Reinventing Cinderella

One of my favorite novels is Just Ella by Margaret Peterson Haddix. I received a copy as a gift when I was about nine, and I've read it multiple times since then. It's a reworking of Cinderella, everybody's favorite fairytale.

Haddix's version takes place after Ella has been carried off to her happily-ever-after by Prince Charming. Contrary to what she had expected, her life becomes an endless round of tedium and conformity. She's expected to be a docile social ornament without any personality. She's not supposed to care about-- or even be aware of-- the unsavory aspects of life, be it boar hunting, poverty, or even the process of lighting a fire. Prince Charming himself has no personality or cognitive ability, and Ella comes to realize that this happily-ever-after isn't what she wants for herself, after all. She makes a daring escape from the castle (dungeon) and decides to do what she wants with her life.

As a nine-year-old, I was a bit unhappy with the ending. It was unsettling to think that Prince Charming and fairytale happily-ever-afters might not be the way Disney portrays them. Given that, I don't know why I read the book more than once. But I did, and I think it's arguably the best treatment of Cinderella that I've ever read.

One of the things you have to come to terms with as you grow up is that fairytales aren't real. There's no guy on the planet who can measure up to the ideal of Prince Charming, and even if he did exist, one would still have difficult times after marriage. Real life doesn't have twittering bluebirds and rainbows all the time.

As sad as it is at first to realize that fairytale endings don't exist, upon further reflection I find that that's a good thing. As Just Ella demonstrates, things aren't always as they appear. Things that look like perfection always have a not-so-perfect side. If you box yourself into this idea that certain things in your life are your set-in-stone destiny, you're setting yourself up for unhappiness. People change, situations change. You may find that something that you thought would make you happy doesn't at all, and that you really want something else. Most importantly, it's your choice what to do with your life. Your fairy godmother isn't going to give you a happily-ever-after; you have to make it yourself, and furthermore, you decide exactly what constitutes happily-ever-after for you. If you don't want to marry Prince Charming, don't. It's up to you.

As William Ernest Henley put it in his poem Invictus: "I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul."

Inside a Song

Anybody who knows me at all, knows that music is really important to me. I listen to lots of different types-- instrumental piano/orchestral and cinematic scores are my favorites, but I also enjoy classical, jazz, pop, some country, and even a fair bit of metal and alternative music (which often surprises people, since I don't really fit the "metalhead" type).
The other day, when I was finishing up the second book of The Lord of the Rings, (which is the second half of The Fellowship of the Ring, see previous blog post)I was at the part where the Company arrives at Cerin Amroth in Lorien. Samwise observes that being in the land of the Elves is like being "inside a song;" an expression which I liked very much. What does it mean to be inside a song? As a musician, I think that studying and performing music is getting inside a song. To learn a song well, you have to really work at it. Even once you've learned the notes and the proper fingering for everything, you have to make sure you're interpreting it well-- putting in the crescendos and diminuendos, using rubato where appropriate, using the pedals properly, etc. Once you've mastered all the minutiae of the composition, you're free to put yourself into the song (although, as my Piano Ensemble instructor last semester pointed out, only a singer can perform a "song." Instrumentalists perform "pieces." Technically.), which is something that is really hard to describe. I do it better when I'm alone.

For me, performing music for other people is a lot different than just playing for myself or for a teacher. And not just because I get nervous, either. When I'm playing alone, it's much... freer. It's hard to describe. I'm playing exactly the same notes, with more or less the same technique and the same expression, but the music moves slower. Most performers have a tendency to perform things at a higher tempo than they practice them, but it's more than that; even if I manage to keep the tempo is the same, the music feels slower to me, because I'm in kind of a "zen" state. More in the moment. When I'm performing, it's like driving on the freeway instead of on a county road. Everything seems to happen faster, and the stakes are higher. I'm not usually nervous while I'm actually playing-- only before and sometimes after. The performance itself is kind of a rush, and I'm usually very comfortable with it-- if very focused. But I'm much more self-aware. I can't always predict whether the performance quality will be better or worse than practice. Sometimes, especially if I haven't practiced as well as I should have, little mistakes that I thought I'd ironed out pop back up in performance. Sometimes (and it's so cool when this happens), I've practiced the piece so much that the technical aspects of it are second nature, and I get into that zen state where I'm able to play even better than I thought I could. Finishing a good performance is like standing on top of the world-- you want to punch the air and yell, "Ha! Take that, world!" It's a great feeling, being inside a song :).

Feminism

The subject of feminism has been on my mind a lot today. A lot of people I know think that feminism is a bad thing, and I find this both saddening and frustrating-- so I'd like to put in words exactly what (I think) feminism is.

I believe that, at bottom, feminism is exactly the same thing as "liberty and justice for all", applied to a specific group that had some trouble getting liberty and justice. Feminism states that women are, legally speaking, persons. The word "person" has certain legal implications (as indicated by the fact that legal documents use the nonstandard plural "persons," rather than "people," in the interest of precision of language). Susan B. Anthony's great address in 1873, "Are Women Persons?" addressed this topic. If you are a person, you have certain rights, privileges, and obligations-- in fact, if you are a person, the Constitution and Bill of Rights apply to you. You have certain inalienable rights, among these being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

All this seems quite obvious to me-- that women are persons, and as such have rights equal to those of men. The question is not one of gender, but of personhood. Gender is irrelevant to personhood.

All this means that, as persons, women have the right to vote (which was recognized legally with the 19th Amendment in 1920). They also have the right to make their own choices regarding their lives-- to marry or not to marry, to work in any field they choose (and receive pay equal to that of a man doing the same work), to have children (or not), to stay home with those children (or not)-- in short, they have the same choices, and the same options, that men do.

That's all well and good, and I'm sure that nobody would disagree with me, as far as I have gotten. The trouble comes when you start to think of the "feminist" as a bra-burning, family-spurning, career-obsessed, man-hating minx. There's a reason that this image springs to mind, but it's not what some people seem to think.

The problem is this-- feminism is a philosophy, and that philosophy, just like any other, can be and has been interpreted, implied, and reworked, for both good and ill. I think that it has been reworked for ill (and, in fact, against itself) in two ways.

Firstly, some feminists have taken the "women are equal to men" too far, and insisted that women are superior to men. This is in fact contrary to feminism itself, the basic premise of which is that all persons are created equal.

Secondly, feminism has sometimes been interpreted to mean that all women should be career women. However, this also goes against true feminism, which states that women, as persons, have the CHOICE to live as they see fit-- if they see fit to pursue a career, that's wonderful. If they see fit to stay home and raise a family, that's wonderful. And if they see fit to do both (whether simultaneously, or at different seasons of life), that's wonderful, too. It's all up to them. Any person, entity, or philosophy which tells women (or any other sort of person) that in order to be "good enough" or "fulfilled" or "worthwhile", they MUST do or be ______, is trying to take away the freedom of those persons, and as such is violating the very meaning of feminism. Such an ideology is a tyrant in liberator's clothing-- but to look at these people and conclude that feminism is bad is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Books and Growing Up

Today I was thinking about the books that I loved growing up (and still do). I read a lot of different kinds of books-- fantasy books like C.S. Lewis's Narnia books and Brian Jacques's Redwall series were some of my favorites. I loved historical fiction and older children's books like Little House on the Prairie and Heidi. I remember my mom used to limit how many Babysitter's Club novels I could read, at one point banning them completely, because she felt that they were "twaddle" (a word she used to describe books which she felt were the literary equivalent of soap operas). At the time, I was very annoyed by this (mostly because I chafed at anything that remotely restricted my ability to "be my own boss"), but now I can see why she did that. As I grew up, my mom taught me that some books are better than others. Some are well-written, some have important things to say, some make you think, some are boring, some you shouldn't read until you're older, and some are just plain bad. As a child I mostly believed her (although I would still sometimes read Babysitter's Club, just to prove that I was my own boss). Now, I still think that, but from experience. I've found that there are some books that when I finish them, I want to read them again and again, and there are others where I feel like I might as well have done something else.

I don't know if I'm a bookworm by nature or nurture-- probably both. I grew up in a house where books were readily available; now, my mom has enough books to take up nine bookshelves, and she's constantly having to juggle the books to make room for more. My mom is definitely a bookworm; she always read to us, and my siblings and I often saw her reading "grown-up books." Reading was never a chore for me. My parents had to make a rule that I couldn't read anything until I'd finished my schoolwork. I was sneaky, though; I could often get away with reading the dictionary, or reading all the examples in my Writing and Spelling books.

It occurs to me that the best kind of learning we do, doesn't come from books that teach us overtly. The best kind is subliminal. Take honesty, for example; I learned from my parents and from church and from the moralizing sorts of books that I ought to be honest. Well, that's all well and good, but mostly those kinds of lessons meant little to me. I think that the most powerful lessons I learned about honesty, didn't contain that word at all. Most likely, the authors of the books I learned honesty from weren't trying to teach that value at all (and if they were, they were very sneaky about it). I learned to be honest by reading about characters who were honest-- like Martin the Warrior in Brian Jacques Redwall novels that I mentioned earlier. When I read about Martin, I wasn't thinking about how honest and brave and valorous he was. I just liked and admired him, as a character. And as a result, I tried to act more like him-- because he was cool!

A lot has been said about children reading books that are "dark," or too scary for them. Looking back on the books I read, some of them scare me a lot more now than they did when I first read them! I read lots of books where people died, or got hurt or maimed. I read books that included battles, torture, mutilation, manipulation, and all sorts of horrible things. And as a reader, I put myself into the shoes of the characters experiencing these things. Why, then, did I not grow up scarred for life?

I think that, for one thing, the bad things I read about were not (for the most part) overly graphic. A lot of them were very frank, but they didn't focus on the bad things. I think that this develops resilience in people-- the ability to hold on to sanity and optimism when bad things happen. Yes, the bad things happened, and sometimes they couldn't be fixed. But the sun still came up in the morning, and even while the bad things were going on, there was still more to the story than that. Rose might have been killed during the battle between the pirate rats and the escaped slaves, and that was very sad, but things still came out okay.

In short, I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to become acquainted with books, and their myriad delights and frustrations (despite the fact that Martin the Warrior had a happy ending, I never really have stopped feeling sad that Rose died). Literacy is a big cause in the world today, and that's a good thing. But I hope that, along with teaching people to be able to decode letters and words, we'll also be able to help them see that the joy of literacy isn't just being able to decode the symbols-- it's what is inside the words that matters. :)

Objective Morality as a Case for God

Yesterday I finished Mere Christianity, a wonderful book by C.S. Lewis which I had attempted (and failed) to finish several times before. It had never really grabbed my attention (even though, in general, I love C.S. Lewis's writing), but this time I found it absorbing, and could not put it down.

What I particularly found intriguing was his argument for the existence of some kind of supernatural being (i.e., God). He argues that the fact that humans do, in fact, have such a thing as morality indicates that there is a supernatural creative force of some kind. Consider, for instance, a person who has to choose between being honest and suffering for it, or being dishonest for his own benefit. When facing this choice, there are in fact three things in his mind. Two of them are the options he has to choose between (honesty and dishonesty), and the third thing is a something that tells him that he should choose honesty. That third thing is separate from his own wanting something-- he may very well want to choose dishonesty-- and can't really be construed as his own "survival instinct" either. Take, for example, the case of a man who sees another man drowning. Again, he has two choices (to help the drowning man at the risk of his own safety, or not help the drowning man and remain safe himself), and a third thing in his mind which tells him that he should help the drowning man, even at personal risk. That couldn't possibly be "survival instinct," because the thing telling him to make the "right" choice is in fact telling him to risk his own survival.

Lewis argues that "morality" is something that man couldn't have come up with himself, and its universality is an indication of its reality. If you look at the religions and moral codes around the world and throughout history, you find a common thread. Sure, there are lots of deviations and differences, but they all contain certain tenets, such as "don't steal," "don't lie," "don't murder," "don't hurt other people," etc. In fact, instances which argue exceptions actually prove the case of objective morality. When somebody is in violation of the moral law, they don't usually say "well, that's a subjective law so it doesn't matter what I do." Instead, they try to argue that what they are doing doesn't really violate the law, or that they are somehow an exception to the law.

Even in the case of people who do argue for subjective morality, you will find that they will be just as upset as anyone else if you cheat them or lie to them. They will at once be appealing to the very moral law that they previously dismissed; they will try to find some objective reason why you should not lie to or cheat them. Lewis takes this as an indication that everybody, deep down, knows that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and that we should live by it.

I had never thought of it in that way before. Of course, we are told by the religious community that morality is something that comes from a source outside of humanity, namely God. I had never considered, though, that the fact that humans even have such a concept as morality-- indeed, that human language contains such words as "should" and "ought"-- is an indication of a supernatural being existing outside of human cognizance. How fascinating.