I was quite caught up with this story. Christina, although crippled, as the author puts it, embraced austerity but craved beauty; ...was curious about other people and yet pathologically private. She was perversely independent yet reliant on others to take care of their basic needs. (p. 303). It's a great story! I loved how the author created it from pictures she sat in front of for days at a time at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Some favorite quotes:
p. 14 (Christina Olsen has an ancestor named Hawthorne that was a key figure in the burning of witches in Salem) Family history: Moral allegories about people determined to root out wickedness in others while denying it in themselves.
p. 15 Over the years, certain stories in the history of a family take hold. They're passed from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely from the plausible.
Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.
p. 35: re: daughtering out
It means no male heirs survived to carry on the family name.
p. 44 Christina Olson's mother to her after she refused help with her twisted leg: You are your own worst enemy, young lady. And you are a coward. It is senseless to mistake fear for bravery. I feel sorry for you. But that's it. We are done trying to help you. It's your life, as your poor father said.
....The pain in my joints is like a needy pet that won't leave me alone. But I can't complain. I've forfeited that right.
p. 75 by Emily Dickinson:
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you-Nobody-too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise - you know!
p. 81 Mother believes pockets on skirts are inelegant. She shows me how to sew a secret pouch into the lining so no one can see. "A lady doesn't reach into her pocket in view of others," she says.
p. 100 "There's a great line from The House of the Seven Gables: 'The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease.' Your father must have felt he had to forge his own path, even if it meant cutting ties to his family. It's brave to resist the pull of the familiar. To be selfish about your own needs. I wrestle with that every day."
Note: The House of the Seven Gables is by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The local church ladies decide to take pity on her and check in on her. She's proud and sees herself as quite capable of looking after herself (which she is!):
p. 188 I know she expects me to act more appreciative. but I didn't ask for this casserole, and I don't particularly care for chipped beef. I don't like her haughty manner, as if she's afraid she'll catch a disease by sitting in a chair. And something in my nature bridles at the expectation that I must be grateful for charity I didn't ask for. Perhaps because it tends to be accompanied by a kind of condescending judgment, a sense that the giver believes I've brought my condition - a condition I'm not complaining about, mind you - on myself.
Not only is she good at looking after herself, she's got a sharp wit too:
p. 196 "I'm fine, Gertrude," I say, attempting to fend her off.
"Oh, I know you have to say that," she stage whispers. "You are so brave, Christina."
"I'm not."
She squeezes my hand. "You are, you are! After all you've been through. I would crawl into a hole."
"No you wouldn't."
"I would! I would just collapse. You are so..." She sticks her lip out in a pretend pout. "You always make the best of things. I admire that so much."
And just like that, I've had enough. I close my eyes, take a breath, open them. "Well, see, now, I admire you."
She puts a hand on her chest. "Really?"
"Yes. I think it would be hard to have such a slender sister, when you try so desperately to watch your weight. That doesn't seem fair at all."
She stand erect. Pulls her stomach in. bites her lip. "I hardly think-"
"It must be very difficult." Reaching out, I pat her shoulder. "Everybody says so."
I know I'm being unkind, but I can't help myself. And I don't regret it when I see the hurt look on her face. My heart is shattered, and all that's left are jagged shards.
Even people who love her are always pitying her. It seems exhausting! This is Ramona, after talking Christina into going to see a doctor in Boston (who in the end decides there's nothing they can do for her)
p. 206 "All right," I tell Ramona. "I'll consider it."
She smiles. "Good! We might get that leaky boat of yours patched up after all."
When she first gets to the hospital, Ramona gives her a book that someone gave her and from what she says she is quite unfamiliar with.
p. 215 Looking at the book jacket, gold with bronze lettering, I realize that this must be the third in Cather's prairie trilogy. I read the other two at Walton's suggestion. A line from O Pioneers! pops into my mind: "People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find..."
Is this a statement on the hopelessness of being in the hospital? Perhaps foreshadowing? In the end, the doctors decide they can't do anything for her except recommend a quiet country life.
p. 216 On the train home, I squint out the window at a silver-dollar moon framed in a blue-velvet sky. I've done what my parents wanted me to do. They don't have to fret about a cure we didn't seek. This disease-whatever it is-will advance as it will. I think about the destructiveness of desire: of wanting something unrealistic, of believing in the possibility of rescue. This stint in Boston only confirms my belief that there is no cure for what ails me. No matter how long I hold a stick with fluttering rags above my head, no trawler in the distance will come to my rescue.
Christina seems to be right in being a pessimist about healing:
p. 223 Over the next few months, the severity of our situation becomes starkly clear. Papa's two thousand dollars in savings are gone. We can't pay our bills. More infirm than ever, Papa is listless and depressed and spends all his time upstairs. I try to be sympathetic, but it's hard. Apples. The fruit that tempted Eve lured my poor gullible father, both seduced by a sweet-talking snake.
On family history:
p. 240 Do our natures dictate the choices we make, I wonder, or do we choose to live a certain way because of circumstances beyond our control? Perhaps these questions are impossible to tease apart because, like a tangle of seaweed on a rock, they are connected at the root. I think of those long-ago Hathorns, determined beyond all reason to leave the past behind - and we, their descendants, inheritors of their contrarian tenacity, sticking it out, one generation after the next, until every last one of us ends up in the graveyard at the bottom of the field.
On pitying Christina (Christina banished Gertrude from her life):
p. 241 And if I'm honest there's something else. Gertrude has become a stand-in for anyone who ever pitied me, didn't try to understand me, abandoned me. She gives my bitterness a place to dwell.
On things coming full circle:
When her father dies, Al suggests she use his wheelchair. She tells him she hates that wheelchair and they decide to get rid of it.
p. 260 For the rest of my life I will think of that wheelchair lying smashed and rusting in the alty water near Mystery Tunnel, a place that once opened me to a world of magic, of possibility, but that over the years has come to mean something else. A place where Walton spun his false promises. A path strewn with anticipation that ends at a pile of rocks. A repository for my broken dreams, the treasure vanishing as soon as I reach for it.
The wheelchair, fool's gold, in the depths below.
p. 300 Nathaniel Hawthorn - who also changed the spelling of his name to obscure the family connection - wrote about is great-great grandfather Hathorne's unremitting ruthlessness in Young Goodman Brown, a tale about how those who fear the darkness in themselves are the most likely to see it in others.
Goodreads says:
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the smash bestseller Orphan Train, a stunning and atmospheric novel of friendship, passion, and art, inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s mysterious and iconic painting Christina’s World.
"Later he told me that he’d been afraid to show me the painting. He thought I wouldn’t like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my legs twisted behind. The arid moonscape of wheatgrass and timothy. That dilapidated house in the distance, looming up like a secret that won’t stay hidden."
To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family’s remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than twenty years, she was host and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth, and became the subject of one of the best known American paintings of the twentieth century.
As she did in her beloved smash bestseller Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline interweaves fact and fiction in a powerful novel that illuminates a little-known part of America’s history. Bringing into focus the flesh-and-blood woman behind the portrait, she vividly imagines the life of a woman with a complicated relationship to her family and her past, and a special bond with one of our greatest modern artists.
Told in evocative and lucid prose, A Piece of the World is a story about the burdens and blessings of family history, and how artist and muse can come together to forge a new and timeless legacy.
