The definition of bad seemed to be headstrong and willful and ever getting angry. They have to learn to be gentle and yielding so they could be the moral light of the home and have nem love them.
Headstrong and willful and angry would make this book infinitely better. Elsie is constantly described as humble, submissive, and meek. The first time she said no to an adult's request was over a hundred pages in, when her grandparents told her to tell the fairy tale to the other little girl. And even then, we're told that her tone was respectful.
She disobeys her father! He tells her to play the piano and sing for some guests, and she says no, because it's Sunday and the song he wants her to sing isn't a religious song. He tells her that she will sit on the piano stool, with no food, until she obeys. She faints and hits her head on the corner of the piano while falling. Travilla, the friend who later marries her, says to her father, "Dinsmore, you're a brute!" Her father had said that her disobeying had humiliated him in front of his friends. We get to read a bit of the conversation among the friends at the party, though, and they seem to think that her father's insistence was much worse than her disobedience.
Elsie is soooooo the patriarchy's Mary Sue.
I predict that by her submission and true morality her father will end up having a change of heart and will be a better man. So she does get what she wants in the end but only by suffering. Boys take action, girls suffer.
I'm reading this on Project Gutenberg. I just got a server error, in the middle of Elsie and her father arguing faith vs. works! (Elsie, of course is on the side of faith.)
t edit: phew. Server came back. Now I can read Elsie telling everyone how they need to be born again.
Well, I started it out of a sort of morbid curiosity. And now I kind of want to finish it, because it just keeps getting worse, and I just keep wondering what on earth this author will do next.
I am glad I have no such curiosity because it sounds like something I would not enjoy reading. Not even a little bit.
This is disturbing. Elsie's father keeps getting upset when she says that she loves Jesus more than she loves him.
This book seems like it's more overtly Old Testament than a lot of them, but the underlying message and the intense emotion is the same.
What do you mean by Old Testament?
I'm also really having trouble figuring out the money in this book. I'm used to things in old books seeming absurdly cheap, but the amounts that people are paying for things here seem like just as much as we'd pay now, if not more.
