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Dec. 23rd, 2015
*Elsie at the World Fair* (1894) totally makes me want to go to a World Fair. Why is this a thing we don’t have anymore? Why can I not go to one location and see replicas of Bavarian castles, collections of ostriches, examples of the manufacturing capacity of various lands, a recreated Laplander village and an embroidered depiction of the development of modes of transport?
Martha Finley must have needed some quick cash, because this novel is basically a list of things that the extended Dinsmore clan saw at the Chicago World Fair of 1893. It’s like a tourist guide (and she acknowledges how useful the official guide was in the preface).
The descriptions of things they saw at the fair – a display of 5,000 lightbulbs set up by Edison! Buffalo Bill’s wild west show! a recreation of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria! – are interspersed with descriptions of family Bible readings.
What little plot there is consists of Lu, the formerly renegade daughter of one of the patriarchs, repeatedly expressing the pleasure she finds in total submission to her father’s will. There are the usual really Oedipal descriptions of her father’s ‘special caresses’ and ‘kisses on her mouth’. Now I think about it, at the very same time this was published over in Vienna Freud was developing theories which addressed the behaviour Finley depicts as not only natural and right but blessed by God.
This series is weirdly compelling. Literally every book has the same plot – daughters must submit to their fathers – and yet I cannot look away.
Martha Finley must have needed some quick cash, because this novel is basically a list of things that the extended Dinsmore clan saw at the Chicago World Fair of 1893. It’s like a tourist guide (and she acknowledges how useful the official guide was in the preface).
The descriptions of things they saw at the fair – a display of 5,000 lightbulbs set up by Edison! Buffalo Bill’s wild west show! a recreation of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria! – are interspersed with descriptions of family Bible readings.
What little plot there is consists of Lu, the formerly renegade daughter of one of the patriarchs, repeatedly expressing the pleasure she finds in total submission to her father’s will. There are the usual really Oedipal descriptions of her father’s ‘special caresses’ and ‘kisses on her mouth’. Now I think about it, at the very same time this was published over in Vienna Freud was developing theories which addressed the behaviour Finley depicts as not only natural and right but blessed by God.
This series is weirdly compelling. Literally every book has the same plot – daughters must submit to their fathers – and yet I cannot look away.