Monday, March 15, 2010

Amelia Earhart and the question of identity

I feel that this is the crux of my novel, I have characters straining to discover who they are. And what they must sacrifice to become the person they want to be. I have young women who strain to define themselves, partly through an intense friendship. Many have had one of those, the one where you feel twinned with your friend and honored that they chose you, and discover years later that they felt the same way. I have Muriel who is an eighty year old widow, a bereft mother and living out the last chapter of her life. And I have Amelia who is half her sister's age plus a few years more, who wonders at her own role now that she's apparently unrecognizable. She has to make herself again. And again. And again. She has to strain to find the things that mattered to her most.

It makes me wonder about what people come to expect. When you're as famous as she was, when crowds gather round you, clamoring for your attention, and all that is taken away from you, what do you feel? There's certainly an element of relief. You can be incognito. You can watch other people without them watching you back, and wanting something from you. We want so much from those who are famous. We want to be them. We want them to touch us. They are our gods and goddesses. Just passing near one of them makes your day special. It seems both shallow and completely understandable. We want to shine the way we imagine they do. And we want to bring them down to earth, as a culture we take such glee in it, when our 'ordained' great fall. Take all this unseemly and absurd attention given to Tiger Woods' indiscretions. Yes, he was an idiot, yes, he had extremely poor taste, and yes, I think his wife probably should have gone after him with a tire iron, but she only had a golf club handy. Still who really cares? Apparently everyone does according to the news media. It must be a relief not to have to hide who you are, to be a normal person and go about your routines unnoticed. Still, you have to also miss all that the attention brought you. There are real dividends. And for her, it meant an escape from the expectations her family placed on her, it gave her financial and emotional independence and above all she got to fly.

That's all we really want I think, to be able to fly. To fly away clean. To make our best getaway. Hats off to you Amelia.
Meanwhile back to the chapter that's been plaguing me for a while now. And onwards to the book that needs tweaking and a resolution. If fame retreats, do you pursue it again. I have John Lennon in my book, I was there when he was shot, it was really one of the saddest days of my life, he only wanted privacy, he, the most famous man in the world, more famous than Jesus. Look what that got him.

11 comments:

  1. If Amelia prefers to stay out of the spotlight, she should know that she wouldn't necessarily need fame again as a means to raise enough money for a world flight. There are other ways, like the recent world flight fund-raiser for ALS (it's a disease that I can't spell) medical research, done by two women pilots who financed it partly by donations. Thought I'd drop that comment for what it's worth, though I don't know whether you have her thinking seriously about another world flight.
    Has she thought about going back to college and getting a degree? I can see her becoming a professor and putting together a women's studies program at some university; sentiment might draw her to Purdue (I don't think Purdue had a women's studies program in the early 80's).

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, I have been wondering about that, I have her set up to consider her options right about now and was just thinking about it, while doing laps in the pool, my usual place of last resort when I can't do another thing without jumping out of my skin. Isn't there someone else who wanted to recreate her flight to help Lyme disease victims? Yes, it would take money and I also think she'd be so interested in the progress made vis a vis plane travel, but I do wonder if that would cause her to rethink her own role. Where is the adventure if you're not flying solo? And she was someone who pushed the edge of the envelope always, where does one do that, too young to take up Xtreme snowboarding (a joke surely). Pondering these options, but unconvinced that she would opt for staying completely out of the limelight, once you've had it shone on you, wouldn't you miss it? Sorry for the long response, onwards to ponder.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I rememeber where I was the day John Lennon was shot. Very sad, I suppose in a way fame killed him. What is fame really? It is human attention. When you get lots of attention you are famous. You are reflected in other minds that are looking at you. In a way, all these unknown people who are thinking of you when you're famous amount to a kind of giant hand-mirror, as they are human attention reflecting your larger-than-life public image back to you. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, whose the fairest of them all....? I'm reading a book right now called "Moments of Clarity" which I recommend- it's by one of the Kennedy's (of a different name, I forget which one) and interviews Judy Collins, Richard Dreyfus, Susan Cheever, and many others about their recovery from addiction to drugs and alcohol. Alec Baldwin in this book says that fame is "like a hit off a cocaine pipe", or something like that. I loved reading this post Naomi.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you Colleen, it surely is a preoccupation in our culture. And I suppose I want a piece of fame myself, however small. I want to be known as a writer in some way, why else write fiction and publish except to gain an audience? I'll look for that book, sounds interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I like Colleen's comment about the giant hand-mirror. I think there's 2 parts to the equation of fame: the celebrity projecting a larger-than-life image, and the audience projecting whatever it needs to see onto the celebrity. There's an extended essay on this subject by Susan Erikson Bloland, daughter of a famous person (Erik Erikson) in the Nov. 1999 issue of The Atlantic magazine. It's called "Fame" and is available in the magazine's online archives (www.theatlantic.com and click on archives).

    ReplyDelete
  6. Uh oh. I just now checked and found that The Atlantic now charges a fee for access to articles older than July 2004. Sorry.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I can usually get around those things, I will check it out. . . or pay if I have to. I guess magazines have to make money any way they can these days.

    ReplyDelete
  8. There's a lot of food for thought in that essay. When and if you read it, I look forward to your posting some comments. I have some ideas regarding applicability to AE, but don't want to comment before you've read it.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I have just read this piece on Fame. I also see she's written a memoir. I might pick it up, she writes eloquently. I think her points are well taken, and remind me of my own experiences with narcissistic personalities. As for Amelia, I wonder what she felt about all of it, fame came to her, she didn't seek it out. But once it was an established part of her life, she courted it, and needed it. That's quite different from someone like Erikson whose drive made him court fame and attention early and often. I'm trying to figure out what the middle ground would be here, or if there is one. A very interesting and I think well argued take on what it means to be famous and how destructive it can be for those who are closest. It does have a great deal to do with my concept, Muriel choosing to become keeper of the flame so to speak. Thanks so much for mentioning it.

    ReplyDelete
  10. You're making an important distinction, one I was going to point out in fact, between narcissistic seeking of fame for its own sake, and fame as an acquired taste as in AE's case. I've been thinking about what emotional benefits fame might have provided her, and am not convinced that ego-stroking was a big part of it. She did keep a file of obviously silly purple-prose-praise newsclippings about herself as a reminder to herself not to let all the attention go to her head. I'd speculate that there was a more subtle benefit: the obvious courage it took to do ocean flights was a rejoinder to men's disbelief in women's courage. Not just disbelief experienced in the abstract as a cultural thing, but as personally experienced. I'm suggesting that whatever personal insults she received from men -- genderized verbal abuse,etc.-- gave her added incentive to prove her courage, and added satisfaction when the flights were successfully completed.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Yes, I think this is an important point. She was so incredibly civilized and private, I'm sure she got a lot of grief. And I'm convinced the way she dressed was another way of both fitting in, and proving her point. I know that it's fashionable to imagine she was a closet lesbian in some circles. I don't think that's necessarily important, it's not about her sexuality, it's that the clothes she wore gave her power, cachet in that world.

    ReplyDelete