The problem that Alice had

 Book 17 for year 2023 is Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein. I finished it yesterday and I have many thoughts about it. It was good first of all, and brilliant in the way that the characters and story lives on even though the text was short. Once a man told me that if you can't explain you thesis on one single paper then it's not worth writing. 

Bernstein's thesis is that a woman can feel odd and out of place where her brother would turn such a feeling of being misfit into his personal triumph. We never find out the name of the main character, the sister, she travels to a unknown place up "north" to care for her brother who is ill and dying. In the beginning the brother is still capable of traveling and doing his business and so he goes on a journey leaving the Sister to care for his estate. During her time of solitude she reflects on her life and work always stumbling over her own person. I'm reminded of my favorite passage in Alice in the Wonderland (chapter 5)

The Caterpillar was the first to speak.

“What size do you want to be?” it asked.

“Oh, I’m not particular as to size,” Alice hastily replied; “only one doesn’t like changing so often, you know.”

“I don’t know,” said the Caterpillar.

Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in her life before, and she felt that she was losing her temper.

“Are you content now?” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, I should like to be a little larger, sir, if you wouldn’t mind,” said Alice: “three inches is such a wretched height to be.”

“It is a very good height indeed!” said the Caterpillar angrily, rearing itself upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high).

“But I’m not used to it!” pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And she thought of herself, “I wish the creatures wouldn’t be so easily offended!”

“You’ll get used to it in time,” said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.

This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In a minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the grass, merely remarking as it went, “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.”

Like Alice, many women, including myself and the Sister struggle in a world where we are never quite the right size (and I don't mean physically). Bernstein masterfully describes how that feels, and how society (siblings, parents, villagers) cut away with their words a woman's right to her mere existence. This is the ultimate point and sentence in the book, the Sister decides to exist and take place no matter if she, like Alice, may vary in size. 

Bernstein describes how the original family peels away layer after layer like the petals off a flower from the person that the Sister could have been, had she been allowed to grow in peace, to become her own person. Using criticism and comparison the Sister is denied those chances even as she is never quite loved by the mother. The Sister describes her adult dating experiences as follows "My partners led me through the door, doing things to me they had done to others, doing things to me they could have done to anyone, anybody at all, and to put it plainly I was sure that, in each of their minds, with their eyes closed, they where with someone entirely other, not me-"

The feeling of not being in ones own body entirely is much more common for women than men, I dare argue. 

What I didn't like about the book was that the village church (ieg. christianity) was used as the place and venue of her ultimate condemnation when the church essentially (Orthodox Christianity) stands for something completely different. I didn't get the sense that this particular church was orthodox and so I don't wonder if the establishment of western Christianity is used as a symbol to condemn the odd one, just like in The Scarlet Letter which I plan to read before the year ends. The sister knew that the villagers not only condemned her for her presence in the village but her otherness upon arrival, she was also Jewish which might have played a part, yet her magical imaginations and her being, her way of talking and conducting herself, no matter how suitable she tried to be, roused only suspicion. 

"I reminded myself. Not everything was possible. So much was refused in advance" and I think this could be owing to the fact that she was female and strong. 

Lastly I found this quote that I lastly want to share with you, insightful, funny and smart "Only we in the generation below understood that a man could be both sad and a scumbag, that in fact sadness was the excuse these men most often availed themselves of" 

So, in life, I wish women had the advantage to apply the "I don't give a fuck" mentality as a popular self-help book describes, however being female is not that easy as Carol Lewis imagined in the Caterpillar's advice, on one side, if you don't give a fuck you might grow a bit taller, but if you eat the other side of the mushroom you'll shrink again, however the world, as in the society will most times prescribe sizes and molds for you to fit in, the judgement is out there, but so is the truth. And lastly, like the Sister realized, what matters to her, to me, to anyone, is the truth (John. 14:6).