Enough of the harshness of modern life
Sometimes it’s important to actively seek wholesomeness, especially today when voices are harsh, grating, even threatening. When shouting and name-calling become the norm, when what you were brought up to believe to be right and good is turned upside down.I was thinking about this as I was discovering a video treasure, Masterpiece’s version of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.” I have always been a fan of that story. I guess I’ve watched all of the cinematic and TV versions with a sense of familiar delight. There is something about this story that is both a set piece for the times in which it was written and as a timeless statement about family and women and home and, yes, tender kindness in strength.
The Masterpiece version which first aired (and I don’t know how I missed it) two years ago, is superb. The cast is spot-on, with performances indistinguishable from the daily lives of real young women, mixtures of pride and anxiety and exuberance, of sibling love and animosity. The costumes respected actual clothing and the setting was, without a doubt, evocative of home – safety and refuge.
I have a small picture that I bought years ago at a yard sale in Marblehead, Mass., of a rose, surrounded by a sea glass blue mat. I think I paid two dollars for it. It’s my go-to artwork when I need to focus on something to bring me to a more centered place. It’s soft. How else can I explain this? It is warm. It says peace. It isn’t something that demands interpretation. It just is, pretty, demure, reminiscent of a place where I’ve never been, but remembered.
I do think that it carries those “watercolor memories” of good times in childhood where all was right with the world and sleep came without urging. Is it the drawing, the colors? Maybe it’s the visual equal of aspirations for a time and a place that may have never been, but should be.
“Little Women,” so familiar, has dialog that is the verbal equal of that feeling. I never lived in a house in Massachusetts with three sisters, but still the story was my story, at least in part. There was a gentle strength brought about by the power of the family’s love for one another, not in some fantasy of youth, but in the outright struggles of growing up in a family where there was poverty, sickness, spite, pettiness, … the things we all experience.
There was the tenderness of a house that provided the haven for each of the women to be who they were and would be. There was the reality of making do with little and suffering the slings of class disparities that are still real today. There was the power of a mother’s love and care holding them all together during the difficult times … as real as my mother’s strength during equally hard times.
While our house was far more minimalistic than that of the house in “Little Women,” I had dreams of a house like theirs and could, as a child, live in my dreams in a house like that house.
As adults, we are supposed to be inured to the harsh realities of daily life, to adapt to the rough edges of experience. Not true! Inside we retain that need for comfort, for safety, for the knowledge that you are being cared for. To quote Barbara Streisand, “We are children, needing other children, and yet letting our grown-up pride hide all the need inside.”
Vulgar language, name calling, dissembling, trashing cultural mores in favor of the bottom line – all of the wounds of the modern world made even more cutting by the assault of information overload and normative disreputable behaviors that disturb.
An hour or two enjoying the pleasure of the wholesomeness of a fictional world that parallels the real, that brings a sense of how things are and should be is not escape, it’s therapy.
Ann Ferro is a mother, a grandmother and a retired social studies teacher. While still figuring out what she wants to be when she grows up, she lives in Marcellus with lots of books, a spouse and a large orange cat.
