1930: Hitty, Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field

I had never heard of this book before I read it for this blog, but I found the story line familiar, as would most people: it's the story told from the perspective of a toy. Like the Tin Soldier or the cast of the Toy Story movies, Hitty is a doll who goes through many owners and adventures, always without her owners realizing that she is observing them. But I read this as more than just a story about a doll. It seemed to play around a lot with the subject/object duality. Hitty is an object, but giving her a voice and personality subjectifies her. Her position as an observer gives her the ability to view her owners, who range all over the social spectrum, with objectivity. And though the story makes her subjective, her immobility as an object makes her the passive victim of the whims of her owners.

In essence, Hitty is a slave. Though she has a life and thoughts of her own, she is considered property to be treasured or abused on a whim. When I wrote about Smoky the Cowhorse, I made this assertion based on contextual evidence, but in Hitty the author actually makes this comparison explicit. From her time with a Quaker family who reads Uncle Tom's Cabin but cannot participate in the war, Hitty makes her way to the South where she meets two old ladies who lost loved ones at the hands of the "Yankees." Later still, she comes to belong to a little black girl whose family, while technically freed, still live in poverty in a shack belonging to a plantation. Even more explicit, toward the end of the book Hitty is auctioned off in an estate sale where she discovers that she is a valuable antique. She remarks, "I am sure no slave on the block was ever more surprised at her own value than I."

This explicit comparison colors much of the rest of the story with extra shades of meaning. For instance, when she's put on display at various places, such as the cotton expo and a junk sale, I was reminded of the Hottentot Venus. I could hardly help flinching when Hitty says that being sold was a "great relief to me, as I grew tired of being explored by so many strange fingers."

Additionally, the book seems more like a slave narrative when we consider that Hitty is only able to write her memoirs after a hundred years or more. For the rest of her time, her ability to write "her story" leaves her essentially without a "history." When she hears her owner wondering about her origins, she thinks, "it made me wish more than ever that I had some way of telling her about myself." The only thing each owner can discover is her name, cross stitched (branded?) on her undergarments by her first owner.

Of course, this all might make it sound like an unpleasant book, but it really isn't. In fact, there are quite a few people who make their own Hitty dolls and form clubs about her. As a side note, Hitty actually does exist; Rachel Field bought her from the antique store where she ends the book, and she now lives in the Library Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. There's plenty of info on the internet about making your own Hitty, as well as kits you can buy for flat traveling Hittys that you can mail to friends or family members. Maybe I'll have to learn how to whittle so that I can make my own Hitty ...

1929: The Trumpeter of Krakow by Eric P. Kelly

These days the inside of dust jackets mostly feature a quote from the book or from the New York Times Book Review. But I always appreciate when the dust jacket actually has a summary of the plot, as older books often do, because then I can judge the book before I even reach the first page.

In the edition of The Trumpeter of Krakow I read, printed by MacMillan and illustrated by Janina Domanska in 1966, the flap says, "out of his great love of Poland and its history, Mr. Kelly painted a vivid picture of the political and social life of Krakow in the early Renaissance." To a large extent, this summary is accurate. The story opens with a historical moment. An earlier trumpeter of Krakow, sworn to trumpet on the hour from the balcony of the Church of Our Lady Mary, is shot down by invading forces before he can finish the last few notes of the Heynal. When the current story takes place years later, with Pan Andrew and his family hiding from their enemies in Krakow, he and his son become the new trumpeters of Krakow. They learn that it is now tradition to cut the Heynal short in honor of that trumpeter's bravery. To this extent, the story has a strong current of patriotism and pride in the quality and character of Poland.

But the reason for Pan Andrew's family's migration is what really interested me in this story. Their house is burnt to the ground and looted, forcing them to flee through the night. Joseph (the main character) gradually discovers that his father is responsible for hiding a great treasure, the Tarnov Crystal. This crystal is said to have occult powers. The narrator explains that "men were then but beginning to see the folly of many superstitions and cruelties that had been prevalent since the Dark Ages; they believed that certain persons had malign powers such as could transform others into strange animals; they thought that by magic, men could work out their spite upon others in horribly malicious ways." Indeed, with all of the astrologers and alchemists living in the university section of the city, the characters often have a hard time judging the thin line between scientific explorations and the dark arts.

At first, the Tarnov Crystal seems like it might be a tool for these dark arts, possibly even the key to the Philosopher's Stone. But by the end of the book we discover that when people are entranced by the beauty of the Crystal, it's not the devil's secrets that they see in its depths, but the secrets of their own minds. For instance, when the alchemist goes into a trance and thinks he has found a way into the Devil's workshop, we are told that in fact "the information he had during the trance came from his own fund of learning." This is a theme throughout the book, that mystical things turn out to be products of the human imagination. The Alchemist knows this better than anyone because he uses a costume, phosphorescent chemicals, and explosive powders to frighten robbers who come to steal the Crystal. Even though there's a scientific explanation for this apparition, the robbers' imaginations supply the terror.

Throughout the whole book, these powers of the human mind take on a darkness, especially in contrast to the innocence of the Pan Andrew family, who are blessedly unaware of the inner workings of their own subconscious. The Alchemist, on the other hand, knows that the Crystal's powers are terrible, which knowledge compels him to fling the Crystal into the river at the end in order to prevent any more disasters from occurring. Possibly I exaggerate the prevalence of this theme ... I've had "the mind" on the mind for a while, anticipating A.S. Byatt's new book, which she said is going to be about some of Freud's disciples/patients, a group who rather famously suffered at the hands of psychological over-investigation. Read it and decide for yourself, I guess.