I think it is my overwhelming love of narrative that made me a Victorianist in grad school, way back last week when I was in grad school. The thing that I fundamentally and always disliked about Modernism as a literary movement was the
en medias res opening which is when an author plunges slap into the middle of someone's mental processes or lunch break or car chase without an ounce of back story. I love back story. In grade school (completely different from grad school but the same in that both are in my past) (I am going to try to stop bringing that up now, the thing about how I'm finished with grad school) I always got annoyed by story problems in math because I never felt like they gave me enough context. In the first place, why is the farmer planting so much corn and so little soy by comparison? Is that all he plants? Does he have a vegetable garden and maybe a cow to supplement his income and feed himself and/or his family? Why diversify his crops at all? What is his name? Is he a lonely, reedy bachelor farmer saving up to propose to the baker's daughter in town? Is he a florid, well-established married farmer with a rosy-cheeked, bustlingly capable wife and a kitchen-table's worth of stalwart sons? Is he a struggling immigrant with many mouths to feed? If I get this question wrong, will he be able to feed his family this winter/propose to Ida Mae/avoid being scolded by capable bustling wife? What are the stakes here? And why is a FARMER asking an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENT to do his basic math? How good of a farmer are you if you can't compute bushels and acres?
This is also why I have always loved Victorian novels. Four solid chapters about the family background of the heroine detailing her parents' lives before she ever enters the plot at all? Yes please. Meandering description of topographical surroundings with broad regional metaphors? Sign me up. I like to know how a story goes from the beginning, an element I assume everyone I have ever told a story to also appreciates, which drives my friends crazy all my friends absolutely love about me! The more back story, the more detailed, (provided it's well done, of course and always), the more satisfied I and my endlessly questioning imagination will be.
I've recently realized that I try to treat the Internet like a Victorian novel, in that when I find a blog or webcomic or Twitter feed that I like I will go back through the archives to the VERY BEGINNING and read it the whole way through, regardless of inanity, and will continue reading even if it stops being funny or awesome, because I want to know what brought the author/s-in-question to the point at which I encountered him/her/them. I want their back story.
All that to say that I recently read the blog of a woman who blogged her experience with the pregnancy of her now seven-year-old daughter, and it occurred to me that as a 23-just-shy-of-24 year old it would be neither unusual nor illogical for me to get married and have a baby, right now, at my age, and my instantaneous reaction to this realization was a very mature bout of irrepressible giggling at the idea that I have a biological clock and that it is supposed to be ticking. So there goes that theory.
