You are what you read

Returning to some thoughts that struck me while reading Little Women with the girls, and revisiting some pages I had dog-eared during the read-aloud (much to Atticus's distress ... he has a strict, personal, no-dog-earing-books policy, whereas I am more lax in my approach, making dog-ear exceptions for certain books or moments. They are however, and I can assure you of this, the tiniest of dog-ears.)

Diverting your attention now from our silly private squabble back to a great work of literature:

Late in the book, when Jo has gone to live in New York City and is making nice little chunks of money for her anonymously written potboilers, Louisa May Alcott observes the following:

But Mr. Dashwood rejected any but thrilling tales, and as thrills could not be produced except by harrowing up the soulsof the readers, history and romance, land and sea, science and art, police records and lunatic asylums, had to be ransacked for the purpose. Jo soon found that her innocent experience had given her but few glimpses of the tragic world which underlies society, so regarding it in a business light, she set about supplying her deficiencies with characteristic energy. Eager to find material for stories, and bent on making them original in plot, if not masterly in execution, she searched newspapers for accidents, incidents, and crimes. She excited the suspicions of public librarians by asking for works on poisons.

She studied faces in the street, and characters, good, bad, and indifferent, all about her. She delved in the dust of ancient times for facts or fictions so old that
they were as good as new, and introduced herself to folly, sin, and misery, as well as her limited opportunities allowed. She thought she was prospering finely, but unconsciously she was beginning to desecrate some of the womanliest attributes of a
woman's character. She was living in bad society, and imaginary though it was, its influence affected her, for she was feeding heart and fancy on dangerous and unsubstantial food, and was fast brushing the innocent bloom from her nature by
a premature acquaintance with the darker side of life, which comes soon enough to all of us.

She was beginning to feel rather than see this, for much describing of other people's passions and feelings set her to studying and speculating about her own, a morbid amusement in which healthy young minds do not voluntarily indulge.

When I read this to the girls, we stopped to talk about it for a minute. First of all, we compared it to my writing ... would this be sort of like Mom writing for "one of those fake magazines" as we call "The National Enquirer" and its ilk? Yes, we all agreed that a good Catholic mom shouldn't write for the fake magazines, no matter how much they might pay for a story.

And what about the effect it was having on Jo? We talked about the power of pictures and ideas, and of how they leap or seep into our minds, of how hard it can be to shake a picture which has caught one off-guard and scared, startled or horrified. By searching out the ugly side of life, in order to spice up her stories, Jo was allowing that ugliness into her mind and her soul, and how could that not have an effect? My older kids have both, I'm sorry to say, seen a few ugly or scary things when I was not quick enough or alert enough to shield them. They know that, once implanted in one's mind, a picture can be hard to shake and they've had the experience of saying, "I wish I'd never seen that." They've also been in "protector" mode: they compared all of this to the way they'll shield Ramona from a scene that would scare her in one of their movies.

They understood.

I can't imagine a better lesson on discernment of literature (and TV viewing, in our century, though lucky Jo didn't have to contend with that) and all because we were reading a great book together.

Who says you need a curriculum to cover this stuff?