A wrinkle in Pirene? · 10:47pm Oct 26th, 2015
Somewhere in my busy life I've found room to re-read some of the books in Madeleine L'engle's wonderful saga, and first among these at the moment is A Wind in the Door. It's been years since I read these absolutely magical pieces of work, which have such a great deal of meaning in them that I think can be appreciated by anyone, no matter what outlook you might have on the world. Why? Because she creates a narrative that, although filled with imagery and symbols inspired by her own spiritual path, encourages the reader to find their own understanding of the universe and their place in it, rather than to subscribe to any one, specific thing.
Enough of that, though! I thought of it because, while reading Wind, I came back to a world that I didn't realise I'd missed for so long, and that had a profound effect on my imagination when I was a kid. And I realised today an odd connection, faint though it probably is, between Charles Wallace and Amelia.
Charles Wallace, in the first two books, is an extremely precocious child, who speaks and thinks like a university professor and has insights into the thoughts and feelings of the people around him that goes far beyond social cues (or majoring in psychology, har de har). The same arguments that are used to protest the idea of Amelia being realistic apply to him, as well - he even seems to have absorbed a certain level of maturity into himself, just by understanding intuitively how his elders view the world, that we readers would usually consider entirely inappropriate in the characterisation of a six-year-old. He counteracts this with the wide-eyed, trusting nature that he shares with Amelia and his natural frustration, mirroring hers, that his family seem to be the only people who can understand and appreciate him.
With that thought in mind, I'm going to encourage anyone who's a fan of Pirene to read the Time saga if you haven't:
A Wrinkle in Time - Meg Murry, the oldest, makes wormholes and goes on a wild adventure with three old ladies to find her father.
A Wind in the Door - Charles Wallace is deathly ill and Meg teams up with a cherubim to save him.
A Swiftly Tilting Planet - Charles Wallace rides a time-travelling unicorn to set right what once was wrong and save the planet from nuclear war.
Many Waters - The middle twins, Sandy and Dennys, mess with their dad's computer and end up involved in the Noah's Ark story??? (It's been a while since I read this one)
Hahaha. Those are baffling sounding books.
I think the idea of Amelia is far older than she is. Really, if anything, she is my sister - precocious and angry at the world, someone who doesn't really fit.
3499224 Actually, she wrote them for kids and young adults so they were perfect reading material for tiny me, and are pretty nice bedtime reading for me now. There's a reason I used to identify a bit with Charles Wallace - the smart child with weird interests that no one seems to like. I'm not as smart as Charles or Amelia, but I had the same resentment for a long, long time for a world that seemed to run too slowly and then caught up too fast.
Honestly, give them a try! They're way less weird than they sound, Pinkie promise.
I was more partial to L'Engle's Meet the Austins series, personally. Got a lot of wierd comments from peers for reading A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
I'd have to re-read the L'Engle books to give specifics, but in terms of comparing him and Amelia (and audience reactions), a few points come to mind:
We don't actually get a lot of Charles Wallace's perspective until Planet. CW is similar to Amelia, but the audience doesn't have to experience his POV as much. Nor was his character written specifically to "fall" the way she does.
By the time we get CW's POV in Planet, he's much older. Still a tender age, perhaps, but old enough to think through his actions. CW got better guidance from family and unicorn as well. Worked out better than Scottish Chaos cat, at least.
The audience for Pirene is probably a bit older than Wind, so the story was written accordingly. Amelia's march into oblivion was written for an audience that could understand and wanted to watch a trainwreck (and the author's notes encouraged that, iirc). Her journey is themed in isolation and a survival mindset, while CW is more about exploration and saving the world. I don't remember CW being that prevalent in Wind, and though the book was about his survival, that wasn't the overall theme.
Though audiences grow older, I think many of our reactions and feelings about stories don't. Just as I think Amelia would be inappropriate for a younger audience, I think some people disliked her arc because they didn't want to see a trainwreck. Awesome though it was.
What both stories do well is use these younger characters to make the mythology and supernatural/sci-fi/spiritual elements of the story accessible to audiences. Charles Wallace and Amelia are both given educations about these elements, which draws the audience is as well.
tl;dr CW is a goody two shoes. Amelia gets broken out of it because of bad guidance. I think those two are a good comparison, and fans of Wrinkle might get some additional insight into Amelia that way (I did). Definitely a good argument against folks who saw Amelia as over-competent, but there are other reasons to dislike Amelia's arc that are harder to argue. Haters gonna hate.
3500564 Haters gonna hate.
So far, I actually find Leit Motif and Amelia the most interesting and heartbreaking characters to read. Amelia, though, reminds me of a lot of people in literature and real life, including myself. Though people might not like reading about someone doing progressively more awful things and taking bad advice from the wrong crowd, I think to dislike her on that ground alone is missing the point of her character arc. I was actually talking about her briefly to a professor and he brought up a Zen story about a murderer who realised the weight of his actions and decided to become a monk, eventually reaching enlightenment. Amelia probably won't wind up like that, but she has a chance at redemption nevertheless, and she should be given that by her readers. Given the nature of the story, and what I know about her actions from peeking around in the blogs and comment threads written about her, I've gathered that a lot of people are unwilling to accept the idea that a villain in a story or in real life can experience a turnaround and spend their lives reforming, and would rather see such a person die or receive some other punishment that would make them feel good in a kind of vindictive way. Truthfully, that doesn't accomplish anything except to make people feel good about seeing these people suffer, because it is unlikely that pain or loss or death or incarceration by themselves will teach someone anything. Amelia's arc, as far as my understanding goes, is about learning a better way of doing things from the choices she makes in the story, which I find a lot more meaningful and rich than just killing her off. The latter kind of makes it into a black-and-white morality tale.
I do admit I have exceptions, though - it depends on the context of the story. I had some pretty strong gut feelings about Walter White in Breaking Bad, but in the end I thought what they did with his character was a perfect fit. His tragedy is that he realised where he'd gone wrong, but was truly too late to turn back.
Your post got me to pick up these books! gonna try them out soon
I actually read the first one when I was really young, but I don't recall anything. I think it went completely over my head at the time.
3647626 Oh, brilliant! I hope you enjoy them as much as I have!