This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates.
I went through a period in my tweens in which I watched the 1991 The Mummy at least once a week. Sometimes more often than that. I knew most of it by heart, including all of its lines in fake ancient Egyptian. This has blossomed, in my later years, into an ability to watch basically anything as if it’s the first time, a skill that I am still trying to figure out how to monetize.
This tendency tells me that, had I been born over a hundred years ago, I may have been an ideal readership for the stories of Laura Jean Libbey, an incredibly popular series of novellas published toward the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth in the United States. Because really, even her contemporaries and her fans admitted her stories were all the same. They have titles like Ione, a Broken Love Dream (what does this even mean?), Little Rosebud’s Lovers; or a Cruel Revenge, and Kidnapped at the Altar: or The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain (just…yes.) In lieu of a summary of any of them, I think you can get the gist with these:
1. “Phew! What an independent little piece we are, to be sure!” he cried.
2. “He helped her to alight with as much courtly grace as though she had been a princess instead of a poor little working-girl.”
3. “I am offended!” cried Jessie Bain, indignantly. “I always supposed before this that people could sit down in a public park without being molested; but it seems not; so I shall move on!”
4. “Like a flash, Leonie tore herself free from the man’s detaining grasp, her brown eyes blazing, and her fairy young face flushed to a deep crimson. ‘You are no gentleman, sir,’ she cried, fairly trembling with emotion.”
5. “Get me a life-boat, somebody–anybody! Half my fortune for a life-boat!”
6. “And there we will leave them, dear reader, for when a girl marries, all the ills of life should be left behind her, and she should dwell in sunshine and love ever after.”
A young girl, often a factory worker, attracts the wolfish attention of every male in her vicinity. One of these – and just one – is not a moustache twirling villain after her virtue and freedom. The integrity of her virtue and her bouncing curls are threatened, and there are also usually a few swoons and shock-induced fevers. Finally, she is saved by said adoring non-villain and swept away from her working girl life.
In other words, Libbey wrote the kind of novels that would have given George Eliot a conniption. Eliot’s description of the typical heroine of such “silly novels” is almost verbatim of most of Libbey’s leading ladies: her “eyes and…wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues.”
Without exception, Libbey’s fair heroines are “fair,” “innocent,” “bewitching,” and “childlike,” with a rosy, dimpled face and a “wealth” of hair falling to her waist in “heavy curls.” It’s a good thing that she is wealthy in hair, because she is always lacking in, you know, actual wealth. She is loyal to her family, but they usually die off pretty early in the story. She is virtuous, yet “willful.” Pursued from all corners, she is desired by every male she meets, but completely devoid of hormones herself.
In the 1970s, Paula Smith identified a trend in the Star Trek fanfiction she read that she called “Lieutenant Mary Sue” stories, mocking it in her own parody featuring Mary Sue, “the youngest lieutenant in the fleet” who attracts the desire and admiration of everyone else on the Enterprise. She, and all of her attractively flawed descendants, is “amazingly intelligent, outrageously beautiful, adored by all around her.” But the kind of stories Smith was noticing have a history that goes beyond Trekkie fandom.
Modern fiction featuring a Mary Sue, whether fanfic or mainstream, tends to be criticized for a laziness or self-centeredness that rolls author, heroine, and reader into a ball of nauseating perfection. But the history of Laura Jean Libbey’s working girls and their stories gives the concept a little more credit. In her writings and public persona, she spoke of herself as friend to and one of the working girls, but kept her life vague and out of the public eye. This championing of the typical factory girl was pretty unusual for the time. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the tendency was to use the character of the working girl as shorthand for disreputability and easy morals, or to embody the horrible working conditions in the factories. Some concerned menfolk thought that women working outside of the home, in factories, wore out their bodies and morals to no good end.
But sometimes, concerned menfolk and even George Eliot can be wrong. After all, the original Mary Sues tended to show young women and ethnic minorities in positions of leadership and power, where before they were relegated to minor roles. So in all their obnoxiously saucy-Jessie-Bainness, Libbey’s heroines show the working girl reader her literary counterpart as ideal, as desirable, but not easy. And the way you would have read these stories would have made this wish fulfillment even more intense. Like when the narrator of Leonie’s story says how, “The great sensational story found its way into the daily papers, as sensational stories always do; and many a working-girl read the story of her struggle against adverse fate. She had been a working-girl like themselves; she had known all their privations, the early rising, hurried toilet, and hurrying steps to the work-shop.” When they were first published, many of Libbey’s works were serialized in magazines and newspapers, just as Leonie’s story is published in the papers and then read by other (fictional) working girls.
These layers of stories-about-working-girls-within-stories-about-working girls erase the boundaries separating the reader from the fantasy world of the novel until she is the one reading Leonie Locke’s story in the papers. In thinking of Laura Jean Libbey’s heroine as Mary Sue’s grandmother, we can salvage not only Libbey’s reputation as a forgettably trashy woman novelist, but also the idea of what a Mary Sue can offer to the literary world and her readers. Her characters, in their Mary Sue-ishness, are admirable and desirable, unlike their working girl counterparts in other, less flattering stories. Not only do Libbey’s narratives give its readers romantic fictions of escape, but they also create imaginary worlds in which their readers gain cultural power (and great hair.)
Tags: books, katja jylkka, laura jean libbey, the gentleman scholar sponsorship series
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“I am offended!” cried Jessie Bain, indignantly. “I always supposed before this that people could sit down in a public park without being molested; but it seems not; so I shall move on!”
Alas, the phenomenon of women being addressed by total strangers is not a new one! I am going to begin saying this whenever strangers talk to me in public now, with offended graciousness.
But also this is excellent!
My nose is straight, but my morals certainly have moments of irregularity. These books sound great!
“You are no gentleman, sir,” is actually still a fairly effective retort, if mostly because you confuse the hell out of the recipient.
When I read works from the 19th and early 20th century, I am always puzzled by the way young working women are treated. It’s either a great awful tragedy that these delicate blooms MUST work and wither away their beauty, or evidence of the working classes natural lack of decorum and delicacy of character.
I think it is no coincidence that my favourite are the books that approach it with something approaching complexity. yes, the work is hard, and often grim and destructive to you, but it’s necessary, and the problem is not that women are working, it’s that the work they are doing is so damaging.
It also boggles my mind the way that people conveniently forget that women have always worked, and they’ve often done the low-paid, dangerous, dirty work too. But I suppsoe it was only poor women who had their faces destroyed by phosphorous poisoning, or who drove themselves blind through fine embroidery, or who earned so little at their factory jobs that many of them were prostitutes after hours to earn extra cash, and poor women don’t count, right?
The idea that women have always worked for basically all of history is one that conveniently escapes a lot of traditional North American social narratives, precisely because it does not neatly fall into the trajectory of history that we teach. There is not a lot of “women’s history” until you get to the suffragettes (who were mostly upper-class women), then you discuss women in factory jobs, and then you get into post-WWII and baby boom women’s lib discussions.
There are a LOT of reasons for this, and one of the big ones is that social history is usually derided as “useless” or namby-pamby not-real-history, despite the fact that it discusses what the vast majority of people were doing–which is, as always, working. It’s tied in with the fact that labour history is also not commonly taught–we don’t learn much in schools about what ANY workers were doing unless it’s tied to a larger political or economic point. So male workers don’t get any time, and female workers get even LESS time. Then students get the idea that “women in factories were the FIRST women working.” It also has to do with the idea of how we define “work,” and if you consider “work is only work when it comes with wages” (which is a big discussion for us right now, in 2014, even) then for large parts of history MEN were not “working” either. But they were doing the work of a farmer or a serf or a peasant, and wives were doing commensurate work–but again, not for wages.
So this is a HUGE topic and a huge issue and wayyyy undertaught/underserved, but labour history is an awesome place to start in discussing it, I think.
http://unwinona.tumblr.com/post/76199740643/the-i…
Here’s a quote from the above linked essay that’s relevant to this:
“There is a reason that most fanfiction authors, specifically girls, start with a Mary Sue. It’s because girls are taught that they are never enough. You can’t be too loud, too quiet, too smart, too stupid. You can’t ask too many questions or know too many answers. No one is flocking to you for advice. Then something wonderful happens. The girl who was told she’s stupid finds out that she can be a better wizard than Albus Dumbledore. And that is something very important. Terrible at sports? You’re a warrior who does backflips and Legolas thinks you’re THE BEST. No friends? You get a standing ovation from Han Solo and the entire Rebel Alliance when you crash-land safely on Hoth after blowing up the Super Double Death Star. It’s all about you. Everyone in your favorite universe is TOTALLY ALL ABOUT YOU.
I started writing fanfiction the way most girls did, by re-inventing themselves.
Mary Sues exist because children who are told they’re nothing want to be everything. ”
I love that last line. “Mary Sues exist because children who are told they’re nothing want to be everything.”
Yes! It’s easy to dismiss this trope from an adult perspective, but it’s attractive to young readers for a reason.
I think it’s also fantastic to get a positive response to Mary Sue characters that isn’t just “well but Han Solo/Batman/Taran Wanderer are ALSO Mary Sues!” Which is a valid point, but it’s nice to get a barrage of perspectives on the matter.
and the whole “told they’re nothing” really resonates with me.
Hmmm This really hits home for me.
I was not a confident child, and am not a confident adult – well I’m pretty good at projecting it when needed but basically I think I generally suck. I am a fairly prolific reader, and I find I mainly read YA fiction, for a number of reasons (I like plot, ‘Adult’ fiction often wears it’s motives on it’s sleeves, YA is less pretentious). And when I read fiction, I pretty much accept the author’s vision, what they say goes (i.e. not a fanfictioner)
So now I’m wondering whether I am actually reading YA for the Mary Sues, that because I don’t think I’m that great, I seek out fiction where someone also not-great can do/be more.
Food for thought. I think I’ll come back to this.
I read a lot of YA in part bc one of my best friends is a YA librarian and she knows me SUPER well and recommends me stuff RIGHT up my alley. Personally, I like my protags flawed, but successful despite/because of their flaws. At least I do now. As a kid, I read books and aspired to be just like the protags I read about (who were mostly male and white and able bodied and heterosexual and and and). They were a way of seeing my ideal self. But now as an adult, I want more stories about people who kinda suck and survive anyway, because i kind of suck, but I’m still hanging on.
*adult ya reader fist bump*
*adult YA reader fist bump* right back at ‘ya!
For me (though I need to think more about this Mary Sue thing) it’s not about the protagonists, it’s about the plot. I read pretty fast, and I want a good strong plot – that’s what matters to me the most.
One of the other reasons I read a lot of YA is that I think a YA book has to be reasonably good in order to survive (i.e. be bought and not fade into the ether), whereas I find a lot more variety in ‘adult fiction’ books. Some are good, but a non-minor number are just bad. So if you’re browsing library shelves, the chance that a random YA book will be ok/not crap is higher than the chance of a random ‘fiction’ book being ok/not crap. That’s my theory at any rate.
Thank you for linking to the essay posted on tumblr! I was just sitting at my desk thinking “I know I just read something somewhere that complements this piece really nicely, but what was it?”
And dang, tumblr is a real bear to search through!
“And there we will leave them, dear reader, for when a girl marries, all the ills of life should be left behind her, and she should dwell in sunshine and love ever after.”
Sadly, popular culture seems to still be laboring under this misapprehension. Fortunately for me, I have loose morals, and so will never have this kind of happy ending.
Ha! My bf likes to say I’m “morally lax”.
ROSIE M. BANKS ROSIE M. BANKS!!!
YES! I was like, “Wodehouse was alllll over these.
Grandma! +50 pts! I have a strict rule about never cooking for more than 12 people and even then, never before noon because anything more is CATERING which is a JOB and requires the exchange of goods or services. Plus, I'm sure your Grandma didn't take weekends off! She's the best. (Sidenote: Irish farmland sounds gorgeous).
Betty Neels books fall squarely in this category! I devoured them when I was younger – they needed almost no thought because they were written basically by mad-lib.
Heroine is [short with a ‘neat figure’ and a ‘plain face saved by a pair of fine eyes’ OR ‘Juno-esqe’ with a pretty face]. She is a [nurse OR admin assistant] who meets an exceedingly tall Dutch [doctor OR occasionally a lawyer]. He is [engaged to/dating someone awful who is exactly the opposite of the heroine to the point where you wonder why this super smart doctor guy is so bad at recognizing what a witch his fiancee is because he’s really good at charming everyone else around him and reading the heroine’s mind in a really pretty patronizing way a lot of the time]. The heroine and hero [spend a lot of time together in ways that are sneaky kind of dates though he refuses to state his interest in her OR have a marriage of convenience]. He will kiss her [surprisingly OR inappropriately at least once]. At the end of the book, he will confess that [he didn’t realize he loved her until recently because she’s so drab and unassuming he barely noticed her OR he was in love with her from the moment they met and she’s so silly for not noticing that he was grooming her to be his wife].
All that being said, I would still totally get with a tall, handsome Dutch doctor [who is sometimes a baron or something].
These books are what Anne Shirley and her Story Writing Club aspired to write. Amazing.
I wish to congratulate you. I wish to thank you. You go from strength to strength. I have read ‘All for Love,’ I have read ‘Only a Factory Girl,’ I know ‘Madcap Myrtle’ by heart. But this—this is your bravest and best. It tears the heart-strings.
Wow, thank you for sharing that! I've never thought about the Mary Sue phenomenon in those terms before.
I own a large run of George Munro’s Family Story Paper that includes Laura Jean Libbey serials from 1897 to 1913. I can find no popular culture archive interested in their study or preservation. Broadsheet story papers have incredibly small type and are easily damaged. The archive needs to be digitized and given some respect, considering all of the historical significance cited here. If anyone is interested, contact me, Murray Bishoff, at [email protected]