Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy (3 page)

Tragically, this idyll did not last long. Webster died from complications of childbirth less than a year after her marriage, only a few hours after the birth of her daughter, Jean Webster McKinney, who survived. Uterine fibroids were cited as the cause in some reports; certainly having a first child at the age of forty carried more risk in 1916 than it does today. Webster's obituary and birth announcement for her daughter appeared side by side in the newspaper.

Following her death, Webster's reputation waned; but
Daddy-Long-Legs
has been made into three film versions. Despite Webster's emphasis on Judy's rebellious spirit, these films make her less central as a character and allow her less agency in changing people and institutions. In the popular 1919 silent film, starring Mary Pickford, more than half the time is given to Judy's childhood in the orphanage. According to
Variety,
“The punch of the picture is not in the love story of Judy growing up, falling in love with her guardian, and eventually marrying him, but in the pathos of the wistful little Judy, with her heart full of love, being constantly misunderstood—extracting joy through the instructive ‘mothering' of the other little orphans.”
¹²
The 1931 version, starring Janet Gaynor, is also more of a Cinderella story, with Judy as the poor orphan girl who marries a rich man. The best-known movie treatment is the 1955 musical, with Leslie Caron and Fred Astaire. Caron, as a sweet, passive French version of Judy named Julie André, seems bizarrely out of place at Walston, an American women's college of the 1950s with the students in beanies and tight-waisted dresses. Astaire is the rogue scion of the Pendleton family, who plays the drums when he is taking a break from advising the French government on its economy. In his New York mansion/family museum, we see his grandfather, Jervis Pendleton, painted by Whistler; his father, Jervis Pendleton II, painted by Sargent; and his own portrait by Picasso. Johnny Mercer wrote one of his best songs, “Something's Gotta Give,” for the screen romance of Judy and Jervis; but the description of Judy as an “irresistible force” seems peculiar in light of Caron's kittenish and saccharine performance.

But Judy Abbott and Sallie McBride were indeed irresistible forces who bowled over both their suitors and their antagonists with their intelligence, imagination, high spirits, determination, and grit. They were part of a new wave of American heroines in the twentieth century, feisty and fast-talking dames whose refusal to kowtow to men marked their independence and charm rather than hostility or prudishness. This kind of heroine flourished particularly in the movies; as Karen Alkalay-Gut suggests, “the concept of playful, combative, and productive partnerships between a man and a woman in American novels and film ... from Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy to the present, ... was first ... fixed by Webster.”
¹³
With their colloquial language, cartoon-like illustrations, and frank descriptions of their lives, problems, and feelings, Judy and Sallie can be seen as precursors of today's endearing singletons and bachelorettes, from Cathy Guisewaite's popular comic-strip heroine, to Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones, with her diary, and her hordes of scribbling sisters and imitators. Webster contributed a mixture of seriousness of purpose and playfulness of expression to the portrait of the New Woman that is as fresh and modern as it was a century ago, and should delight a new generation of readers.

 

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

1. Karen Alkalay-Gut, “Jean Webster,”
http://karenalkalay-gut.com/web.html
.

2. Jean Webster McKinney Papers, Vassar College, Box 25, Folder 1.

3. Elizabeth Daniels, “Vassar History,”
http://vassun,vassar.edu/~daniels/1891_1904.html
.

4. Quoted in Karen Alkalay-Gut,
Alone in the Dawn: The Life of Adelaide Crapsey,
Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1988, 119.

5. Jean Webster McKinney Papers, Vassar College, Box 25, Folder 1; unidentified clipping from 1907.

6. Anne Bower,
Epistolary Responses: The Letter in 20th-Century American Fiction and Criticism,
Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1987, 99.

7. Quoted in Christine Stansell,
American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century,
New York: Henry Holt, 2000, 231.

8. “Girl Writer as a Juror—Help,”
New York Times,
May 11, 1909.

9. Alkalay-Gut,
Alone in the Dawn,
249.

10. Alan Simpson, with Mary Simpson,
Jean Webster: Storyteller,
New York: Tymor Associates, 1984, 81.

11. Jean Webster McKinney Papers, Vassar College, Box 12, Folder 5.

12.
Variety,
May 16, 1919:54, quoted in Bower, 104-105.

13. Alkalay-Gut, “Jean Webster.”

Suggestions for Further Reading

When Patty Went to College.
New York: Century, 1903.

The Wheat Princess.
New York: Century, 1905.

Jerry Junior.
New York: Century, 1907.

The Four Pools Mystery.
New York: Century, 1908.

Much Ado About Peter.
New York: Century, 1909.

Just Patty.
New York: Century, 1911.

Daddy-Long-Legs.
New York: Century, 1912.

Dear Enemy.
New York: Century, 1915.

Alkalay-Gut, Karen. “Jean Webster,”
http://karenalkalay-gut.com/web
. html.

Salisbury, Rachel. “Jean Webster,”
Notable American Women,
Vol. III. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971, 555-556.

Simpson, Alan and Mary, with Ralph Connor.
Jean Webster: Storyteller.
Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Tymor Associates, 1984.

Papers, letters, manuscripts, and clippings are in the Jean Webster McKinney Collection at Vassar College.

Alkalay-Gut, Karen. “‘If Mark Twain Had a Sister': Gender-Specific Values and Structures in Jean Webster's
Daddy-Long-Legs.
”
Journal of American Culture,
16 (Winter 1993): 91-99.

Bower, Ann. “Delettering: Responses to Agencies in Jean Webster's
Daddy-Long-Legs,
” in
Epistolary Responses: The Letter in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Criticism.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997.

Adickes, Sandra L.
To Be Young Was Very Heaven: Women in New York Before the First World War.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.

Alkalay-Gut, Karen.
Alone in the Dawn: The Life of Adelaide Crapsey.
Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1988.

Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz.
Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1920s.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985.

Stansell, Christine.
American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000.

A Note on the Texts

The texts of
Daddy-Long-Legs
and
Dear Enemy
have been reset from the original editions, published by The Century Co. in 1912 and 1915 respectively. Jean Webster's drawings, which are integral to the novels, are reproduced here.

DADDY-LONG-LEGS

BY
JEAN WEBSTER

 

With Illustrations
by The Author

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.

1912

TO YOU

The first Wednesday in every month was a Perfectly Awful Day—a day to be awaited with dread, endured with courage and forgotten with haste. Every floor must be spotless, every chair dustless, and every bed without a wrinkle. Ninety-seven squirming little orphans must be scrubbed and combed and buttoned into freshly starched ginghams; and all ninety-seven reminded of their manners, and told to say, “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” whenever a Trustee spoke.

It was a distressing time; and poor Jerusha Abbott, being the oldest orphan, had to bear the brunt of it. But this particular first Wednesday, like its predecessors, finally dragged itself to a close. Jerusha escaped from the pantry where she had been making sandwiches for the asylum's guests, and turned upstairs to accomplish her regular work. Her special care was room F, where eleven little tots, from four to seven, occupied eleven little cots set in a row. Jerusha assembled her charges, straightened their rumpled frocks, wiped their noses, and started them in an orderly and willing line toward the dining-room to engage themselves for a blessed half hour with bread and milk and prune pudding.

Then she dropped down on the window seat and leaned throbbing temples against the cool glass. She had been on her feet since five that morning, doing everybody's bidding, scolded and hurried by a nervous matron. Mrs. Lippett, behind the scenes, did not always maintain that calm and pompous dignity with which she faced an audience of Trustees and lady visitors. Jerusha gazed out across a broad stretch of frozen lawn, beyond the tall iron paling that marked the confines of the asylum, down undulating ridges sprinkled with country estates, to the spires of the village rising from the midst of bare trees.

The day was ended—quite successfully, so far as she knew. The Trustees and the visiting committee had made their rounds, and read their reports, and drunk their tea, and now were hurrying home to their own cheerful firesides, to forget their bothersome little charges for another month. Jerusha leaned forward watching with curiosity—and a touch of wistfulness—the stream of carriages and automobiles that rolled out of the asylum gates. In imagination she followed first one equipage then another to the big houses dotted along the hillside. She pictured herself in a fur coat and a velvet hat trimmed with feathers leaning back in the seat and nonchalantly murmuring “Home” to the driver. But on the door-sill of her home the picture grew blurred.

Jerusha had an imagination—an imagination, Mrs. Lippett told her, that would get her into trouble if she didn't take care—but keen as it was, it could not carry her beyond the front porch of the houses she would enter. Poor, eager, adventurous little Jerusha, in all her seventeen years, had never stepped inside an ordinary house; she could not picture the daily routine of those other human beings who carried on their lives undiscommoded by orphans.

Tommy Dillon who had joined the choir, came singing up the stairs and down the corridor, his chant growing louder as he approached room F. Jerusha wrenched herself from the window and refaced the troubles of life.

“Who wants me?” she cut into Tommy's chant with a note of sharp anxiety.

Tommy piously intoned, but his accent was not entirely malicious. Even the most hardened little orphan felt sympathy for an erring sister who was summoned to the office to face an annoyed matron; and Tommy liked Jerusha even if she did sometimes jerk him by the arm and nearly scrub his nose off.

Jerusha went without comment, but with two parallel lines on her brow. What could have gone wrong, she wondered. Were the sandwiches not thin enough? Were there shells in the nut cakes? Had a lady visitor seen the hole in Susie Hawthorn's stocking? Had—O horrors!—one of the cherubic little babes in her own room F “sassed” a Trustee?

The long lower hall had not been lighted, and as she came downstairs, a last Trustee stood, on the point of departure, in the open door that led to the porte-cochère. Jerusha caught only a fleeting impression of the man—and the impression consisted entirely of tallness. He was waving his arm toward an automobile waiting in the curved drive. As it sprang into motion and approached, head on for an instant, the glaring headlights threw his shadow sharply against the wall inside. The shadow pictured grotesquely elongated legs and arms that ran along the floor and up the wall of the corridor. It looked, for all the world, like a huge, wavering daddy-long-legs.

Jerusha's anxious frown gave place to quick laughter. She was by nature a sunny soul, and had always snatched the tiniest excuse to be amused. If one could derive any sort of entertainment out of the oppressive fact of a Trustee, it was something unexpected to the good. She advanced to the office quite cheered by the tiny episode, and presented a smiling face to Mrs. Lippett. To her surprise the matron was also, if not exactly smiling, at least appreciably affable; she wore an expression almost as pleasant as the one she donned for visitors.

“Sit down, Jerusha, I have something to say to you.”

Jerusha dropped into the nearest chair and waited with a touch of breathlessness. An automobile flashed past the window; Mrs. Lippett glanced after it.