A Continuation of a Northern Light
A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly
Set in 1906, A Gathering Light (titled A Northern Light in the US) is the story of sixteen-year-old Mattie Gokey, the oldest daughter of a farmer from upstate New York. Ever since her mother passed away, Mattie has been looking after her younger sisters and giving her father a hand with the farm—and all the while trying desperately to find time to study for her final high school examinations, to read Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, or Jane Austen, and to write her stories, which are her greatest passion.
Mattie's teacher, Miss Wilcox, believes she has talent, and constantly encourages her to pursue her intellectual interests. Mattie's greatest ambition is to go to New York City and attend university, but she knows that to do so she'll have to leave everything and everyone she cares about behind. Mattie's dilemma is only solved when her life gets wrapped up with Grace Brown's, a young woman who's found drowned in Big Moose Lake. As she begins make sense of the circumstances that led to Grace's death, Mattie also gains a better understanding of the position she is in.
Many of you are likely familiar with Grace Brown's real murder case. I wasn't, though, and as Mattie read her letters (many of which Jennifer Donnelly actually includes in the novel), my heart broke for her. And also for Mattie herself: Mattie wants books and stories and words (she has the habit of learning a new word from the dictionary her mother left her every day). But she also wants love, intimacy, and yes, sex too. Which is both understandable and legitimate: she's a teenage girl, she falls in love, and she has to try to balance the different directions in which her body, her heart and her mind pull her.
My favourite thing about A Gathering Light was that it didn't make Mattie's hesitation seem dumb—not in the least. It didn't portray her as weak for having doubts, for hesitating, for being unable to make up her mind. What it did was portray the position she's in complexly and with complete respect, and by doing so it fully exposed its artificiality, its unfairness and its absurdity. Why does she have to choose at all? Why were women forced to pick between books or love; a home or a public life; a family or an education? A Gathering Light isn't about right decisions versus wrong decisions; it isn't about being independent or giving in, and it isn't about an education being legitimate and love being silly, or the other way around. The point is that no matter what she decides, Mattie will have to give up things that are important to her. More than about her final decision, this is a story about why this should be so—it's about a young girl's realisation that the world she lives in puts all human beings of her gender in an extremely unfair position. As you can probably tell by now, I loved A Gathering Light. I loved the fact that it's full of references to other works of literature, and to the lives of women writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries (it's funny how lately, having been thinking about the whole topic of literature as a conversation, I find examples everywhere). I loved the writing, which is insightful, subtle, graceful, and full of quiet power and beauty. I loved that this isn't a book that points fingers at anyone in particular, but rather one that exposes injustice as a system to which even the most well-meaning people can contribute. I also loved how in addition to gender, it deals with race, class, and many of the other reasons why people are put at a disadvantage. I loved the characterization—everyone in the novel feels like a real human being. I loved that this is a book that is not afraid to tackle the grimmer side of life. It's a triumphant novel in some ways—full of life, courage, determination and idealism—but it's also not one that romanticizes life at the turn of the twentieth-century. Bad things happen to good people, as they did then and still do now. Okay, long gushy paragraphs over. Let me just finish this by saying that it was really great for me to read this and Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night in close succession. One is a classic mystery novel from the 1930's; the other is a contemporary YA novel. Yet they deal with many of the same themes in an equally complex and satisfying manner, and each of them made me appreciate the other more. Don't you love that kind of reading synchronicity? Favourite passages: Table eight was a single woman. She was sitting quietly, sipping lemonade and reading. I couldn't take my eyes off her. "I'd kill for a dress like that," Fran said as she passed by me. But it wasn't her dress I wanted, it was her freedom. She could sit by a window and read, with nobody to say, "Are the chickens fed? What's for supper? Have the pigs been slopped? The garden hoed? The cows milked? The stove blacked?" I thought she was the luckiest woman on the face of the earth. As I tried to figure out what I could say—to find words that weren't a lie but weren't quite the truth, either—I thought that madness wasn't quite like they tell it in books. It isn't Miss Havisham sitting in the ruins of her mansion, all vicious and majestic. And it isn't like in Jane Eyre, either, with Rochester's wife banging around in the attic, shrieking and carrying on and frightening the help. When your mind goes, it's not castles and cobwebs and silver candelabra. It's dirty sheets and sour milk and dog shit on the floor. It's Emmie cowering under her bed, crying and singing while her kids try to make soup from seed potatoes. (Did I miss yours?)Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get—a cold, sick feeling deep down inside—when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don't want it to, but you can't stop it. And you know, for the first time, for the very first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again be quite the same person again.
Other opinions:
Read Warbler, Leafing Through Life, Valentina's Room, At Home With Books, The Written World, Mari Reads, Fyrefly's Book Blog, Bonnie's Books
Source: http://www.thingsmeanalot.com/2010/03/gathering-light-by-jennifer-donnelly.html
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