Why, Miss A! You're Beautiful Without Your Shift In Meaning!

[mrissa]

A few months ago, we had to explain to my goddaughter the old trope where the hero takes off the heroine's glasses and says, "Why, Miss A! You're beautiful without your glasses!" Because...she has never known a world where she can't get cute glasses in flattering styles and a wide variety of colors. That's just how glasses are--and not because her parents are wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, either. Some of my friends who are struggling a lot for money still browse dozens and hundreds of glasses styles on the internet, able to choose from more on their tight budget than the richest could have dreamed of on theirs 50 years ago--especially the richest children.

My parents tell stories of having one choice of glasses, sometimes one gendered choice--here you go, here are your glasses. Doesn't flatter your face? Too bad, this is what you get. Glasses. Now you can see. The fashion for girls right now is cat's eyes. Boys get square blocky ones. For me, it was a little better than that, but not much--and they were not well-fitted to my child's head, on the assumption that kids were growing, and as a result they were always slipping down my nose, and--in a fairly low-parental-conflict childhood--my mother was always nagging me to push my glasses back up.

Meg Murry's glasses did that too. In A Wrinkle in Time. It was one of the reasons I bonded with her instantly when I first read the book in grade school: ugh, the glasses thing.

My goddaughter doesn't have that. Meg's glasses slipping down her nose are an individual character trait for her, not a bonding moment for every kid with glasses. There is no presumption that obviously everyone would look better without theirs, because, hey, there are so many flattering pairs of glasses, she knows so many people who look great in them. She looks great in hers. And if some jerk ever tries to take her glasses off to tell her she's beautiful without them, she hasn't been prepared that that's the only way this can ever work. The idea of finding someone who thinks she's pretty great with them is not a massive shock. It's...life, it's reasonable, it's how things are.

The entire meaning of that description has shifted.

So you can't just put Meg Murry in a pair of glasses and film it that way, assume the modern viewer will get it--in fact, you can assume they won't. Translation is like that. The past, we say over and over again, is a foreign country. Sometimes the recent past even more so, because we don't think of what we're not seeing. We don't have to explain chamber pots and carriages in the Murry home. Glasses are known technology, aren't they? We understand glasses, don't we? Oh.

And then there's the hair.

This article on Meg's natural hair in the movie is really good, really interesting. It quotes from the book, and I'm going to repeat the quote: "Meg’s hair had been passable as long as she wore it tidily in plaits. When she went into high school it was cut, and now she and her mother struggled with putting it up, but one side would come out curly and the other straight."

Pretty straightforward, right?

Well.

A Wrinkle in Time has a 1962 publication date. Before the hippie era. So...I think younger readers mostly don't understand the implications of women's hair here. The passive voice is not accidental: when she went into high school it was cut. This is basically a force of nature, in social terms of the time. Wearing her hair in the braids that actually worked for (book) Meg is no longer an option because that is little kid hair. If you find a high school yearbook from the early 1960s, especially in a small town, you are not seeing the option of long hair worn straight or in braids yet. That came later. So what has happened here is that there are requirements of existing in the teen social world, between the kid world and the adult world, and Meg's hair is failing her at them. Imagine one of the bouffants from a 1962 yearbook, but done poorly. That is what they mean by "up." It is "done," it is done with a fair amount of AquaNet or equivalent, it is one of the miserable child faces underneath a failed elaborate coiffure, because an extremely simple hairstyle of whatever length was not one of the options at the time.

Some of this is universal. Hair texture changes at puberty--sometimes daily--and it can feel impossible to work with whatever you got. And figuring out what on earth other people think is stylish and why on earth they think that is even more difficult when "people" means "whoever I am randomly assigned by geography" rather than "someone I have any interests in common with." But...I think that people who post-date the hippie era--myself included, on some emotional levels--have difficulty conceiving just how many more options there are for What People Can Look Like, what we can do our hair like, what we can do our clothes like, what we can reject or choose for makeup or nails or any other grooming options.

And so...if you showed a modern audience. Especially a modern child audience. The vision of Meg that was in Madeleine L'Engle's head for Meg. The hair that had "been cut" and "put up," the failed bouffant. It would be fundamentally not understood. Even if she was surrounded by other '62 teenagers in a '62 high school. The reaction, I think, would be, "What happened to her hair? Why did she do that?" Because as modern viewers, we just don't have the context of the range of bad hair in the past. We know what present teen struggles with hair look like. We have no reason to keep the data set for 1962.

Similarly, if you filmed the fancy dress occasions of the 1920s, exactly as imagined by F. Scott Fitzgerald--the brilliantine on the gentlemen's hair would overwhelm us as modern viewers. And so on through history. It just...gets adjusted for the modern viewer. Inherently. Because the world is large, history is large, we cannot keep it all in our head. Every movie made from a book is a translation. No matter how faithful to the text it tries to be. It's still a translation. The more so for a movie that's more than a year or two from its source text.

So--read the article in the link about how Ava DuVernay decided to translate Meg's struggles with her hair. It is a translation, a visual translation, or a transformation, but it's a necessary one even if the movie had decided to do other things than what it did with race (of which I thoroughly approve), because the world has gone on. I haven't seen this movie yet. I don't know if I'll ever be able to--I hear that it's one of the most vertigo-inducing movies made in a very vertigo-inducing recent crop of movies. But I think that this particular choice of visual translation of Meg's struggles with her hair is a brilliant one. It's one that has some chance of making sense to a modern audience in a way that a literal rendering of the original just couldn't. And the minute I hear people talk about filming what's on the page, I know that they're missing how books and film work differently as media--much less books and film across time.

Comments

[umadoshi]

This is a great post!

[mrissa]

Thanks!

[swan_tower]

Since the only thing I straight-up disliked about the film was the unnecessarily wobbly camera work, I fear you might have a very difficult time watching it. Which is a great shame.

The hair . . . I find myself thinking about what you can do in, say, a cable drama vs. a film. In a hypothetical Netflix version of A Wrinkle in Time, you could keep the 1962 setting and give us the scene (or the repeated scenes) of Meg and her mother trying to get her hair to conform to the Only Acceptable Style and failing. But in a two-hour movie? Nope. And that hypothetical Netflix show would probably be catering to a different audience -- the same kind of audience who watches Stranger Things, because those people are interested in being immersed in a past era and all its weirdnesses, especially if they lived through them. But that's not the audience DuVernay is aiming for, and for her audience, updating to the modern era and all its weirdnesses is absolutely the way to go. I thought everything about the updating was absolutely fantastic, and was left with only a few small structural quibbles and a hearty dislike of the stupid wobbly camera.

[mrissa]

I don't know, I think we have enough more options for hair that getting across why this is the Only Acceptable Style (or range of styles) to a modern audience would still be very hard, even in a miniseries. I feel like you would run the risk of conveying the idea that Meg herself actively wanted it that way, which...is not really what was going on there.

And yes, you're right, it caters to an audience that puts Meg and her struggles in the past, which is a very different choice indeed.

[rosefox]

I was thinking about glasses as assistive devices recently, because I saw someone say "I wish wheelchairs could be considered as unremarkable as glasses—does anyone even think of glasses as assistive devices for disabled people?" and thought of the books from my mother's childhood in which people in glasses were teased mercilessly. The sneer of "four-eyes" is as baffling to your goddaughter as the notion of glasses being ugly.

Some of that is about advances in technology as well as fashion—lenses can be much thinner even for very nearsighted people, and materials science has brought us those lightweight, inexpensive frames—but it's also about familiarity and culture shift. And I hope that another generation or two will see that same shift around other assistive devices. As you say: life, reasonable, how things are.

[conuly]

There are even people who go onto coastal.com or similar sites and order frames with plain, non-prescription lenses for fashion purposes. They want glasses to accessorize, not because they need them.

[mrissa]

Yah, I was on the cusp where my parents were a little worried about "four-eyes" but I didn't really receive it. I got teased for other things, not that.

I really hope that too, about other assistive devices. On days when I'm using my cane and exhausted about being people's practice case, it's hard to see there from here, but I guess it was when my mom was a 10-year-old "four-eyes" too. So we'll see.

[swan_tower]

I never thought of it in these terms before, but you just made me realize there was a time when canes were both an assistive device for those who needed them and a fashion accessory for people (well, mostly gentlemen) who wanted to treat them as such. And I know I've seen at least a minor increase in the aesthetic options for more ergonomic styles of cane (i.e. any options other than "black or hospital gray"), so maybe we will indeed get there.

[mrissa]

Mine is red and my other one is bamboo. One of the problems I've run into with that is that the less it looks really hospital-issue, the less people parse that I really need it--especially since I don't have an immediate physical cue they can read for "this is why she needs it." So having any amount of flair to your cane at all can tip the balance toward "you're just doing it for ATTENTION."

UGH.

[swan_tower]

Ugh indeed. Why do people have to be clueless and/or jerks?

[landofnowhere]

When I reread A Wrinkle in Time about five or so years ago, Meg's fretting about her looks felt like a tired cliche (because I've had enough of reading about basically-normal-looking white girls fretting about their looks and needing the affirmation of a boy's interest). I was really glad that the film's casting made it read in a way that felt fresher to me (and just glad about the multiracial casting in general).

But thank you for explaining some of the original context that makes the original book fresher!

[mrissa]

Yah, at the time having a heroine who was awkward and unpretty was really not the norm. At all. This is the book that broke that ground.

[sartorias]

I really want to see the movie--had intended this week, but. I hope it will last into next week.

And yes. When I got my glasses, there were two styles, cats eyes, and a clunky curve the other direction, baby blue or pink. I hated the cats eyes, so I opted for the clunky other ones, and when I got my next glasses change, threw them off entirely and insisted on boys' glasses, which at least were black, as I'd rather be caught dead than in pink anything. They kept saying, aghast, "Are you sure?" and later pix make it clear that they were even more wrong for my chubby zit face.

And oh, yes. The hair. There were three styles, or you were an outsider: pixie, flip, or page boy.

[pameladean]

I too clutched Meg to my heart FOREVER because of her glasses. I was, however, just enough younger than Meg that when I got to high school "was cut" was no longer operative. This was partly a general effect of the burgeoning hippie movement but partly that my mother had, when I was five, taken me to get my hair cut and asked for a pixie cut, which was the worst haircut ever for me, and she knew it and she knew that I knew it. I never got my hair cut again, from that day to this. In high school I wore it in pigtails -- it was, at that point, too unruly to braid. Or at least I couldn't braid it myself. There was a sharp divide in my class between girls with long, straight hair, girls who wanted long, straight hair but couldn't achieve it, and girls who still wore their hair "up." Who got teased about what followed rules that I never did figure out.

I am really glad that kids, too, can now have All the Frames.

P.

[mrissa]

A...pixie cut.

The mind boggles.

[pameladean]

I know. I can't imagine what they were thinking. It's as if they had forgotten what I look like. And my grandmother is the one who makes it "they," and she'd been making most of my clothes since I was BORN and they were always great. Not only did I love them madly at the time, I have the photos. So this haircut, I don't know, perhaps actual pixies were involved.

P.

[carbonel]

There's a photo of me with a pixie but from when I was somewhere around 3 or 4 years old. For years I thought that was the best photo of me ever, and mourned the fact that my hair no longer supported that style.

I grew up in the hippie sixties, so long hair was perfectly normal and expected. However, my hair turned frizzy and unmanageable around fifth grade (burgeoning hormones, I suppose), and life was a fight with my hair (there were several bouts of straightening) until at least my 30s, when it decided, to my great relief, to be straight without any outside interference. Growing my hair down to my waist was a much-delayed but still happy achievement.

[carbonel]

I remember reading books and watching movies that had the "you're beautiful without your glasses" bit, but it never really registered as applying to me, mostly because I knew I was never going to be beautiful. Not like the girls in the books and movies, at least.

For me, though, glasses were a different sort of fight. In second grade, my friend down the block got glasses, and I thought they were so pretty (blue, with little gems -- fake, of course -- at each temple) and was so envious that my parents refused to consider that I really needed glasses when I insisted I did. Thankfully, the school had mandatory eye testing (the "Big E" test), and I flunked it handily, without any cheating necessary, and I got my glasses. Then there was a fight because I needed them all the time, but I was only supposed to wear them in school because "you'll make your eyes worse." So I would sneak the glasses on, or go around squinting. And I got the "I told you so" from my parents, because I kept needing new and stronger prescriptions over the years, but they gave up on the the only-at-school thing after a while.

[conuly]

...did anybody ever, at any point, educate your parents in the fact that myopia always tends to get worse in childhood, whether you wear glasses or not? (Indeed, recent studies shows it worsens faster in children who don't wear glasses at the correct prescription!)

The body is growing. That includes the eyeballs.

[carbonel]

I'm not sure they ever realized it as a general case, partly because my parents had friends who had children whose eyes were much more stable -- probably because their corrections were much more minimal

This was the early 1960s. After the first time, my parents believed me when I (backed by the eye doctor) said I needed new glasses, but I always felt a little guilty about it -- mixed with the new-glasses pleasure of having everything in focus again.

At least they didn't try to foist fix-your-eyesight exercises on me.

Outstanding essay, thank you.

[jesse_the_k]

Got my glasses in 1960. I got lots of "four-eyes" plus I had braids so--among the children of classicists--I was "Medusa."

[genarti]

I really love this post! Thank you for it.

My mother is a few years older than Meg Murry, which is something I never put together before; I have also never put together her high school yearbook, with its bouffants, with Meg's hairdos. (Mom has fine straight hair and a thin face, and about as much interest in high-maintenance hairstyles as I have, which is to say none. Bouffants in no way suit her. She still had one. And skirts every day at school unless it was below zero, even though she was a tomboy who would immediately change when she got home so she could climb trees. But it was what one did.)

But I read about Meg as a kid in the late 80s or early 90s, and so that's what I pictured: a kid like me, with a little bit of an In The Past haze over it, but with bushy hair and a severe but somewhat idiosyncratic hangup about her glasses. I was aware of the trope that glasses were unflattering, of course, but I fundamentally didn't grasp the extent of how it used to be. And I never really pictured Meg as the early 60s child she would have been, anyway, not in the details. This is a great explanation, and a great penny-drop moment for me, too.

[mrissa]

Was it that wearing skirts was what one did, or was it the rule? For my mother, there was a rule that the young ladies had to wear skirts, period and full stop. Trousers were not allowed.

When I got to school, trousers were allowed, but shorts were not. It wasn't until I was in...first or second grade, I forget which...that they decided that shorts would be all right. Which was a relief, because school started in mid-August, and it was beastly hot.

[genarti]

Officially the rule. Trousers were allowed if it was below zero (if I remember correctly), which happened very rarely in southern Ohio, but which she was gleeful about for that reason.

I'm not sure when it became a social force of What's Done rather than a literal rule, if it was in college or the working world or what. But I do know that she spent years as an adult wearing skirts out and about, and then coming home and immediately changing into jeans, even when she co-owned her own store and could have done in theory have done as she pleased. I remember finding this anecdote baffling as a child, and then finding that I was doing the exact same thing except with business casual skirts-or-slacks once I was in the working world.