Issue 5
2002
Anne Finger:
Betty MacDonald is best known for her book
The Egg and I
(a bestseller when it was
published in 1945, it was made into a movie
starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurry)
and her children's books,
the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle series.
The Egg and I is the story of a city girl
who,
at the age of 18, marries a chicken farmer --
from "that
delightful old school of husbands
who lift up the mattresses to see if
the little woman
has dusted the springs" -- and settles down with him
to raise children and poultry -- and conceives an
almost pathological
hatred of chickens.
Published in 1945, The Egg and I is a classic
of the
wisecracking, disgruntled dame variety --
but it isn't hard to see that
beneath that veneer, the book
voiced real complaints about women's lot
in marriage
and a tough streak of anti-romantic realism. (It also
contributed to the image of Seattle and its environs
as a realm of
backwoods eccentrics -- a far cry from
the current stereotype of grunge
rockers and
latte-drinking drones for Microsoft.)
The Plague and I (1948), MacDonald's subsequent
-- and
largely ignored -- autobiographical follow-up,
concerns the year she
spent in a tuberculosis sanitarium.
In it, she brings the same grim
humor to the story of her
institutionalization and the dehumanizing
treatment
she experiences there.
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