When I was in tenth grade, my English teacher kept us in line by saying she previously worked for the FBI*. She came from another time, which I did not appreciate until decades later when I read Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing.
Tenth grade was a strange year. It was the year I found my voice** and started a writing club. It was the year I was less angry at things and people. It was the year I began to realize that other people were not set out of time, but that I had not lived enough to understand the conversations going on around me.
Mrs. O had a thing about Henrik Ibsen’s “The Dollhouse”. She would talk about how important it was – a piece of fiction where a woman chose – chose! – a life outside of her husband and children. That the protagonist had gone from her father to her husband’s household, and molded her personality to fit. We sophomores stared and waited, not wondering, just waiting for the punchline. In the modern age, we were children of divorce and working parents, mothers with multiple degrees who kept household and career alike.
But Mrs. O waxed on about a woman choosing herself, even if she didn’t know that self yet. As a child, I empathized more with the children who would be left with the stern personality of the father, and as an adult, my heart still aches for them. They would not see a pathway before them to strive for their own freedom, only that a fellow prisoner escaped and did not choose to take them, too.
Decades later, reading about a playwright and critic who fell in love with the then contemporary play, “The Dollhouse”, I finally understood what it was trying to say. In a time before the necessity of two parent working households, in the time before choice, this play mattered. To say there was a choice before that choice was even a thing to be imagined!
The worst part about listening to marketing your work is when people talk about trends vs. Evergreens. When they say trend, they mean you are saying something about the conversation or state of the world today. Evergreens say something about the human experience as it has been and will be. Everyone wants to write an evergreen. For one thing, they sell beyond the pop of the moment. Ibsen wrote an evergreen that was also a trend. While what he had to say was new in his time, in our lifetimes there are still people to which the thought of choosing your own path is a new concept. Maybe not when they are tenth graders in desks in high school, perhaps later in life when they have found themselves at ends. Just as I hope to write something that can be reread as new in different stages of life, I wonder what treasured stories, that I have always accepted, will tell me something new now that I am somebody else.
*One of my classmates nagged Mrs. O until she confessed that she had been a secretary for the FBI. My classmate uttered the immortal words, “Oh, that’s boring.” And we all listened to the sound of one grade falling.
**I’m pretty sure I had a voice before tenth grade, but as my brother put it, “We didn’t think you could talk.” Thanks.