I bring up these vignettes because our last book club selection, "So Big" by Edna Ferber, is set in the late 1800s through the early part of the 1900s, a time when creature comforts were few and far between especially for people who lived in rural areas. The book follows the life of Selina Peake DeJong, a young woman who spends her early life with her father in Chicago. After finishing school, she opts to head to the country to teach school. She arrives at the home of the Pool family, where she will stay while she teaches. For the first time in her life, Selina (and, in my case, me) sees what it is like to live on a "working farm". The life is hard and brutal, and it ages people quickly. Selina adjusts to a life that includes sleeping in a room where her cup of water often freezes in the cold. After teaching for a year, Selina meets Pervus DeJong, whom she marries. The couple have a baby, named Dirk, and nicknamed "So Big". The family lives together on a farm, working and loving hard. After a short time, Pervus dies, leaving Selina alone to raise a son and work the farm. The book focuses on how Selina makes her way in a male dominated world at a time when a women's place was literally in the kitchen. She faces many of the same challenges that women of today face, albeit in the farming market rather than the boardroom. Selina works nonstop-there is seemingly no end to the chores that must be done every single day. All the while, she raises "So Big" into a fine young man who heads off to Midwest University (a thinly veiled University of Chicago) after graduation from high school.
While at Midwest University, So Big encounters the class struggles du jour. Perhaps the best example of the class conflicts is the description of the friendship that forms between So Big (a Classified, i.e. young students who cut class and worried about football games, members of the opposite sex and, charmingly, "fudge") and Mattie (an Unclassified, i.e. an older, earnest student whose education was interrupted for some reason or another and who takes school very seriously). Despite an initial spark in the relationship, including a visit home to Selina, So Big drops her when a fraternity brother voice disapproval of friendship with an "Unclassified". So Big's decision to stick with his wealthy and popular fraternity and forsake his simple and true friend foreshadows his life to come.
After the university, So Big experiences great success in his chosen profession of architecture. He finds himself mixing with the upper classes, as his career skyrockets. Near the end of the book, he visits his mother on the farm with some friends of his. The comparison is striking and begs the question: "what is success?" Is success a working farm that is achieved after hard work and that brings much happiness and contentment (but not much money) to the farmer? Or is it a soul numbing job that delivers a large salary, a butler and the material trappings of money?
The questions of class and "success" are still extremely relevant today. Selina represents a content, happy, poor, proud woman who would likely be considered "lower class" by today's standards. In comparison, her son is an upper class, career man with a large abode who dines at the finest restaurants and wears the finest clothes. With this book, the reader plunges to the dizzying lows of Selina, who must live in a room without heat, to the highest of highs with So Big as he runs with the "in" crowd. My one complaint about the book is that I feel it ended too soon. I wanted to know more about Selina and So Big, and what ultimately became of them. Did So Big leave the fast track? Did he return to the farm and the land her grew up on? Did Selina ever leave the farm and spend some luxury time with her wealthy son? Ms. Ferber did not answer these questions and so I-reading in my air conditioning cooled house, with my electric lights, drinking an ice cold pop-was left to wonder.