Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy Read Free Page B

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.
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    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