Commentary: Damned if you do. . .

I recently read two books, one silly, one serious. I don't recommend Jerramy Fine's Somedaw My Prince Will Come. It's a silly, silly book. Its subtitle, True Adventures of a Wannabe Princess is, quite frankly, nauseating. This would be a fine entry in the weaker sort of chick lit category, but is frightening when contemplated as a memoir. Bascially, Fine decides at a tender age that she's meant to be a princess of the English Royal Family (first her parents and later she decide that the strength of her resolution is because she was a princess, or at least nobility, in a previous life). At the age of six, she decides that her future spouse would be Peter, son of Princess Anne. The rest of the book chronicles her attempts to remake herself into a "proper" upper-class Englishwoman and meet her future prince. One of the book's strengths is its voice; although Fine is over thirty, she sounds quite convincingly like the teenager and young twenty-something her book covers.

On the other hand, I can recommend Kate Clifford Larson's book on Mary Surratt, The Assassin's Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln. Larson has done her homework on the scholarship surrounding Lincoln's assassination as well as the conspirators' trials. Larson does a nice job balancing clear writing with an eye for larger detail such as the role border states played in the Civil War, and the truly divided feelings of border states' residents without getting bogged down in the scholarship.

These books have no apparent connection on the surface. What I found striking about them is the ways both books undercut the messages of femininity they apparently espouse. Lawson's Mary Surratt and Fine's self-portrait wind up defying the assumptions that go with wife/mother and would-be princess.

Surratt was the first woman executed by the US Government. Her crime was conspiring with John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Larson's book is an exploration of Surratt's role in the plot, her trial, and the evidence against her. In the Introduction, Larson admits that she thought Surratt was "more innocent" (xiv) when she began her research, although she later changed her mind. A crucial point to Larson's exploration is the conflict between Surratt's real-life and Victorian values. Larson suggests that although Surratt was part of "a new breed of troublesome woman" (xviii), one that included woman soldiers and spies during the war, the gender norms of the day resisted the idea that a woman could be involved in such a horrific crime. Added to this was her age and the fact that she was a mother. Post-trial appeals that asked for commutation of her sentence gave her age and her gender as the reason.

I have a hard time seeing Surratt as a "troublesome wwoman," if that term is defined as a "woman doing things atypical to our expectations." Although Surratt's son, John, was a spy for Confederate forces, and a young woman who was a spy, Sarah Slater, stayed at the Surratt boardinghouse occasionally, what I find interesting is that while Mary Surratt could be called a "troublesome woman" by conspiring to kill the president, her participation appears to have fallen largely along mid-Victorian notions of women's participation in society. Surratt did not shoot Lincoln herself, nor did she attack any of the other men whom Booth targeted. Instead, she offered both her Washington boarding house and her Surrattsville tavern in southern Maryland as a refuge for conspirators and a hiding place for weapons. Despite her travels back and forth between her two properties, she did not hide guns herself in her tavern; instead she sent one of the male conspirators to do so instead. Larson echoes Andrew Johnson's comment that Surratt "kept the nest which hatched the egg" (xix), itself a very maternal image. Surratt appears to have been a kind of conspirators' Angel in the House. As Larson herself concludes, "In providing a warm home, private encouragement, and material support to Abraham Lincoln's murderer, she offered more than most of Booth's supporters" (230). Ironically, the woman executed for assassination, one of the most notorious characters of the day, participated in one of the most traditionally feminine ways.

Fine, on the other hand, appears to be caught in the most traditional narrative of all: the faithful girl, waiting for her prince. Fine does anything but wait, however. She moves to London, enrolls in the LSE, finds a job, makes the "right" friends, lives in the "right" places, and learns how to fit in with her new upper-class crowd. While wrapped up in finding Mr. Royal Right (with lots of Mr. Slightly-Less-Exalted Wrongs) and meditations on why Fine can't seem to leave her dream world behind and grow up, at its heart, this narrative is the quintessential American tale of how to recreate yourself. Fine is Jay Gatsby without the tragic ending. For all its fluff and silliness, Fine is an example of grit, determination, and the desire to be somewhere and someone else. If her choice seems narrow and deplorable, Fine does achieve, in the end, a meeting with her fantasy spouse, a long-term job in London, a boyfriend, and, eventually, some perspective.

Both Jerramy Fine, or really "Jerramy Fine," and Mary Surratt show both how pervasive our narratives of women as princesses in waiting, wives, and nurterers are. And yet, both books hint at how complicated they can be.