"Vain man, Benjamin Franklin!"

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

Dear Lori,

Following the dramatic events of the preceding chapters, culminating in the Mrs. Doubtfire-esque revelation of Chapter 19, I anticipated a lull in Young's narrative twists for at least another 250 pages. Yet, in Chapter 23, she delivers a revelation so startling that I hesitate to disclose it. Who could have predicted the vitriolic animosity Miss MacIntosh would harbor towards one of our most cherished Founding Fathers? I refer, of course, to Philadelphia's own Benjamin Franklin. In Miss MacIntosh's eyes, Franklin has committed the Promethean transgression of bestowing electricity upon humanity, thus paving the way for the electric lightbulb — the alleged betrayer of feminine mystique and the ruination of marriages.

"Vain man, Benjamin Franklin!" she suddenly exclaimed. "It is he who has helped to put us in this bad way. It was he, paving the way for electric lights. It was he, trying to harness the lightning of the heavens as he was not asked to do, so now we must have all these electric lights disturbing our privacy, keeping us up all night, my dear, making the nights like the days, and a man has not the privacy of his own bedroom…”

And -

“Ulysses, if ever he had seen Penelope under electric lights, would never have come home, would have wandered the wide seas forever, and she would always have woven her web."

The tirade she unleashes upon poor Ben is as injudicious as it is inexplicable and lasts for several paragraphs. That Miss MacIntosh, the very embodiment of Midwestern practicality, should turn on the creator of Poor Richard's Almanac, Silence Dogood, and the homespun aphorism—well, to this I say, "Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices." If Young had penned her magnum opus post-2001, after the biography of John Adams turned so many against the man who single-handedly secured the funding for the American Revolution, invented bifocals and the flexible catheter, it might make some sense. David McCullough has much to answer for, but that is a topic for another correspondence. Suffice it to say that to flaunt such opinions in a book published in 1965, so close to the nation's centennial, is a shocking turn of the worm.

And yet, is it truly surprising after all we've learned about Georgia MacIntosh's character and hypocrisies? As you observed in your last letter, Miss MacIntosh's delusions – as described by Vera – have been presented as more egregious than those exhibited by her mother and Mr. Spitzer. So what, I wonder, causes Vera's change of heart?

Happy New Year from across the Rubicon,

Tara