.

2:15 PM, January 10, 2011
cl said...

Beata kind of reminded me of those long-ago queens expected to go to convents or some other shut-in situation when their husband dies. Like a self-imposed exile of virtue. Or like her life was over without John Ashley, which, as kc pointed out the single-minded devotion, might explain why she was indifferent to interacting with the community whereas the girls, especially Constance, felt deprived.

I loved the Russian countess. Erin, are you planning to post about her? She was remarkable. A better parent in some ways to both families than their more traditionally minded mothers.

KC, I hadn't thought about parallels between the boardinghouses. That would be worth revisiting, too.

4:00 PM, January 11, 2011
cl said...

Oh, yes, and Eustacia sticking by the husband. Again I think I assumed that in that time/place she didn't have much of a choice, especially with a man who looked like a good citizen on the surface. But I also remember her bit right after the wedding when she realized the gravity of her error: She went to a church of her faith and ... She had made a mistake, but she trusted that the sacrament of marriage would, in some unforseeable way, support her." I think it's odd that one could have such a dedicated notion of faith to assume an answer or some relief would come years or decades later, but she really was of some strange makeup that she had made her bed and must lie in it.

4:10 PM, January 11, 2011
kc said...

Remember how we talked about a course called "The Hotel in Literature"? This would fit right in — Mrs. Ashley's boardinghouse and Mrs. Wickersham's hotel — women engaging in one of the few occupations open to them and providing refuge for various quirky characters, outcasts in the process.

4:45 PM, January 11, 2011
Erin said...

Great comments! I agree the book is full of interesting female characters. I will post about some of them later when I have the book in front of me.

I was going to do a separate post about Eustacia, but we might as well discuss it here. I, too, assumed that maybe divorce wasn't really an option for her in that time and place. But yes, I found it disappointing that Wilder seemed to write about Eustacia's putting up with her awful husband as a virtue. Like right after the John Ashley scene I mentioned, it says that she gave up being jealous of Beata Ashley's marriage just as she had given up being angry at her husband and her situation. And to me that just sounds like repressing her feelings or something, not necessarily something to praise.

2:03 PM, January 12, 2011
kc said...

Yes, exactly. It's almost like Wilder is holding up women who suffer in silence and who stick stubbornly by their youthful mistakes as some kind of feminine ideal. It's really gross! That's not character to me. It's lack of character — which shouldn't be idealized, however inevitable it may be. Give me the feisty, take-charge Mrs. Wickersham (or the Russian countess) any day! I'd like to see some worthless creep try to shove HER into a corner of lifelong misery and self-abnegation.

2:48 PM, January 12, 2011
kc said...

And the corollary is that the devotion of a woman like Beata, even though idealized, really has little value because it isn't genuine; it's merely mandated by social convention. She's like a dog who'd be loyal to any master. Whereas the love of Mrs. Wickersham or the countess ... if you have it, you understand that you've earned it and that it's genuine and personal. "It would be something to be loved by a girl like her," as Jane Austen says of one of her heroines (though it's true of them all!)

3:17 PM, January 12, 2011
kc said...

d'oh! I meant Eustacia, not Beata, in that last comment.

3:18 PM, January 12, 2011

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