Where to begin. Rebecca. Dear, sweet, raven-haired Rebecca is the most precious, precocious, syrupy, practically-perfect-in-every-way youngster you’d ever be lucky enough to cross paths with. She is born in the middle of about 7 brothers and sisters to a downtrodden woman named Aurelia. Her devil-may-care father died young, having first sullied the good name of his wife and alienating her family. Being the single mother of seven seems to have erased some of her maternal sentimentality, “The parent who is obliged to feed and clothe seven children on an income of fifteen dollars a month seldom has time to discriminate carefully between the various members of her brood.” I heard that.
The book opens with the spirited young Rebecca taking a journey from Sunnybrook Farm to go live with her aunts. At first I thought she was going for just a few weeks or the summer but this was back in the day when the pineapple of welcome was kept on the bedpost for years. The fellow driving her (via horse and buggy) to her aunt’s house is flabbergasted by Rebecca’s stream of poetic bullshit about how beautiful everything is and how wonderful it is to be alive. She’s no ordinary eleven year old. This guy has an unnatural affection for Rebecca that lasts the entire book . He is, as the Rebecca-obssessed author would say, “dull.” Not boring, just stupid as a bag of rocks, as are most of the people Rebecca encounters, at least when compared to her radiant, innocent, yet prolific, genius.
There are two aunts. Miranda and Jane. Miranda is an epic bitch. She is rigid and very inclined to dislike our poor heroine because she despised her Spaniard father. She subscribes to the “spare the rod, spoil the child” school of thought– if you replace “the rod” with “telling Rebecca to go fuck herself every time you see her.” As the author puts it, “Miranda Sawyer had a heart, of course, but she had never used it for any other purpose than the pumping and circulating of blood.” Heh. Jane is of much softer temperament and tries to run interference between Rebecca and Miranda.
Rebecca attends the local school where she becomes fast friends with the dumbest girl ever to set foot in a novel. Totally bankrupt of originality, a needy follower who’s never had a deeper thought than, “Rebecca sure is something!” Emma Jane is our heroine’s very unfortunate sidekick. [Sidebar: There are a lot of parallels between this story and Anne of Green Gables which I read as a kid. I don’t remember finding Anne as annoying but the stories are practically identical. Anne’s sidekick is remarkably similar to Emma Jane. She is a blank slate who leans toward the chubby side, providing a very flattering contrast to the thin and highly imaginative title character.] I have to say I really couldn’t get enough of Emma Jane. She is so unflatteringly portrayed that I began to look forward to the imaginatively condescending ways the author described her. See below:
“’I wish I was like you – pretty in all colors!’ sighed Rebecca and looked longingly at Emma Jane’s fat, rosy cheeks; at her blue eyes, which said nothing; at her neat nose, which had no character; at her red lips, from between which no word worth listening to had ever issued.” (Emphasis added)
“It is not possible to blink the truth that Emma Jane was dull; but a dogged, unswerving loyalty, and the gift of devoted, unselfish loving, these, after all, are talents of a sort, and may possibly be of as much value in the world as a sense of numbers or a faculty for languages.”
“This sort of thing made Emma Jane nervous and fidgety, but she was Rebecca’s slave and hugged her chains, no matter how uncomfortable they made her.” “Dull Emma Jane had never seemed to Rebecca so near, so dear, so tried and true; and Rebecca, to Emma Jane’s faithful heart, had never been so brilliant, so bewildering, so fascinating, as in this visit together.”
I love how the author qualifies her rare compliments of Emma Jean with “perhaps.” “Perhaps Emma Jane’s borderline retarded intellect and dog-like adoration of Rebecca was as valuable – in its own way - as Rebecca’s blinding charisma and intensely felt morality. Perhaps it was. I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to decide.”
Rebecca is hugely popular at school but, quite unaccountably given her lack of instruction on the matter, a true champion of those weaker than she and a girl who does not tolerate gossip. It would almost seem that Rebecca contained a glow of goodness that Jesus himself implanted in her, not unlike the device the aliens implanted in Scully on X-files. Truly, it is that miraculous.
Eventually, Rebecca graduates and her aunts send her to college so that she can be a teacher and help her mother pay off her mortgage. This mortgage is like a shit stain on the entire family’s proverbial shoe that they can’t scrape off. Apparently back in Rebecca’s time one did not take out a mortgage. One either had the damn cash or one accepted his lot as a landless have-not with grace and dignity. Rebecca’s rakish father had the audacity to borrow money to buy a farm and then had the nerve to die leaving Rebecca’s mother with a (shudder) loan. Rebecca is the family’s only hope of freeing them from the lowly state of debt but she can’t get a job as a teacher without education. (They won’t give me a job without education but how can I get an education without a job?)
I forgot to mention that Emma Jane’s family is rich. Spoiled bitch. So even though she’s as dim as a solar yard light (they’re really dim – you can’t see shit by them), she and her mother badger her father until he relents and sends her to school with her beloved, superior bestie. Yay, Emma Jane at college! This should be good.
Okay, so at college Rebecca meets Miss Maxwell. Miss Maxwell thinks all of her students are fucking imbeciles. All except one - that’s right, Rebecca! Actual quote from her letter:
“Month after month I toil on, opening oyster after oyster , but seldom finding a pearl. Fancy my joy this term when, without any violent effort at shell-splitting, I came upon a rare pearl; a black one, but of satin skin and beautiful luster! Her name is Rebecca…Man has done nothing for her; she has no family to speak of, no money no education worthy the name, has had no advantages of any sort; but Dame Nature flung herself into the breach and said: - ‘This child I to myself will take; She shall be mine and I will make a Lady of my own!’” Holy shit!
So there’s this other part of the story that’s kind of odd. Maybe it wasn’t at the time but to my ears it’s really weird and kind of creepy. Rebecca, in typical selfless manner, is helping the poor kids in town sell soap because if they sell enough they get a lamp. Rebecca’s innocent goodness is enough to melt one’s heart. And when a rich guy happens across Rebecca and her hugely forgettable sidekick (who by the way sells three bars of soap to Rebecca’s dozens) he not only buys every last bar of soap, he basically stalks Rebecca for the rest of her life, buying her expensive presents and writing her letters.
But I’m sorry, I’ve got to go back to this soap. Because Emma Jane brings an unprecedented level of failure to soap selling, especially as compared to Rebecca’s unloading a pallet of the shit.
“Emma Jane had disposed of three single cakes, Rebecca of three boxes; for a difference in their ability to persuade the public was clearly defined at the start, though neither of them ascribed either success or defeat to anything but the imperious force of circumstances [LC Note – Do you SEE, gentle reader, how incredibly humble Rebecca is – truly oblivious of her own excellence in all things and her friend’s complete ineptitude?)
“Housewives looked at Emma Jane and desired no soap; listened to her description of its merits, and still desired none. Other stars in their courses governed Rebecca’s doing. The people whom she interviewed either remembered their present need of soap, or reminded themselves that they would need it in the future; the notable point in the case being that lucky Rebecca accomplished, with almost no effort, results that poor little Emma Jane failed to attain by hard and conscientious labor.”
Yes, poor, poor Emma Jane. Why, she could no more get the housewives to desire soap than she could utter one word worth listening to. Emma Jane is the fucking worst.
So anyway, this guy – whom Rebecca calls Mr. Aladdin – follows her education closely and sends her gifts every Christmas. But he also sends Emma Jane gifts so it does not seem improper. He’s very careful to always visit them both and includes them both in his letters. Rebecca and her aunts are too proud to accept anything more than Christmas gifts even though Mr. Aladdin longs to give her greater comforts. Aladdin is friends with Ms. Maxwell as well and she assures him that Rebecca is developing character from these hardships. And ample opportunity to develop character is presented to her.
On the day of Rebecca’s graduation (in three years instead of four), with Rebecca looking forward to spending the summer at the sea with her beloved Miss Maxwell followed by her starting her dream teaching job in a big city, her aunt Miranda has a stroke and is left paralyzed. Rebecca’s heart is full of goodness and she bears no grudge against Miranda for her waspish tongue. She cancels her plans to go away with Miss Maxwell and immediately goes to help Jane with Miranda. Miranda begins to recover and it seems Rebecca will be able to salvage a few weeks of her summer when her mother falls out of a hay barn and needs Rebecca to come home to take care of her. Rebecca’s summer is dashed and she loses her fly ass job. But does she mind? Of course not, for her duty is to her mother and she is filled with goodness.
What Rebecca doesn’t know is that sunnybrookier days are just around the corner. Miranda finally dies and leaves Rebecca her house (gasp! Who know that she had such tender feelings for the girl?) And best of all? Well, it’s not explicitly stated but there are hints that Mr. 40-year-old Aladdin himself has designs on the 17 year old girl he met when she was 11. The author gives her first hint of this with a shot at Emma Jane:
Rebecca: “Mr. Aladdin! Oh! I knew you were in Wareham, and I was afraid you wouldn’t have time to come and see us.”
Aladdin: “Who is ‘us’? The aunts are not here, are they? Oh, you mean the rich blacksmith’s daughter, whose name I can never remember. Is she here?”
He also has a conversation with Miss Maxwell and one gets the impression that he is going to propose to her one of these days. How wonderful for Rebecca! But does he declare his feelings for her? Our gentle author is too delicate to say…and that is the story of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
BOTTOM LINE Okay, I’ve been a little critical of this novel. It was written in 1903 so maybe I should cut it some slack. In reality there were a couple of passages that were actually charming and it was a fascinating glimpse into the time. On the other hand it was pious and preachy and shoved Rebecca’s perfection so far down your throat I had a gag reflex more than once. Should you read it? Well the Emma Jane burns are priceless and I think for that reason alone it’s worth a glance.
