Psyche Read Free Page B

North Americans. Contemporary ideas of psychology were sufficiently influential that these “abnormal” self-confessed killers received life sentences instead of death. Public opinion was that children were not safe outside the house and predators could take any form.
    The next kidnapping to become a public obsession proved that children were not safe even within their homes. The most famous kidnapping of the twentieth century is the 1932 abduction of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. who, like Psyche, was taken from his home when parents and servants were nearby. The Lindbergh child was only twenty months old and, like Psyche, blonde and blue-eyed. His parents were wealthy and famous: Charles Lindbergh had made the first solo flight across the Atlantic. Unlike earlier American kidnapping cases, Charles A. Lindbergh Jr.’s mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, played a prominent role in the public view of the tragedy, where she was portrayed as the dignified, grieving mother. 24 The fear of death and mutilation present in all child kidnapping cases was indelibly imprinted on the public mind when the toddler’s decomposed body was found over two months after his kidnapping.
    After the 1930s, kidnapping of children for ransom became less common. Fears now focused on sexual exploitation. The non-familial abduction of children, while tragic, was relatively uncommon in the United States, but its possibility loomed large in the imagination of anxious parents. Fass has written that the possibility of “kidnapping threatened the physical and emotional integrity of the family and the sanctity of child life, which was the modern family’s central responsibility.” 25
    In the 1950s, Fass argues, kidnapping was transformed from a crime to an American “fixation” as “some of the psychological currents stirred up in the 1920s were attached to general uneasiness about sexuality and gender and a recharged familialism.” 26 Babies and adolescent girls were regarded as particularly vulnerable. Psyche, both as an infant and an adolescent girl, reflects this anxiety. The significant deviation in Psyche’s story, however, is that her mother expresses no fear that her identity might be permanently altered.
    Although not intended to be interpreted too literally, the context of the novel evokes a particular time and place. Young acknowledges the novelist’s responsibility to “catch our way of life now” before it is lost to memory. 27 The maid wears a proper black and white uniform and refers to her employer as “the master.” Coffee is not “to go” but drunk at a counter out of a proper cup. Radio and television have not flattened out local accents, and the author writes the northern Ontario working class rural accent in dialect. Unemployed, itinerant men are described as “Hoboes” moving from “jungle” to “jungle” where transients congregated and camped. A wrapper was a house dress, loosely cut and designed for hard domestic work, even if little of this actually happens in Mag’s shack.
Fanny Fanner’s Boston Cook Book
, first published in 1896, was the most popular American cookbook, so it is not surprising that it and the Bible share the distinction of being the only books in Mag and Butch’s home. Although never stated explicitly, it is difficult not to associate the slag surrounding the mines with Sudbury, Ontario, the city with Toronto, and the location of Oliver’s Restaurant with Muskoka towns such as Gravenhurst or Huntsville.
    That Phyllis Brett Young attended the Ontario College of Art (OCA) during the 1930s not only accounts for some details in descriptions of the city in the novel but also provides clues about the artistic context in which readers might situate the novel’s heroine. Still today, on Grange Park in Toronto, you find the University Settlement and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), the latter bearing a resemblance