The Hidden Child by Louise Fein

If you are one of the many who believe that eugenics was a tool only of Nazi Germany, you should read the excellent and thoroughly researched historical novel by Louise Fein entitled, The Hidden Child.

Often, the best way of really bringing home the horrors of a practice is to embody it, to show how real people are affected by the practice. Louise Fein has done just that in her sad but wonderful novel. As Eleanor is watching over her beautiful five year old child, Mabel,  frolicking  in a park, suddenly and out of nowhere Mabel begins to act in a most frightening way. A postman has just dropped his bike in shock as he points to the beautiful child in front of him. 

Eleanor turns in confusion.

Mabel! Sticks scattered around her, she’s sitting on the dusty ground, face twisted, her eyes weirdly rolling back. Her chin drops to her chest, once, twice, hands twitching. 

Eleanor’s feet are rooted to the ground in horror. Her daughter looks as though she’s been possessed, her normal sweet expression vanished behind the contorted features of her face. 

But this is not the first nor the last of these fits. Eleanor’s instinctive reaction is to brush of the momentary behavior, and she implores the postman not to fetch a doctor.  Besides her inclination to deny and hope the momentary aberration is just that, passing and of no significance, she is married to a psychologist who is a leader of the eugenics movement in the U.K., and who would be most embarrassed to admit his daughter is among the unfit who need to be weeded from society.

Fein skillfully weaves her story. Edward, the psychologist husband, insists that Mabel’s ailment must not be discovered, both to protect the child from being singled out and ridiculed, and to protect his own reputation within the movement. He insists that it will be best for all concerned if Mabel is locked away in a sanitarium and kept from public scrutiny. 

Although heartbroken, Eleanor cannot stand up to her husband and his professional stature and eventually defers to his judgment. Unable even to visit her young child, she slowly becomes more and more aware that her husband sees only what he wants to see and that he even skews his research to omit  evidence that would count against his theories regarding the improvement of the race via incarceration, sterilization and other drastic measures.

The story itself is compelling and so well written, but the controversy behind the theory is really the most important part of this novel. Fein, herself, has a child with epilepsy, and that no doubt adds to her careful and thorough research in writing this book. In her notes at the end of the novel:

I was therefore rather shocked that when I began to look into the ideas behind the inhumane treatment of people with disabilities, including epilepsy, in the 1920s, I found , in fact, that Nazi Germany took its lead in this area from widespread and accepted eugenics ideas circulating in both the United Kingdom and the United States. The eugenics movement had been born in England in the late nineteenth century and was extremely widespread in the first thirty years or so of the twentieth century.

The pseudo-science of eugenics and other theories such as craniology are thoroughly debunked by Stephen Jay Gould in his superb set of essays, The Mismeasure of Man. Like Edward in this novel, many of the experiments meant to support the theories were manipulated such that only confirmatory data was allowed and contra evidence swept under the rug. 

This novel and the story stand on their own quite apart from the eugenics controversy, but the social and political importance of the book  needs to be emphasized. 

I will end with another quote from the author’s end notes:

Legislation was proposed for compulsory sterilization and incarceration of those considered “weak-minded,” a catchall phrase for those with learning difficulties as well as epileptics, criminals, those with behavioral difficulties, alcoholics and anyone else considered “undesirable” and ruinous to the health of the population in general.

Oh William by Elizabeth Strout

Believe me, I am giving nothing away by beginning my remarks by quoting the last page of Elizabeth’s Strout’s new novel, Oh William

And then I thought, Oh William!

But when I think Oh William!, don’t I  mean Oh Lucy! too?

Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!

Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do.

But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.

This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.

Strout in her unique way, again reminds us that there are no ordinary people, that everyone is extraordinary, and that the simplest of day to day events is filled with mystery.

As she does in each of her novels, Strout revisits old characters. This time it is Lucy Barton who reappears. Like Strout, Lucy Barton is an author. Her most recent husband, David has died leaving her buried in grief. And she decides to tell us a few things about her first husband William with whom she has remained good friends after their divorce. They have two adult daughters together, and the two daughters have a half-sister from William’s last marriage. William has been married three times: Lucy, Joanne, and Estelle.

William has been having terrifying dreams and he finds it quite natural to confide in Lucy regarding those dreams. He wonders if the dreams have simply to do with getting older. 

“Maybe,” I said. But I was not sure this was the reason. William has always been a mystery to me—and to our girls as well. I said, tentatively, “Do you want to see anyone to talk to about them?”

Strout’s writing is so simplistic, so flat, and yet her readers understand they are being given a very wise view of the world.  At times her writing seems almost like the awkward journal jottings of a high-schooler. And yet, and yet there seem to be profound insights  about marriage, about raising children, about respecting old relationships and getting beyond petty jealousy.

Both William and Lucy have had sad, lonely childhoods and few warm feelings about their mothers. 

There is this about my own mother:

I have written about her and I really do not care to write anything else about her. But I understand one might need to know a few things for this story. The few things would be this: I have no memory of my mother ever touching any of her children except in violence. I do not remember that she ever said, I love you, Lucy. 

The rather complicated and often humorous plot of this novel is, I think, much less important than Lucy’s asides; asides about choice and loneliness and not being able to let go of past hurts.

People are lonely, is my point here. Many people can’t say to those they know well what it is they feel they might want to say.

The only other writer I can think of who is as skillful in uncovering the extraordinary in ordinary lives is Alice Munro, and like Munro who writes almost exclusively short stories, Strout makes her points in passing, in throw-off comments. Her insights cannot be easily summed up, her messages not easily articulated.

I will leave you with this heart-rending quote from Lucy.

There have been times—and I mean recently—when I feel the curtain of my childhood descend around me once again. A terrible enclosure, a quiet horror: This is the feeling and it was with me my entire childhood, and it came back to me with a whoosh the other day. To remember so quietly, yet vividly, to have it re-presented to me in this way, the sense of doom I grew up with, knowing I could never leave that house (except to go to school, which meant the world to me, even though I had no friends there, but I was out of the house)—to have this come back to me presented a domain of dull and terrifying dreariness to me.: There was no escape.

When I was young there was no escape, is what I am saying. 

Oh Elizabeth, you genius story-teller, please keep writing.

A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier

It is 1932, England and all of Europe is still under the cloud of World War I. So many men died in the war that there are thousands upon thousands of young widows or unmarried ‘spinsters’ who are dubbed ‘surplus woman', woman who will be unlikely to marry or have children. Violet Speedwell is one such woman; at thirty-eight, she has lost both her older brother and her finance, Laurence. Violet’s mother is inconsolable over the death of her oldest son, and is super-critical of her daughter, so much so that she makes Violet’s life miserable, and Violet longs to get away from her home and town where she feels suffocated by the life of caring for her aging mother.

When Violet spots an ad for a typist in a nearby town, she applies, and immediately accepts the low-paying job when it is offered. 

When it became clear that Mrs. Speedwell was not going to see her off as she normally did, watching from the doorway until visitors were out of sight, Violet went over and kissed her on the forehead. “Good-bye, Mother” she murmured. “I’ll see you next Sunday.”

Mrs. Speedwell sniffed,. “Don’t bother. I may be dead by then.”

And thus Violet begins her new life, living in a boardinghouse with other young women and working long hours typing forms for an insurance company. Excited by the new freedom, she puts up with meals of sardines on toast or beans on toast. 

She took herself to the cinema every week—her one indulgence, which she paid for by going without a meal that day. 

Her life is dreary and lonely until one day she goes to the grand cathedral in Winchester and happens onto a particular service, one filled with mostly older  women. She is not at the church to pray, ”prayers had died in the war alongside George and Laurence and a nation full of young men.”

It turns out to be a special mass for broderers, i.e. women who embroider seat cushions and kneelers  for the hard wooden benches of the cathedral. At first blocked from entering the group, she persists and eventually is allowed to be a part of the group. An so begins a new and much less socially impoverished  life as she befriends other broderers and comes under the very kind tutelage of Miss  Pesel, one of two women in charge of the group of women.

When I picked up this novel, I knew nothing of spinning, weaving, crocheting , or embroidering, but I was fascinated by the descriptions and by the friendships between the women. Although Violet has had very limited introduction to needlework, she quickly takes to it under the watchful eye of Miss Pesel. She also becomes friends with an older man, Arthur, who is a bell-ringer for the cathedral. Arthur is married to a woman who is frail and ailing, unable to recover from the loss of her son in the war.

In order to be allowed to attend the daytime broderers meetings, Violet comes up with a plan to improve efficiency in the insurance office  such that it will allow both she and Olive, the other typist to attend the meetings.

“But, Miss Speedwell, I  shall say this  idea came from me, if you don’t mind,” he added with a frown. “I can’t think what management would say about a girl having such a ...progressive idea”

The author, Chevalier, has such a wonderful ear for the nuances and prejudices of this time in a Europe decimated by one war and on the eve of another. 

Violet decides on a walking tour in the country in place of the holidays of the past spent with her mother and younger brother and his family. She has a frightening encounter with a man she calls the corn man, having met him in a cornfield and then followed by him. Having walked to Sthe small town where Arthur lives, she confides in him about the scare she has had. “ He frightened you?”

“Yes” Arthur looked at her waiting.

“It’s not easy being a woman on your your own,” Violet explained after a moment. “No one expects it, though there are plenty of us. The ‘surplus women’. One would think it would not be such a surprise to see a woman walk through a field, or have a cup of tea in a pub.”

This is such a lovely little novel; I didn’t expect to be so intrigued by it, reading it as a kind  of respite from two rather heavy novels, but by the end, I knew I had to call it to the attention of other readers.

Among the broderers, Violet becomes a special friend of Gilda, and Gilda seems to light up when yet another woman, DJ, Dorothy, shows up at meetings. 

When Gilda appeared—out of breath and shouting hello—DJ started,  and suddenly solidified, as if outlined by solid black. She did not stop smiling, but her eyes drifted toward the corner of the room as if to dodge attention. Gilda too seemed out of sorts, looking everywhere but at DJ, and laughing a little too brightly as she removed her cloche...Violet discovered that there was something to discover, though she did not yet understand what it was.

Only Violet and eventually Miss Pesel accept the relationship between the two women.

There was something around them that made them seem closer than others, although they were not actually standing closer or even looking at each other. It was like an invisible fence, penning them together.

“That’s what can happen when you’re a spinster.”

It was said quietly, behind Violet, one woman to another. There was sarcasm in the words and a harshness, and something like fear.. 

Violet comes to see just how lovely and natural the relationship between Gilda and DJ is, opening her eyes to new possibilities.