National Sewing Month Ends; Coat Progress Continues

Today, we bid adieu to National Sewing Month, but I have just barely begun work on the Soho Coat. I have cut out the pattern pieces and have marked all but the front and the sleeves. I might be able to squeeze in a couple of hours of work on it this week, but I'm not sure. After all, Halloween will be coming up, and my son and I still don't have costumes yet. We're thinking Mario and Luigi. . . .
What are you sewing for Halloween?

Mad Men: Six Month Leave

"Six Month Leave" seemed to me like a pause to take a breath after the dynamic past two episodes, "A Night to Remember" and "The Golden Violin." But it's not only a release of tension; it's also gathering up the energy to set us up for some more powerful developments in the lives of the characters.

(photo courtesy of amctv.com)

For example, after all the recent focus on the women, we have a boy's night out that reveals how the men at Sterling Cooper react to the loss or threatened loss of what defines them as men. First, loss of a job. Freddy Rumson is being let go in the nicest possible way because he has crossed the line when it comes to liquor consumption. Roger and Don send Freddy off in a haze of booze and illegal gambling. Freddy's own sense of loss--"what will I be without my job?" he asks--isn't taken seriously by either men. A sense of impending doom seems to engulf Freddy as a taxicab takes him home, possibly to a long suicide of alcoholism.

Then there's the discussion of Don's personal situation, living apart from his family. Roger claims he's been where Don is now, and all it takes is "the grand gesture"--I assume, a tearful apology, a false promise, some nice jewelry or a trip--to get back in Betty's good graces. Don's admission of no sadness but relief instead, could be either real or macho posturing, but it seems to floor Roger. It's as if Don has opened up the possibility that one doesn't have to stay married at all, and as we know about Roger, he can't tolerate the comfort and familiarity of marriage. He's all about the chase. So Roger stupidly uses Don's early morning ramblings to justify leaving Mona for Jane. Jane! of all people! Foolish man, invigorated by the chase and novelty-- he is only setting himself up for a series of marriages to pretty young things who will suck him dry.

We are given some historical context to set the date (August 1962)in people's reactions to Marilyn Monroe's death: The teariest women are those who see their looks as a major asset. Jane snivels about never taking pills and gets sympathy from other secretaries. Joan, more reflective and closer to Monroe in age, takes a moment to lie down in Roger's office. She sees Monroe as a victim of men's fantasies and exploitation, eventually discarded by them when they were bored. During this scene with Roger, I thought of the "Happy Birthday Mr. President" footage--Monroe is almost scary in her ghostliness and breathless, catatonic state. Think of the flurry of books and documentaries about the rumors of a Kennedy conspiracy to kill her before she talked and stage it like a suicide--is Joan prescient in her statement about the world destroying Monroe?




I also vividly recall Peggy's clear-eyed assessment of Pete after hearing about Freddy being let go. When he explains to her that this is how business is done and how people advance, you can see her thinking, "yes, that's true." But when he lays his hand on her shoulder just a touch too long, you can see the revulsion flicker across her face. It's like she is thinking "One time that would have turned me on, but now it feels disgusting." Elisabeth Moss is a very thoughtful actress; you have a sense of a real intelligence behind those eyes, even when she (as Peggy) is trying to hide her thoughts and feelings.

Back on the home front, a depressed Betty sets up her horsey friend Sara Beth and the young guy Arthur at lunch: I see that as spiteful payback for Sara Beth going on about her devoted albeit boring husband, her sexy dreams of Arthur, and how Betty is so lucky because Don is so perfect. The setup also allows Betty not to divulge her own tenuous marital situation during a friendly lunch. I loved how mechanically she moves about the kitchen as Sally and Bobby make cookies, and how she takes the phone off the hook without any hesitation so her friends can't find out why she hasn't shown up. There's something evil and also pathetic about setting Sara Beth and Arthur up for a possible affair; it's cruel to put them in a scenario in which they will make the wrong choice, but it also shows how she can't get at the person she wants to hurt most: Don. So she's given up on kicking Bobby and now she's manipulating other people into punishing situations instead.



Finally, there's the encounter between Don and Betty when he brings the kids back home. He asks her repeatedly what she wants and she won't tell him. I don't know whose side I'm on at this point. On the one hand, I want Betty to drop the passive-aggressive approach and tell Don how things will be from now on. On the other, I know--and I think Betty knows, hence the refusal to say what she wants--that Don isn't asking because he really cares about what Betty wants. He just wants a set of instructions to follow so he can keep his facade of the perfect family life intact. If Betty were to tell him, "I'll take you back on these conditions: home every night by 6pm, a babysitter every Friday so we can go to the movies, free 24-hour access to your desk, and you in nothing but briefs doing yardwork every Saturday," he would accept it, because he could follow the directions without any real emotional commitment. But Betty won't give him such an easy way back home.



So let's take our deep breath, and see what happens when this show exhales on this thread, shall we?

Hate Your Job? Read Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres

Do you ever fantasize about life in a Victorian country house? When you read Jane Eyre, did you imagine yourself in Jane's place, the plain little governess who wins the heart of her rich and handsome employer? Did you think being a governess could be romantic? Well, you won't after reading Ruth Brandon's book, Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres.

Brandon's study of the lives of English governesses over the span of a century (from the late eighteenth century to 1869, the establishment of Girton College for women at Cambridge Universty) reveals the snobbery, poverty and uncertainty that plagued the lives of women who taught the children of the wealthy and middle-class. Brandon's case studies include some famous governesses (the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Lord Byron's lover, Claire Claremont, and Anna Leonowens of The King and I fame) as well as more typical examples of genteel women who fell on hard times and had to support themselves.

Governesses generally came from respectable families who had fallen on hard times; they were the women who had failed to find a husband. Entering a well-to-do family to teach and look after the children was one of the few respectable options available to educated young women in desperate circumstances. Governesses were in an amiguous position in English society--they weren't members of the serving class, but they had to earn their living working for their social equals. Despite their education and respectable background, governesses were generally regarded as both pitiable and threatening.

"Pitiable" is self-explanatory; often poorly paid and socially isolated, governesses were the young ladies whose families had fallen from financial grace or who had failed in the marriage market. "Threatening" is a little more complicated, and yet Brandon makes a compelling case for how nineteenth-century English society's disdain for the governess concealed anxiety about the very existence of working single women. If, as Victorian values dictated, women were meant to complement men as their helpmates and mothers to their children, what about the surplus of middle- and upper-middle-class single women? (Apparently working-class single women worked and no one felt too threatened by that.) The educated single woman hired to educate one's daughters could be seen as a harbinger of their fate if one lost one's fortune or failed to find decent husbands for them. No wonder relations between the governess and her employers often were strained and chilly.

In describing the lives of famous and unknown governesses, Brandon creates a narrative arc that shows how the limited education for women perpetuated itself through the practice of hiring a live-in teacher for one's children, usually daughters. Most governesses were versed in English history and grammar, fashionable modern languages, some math, geography, and especially music and needlework. This was the education of a "young lady" meant to snare a husband and adorn his household, not to compete with men in the professional marketplace. Brandon sees the effort of feminist reformers like Emily Davies to establish a college for women that was equal to that of men as the beginning of the end for the governess.

What struck me most as I read Governess was how much women's work was devalued, even as many women supported parents and siblings through governessing. Because the governess often lived with her employers, room and board was not an issue, so many sent their wages back to support widowed mothers, younger siblings, or even put brothers through school and establish them in a profession. Many governesses retired with almost nothing, and some of them had to deal with ungrateful male relatives who did not return the favor done for them. It's depressing to see how families assumed the governess was working for their benefit and not for her own; of course Nelly's wages should go to Tom's education instead of her own pleasure or future. For all the cultural revulsion over women working, many genteel families on hard times had no qualms about living off the earnings of their unmarried sisters and daughters.

Governess reveals the drab underbelly of the wish-fulfillment scenario of Jane Eyre and shows what could have been the possible fate of some of Jane Austen's heroines if they had not made happy marriages. I know that when I start getting down about my job, I'll remind myself it could be worse: I could be teaching French to the youngest Kardashian sisters.

Mad Men on NPR's Fresh Air!

I love Terry Gross and her interviews on NPR's Fresh Air! And it's especially sweet when she interviews Matthew Wiener, Jon Hamm (Don Draper) and John Slattery (Roger Sterling) about Mad Men. Enjoy this interview.

Yay for Mad Men

Mad Men, my favorite scripted show, won the Emmy for best drama and Matthew Wiener won for best screenwriting! Yay! Last night's episode was a rerun of "Three Sundays," an excellent episode from this season. Check out Basket of Kisses for more details. Also, enjoy this pretty photo of the cast and crew of Mad Men at last night's Emmy awards, courtesy of the New York Times.

Fiction: The Painter from Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein

The Painter from Shanghai (Historical Fiction) is an atmospheric and enthralling debut novel by Jennifer Cody Epstein. If you have never thought about twentieth-century Chinese art,or the effect of politics on artistic expression, this book will have you pondering these and wanting to learn more. Based on the life of Pan Yuliang, a woman painter who overcame prostitution and sexism to become one of the most respected artists of pre-Communist China, The Painter from Shanghai depicts Madame Pan as a woman who struggles with her shameful past and culture's sexism. In one pivotal scene, Yuliang makes a breakthrough about her adolescence in a brothel and her current difficulty with painting nudes:

And yet studying her model again now, Yulian suddenly realizes that her
troubles, then and now, arise from her own failure to see skin as either more or
less than itself; to see it outside of a spectrum of pain. In her old life
it was a liability, a soft surface waiting for wounds. As such at the
academy it inspires not creative passion but a wave of remembered
revulsion. And in both places she's been unable--hard as she might try--to
see it as beautiful. . . She thinks of Jinling, not in death, as she was the
last time Yuliang saw her, but in those impossibly early days when Yuliang first
began to attend to her. Before she fully understood a body's worth in
monetary terms, and could value it only in the currency of beauty. She
thinks of the way Jinling's skin had looked early in the morning. Sheened
in perspiration, stretched out in sheer joy. Limned in the early light of
a sunrise.

When Pan Yuliang recovers this sense of the body's beauty, she is able to
improve the quality of her nudes. You can see samples of Pan Yuliang's
paintings on Jennifer Cody Epstein's website. Madame Pan travels to France during the 1920s on a painting fellowship and returns to a China that has been wracked by revolution and Japanese imperialism. The last section of the novel takes place in 1936Nanjing, just before the horrible invasion. A new approach to the arts dictates that art must celebrate the common people and revolutionary ideals, and Pan Yuliang's last exhibit is a victim of this zeal. She flees to Paris, and never returns to China.

Anchoring the tale of Pan Yuliang's artistic growth is her marriage to Pan Zanhua, a custom's collector. Epstein sketches a sympathetic portrayal of a man who is caught between Western-style ideals and conservative Chinese values regarding marriage. Marriage to Pan Zanhua simultaneously frees Yuliang--from prostitution, illiteracy, and financial stress--but keeps her in the loving, possessive grip of a man faced with his own struggle to keep his wife close to his side while allowing her the freedom to travel for her art and safety.

I strongly recommend the Painter from Shanghai for its ability to capture the complexity of twentieth-century Chinese history, the artist's creative process, and last but not least, the character of a woman who faced so much adversity and overcame it to pursue her calling to paint.

Book Review: Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China by Fuchsia Dunlop

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Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China is so much more than a record of Fuchsia Dunlop's eating experience in China. It is a travel narrative, a coming-of-age story, a recipe collection, and a record of how China has changed within the past fifteen yearsDunlop, a British journalist who specializes in Chinese culture and food, first went to China in 1992 and returned on a research fellowship in 1994. It was at Sichuan University that she realized her true calling was cookery and food, not foreign policy, and she became the first Westerner to study at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. She is the author of two well-received cookbooks, Land of Plenty (2002) and Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook , and she includes some of her favorite Chinese recipes in chapters of Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper.

The theme of Dunlop's book seems to be the omnivourous approach of the Chinese to eating. As she points out, Westerners are fascinated and repulsed by stories of Chinese recipes for dogs, animal penises, lizards and insects. Early in her travels, Dunlop vowed to herself that she would broaden her culinary horizons and try anything that her eager Chinese hosts would offer her, no matter how surprising or potentially disgusting it would seem to her upper-middle class British sensibilities. By the time, she has returned to England at her memoir's end, she can view a caterpillar in the same way as a native Chinese: not as a contaminant on her salad, but as a possibly tasty addition.

I can see where the "gross out" factor might turn prospective readers off to the book, or to the Chinese as a people, but Dunlop sees this as a trait of curiousity and resourcefulness, a willingness to take pleasure in certain aspects of food (its mouth feel, its preparation) that Western cuisines limit to the safe and obvious. Along the way, not only does Dunlop's palate change, but also China. The pet food scare of 2007 that had many Americans wondering about the safety of Chinese-made products is just the tip of the iceberg for "a professional omnivore" like Dunlop:

In the old days, in Sichuan, my hunger was a free and joyful thing.
The food before me was fresh, free-range, and wholesome, and I wanted to
devour it all. But in the last ten or fifteen years China has changed beyond all
recognition. I've seen the sewer-like rivers,the suppurating sores oflakes. I've read the newspaper reports;breathedthe toxic air and drunk the dirty water. And I've eaten far too much meat from endangered species. In China I have to throw all my principles to the wind if I am to continue in my vow of eating everything.

Fortunately, a trip to Hangzhou Province in eastern China revives Dunlop's love affair with China, as it points to a hopeful future of a more thoughtful approach to food production and consumption. Dunlop shows that China is far from monolithic; different provinces have different climates and histories that shape their cuisines. Sichuan cuisine is a playful, flirtatious "spice girl" who uses its famous pepper to charm, while Hunan is a fire-breathing peasant who piles on the chiles in its cooking. Coincidentally, Hunan Province is the birthplace of Mao Zedong.

Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper piqued my own latent interest in Chinese food and culture. While I only have access to Chinese-American buffets in my own neck of the woods, Dunlop's book has inspired me to check out her earlier cookbooks as well as some other favorites.



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