#queuing this one

[desrowchoker]

good morning! pete wentz. you agree. reblog

[sleepvines]

he who runs the tea house

[no-where-new-hero]

Fire and Hemlock Readalong: Chapter 5

...in which Polly trains to become a hero.

Another huge chapter that manages to squish a lot of important thematic stuff in, mostly surrounding stories and gender roles.

First of all, we have Nina as King Herod. Nina is an interestingly androgynous character, which I'm realizing this time around--yes, she's the "silly" one according to DWJ's estimation, but there's also enough similar in her to Polly that draws them together. Then, we have Dad's vs. Mr. Lynn's Christmas presents: Dad gives Polly a disappointing dollhouse at Ivy's behest, though she doesn't want it, and she feels like it's something she should be grateful for. This feels a very typical anti-feminist sentiment couched in the language of childhood: oh, you get crumbs? Well, be grateful you're getting anything at all from a man. Mr. Lynn, on the other hand, gives her expressly androgynous reading material: adventure stories, not "girls books," with perhaps the exception of Henrietta's House, which I unfortunately can find very little info about--though Polly tells us the made-up adventures are "reely trew," another suggestion of where this novel is going. He also sends her the soldiers she wants, which also plays into how he sees her as boy-adjacent in a way that fulfills her.

The major part of this chapter is, of course, Polly's hero training, which starts out as athleticism and morphs into a more traditional sense of defending justice, if only in the schoolyard. There are two interesting things happening here: on the one hand, Polly is consciously turning herself into a hero "on the inside" through the same kind of "being things" way she described to Mr. Lynn. She's settling into an identity for herself that's driven largely by her friendship with Mr. Lynn, though that's not entirely legible at this point. She's also becoming visible, as it were, to her peers, which is another formation of identity, and it's repeatedly stated as a bit at odds with how she feels inside. It's one of the best portrayals of what it feels like to grow up that I've ever come across because it's so subtle. We don't either over-dwell on Polly's feelings or get sweeping conclusions. There are just these little interactions with Nina or the Headmistress or Ivy where the conflict between self and other comes up and mirrors the conflict between Nowhere and Now-Here.

A last thing in this chapter that's super provocative is how Polly expressly states she's becoming a hero because "I think I have to save someone." Already, she has a sense of what she will come to mean to Mr. Lynn, and the glimmerings of her nascent vanity suggest what he will come to mean to her.