What I Learned from Karen Cushman’s Novels

Great historic fiction is immersive. As a child, it usually made me really feel like I’d time traveled. Karen Cushman’s center grade novels from the Nineteen Nineties, The Midwife’s Apprentice and Catherine, Called Birdy, transported me. Historical fiction additionally made me understand what I had in widespread with individuals from the previous and which social points nonetheless existed in my very own time.

The phrase “girl power” was in every single place in late Nineteen Nineties popular culture, when I was in 4th or fifth grade, and I related it with loud, offended rock bands. My household has all the time inspired me to be unbiased and opinionated, however I most likely thought unbiased ladies have been a current phenomenon. Although the aesthetics have been completely completely different, Cushman’s novels helped me understand individuals have felt trapped by societal expectations and fought them all through historical past.

Catherine, Called Birdy is an epistolary novel written in diary format. Birdy’s entries include every little thing about her day by day life in 1200s England, from mundane chores to saints’ days. As Sarah Rettger wrote about Birdy on Book Riot in 2013: “Wouldn’t you choose keeping a diary over doing your daily spinning?” The 1995 Trophy Newbery copy I learn had a canopy illustration of Catherine rigging a bucket to pour over a suitor’s head.

Lena Dunham tailored and directed Amazon Prime’s 2022 film adaptation of Catherine, Called Birdy. She remembers the e book as a childhood favourite. The film, starring Bella Ramsey as Birdy, captures the character’s distinctive voice and rebellious persona. Her exclamation of “Corpus bones!” is repeated regularly in each the film and the e book.

Birdy is a vivid character — by no means imprecise. She’s ambiguous, although, as a result of readers can interpret and determine together with her for numerous causes. She desires to be a monk, not a nun, demonstrating how completely she rejects conventional gender roles. Her brother Edward, a monk, says she wouldn’t succeed at disguising herself as a boy.

Birdy thinks: “[W]ith these apples on my chest, I would not fool even the most aged of abbots. Deus! Last year they were but walnuts and I might have gotten away of it…I thought mayhap to join a nunnery instead, but as the chief occupation of nuns is embroidery, it would be like falling from the spit into the cooking fire.” This passage accommodates Birdy’s trademark frank discussions of bodily features and puberty.

This scene additionally reveals how the e book lends itself to a number of interpretations that work equally nicely. Birdy might need to dwell as a person, or have the identical freedom as a girl that males have. The monks’ actions, equivalent to illuminating manuscripts, might enchantment to her greater than the nuns’ needlework. The textual content helps readings of Birdy as probably queer, even when she lacks the vocabulary to explain this. LGBTQIA youngsters have all the time existed. Birdy desires her autonomy in any respect prices.

No marvel this e book was a touchstone to so many Millennials, particularly queer Millennials. Rereading the e book as an grownup, Jeanna Kadlec wrote in 2019, “it struck me that the plot was driven less by the question of marriage or no marriage and more by Catherine’s complicated relationship to socially mandated feminine obedience and submission.” Kadlec wrote that she realized about consent as a toddler partly from this e book. Birdy’s refusal to comply with a wedding she didn’t need was highly effective. In the e book, Catherine’s father represents the oppressive, abusive patriarchy generally, as Kadlec’s essay factors out. The film develops him extra as a personality. In the movie, Catherine sees her father’s tender facet when he fears his spouse, Lady Aislinn, will die in childbirth.

Unlike Birdy, I’ve by no means felt any lack of acceptance from my household. I’m disabled and aromantic. I’ve usually felt my society generally pressuring me to really feel sorry for myself, be much less opinionated, or to seek for achievement in romantic relationships. Birdy has all the time been a job mannequin to nonconformists.

Soon after ending Birdy, I learn The Midwife’s Apprentice, one other award-winning center grade novel by Cushman set in medieval England. The protagonist, Alyce, is a homeless, orphan lady who creates her personal identification and place on the earth. The villagers contemplate a “two-headed calf” an omen of evil. Even then, I thought a “two-headed” animal was a pair of conjoined twins. I was horrified to study that disabled individuals and animals have been believed to represent evil. However, I additionally sensed this was an essential a part of incapacity historical past, which I ought to find out about as a disabled individual.

The beginning of a “two-headed calf” in The Midwife’s Apprentice was my stunning gateway to analysis “freak shows” and different dehumanizing features of incapacity historical past. I first discovered and browse Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of a Monstrous Child” alone in highschool. Montaigne lived in sixteenth century France and helped create essays as a contemporary literary type. In this essay, he describes kids with numerous disabilities, together with conjoined twins. This essay nonetheless horrifies me as a result of it describes disabled kids’s our bodies in an invasive approach and calls them “monstrous.”

Ironically, the ending turns far more accepting:

Those which we name monsters will not be so with God, who within the immensitie of his worke seeth the infinitie of formes therein contained…We name that towards nature, which commeth towards custome. There is nothing, in any respect or not it’s, that isn’t based on hir. Let due to this fact this universall and naturall purpose, chase from us the error, and expell the astonishment, which noveltie breedeth, and strangenes causeth in us.

Montaigne writes that non-disabled individuals label disabled individuals unusual, irregular, or unnatural, however they need to not. We can’t be unnatural if nature (or God) made us that approach. The onus is on non-disabled individuals to alter how they consider and deal with disabled individuals. As I reread it, I can hint the writer interrogating his personal biases, maybe having an epiphany. This is precisely how all nice essays work, even at present. I nonetheless assume “natural” and “normal” are arbitrary and dangerous labels.

The sexism and ableism within the medieval settings of Karen Cushman’s novels have been extra violent and blatant than something I’d witnessed or skilled as a child. However, these types of oppression nonetheless exist. The distinction with my very own period helped me acknowledge them extra clearly. I usually discovered historic fiction so vivid and engaging, it led me to learn extra historical past, together with fiction and essays from centuries in the past.

Check out extra books concerning the Middle Ages, or historic fiction about any period.