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March/April 2021 |
Curiosities At Midnight on the 31st of March, by Josephine Young Case (1938) Josephine Young Case (1908-1990), the daughter of pioneering industrialist and the first chairman of General Electric Owen D. Young (1874-1962), crafts a novel in blank verse. Released in the ninth year of the twentieth century's worst economic crisis, this speculative epic poem is a strident call to return to the soil and reaffirm the value of work. As if hermitically sealed, the town of Saugerville—a distillation of rural Americana newly electrified—emerges in a pre-Beringian wilderness of loneliness and endless trees. Roads evaporate into forests, electricity flickers off. A new cartography intrudes with its center on the clustered houses, two steeples, and roughhewn fields. Tracing an ensemble cast over one year, Case unearths a traumatic tapestry of severed horizons and grim survival. Some residents find meaning in a comparative dance with their pasts, now only a substratum of memory ("'Folks had good families in those days,' said Ed"). Others fear a further constriction of horizons, cutting neighbor from neighbor ("An even smaller band left here to face / In twos and threes a strange and hostile world"). One character, possessed by primordial dreams of power and prestige, conjures fantasies of wealth in a cave at the edge of the forest. For some a sense of doom remains, buried in their hearts, festering as the darkest nights set in. In the wreckage of the Great Depression, Case's argument for self-reliance, like other agrarian theorists of the early twentieth century, foreshadow the back-to-the-land movement of the sixties. As the horror fades, Saugerville's new traditions reaffirm the ties that bind and push aside the technological obfuscation brought on by an increasingly industrial age. — | |
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