Under Two Flags

Under Two Flags, by Ouida, is the mother of all books about running off to join the foreign legion, although technically when Bertie Cecil leaves England for Algeria, he joins the Chasseurs d’Afrique, a cavalry regiment.

Bertie is an officer in the Life Guards, which seems to mean that he gets to hang out with other aristocrats a lot and never has to fight, unless some jealous husband challenges him to a duel. Bertie is languid and elegant and perfectly suited to this lifestyle, but his family, although excessively aristocratic, is not well-off, and Bertie is the second of three sons. The elder brother is the heir to Royallieu, the family estate, and the younger, Berkeley, is their father’s favorite. Berkeley has a gambling problem, and, what’s worse, a weak mouth or chin or something, which is how novelists indicate that someone is going to turn out to be evil in books like this. Yes, it’s another inexplicably evil younger brother.

Bertie manages to float along on absolutely no money at all for a while, winning horse races, hanging out with his friend the Seraph, and and coming up with sneaky ways to spend time with his mistress, Lady Guenevere.Meanwhile, Berkeley is getting ever deeper into debt, and he somehow thinks it’s a good idea to try to borrow money from Bertie at the same time as he whines about how Bertie is even more extravagant and deeper in debt that he is. He also — horror of horrors — asks Bertie to borrow money from Seraph for him, because he has no inborn sense of honor. Whatever. Bertie might be better off if he had less of an inborn sense of honor.

A Romance of the Republic

I recently finished a book by Lydia Maria Child called A Romance of the Republic. Child was a well-known children’s author before the Civil War, but she made herself unpopular by openly espousing abolitionist views. She wrote this novel after the war, but according to the professor who recommended that I read it, it didn’t go over very well.

I wrote a summary of it, but it’s ridiculously long, so I’m going to talk about it a little here and provide a link to the longer summary at the end.

This book is about octoroons. An octoroon was the technical term for the child of a white person and a quadroon. A quadroon was the offspring of a white person and a mulatto. And so on. In other words, the two protagonists are one eighth black, but the word ‘octoroon’ is far more fun. Say it out loud. Doesn’t it kind of sound like ‘nectarine’?

I think octoroons must’ve been used to criticize slavery often. One of the characters, a Mr. Bright, says that he was converted to abolitionism by seeing an advertisement about an escaped slave who was described as having sandy hair, blue eyes, and a ruddy complexion. You get the idea.

The two octoroons of this novel are young women, not sandy-hired and blue-eyed, but Italian-looking, and very beautiful. Their names are Rosabella and Floracita, and they’ve been brought up not knowing that their mother was a slave. Their father’s death, and the plans of his creditors to sell the girls in order to pay his debts, sends them off on a series of adventures, which end up separating them for over twenty years.

It’s a typical, melodramatic sentimental novel: there’s a false marriage with a man named Gerald Fitzgerald, babies switched at birth, hints of incest, estranged relatives, narrow escapes, and lots of instances where the two sisters just miss being reunited — pretty much everything one could possibly want. Rosa even has a short but successful career as an opera singer. And there end up being three Gerald Fitzgeralds.

So. Which is more fun to say? ‘Octoroon’ or ‘Gerald Fitzgerald’?

Full summary and family tree here.

Elsie Dinsmore and Holidays at Roselands

Okay, I should really be working on this week’s assignment for my thesis class, but first I need to talk a little about Elsie Dinsmore.

It should come as a surprise to no one that I’m writing my thesis on old children’s books — girls’ series, mostly from the early 20th century — and this week I’ve been reading the first couple of Elsie Dinsmore books. The Elsie books were written my Martha Finley and ran from 1867 to 1905. There are 28 books, but Elsie is a grandmother by book eight. Actually a grandmother, as opposed to behaving like a grandmother, which she does right from the beginning.