The Magnificent Ambersons: The Title of This Recital Is “Ladies First”
Diablevert has made some particularly convincing arguments for the merits of what I find to be a thoroughly mediocre book. And I’d like to thank her for that, because I definitely appreciate this book better for her comments on it. But I still do not think that it holds up ninety years later and probably did not deserve the Pulitzer (more on what did later, in a post on… drum-roll… Pulitzer history! Please, try to contain your excitement.)
Having gone through my English literature initiation at college in the late 90s, I think it’s nigh on impossible for me to write about a book without thinking how various schools of literary criticism would have a field day ripping it up. (This is probably why I stopped writing about books for a good long while.) Looking at this thing like you were a Marxist critic or a feminist critic… well, something’s rotten in the state of Denmark. (HA! Again, Hamlet references bring the flava.) Thinking about MagAm from a feminist perspective, in particular, gets my back up.
All of the women in the novel are shallowly drawn. You could say the same thing for the male characters too, but the boys are lucky enough to die quietly, off-stage, with a measure of solemnity or leave with a bit of worldly success intact. (Overlooking, as, alas, we may have to do right up through Gone with the Wind, anyone who is not white, for they haven’t been afforded success or dignity in any of these books to date.) The women of MagAmb are constellations and primary victims of George’s raging ego.
The three main female characters—George’s mother, Lucy, and Aunt Fanny—are all creatures governed by emotion and the men around them. George’s mother takes the “angel in the house” stereotype to the extreme, with her nearly erotic devotion to her son, following his every word as law to the point of ridiculousness. Aunt Fanny is often played for comic relief, until she’s retired on a spinster’s allotment and we are comforted with the fact that she was probably “better suited” to this meager life all along. Lucy, the spunky ingénue, starts off less blatantly typecast, but is stuck pining away for George at the end of the book for no good reason—maybe because she’s the only marriageable female in the book. One could say that the only impediment to their marriage was George’s lack of ambition, which is remedied by his new job as an explosions expert. But I’m gonna assume that the medicine of the time was not so great and Lucy was really signing up to be the lifelong caretaker of an invalid at the book’s glowing close. I agree that Tarkington has a strange affection for George, but I think his failings go way past callow youth, when you look at the amount of suffering he caused.
These are obvious points, and I would probably overlook them in a book that wowed me in another way—its wit, its poetry, its vividness. But I don’t get that from The Magnificent Ambersons, so what I’m left with leaves me cold. I just can’t see how it won both a Pulitzer prize and squeaked onto the list of the greatest novels of our time—Modern Library, that’s you I’m pointing a finger at.
