Book Review: Christy

(I know...groan...this is not a new book. Most people have already read it. I'm still trying to catch up after three days without electricity last week.)

Title: Christy

Author: Catherine Marshall

Date: 1967

Publisher: Marshall LeSourd

ISBN: 978-1683701323 (click to buy it from my Bookshop page)

Length: 518 pages

Quote: "That Cutter Gap is right rough country."

“Christy, I never know what to expect from you,” wrote an early fan of this novel. I did—sort of. I did not foresee all the twists in the plot but I guessed right away that Christy, being based on Catherine Marshall’s mother’s memories, was going to marry somebody and have to give up her rural mission school in the end. 

Christy is a nice, sheltered young lady from Asheville who heeds a call that was actually made, around the turn of the twentieth century, to help “develop” rural settlements into small towns, with schools and churches where people could be urged to conform to “modern” ways and buy things they might not otherwise have wanted. As the teacher in a one-room school in fictional Cutter Gap, somewhere in rural East Tennessee, she’s also pressed into service as emergency nurse at a woefully undersupplied mission hospital, which is good for several scenes of horror and gross-outs. During a difficult childbirth a man remembers an old Pagan British ritual and sacrifices a finger, but the baby doesn’t make it anyway; then there’s the head injury that calls for a primitive form of brain surgery, which only a few very brave doctors were attempting at this period, but sometimes it did work. Then there’s the epidemic of typhoid fever, a gross-out disease if ever one was. Meanwhile, in addition to teaching all the grades at once, Christy is asked to accept one of her dropout students as a roommate. Then there’s her adult literacy class, in which she makes a real friend—and loses her. Just the sort of thing any urban or rural mission teacher could expect in 1912.

Inadvertently this mission has stocked itself with four bachelors: a full-grown man, a full-grown woman, a young man, and a young woman. What makes this a novel rather than a mere romance is that only two of the four marry each other at the end of the book. Readers aren’t absolutely guaranteed that one of the two will be Christy (the author could have been saving her for a sequel), but whether she will marry the preacher or the doctor, and why, I’ll never tell. Both the preacher and the doctor are nicer than most heroes of fictional romance.

By the turn of the twentieth century I found myself groaning, as I reread this classic novel, at the bad ideas Christy and her friends work to sell people who would have done better without them. But history can’t be changed to suit present tastes. Christy and friends thought they needed to sell the derelict O’Teale family on the ideas of going to school and church in order to sell them on the ideas of, er um, at least burying the bodywastes they leave on the ground as wantonly as their dogs do. Hmph. A little attention to why cats are more pleasant to have in the house than dogs are would suffice. But I mean to say...people like Christy’s mission team are still today doggedly building sewer grids to burden more neighborhoods with unsanitary, outdated water-flush toilets. Though if people are determined to breed roaches, rats, and mosquitoes all that efficiently, it seems to me, they really ought at least to eat them.

Is Christy one big exercise in “dumb, dirty, lazy hillbilly” stereotypes? By no means; although the O’Teales are remarkably dirty and the Taylors are remarkably dumb. Christy is, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an attempt to break up a really hateful stereotype into a full spectrum of more realistic types. Some students at any school are always going to be more ignorant than a first-year teacher would believe humans could be. Some are always going to be more intelligent, disciplined, and prepared for a good college education than some of that teacher’s classmates were. Many things about mission schools have changed since Christy’s time. The spectrum is not one of them. None of Christy’s students is rich but some of them are much less destitute than others. A few people in the rural community have even gone somewhere, or sent off somewhere, and got some education; while she meets adults who don't know how to read, Christy also disappoints her audience by not being able to teach Latin and Greek to people who believe (as most people in the nineteenth century did) that English-speaking people ought to need formal education only to read “the classics” of other languages. In trying to delineate the differences between a dumb hillbilly like Lundy and a smart one like the doctor, or between bumptious Ruby Mae, puny Opal, unfortunate Fairlight and fortunate Christy, Marshall was presenting new stereotypes based on the ones hillbillies already had for themselves. At least she does know the differences.

What was it like for a young, naive hillbilly to read this book in the 1970s when it came out? Christy is not as delightful an affirmation of mountain people and their ways as Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Family was, when I was younger, or as Harriette Simpson Arnow’s Mountain Path or Between the Roses were, when I was older than when I read Christy. (And I remember being shocked by the child abuse scene someone tastefully narrates to Christy. Real child molestation is rare; it used not to be talked about when it did happen, so that character in Christy was the first victim of it I ever “knew,” even third-hand.) I thought Marshall could have confronted more of the generalizations she allows characters to make about hillbillies, but she did understand the critical thing: that although the extreme, desperate cases reported from any community that needs anything usually do exist, usually are almost as desperate as they’ve reported to be, they are not typical. By and large I liked Christy, and still do.

It remained to the current century to generate the sequel, in which a modern Christy-type girl tries to pay off her college debts by working in a poorer community and, at an age where she'd still be shocked to hear that someone she knew had been sexually molested as a child, is accused of doing the molesting herself. I didn't write that story; it happened to a Gate City girl who went to teach in Jonesville. Yes, times have changed. It's still helpful, though, to have a good clear picture of what they've changed from.