The egg and me (book)

The Egg and I (title of the English original: The Egg and I ) is an autobiographical humorous story by the American writer Betty MacDonald . The book, published in 1945, describes the narrator's experiences on a chicken farm on the edge of the Olympic Mountains in the late 1920s. It became a bestseller , translated into numerous languages ​​and sold over three million copies worldwide. A film adaptation of the book gave rise to a whole series of other films, the focus of which were the hillbillys described in the book.

It was not until the 1970s that the work received some attention in literary studies, especially in women's studies , in the wake of a discussion about domestic humor and "comical feminism" . As early as 1951, however, in the course of a defamation process, the question of the text type of The Egg and I had become legally acute, i.e. the question of whether it was an autobiographical story or a fictional work. It eventually became the subject of a debate on literary regionalism and the values ​​of the American West. Philological questions about the creation, publication and marketing of the book as well as the biographical references and locations were only clarified in a biography by Paula Becker published in 2016.

Action and formal construction

Location of the Olympic Peninsula (red) on the American west coast

The story, told consistently in the first person form , is divided into five parts, each of which contains several chapters and is introduced by a quote that precedes the text as a motto . The title of the first part, “Such Duty”, is taken from the motto of this part, a Shakespeare quote from The Taming of the Shrew : “Such duty as the subject owes the prince, / Even such a woman oweth to her husband ”(“ The duty that the vassal owes the prince / the wife owes it to her husband ”). It relates directly to the exhortation of the narrator's mother that it is the woman's duty to see that the man is comfortable with his work - a duty that the narrator is unable to fulfill despite great efforts. The three chapters of the first part contain a concise, anecdotal overview of the narrator's childhood. This is followed by the marriage of the 18-year-old to the insurance employee Bob and his decision to run a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula - a decision that the narrator happily supports in accordance with her mother's motto. The two go to the "most untamed corner of the United States", buy an abandoned farm and prepare it. This takes about the period between March and November.

The titles of the other four parts follow the course of the year: November - spring - summer - autumn. The narrative largely leaves the chronological order and strings together anecdotes, recurring events and related reflections. The “November” part, introduced with an abbreviated quote from Thomas Hood's poem No! , which evokes the lack of color, light and warmth and life in November, first describes in detail the work of the farmer in a lonely farm without electricity and water connection and the unequal distribution and recognition of work between the sexes. This ranges from fighting with the anthropomorphized stove "Stove" to washing, ironing, baking and cleaning to getting up in deep darkness and wetness at 4:00 in the morning. The abundant foodstuffs are then enumerated with a more optimistic tone - and the contrast to the customs of the long-established population, who eat macaroni despite this overabundance of pork belly. Her pregnancy is also mentioned here for the first time, in connection with an offer for an abortion using a boot button ("plain old-fashioned buttonhook") made by a local resident.

The motto of “Spring” is a quote from John Keats : “Hear ye not the hum of mighty workings!” The “mighty works” relate to the awakening of nature and the reproductive activity: the narrator gives birth to her daughter, and as When she is back from the hospital, all the animals on the farm have eagerly brought offspring (“had been busy producing”), which increases the workload. The core of the spring part, however, is social intercourse, especially with the closest neighbors. On the one hand there are the Kettles, "Paw" and "Maw" (Papa and Mama) Kettle with their 15 children. Unlike that of the efficient Bob and the narrator, her farm is untidy, dirty and only held together by improvisations. Once relationships are established, Paw keeps arriving to borrow something. Those are the Hicks, on the other hand: While Mr Hicks appears only as "a large ruddy dullard" (burly simpleton with a flushed complexion), Birdie Hicks is downright obsessed with the household, a cleaning devil and able to clean hundreds before breakfast Canning jars of fruit and vegetables. The narrator's sympathies are with Maw Kettle. Another chapter is devoted to the elaborate care of chickens and chicks, which the narrator induces to learn to hate chicks herself, because: “Chickens are so dumb. Any other living thing which you fed 365 days in the year would get to know and perhaps to love you. Not the chicken. "(" Chickens are so stupid. Every other living being that you feed 365 days a year would know you at some point and maybe love you. The chicken doesn't. ")

The “summer” begins with the motto: “Man works from dawn to setting sun / But woman's work is never done” (“Man works from morning to evening / But the woman's work is never done”), a well-known proverb . The issue of gender roles in work that is affected by this concerns, among other things, the conservation work (canning, sterilization, etc.) that falls on women; the narrator, who cannot and does not want to keep up with Birdie Hicks' achievements, has the happiest day of her farm life when the pressure pot finally blows up - but Bob unmovedly chooses a larger one from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. Another chapter describes visits to the farm by friends who are enthusiastic about nature and who are blind to the drudgery of their hostess. Above all, this part is about the Indians , closely related to the gender issue. Crowbar, Clamface and Geoduck Swensen are “Bob's good friends, but I couldn't count them among mine” because women don't count for them (“They were Bob's good friends. I couldn't count them as mine, for they had no use for women and were unable to understand Bob's attitude toward me "). The chapter heading "With bow and arrow" is in ironic contrast to the appearance perceived by the narrator: small, bow-legged and mostly drunk. The chapter reports, among other things, of a threatening situation: a drunk friend of Geoduck visits her at home when she is alone and harasses her; she only gets rid of him at gunpoint. The narrator is then invited to an Indian picnic with her child and husband, so to speak as an offer of peace. She is horrified by the binge drinking, the dirt and the way the children are treated. This is followed by chapters on raising children in non-Indian circles - who are fed pork belly and beer - and the dangerous, often fatal work of men in the logging camp.

The final part "Autumn", introduced again with a quote from Thomas Hood, this time at the beginning of his poem Autumn , begins with a technical change that foreshadows the departure from uncivilized life: Bob builds a water pipe for the farm. This is followed by experiences of rural, alcohol-related social intercourse ("The Theatah - the Dahnse"), including a large birthday party for Maw Kettle. Later, a fire caused by inattention on the part of Paw Kettle leads to a united effort by the men to contain the fire; the narrator is responsible for supplying the helpers with food and alcohol until five in the morning. Finally, Bob reports on a farm in the Seattle metropolitan area that is for sale. The narrator is enthusiastic about the prospect of electricity and water connections and hopes to be able to stay longer in bed in the future, but Bob dampens her enthusiasm: chickens always have to be fed early. The narrative ends with the laconic statement: “Which just goes to show that a man in the chicken business is not his own boss at all. The hen is the boss” (“From which it can be seen that the owner of a chicken farm is by no means his own master is. The hen is his master ”).

A spatial classification of the action near Puget Sound on the Pacific coast of Washington state and, more precisely, on the Olympic Peninsula is quite possible, although the place and landscape names are almost entirely veiled. On the other hand, there is hardly any indication of the chronological classification. Only the repeated allusions to Prohibition suggest that the action was more than twenty years ago.

Creation, publication and marketing history

Creation and editing

The basis of the book is the author's experience. In 1927, when she was twenty, she married the insurance salesman Robert Heskett, with whom she ran a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula until 1930. She often told anecdotes from this time to family and colleagues, including in letters. According to MacDonald's own account, both in her later book Anybody can do anything and in Letters, the decision to write it down came at the repeated insistence of her sister Mary Bard , who later became a writer herself. It's The Egg and I also dedicated to the dedication reads: "To my sister Mary who has always Believed did I can do anything she puts her mind to", eg: "For my sister Mary, who has always believed that I can do anything she has in mind. "

MacDonald probably began the manuscript as early as 1940 or 1941 in Seattle , possibly at the suggestion of a professor of creative writing at the University of Washington . She initially left it behind when she met her second husband Donald MacDonald. Since 1942 she lived with Donald MacDonald on Vashon Island and both commuted to Seattle by ferry to work. Mary Bard, who was in contact with a Doubleday editor and literary scout , Henri Verstappen, told him that her sister was working on a book about the area and arranged a meeting. Verstappen asked Betty MacDonald to put together an exposé by the next day . To do this, she reported sick to the construction company in whose office she worked and promptly lost her job. Since Verstappen found the synopsis promising, she was now serious about completing the manuscript. Because she had to look for work again and also looked after the two children, the paperwork kept getting stuck. Finally, at the end of 1943, Verstappen left the publishing house and sent back the completed chapters.

In February 1944, Betty MacDonald, again at Mary's urging, sent first an exposé and then a more advanced manuscript to the Brandt & Brandt agency in New York. Bernice Baumgarten , literary agent and head of the book department at Brandt & Brandt, considered it promising, but demanded various changes: Instead of being in the form of a diary like the original manuscript, it should be kept in the style of a continuous narrative; besides, it is too short. The biographical chapters of the first part go back to this intervention. Baumgarten also found the end too bitter; one gets the impression that MacDonald had downright hated her husband at times. MacDonald rewrote the ending, in which, as a letter to Baumgarten attests, she was Robert Heskett's character (“in fact he was the greatest bastard there ever was, but… I hoped you wouldn't notice”; “actually he was the most concentrate bastard that ever lived but ... I hoped it was not apparent ") amalgamated with that of her second husband Donald MacDonald. Another point of criticism was that there was too much talk of illegal schnapps distilling in the story . The author then moderated this offensive activity as well. In October 1944 Baumgarten finally succeeded in selling the book on the basis of the synopsis to the publisher JB Lippincott & Co. in Philadelphia. There was still a debate about the book title with Lippincott: The publisher suggested "Fine Feathered Friends," but MacDonald was able to prevail with her original title, The Egg and I. In addition, for legal reasons, Lippincott wanted a change in personal names that were still too similar to the real names, which MacDonald implemented. According to MacDonald's biographer Paula Becker, nothing of the manuscripts has survived, but Becker succeeded in locating the author's correspondence with Baumgarten and Lippincott, which allows conclusions to be drawn about the creation and editing process.

A humorous description of the "long, long year between conception and the birth of The Egg and I " under the heading "Anybody Can Write Books" is the 17th and final chapter of MacDonald's third autobiographical book Anybody can do anything (1950). The author vividly described the obstacles in the writing process in her fourth autobiographical book, Onions in the Stew : “I tried to write in the kitchen, in the dining room, in the living room, in our bedroom, in the guest house, on the terrace, in the courtyard - it is always the same. I'm first and last and always a wife and mother, and no matter what I do, I have to stop to 'think about where I put the big screwdriver' ... "

publication

First, a version was preprinted in the summer of 1945 in three issues of The Atlantic Monthly magazine . This version was shortened and defused (" bowdlerized ") compared to the book edition . The magazine also changed all place names to avoid legal problems. In October 1945 Lippincott finally brought out the book edition, which also showed the changed place names and sold brilliantly. The first editions showed a colored woodcut of a farm scene by Richard Bennett on the dust jacket , but the publisher soon replaced this illustration with a portrait photo of the author. The author of this photo, taken in January 1945, was the photographer Leonid Fink (Seattle). A paperback edition , a book club edition and an edition for "Armed Services" appeared in 1945. On December 30, 1945, the book climbed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for 42 weeks, and on January 5, 1946 it was also published ranked # 1 on Publishers Weekly's bestseller list and held that position for 33 weeks. On the non-fiction annual bestseller list (as a non-fiction book ) in 1946 by Publishers Weekly , the book took first place. In September 1946, a sold circulation of one million was reached. Reader's Digest published a heavily abridged version in the November 1946 issue. The first translations appeared: in 1946 in Danish, Swedish and Spanish, in 1947 in German, Finnish, French, Dutch, Norwegian ( Bokmål ) and Czech, in 1948 in Italian and 1949 in Polish. In 1967 the publisher wrote in a brochure that in the USA and Canada alone, more than 1,801,450 copies had been sold by August 1966, 760,501 of which were in the original hardcover edition by Lippincott. It was the best-selling book Lippincott had ever published. Beth Kraig is assuming a world edition of over three million copies; it has been translated into 32 languages.

Marketing: film rights

Above all, however, it was possible to sell the film rights. Chester Erskine co-wrote a script based on the book with Fred F. Finklehoffe and then directed The Egg and I for Universal Pictures, starring Claudette Colbert as Betty, Fred MacMurray as Bob, Marjorie Main as Maw Kettle and Percy Kilbride as Paw Kettle , which premiered in March 1947. The script significantly reduced the narrator's biting joke and tailored the story to a conciliatory love drama. An attractive farmer added to the characters provided an opportunity for jealousy that was overcome in the happy ending . The film got comedy mainly from its dealings with the Hillbillys , especially the Kettles: Marjorie Main was even nominated for an Oscar (best supporting role), but didn't get it. The film was a box office hit and grossed over $ 5 million. Universal then continued to exploit the recipe for success of rural comedy until 1957 with a whole series of nine Ma-und-Pa-Kettle films that only used the characters (including Birdie Hicks, Geoduck and Crowbar) but nothing more had to do with the original book.

In 1946 Columbia Records also released a record with the song The Egg and I , which was taken from the film's soundtrack . The author was Harry Akst , Harry Ruby , Al Jolson and Bert Kalmar reported, Betty MacDonald was named as the author of the title. Dinah Shore sang to the accompaniment of a big band led by Sonny Burke . Another recording was released by RCA Victor in 1947, with the performers Sammy Kaye and Mary Marlow (vocals).

The Lux Radio Theater broadcast an hour-long live radio version on CBS Radio on May 5, 1947, with orchestra and the voices of Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. CBS also launched a soap opera based on The Egg and I , with Pat Kirkland as Betty and John Craven as Bob, which ran on television from September 1951 to August 1952.

Historical background

Chicken farming

The story, as told in The Egg and I , marks a fundamental shift in the development of commercial chicken farming in the United States. At first, chickens were largely kept by women farmers in the backyard or in the garden in order to cushion the economic risks of agriculture. The animals were mostly cared for according to traditional recipes, the "egg money" was mostly a (low) independent income for the woman. Towards the end of the First World War, increasing efforts can be demonstrated to rationalize and scientifically make chicken farming. "Extension Services" were set up at universities to train farmers, for example in 1918 in Washington State , where the action takes place. In Alderwood Manor in Snohomish County of Washington there was a huge demonstration farm, the farmers should demonstrate the correct way to make chicken breeding money. In the course of the farm crisis of the 1920s , when the prices for agricultural products fell sharply, many farmers went bankrupt and moved west, the new "mechanistic model of chicken rearing" taught at the extensions gained considerably in importance. At the same time, keeping chickens passed from the female to the male domain.

The chicken farm described in The Egg and I can, on the one hand, be regarded as one of the last offshoots of the family business before poultry farming became an agricultural industry. On the other hand, it was a question of intensive animal husbandry , both in terms of herd sizes and methods. The protagonists start with 750 chickens and increase the size of the farm to a maximum of 2000, Bob becomes the most capable chicken farmer in the community, "scientifically, thoroughly and not hindered by traditions or old women stories". He focuses on breeding because, according to him, egg production and breeding cannot be run economically at the same time. Efficient feeding, careful documentation and straightforward disposal of the unproductive animals are necessary to achieve an optimal result. Chicken breeding literature is abundant and used. Control lies explicitly with the male farmer, the narrator feels like a workhorse (" Percheron ").

The motto “Back to nature” therefore only applies to people's living and working conditions, but not to the methods of animal production . The counterpart of pre-scientific animal husbandry is also still present in the book, namely with the Kettles. Maw Kettle raises her chicks in the kitchen without disinfectants and thermometers. “This is what the guide should see,” thinks the narrator bitterly.

Location

Westergard House, Chimacum farm after 1933. Taken as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey

The chicken farm was included in the Center settlement at the time the action takes place ; today it is counted as part of Chimacum . These two settlement areas (“neighboring areas”) were very sparsely populated, in 1926 a total of around 276 people lived there. There were hardly any roads and electricity was only available in the late 1940s, except in the few houses that had their own generators. Cars were still rare, heavy haulage and farm work were done with horses. After all, there was a small shop and post office in Chimacum, as well as a high school that Betty's sister Dede attended. Larger purchases had to be done in Port Ludlow or Port Townsend , which in the latter case would take a whole day.

The Bards had learned a simple life as the children of a wandering mining engineer in the American West, but after that they had grown used to comfort and a social life in Seattle. The fact that the farm in Chimacum represented a “ culture shock ” for the author also had to do with the culture of the families who had farmed the land there for decades and who were often related and related by marriage. This was not a favorable situation for newcomers from the city.

It was true that a large part of the population had Indian ancestors, as MacDonald writes. After the Puget Sound War , Coastal Salish Indians and European immigrants settled in the Chimacum Valley around 1860 and got married. The bishops (not related to the bishops who later sued Betty MacDonald), who had emerged from the marriage of an English seaman with a Snohomish , were particularly influential . William Bishop Jr., who lived there at the time of the plot of The Egg and I , was one of the earliest Native American political representatives in the American West. There was also the influential Hicks family (again not identical or related to the Hicks in The Egg and I ), Skykomish Indians who lived at the mouth of Chimacum Creek.

Analyzes and interpretations

Text type: autobiography or fiction

In the US, the book has been thoroughly than non-fiction (non-fiction) markets. Paula Becker states that at no point was it published there as a work of fiction and that the text has never undergone any substantial change that went beyond new typesetting and printing errors. In Germany, however, Das Ei und ich received the subtitle “ Novel ” at the latest since Rowohlt's paperback edition in the 1950s and was consistently classified under the category of fiction .

Revised Reality

It is certain that the plot was closely based on real events in the author's life and that the characters involved also had role models in reality; but also that MacDonald deliberately changed these events and characters for publication. So Paula Becker suspected that the activity of Hesketts more on the farm, in truth, far to the illicit still had to do, admits than the published version. In particular, the character and course of the marriage differ greatly from what is known about the biography of the author: She left Robert Heskett with her two daughters and divorced him; the rationale was alcoholism and domestic violence . The reports obtained later from neighbors of the Hesketts also agree with this. The conciliatory end of the story is accordingly pure fiction. Nor is the fact mentioned in the book that the author's mother and siblings also ran a farm nearby during the first few years and thus failed, i.e. were by no means as far away from her as it appears in the book. Even the birth of one of Betty MacDonald's two daughters is missing from the story.

The libel suits

The King County Courthouse in Seattle, built in 1916. This is where the trial took place in 1951.

The question "autobiography or fiction" was relevant in two libel suits ( "libel suits"), which were submitted by people who had recognized in the book against the author. Both followed the book publication a considerable distance and were probably triggered by the advertising for the film or, in the second case, the success of the Kettle films. On March 25, 1947, Edward and Ilah Bishop, who had been neighbors of the Hesketts in Chimacum, brought a lawsuit. They stated that they were the role models of the Hicks, recognizable as such and therefore exposed to ridicule, hatred and contempt. For this they asked for $ 100,000 in damages . MacDonald's attorney denied the admissibility of the lawsuit. There was a long back-and-forth over two years, but before the case went to court, attorneys on both sides negotiated an out-of-court settlement that went into effect in May 1949. The plaintiffs received $ 1,500 in return for a written undertaking not to publicly mention their claim.

The second lawsuit filed on September 17, 1949 by Albert Bishop, six of his sons, two of his daughters and one daughter-in-law, against the author, the publisher, the paperback and a bookstore, was considerably more serious. Bishop's wife, identified as Maw Kettle, had since passed away. They said they were portrayed recognizably as Paw Kettle and his children. There was also a lawsuit from Robert Johnson, who described himself as the Indian Crowbar. All said the publication had dire and humiliating consequences for them. The two lawsuits were consolidated and the plaintiffs' claims for damages totaled $ 975,000. On February 5, 1951, the main trial opened in Seattle, which was met with great crowds until the verdict on February 20, 1951. The plaintiffs had to prove that they were represented recognizable in the book and that they had suffered quantifiable damage as a result. The outcome of the process largely depended on whether the Kettles and Crowbar were fictional characters in an otherwise autobiographical book or actually portraits of the plaintiffs.

Much of the trial was devoted to this issue, which provided some entertainment for viewers as plaintiffs publicly affirmed their hillbilly image in an effort to prove their identity with the Kettles. One of the Bishop sons looked deep into the eyes of each judge to prove that they actually had blue eyes, as described in the book. The defense usually spoke of a novel ("novel") and, if possible, denied any identity of the characters and locations with real people and places. Above all, however, she emphasized that the connection between real places and people and those described in the book had been made by the plaintiffs and other people themselves in order to benefit from the popularity of the book. In that case, they could hardly be entitled to sue for damages. She called witnesses who confirmed that the bishops had a certain pride in identifying themselves as the Kettles and that a sister-in-law of the bishops, Anita Larson, who had taken over the alleged Heskett farm, offered paid tours of the Egg and I Farm ”and even put up advertising signs on the street.

Betty MacDonald herself appeared as a witness and stated that the scenes and the characters were fictional. She did not portray any real people outside of her own family. It was only about typical places and people that are not identical to real ones. "I was writing about an imaginary place in an imaginary country", she summarized. On February 20, the jury passed its verdict: The lawsuit was dismissed.

Paula Becker points out that MacDonald's statement was obviously not true. Not only were the places, although they were called “Town” and “Docktown” in the book, easily identifiable as Port Townsend and Port Ludlow , above all she had ticked off the personal names one after the other in her correspondence with the publisher to meet the demands Lippincotts to comply with legal protection. In a letter to Bernice Baumgarten she had already written in 1945: “Perhaps the book would have a better taste if I forgot the truth and made people look less like the ignorant, immoral, vulgar group they actually were , and rather rustic and quaint. If it is to be slanderous to describe people as they were, then let's show them as they weren't. "

Local color and myths

The final frontier: nature and a pioneering spirit

One of the reasons The Egg and I was so successful was the local flavor of the American West, as analyzes of the characteristics of American bestsellers make likely. Ruth Miller Elson said, "If you were going to write a novel that would sell well in the US, a Western setting for at least part of the plot would be a good idea." James Hart wrote in The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste the popularity of MacDonald's book because of the general appeal of Americana during the 1940s, a time when many people moved or had to move from the country to town. The west stood for unspoiled nature and a pioneering spirit, the east for city and civilization.

Speculation about the attractiveness of the location played a role as early as the creation of The Egg and I : The literary scout , at whose request MacDonald wrote her synopsis, was looking for authors and topics from the American Northwest. In the last chapter of her third autobiographical book Anybody can do anything , MacDonald put a pointed version of the stereotypes that spoke for this exotic locality into the mouth of her sister Mary from the book market point of view: “We live on the last frontier of the United States. The land of great salmon migrations , giant firs , uncharted waters and unconquered mountains, and almost nothing has been written about it. If you tell the folks in New York that the salmon jump in our front door and snap at our ankles, they'll believe it. Most people in the United States believe that either we're either frozen over like Antarctica all the time, or that we still wear animal skins and fight with the Indians. So, personally, I think it's time someone from here wrote the truth. "

But, as MacDonald wrote, she chose a special twist to play with these stereotypes, a kind of counter-writing against the illusions of the back-to-the-country scheme: “I would be a kind of rebuttal to all the recently successful 'I-love-this -Write life books' of good comrades whose husbands forced them to live in the country without light and running water. I would show the other side. I would write a report of a bad companion of life in the wilderness without light, water or friends with chickens, Indians and moonshine liquor. "Before eyes she had it specially Louise Dickinson Rich's successful book We Took to the Woods (We moved to the Forests), a 1942 Lippincott anthemic account of a couple's life together in the wilderness of Maine . In a letter to Brandt & Brandt, MacDonald even wrote that their book should actually be called “We don't take to the woods”. For James Hart, this was another secret of The Egg and I's success : the Americans who had recently moved to the city could have felt confirmed that "it could be even more stressful to return to nature than to escape it".

Beth Kraig has examined the ambivalent game of the author with the stereotypes of the unspoiled nature, the pioneering spirit and the "Last Frontier" (last frontier) closer and says that Betty MacDonald "so shaky as" shaky regionalist " Regionalistin " could be described. Above all, she goes into the motif of the pioneer, which recurs several times in The Egg and I. In the introductory chapter, two female attitudes towards the western pioneer spirit appear, personified in two models: The narrator's mother loves danger and adventure and follows her husband wherever his path leads him. She happily accompanies him, “lived in a hut and rode up on horseback with the baby in front of her in the saddle”, while Gammy, her paternal grandmother, obsessively impresses the children with the dangers of outdoor life: “She convinced us that the trees at the edge of the clearing, where our hut stood, were like cage bars in the zoo and behind them hundreds of wolves, grizzly bears and mountain lions lurked who fought for an opportunity to eat us. ”Between these two explicitly called and each with great sympathy The narrator follows thoughtful role models as she follows her husband into the wilderness.

The same applies to the descriptions of nature: The country can “only be described with superlatives. Most rugged, most western, largest, deepest, furthest, richest in game, richest, most fertile, loneliest, most deserted. ”Such representations made a very attractive impression on readers. But calling up the stereotype of unspoiled nature was also accompanied by a feeling of uncanny: “I looked morose at the looming mountains that made me feel as if someone was looking over my shoulder, and at the terrifying masculinity of the forests, and I thought, 'For God's sake, these mountains could shake us off like a fly from their skirt, rearrange their trees a bit and no one would ever know about it.' It was not a comforting thought. ”And elsewhere:“ 'This country hates civilization, and not only in the harmless sense of sticking its tongue out at people, but it is a tremendous, great, overwhelming hatred with all its might Nature behind you ', I thought and hoped we would soon reach a city. ”This takes up the image of the“ sacred place ”as it is rooted in the“ real regionalism ”of the West, and at the same time throws it into twilight. The narrator can only enjoy the idyll of the wilderness undisturbed from the ferry, from where she admires the “great chain of the Olympic Mountains”, which “courteously presents itself in all its snowy splendor”.

Hillbilly and Indians

Betty MacDonald's biographer, Paula Becker, found The Egg and I funny and encouraging, but also "kind of mean". There are clearer judgments from other authors: Jerry Wayne Williamson said that MacDonald was apparently a "very arrogant person" who "said nasty things about other people and meant them." These judgments mainly concern the descriptions of two groups in the book: the rural population and the Indians. The fact that one could take offense at the way the backwoodsmen are portrayed can already be seen in the defamation processes surrounding the book. The idea of ​​these characters in the book was "far less light-hearted than in the movie Hollywood made of them." Maw Kettle is portrayed in drastic terms as vulgar and impure, even if this description is defused to a certain extent by the sympathy of the narrator; in the case of Paw Kettle, who appears as a work-shy scrounger, such a moderation is hardly discernible. Paula Becker comments: "Whatever human element she had observed in these people had been stripped off when Betty wrote her book, and all that remained was caricatures."

Nevertheless, it was precisely these caricatures that aroused the interest of the readership, and that was particularly true of the Kettles, who played the role of the buffoon or fool in the comedy or the Zanni in the Commedia dell'arte in the book. In the film adaptation, the aggressive traits that her portrayal exhibited were greatly diluted and popular characters with golden hearts but uncultivated manners emerged, at which one could laugh good-naturedly. They became iconic figures of rural comedy in America. In the book, on the other hand, the loneliness and discouragement of the narrator comes through, who, as she wrote to Bernice Baumgarten, experienced her neighbors as more terrifying than amusing, as an "ignorant, immoral, amoral, vulgar group". In some cases, for example when criticizing the usual upbringing of children, the tone is no longer humorous. However, the assessment remains ambivalent. Even if the children were raised on coffee, beer and pork belly and kept away from any fresh air: “They survived and grew up, and their lives were certainly more fascinating than that of modern babies with their fixed feeding times and sterile bottles.” The hillbilly world As terrifying as it may seem, MacDonald also has its fascinating sides.

The description of the Indians in The Egg and I, on the other hand, is almost completely free of such ambivalences. They are introduced as a counter-image to the ideologue of the noble savage , which the author, as she reports, knew from her childhood in Butte : prairie Indians with feather headdress. “I still had these romantic notions about Indians when I first got on the chicken farm, and it was a blow when I realized that today's little red brother, at least the Pacific variety I saw, wasn't a big copper-skinned one Is a warrior who, clad only in pearls and feathers and wielding a bow and arrow, wanders through the deep forests. Our Indian, stocky and muddy-colored, was more slouched in a Ford Model T , with a toothpick between his yellow teeth, drunk and a lewd look on his flat face. "The tone becomes even sharper:" The Indians of the Pacific coast, the I saw were as little like the pictures in the Great Northern Railroad calendar as nudibranchs are like dragonflies. [...] The coastal Indian is stocky, bow-legged, dark-skinned, flat-faced, broad-nosed, dirty, sick, ignorant and devious. "

At the time of the book's great popularity, hardly any reader seems to have taken offense at these descriptions. Paula Becker did not find any examples from this period for criticism of such racist descriptions. Ruth Miller Elson, in her analysis of American bestsellers from 1865 to 1965, discusses the treatment of the Indians in these books, suggesting that most bestselling authors would have agreed with this quote from The Egg and I : “The more of them [the Indians] I saw, the more I thought more, what an excellent idea it was to take the land away from them. ”However, these descriptions were later found intolerable. Jerry Wayne Williamson writes: "But she reserved the full force of her contempt for the Northwest Coast Indians," who appear to be "vicious and inferior." In the film adaptation, however, this trait took a back seat. The new edition of The Egg and I in 1987 appeared with a foreword by Betty MacDonald's two daughters, in which they wrote: “We are sure, if Betty were still alive today, she would address the plight of the Indian in a completely different way. We believe that she only wanted to transform what she experienced as a terrifying situation into a funny encounter. "

In her following autobiographical book, The Plague and I , the author treated the anti-Japanese racism of her contemporaries completely differently, namely with deep contempt.

Humor and gender

Uplifting and aggressive humor

Both in the book advertising and in all reactions to the book, the humorous qualities of The Egg and I were particularly emphasized. "If you've forgotten how to laugh - this book is what the doctor prescribes for you," was a quote on the book cover. The German paperback edition of 1951 advertised that it was "one of the funniest books ... that the new Anglo-Saxon literature knows".

In the literature there are various attempts to define this humorous character. So ordered Hamlin Hill 's work as contemporary a realization of the tradition of "native American humor" (native American humor), for which in the 19th century about Mark Twain stand. This tradition, which Hill also apostrophizes as "healthy humor", is characterized by values ​​such as common sense , self-confidence and above all the ability of the protagonist to deal with the comic situation. The ingredients of the comedy essentially came from the outside world: characterization of the characters, puns and physical action. In contrast to this, modern “neurotic humor” stands, urban, on the verge of irrationality and madness and above all introverted, the comedy arises precisely from the inability of the protagonist to deal with the situation ( my friend Harvey is one of his examples). Betty MacDonald is, despite all outbursts of desperation, quite capable of raising chickens, and the characters, especially the Kettles, are characterized by strong local color and could pass as modern variants of dialect humor.

Paula Becker similarly described the book's humor as uplifting and encouraging. She paraphrased his message like this: “Life is hard. We can only control our reaction to it, and laughing is better than crying. That feeling cheered and encouraged readers around the world. ”But this reading of The Egg and I's humor is not the only one that was highlighted in the reception. A pungent, caustic quality of MacDonald's joke was also noticed more often. As artist William Cumming , hearing her broiler tales with colleagues in the National Youth Administration , wrote, “Betty's humor wasn't kind, cozy, or kind. It had the malicious sharpness of a scalpel and could cut. Betty found human error reprehensible. That these mistakes usually led to weird failures didn't mean they were any less fatal in their eyes. She directed her biting humor against the stupidity of the people because it made her angry. ”He even compared her to Billie Holiday : MacDonald laughed like her in order not to throw up. Elsewhere, Paula Becker also pointed out that a “merciless judgment about the weaknesses of others” is a characteristic of the author and the book. If the cleverly tailored portraits of their fellow human beings caused injuries, then the author accepted that for a good story.

These two sides of The Egg and I's humor played a role in the feminist debate surrounding the book. A contemporary critic, Clifton Fadiman in Booklist , linked his perception of the Egg and I's humor to gender characteristics: “The dry humor is that of a woman, but the language is masculine: it stands out from realistic peasant novels by calls things by their names ('calling a spade a spade'), and she does that abundantly ('and there were plenty of spades'). ”Nancy Walker and Zita Z. Dresner cited Fadiman's criticism and stated that MacDonald was in The Egg and I “did not shrink back from the physical and nowhere did I try to revive the brutalities, the rawness and the madness that she found in her environment”.

In her discussion of the book's success, Becker also put the comic qualities of the book in context with the time it was published, namely immediately after the end of the Second World War . The Egg and I have translated the themes of battle, conflict and perseverance, which would have defined non-fictional literature during the war, into a domestic context, where it was not about life and death, but about much smaller stakes. The comedy of the book is also fed by this transmission. " The Egg and I hit the nerve of a war-weary audience as a comforting survival story: a woman's successful struggle to at least get up every morning, despite the inconveniences and challenges."

Domestic humor and weird feminism

The Egg and I is the starting point of a female autobiographical literature of the "writing housewives" (the term Housewife Writers comes from Betty Friedan ), which is subsumed under the terms "domestic humor" and "funny feminism" has been. Friedan wrote: “They are good craftswomen, the best of these writing housewives. And some of their work is funny too. ... But there is something about them that is not weird, like with Uncle Tom ... 'Laugh', the writing housewife says to the real housewife, 'when you feel desperate, empty, bored, trapped in the routines of making beds, driving around, Dishwashing. Ain't it weird We're all trapped in the same trap. '”But real housewives would not have the ability of writing housewives to turn their frustrations into successful newspaper articles and humorous books.

Female self-irony as self-humiliation

Friedan did not mention MacDonald in this context. This is what the literary scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks did twelve years later in her book The Female Imagination : In the autobiographical writings of contemporary 'writing housewives', for example by Erma Bombeck and Jean Kerr , she identified a tendency towards self-irony and self-deprecation with the means of comedy, which according to her, probably with Betty Macdonald and the Egg and I 've started. She analyzed this characteristic of humor in detail using various passages in the text, for example in the short description of the narrator's love story. “His tanned skin, his brown hair, his blue eyes, his white teeth, his smoky voice, his friendly, amiable manner were in themselves enough good qualities to provoke convulsions of admiration in Mary and her friends, but the most wonderful thing about him , the special thing was that he liked me. I still can't understand why ... ”In Chapter 4 of the book, Bob insists on using white pine planks for the kitchen floor, which are impossible to keep clean (white velvet would be worse, the narrator writes). She hates scrubbing the floor every day and still does it, although she knows the pointlessness of this endeavor, but of course it's no use. Spacks comments that the narrator presents herself as inferior and a failure. The humorous tone of this episode thwarted the resentment and anger that lay underneath and were not expressed. This may generate a little compassion for the troubled housewife, but the main emphasis of this narrative is that she makes herself ridiculous and an object of comedy with her pointless efforts. This comic tradition is "fundamentally conservative in its social implications" by confirming the image of female incompetence. The narrator triumphs over her suffering by turning it into comedy, and this ultimately means accepting the suffering. "And those who laugh accept it too."

Critical Potential

Nancy Walker, Zita Z. Dresner and above all Jane F. Levey later attempted to partially revise this negative assessment from the second wave of feminism . In her 1985 essay on 'weird feminism', Walker admitted that the “light-hearted humor” of the criticized authors had an idealizing side: the restriction to housewife and maternal duties was accepted with a cheerful smile. However, she emphasized the signals of unrest and dissatisfaction lying below this surface and analyzed the criticism contained therein using The Egg and I as a work that set the standards for its successors. Initially, the object of the comedy here, as regularly later, is the narrator herself, who is unable to comply with the norms imposed on her and accepted by her, and humor takes on traits of self-irony and self-humiliation. In the themes of the narrator's isolation, the frustrated ambition to achieve the goal of the perfect housewife, and the associated resentment against the man, however, a criticism of the social norms to which the narrator is subject is hidden. The Egg and I is an unusual case insofar as the narrator's emotional isolation from her husband is particularly evident; the criticism is only covered with a thin layer of humor. So Bob punishes the narrator with silent disregard when she forgot to order kerosene for the lamps : "Bob ... showed his disappointment with me by getting up from the table and throwing himself into bed while he was chewing the last bite - undoubtedly to dream of the good old days, when you were still beating women. ”And towards the end of the book the two sit together“ like neighbors who suddenly find themselves in the same hotel room ”, an undisguised representation of alienation in the partnership that in the works of "domestic humor" are rare because they do not go well with its cheerful tone.

Zita Z. Dresner also pointed out in an anthology from 1991 that the protagonist of the book is the young, inexperienced wife, while the narrator's speech reflects the experiences of the author since then. The Egg and I can therefore be read as a female Bildungsroman : the protagonist learns lessons of disillusionment step by step, she gradually frees herself from the inhibiting ideal images of the housewife, which she herself represents at the beginning of the story, and this educational story becomes part of it told with humorous means. The fact that the story ends on a conciliatory note, instead of addressing the separation and divorce that took place in real life and thus the consequence of this educational process, is due to the conventions of the humorous female autobiography.

Mixed messages

In her 2001 magazine article, Levey outlined the book's “mixed messages” even more sharply. The Egg and I not only offers detailed descriptions of the most laborious and unattractive housework, but also a criticism of the mother's role of women - admittedly indirectly and thereby defused to a certain extent. While pregnancy and motherhood are portrayed as worthwhile, but only play a relatively small role in the story, the relationship between the narrator and the chicks she has to raise bears traits of aversion and disgust, yes, unmistakable hostility. “Anything else that I would have cared for from birth would have got such a firm place in my feelings that I could only have pulled myself away from it by force, but here it got to the point where I could actually watch Bob with joy he cut the throats of fifty chickens with his murderous knife and hung them to bleed, "Levey quoted from MacDonald's book, and she commented," Your criticism of motherhood has its place in the chicken house. "That drastic expression of hatred of the objects of her maternal care , acted out on the harmless subject of the chicks, provided a sounding board for the internal conflicts that the readers felt about their maternal duties.

The power struggle between man and woman is also acted out on the harmless object, namely in the form of the narrator's struggle with the stubborn stove. This is not only humanized by giving it the capitalized proper name “Stove”, but also masculine by adding a masculine personal pronoun (“he”). The stove had "none of the warm, friendly properties associated with the name ... pouted in its kitchen corner ... smoked and choked and spat ..." And on the first rainy day the narrator realizes "that Stove was my enemy". Levey commented: "Here was an undoubtedly hostile hearth." If MacDonald had fought such a power struggle with her husband, it would not have been accepted by the reading public, Levey said, but it would have been in the form of this indirect staging.

Reverse pilgrimage

The criticism of the “writing housewives” referred to a specific historical situation: the displacement of housewives from public life at home and hearth in the American suburbs (“suburbia”) after the Second World War, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. In the cases of female autobiographies, such as Shirley Jackson , Jean Kerr , Phyllis McGinley or Erma Bombeck , which are regarded as typical, this was also the situation that the authors glossed over in a humorous way. This was obviously not the case for The Egg and I : It described housewife life in the seemingly primitive “wilderness” of the province. The discussion about this book as the starting point of 'weird feminism' was focused on the readership, which, according to the authors' assumption, consisted primarily of suburban housewives.

Levey saw here another clue for an indirect reflection of the readers' experience: It was a "reverse pilgrimage", not, as in post-war society in general, from the country to the suburbs, but from the city to the country. The alienation she described from community life therefore corresponded to the alienation that the readers had experienced, albeit through a migration in the opposite direction, out of modernity. This reversal allows several interpretations: life in the country, with its isolation and unequal distribution of housework, can be understood as a magnifying mirror for the situation of women in the suburbs, but also as a negative counterpart to the technically better equipped city life and, ultimately, in individual features as well positive, nostalgic counter-image. It is precisely this ambiguity that has enabled the book to reflect so many of the experiences of its readers.

reception

United States

The Egg and I was a surprise hit, driven less by reviews in the press than by the enthusiasm of booksellers and spontaneous reader reactions. The publisher's clever advertising strategy also played a major role in this, as it placed generous advertisements as soon as it recognized the reaction to the preprint that a potential bestseller had emerged here. Another trick of the publisher was to show a large photo of the author on the cover so that the real person of the author advertised the book - and vice versa the book for the author. This resulted in a veritable run on the MacDonald's new home - and busloads of tourists who had identified and invaded the book's locations. As early as January 1946, Life printed a homestory about Betty's home on Vashon Island , with a photo series of several pages.

But the press was also impressed by the work. Clifton Fadiman made some disrespectful remarks in Booklist about the narrator's fateful sacrifice in her unhappy marriage, but praised the realistic language of the book. Another New York reviewer perceived the effect of the book more harmoniously: "For city dwellers who have it dry and comfortable, Mrs. MacDonald's life in the woods is an untroubled pleasure."

The Hollywood film adaptation, and especially the Ma-and-Pa-Kettle films that resulted from it, contributed significantly to the book's popularity. The film critic Bosley Crowther , however, devastated the film version in the New York Times because it was unable to convey the book's biting wit and instead relied on conventional images of men and women, apparently in anticipation of obedience to the Hays Code .

On February 3, 1981, the Jefferson County Board of Commissioners officially named the road that led past the former Heskett Farm, Egg and I Road.

Europe: Czechoslovakia is a special case

The Egg and I also sold very well in Europe. The French edition, entitled L'Œuf et moi , had a sold circulation of 150,000. In Germany, Der Spiegel wrote about Das Ei and I : “It's not about great psychological problems, but about a piece of everyday American life. And it is described with enchanting boldness and winking humor. ”During that time , it received a short review in the“ Written by women ”section. The review highlighted the qualities: "Amusing, optimistic, often with drastic humor."

However, it became a real long seller with a time lag in Czechoslovakia . The first Czech edition appeared in 1947, but there were no reprints between 1948 (the year the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia came to power ) and 1970. Since 1970 the book has been printed again and again, and Samantha Hoekstra counted 51 editions of Betty MacDonald's books in Czech and Slovak from 1947 to 2010. In the Czech Republic , the literary scholar Jiří Trávníček carried out several surveys on the popularity of books among the Czech readership over a period of eight years. In 2007 and 2010, The Egg and I (under the Czech title Vejce a já ) topped the list, and in 2013 it was fifth. In 2015, he reported in a radio interview: “The most popular book of all three studies we carried out is Vejce a já by Betty MacDonald. I have no explanation for this phenomenon, but it is definitely something very Czech. "In a survey of Czech libraries, who evaluated more than 93,000 reader responses to the question about her favorite book was Vejce a já ranked 9th (and Anybody can do anything , a another book by the author, on rank 8). In a 2018 interview, Trávníček stated that Czech women over 50 named Betty MacDonald's books as their favorite books.

In Philip Roth's novel Epilogue: The Prague Orgy ( The Prague orgy . An Epilogue) finds this phenomenon a peculiar literary reception. Narrator Nathan Zuckerman, like Roth himself an American Jewish writer, travels to Prague in the 1970s to find the unpublished manuscript by a Yiddish author. As soon as he succeeded in this, it was confiscated and Zuckerman was forced to get into a car to the airport. There he meets Novak, who introduces himself as Czechoslovak Minister of Culture and talks to him unexpectedly in German: "Do you know Miss Betty MacDonald" denies as Zuckerman, Novak renames it as the author of The Egg and I . Zuckerman recalls, “Was about a farm - wasn't it? I haven't read it since I went to school. ”And further:“ I would be surprised if anyone under thirty even heard of The Egg and I in America . ”Novak can't believe that and declares it to be a "tragedy" that this "masterpiece" was forgotten in America. This is followed by a long tirade about true Czech literature and its writers who are “loved by their readers” as opposed to “some alienated, degenerate, selfish artists”, which Novak also includes Franz Kafka . True writers are "people who know how to submit to historical misfortune in a decent way".

Roth was friends with dissidents in Czech literature; Stanislav Kolář believes that it is highly likely that Roth learned of the book's popularity there during his visits to Czechoslovakia.

science

MacDonald's autobiographical story was initially hardly considered in literary studies. The book was only treated occasionally in the area of ​​bestseller research, for example in James Hart's monograph The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (1950) and much later in Ruth Miller Elson's work Myths and Mores in American Best Sellers 1865-1965 (1985) . One exception is the Mark Twain researcher Hamlin Hill, who in 1963 dealt with The Egg and I as a contemporary example of “native American humor” in a magazine article , a concept originally developed by Walter Blair in 1937 for the independent contribution of American literature to the humorous Writing had been developed.

This changed with the advent of women's studies in the 1970s. Following Betty Friedan's criticism of the “writing housewives”, the literary scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks analyzed the female self-irony in The Egg and I in detail in 1975 and came to a very negative judgment about the effects of this stylistic device. In the 1980s, various researchers took up these analyzes, expanded them to include reflections on the book's critical potential, and tried to relativize or revise Spack's strong normative judgment. The contributions by Nancy Walker and Zita Z. Dresner as well as a posthumously published article by Jane F. Levey (2001) deserve special mention here, which also brought new insights in text analysis. Since then, The Egg and I has been one of the works that are regularly dealt with in the context of the subjects of “domestic humor”, “female humor” and “female autobiography”. The author has an entry in The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States . Barbara Levy dedicated a section to the book in Ladies Laughing (1997), Kristi Siegel considered it in her monograph on Women's Autobiographies (1999) in terms of the mother-daughter relationship, and Penelope Fritzer and Bartholomew Bland included the work in their History of Domestic Humor Writing (2002) on the pioneers of domestic humor in the USA.

In addition to this strand of scientific debate, which focused on the issues of gender and humor, there were also some contributions that focused on “rural comedy” and the image of the hillbilly and Indians. They mostly started from the very widespread film adaptation and followed up with analytical remarks on the book. This applies to Jerry Wayne Williamson's Hillbillyland (1995) and Tim Hollis' Rural Comedy in the 20th Century (2008).

From the regional aspect, namely as a contribution to the literature and imagery of the American West, the literary scholar Beth Kraig subjected The Egg and I to an extensive analysis (2005). Some of the contributions by Mildred Andrews, Beth Kraig and Paula Becker on the HistoryLink website are also geared towards regional history , in particular on the author's biography, the location of the story and, above all, on the sensational defamation trial of 1951.

Susan M. Squier (2011) has chosen an unusual starting point for the analysis of the book: She analyzed it in a history of chicken breeding under the aspect of the "fellow feeling", i.e. the feeling of connection between humans and animals.

The biography Betty MacDonalds by Paula Becker (2016) was the first to evaluate numerous documents on the creation and publication process of The Egg and I. Becker had succeeded in particular in locating and sifting through folders with MacDonald's correspondence on this and the following books, especially with Bernice Baumgarten and Lippincott-Verlag, but also, for example, MacDonald's replies to readers' mail. Becker also used a lot of archive information for the first time and was able to correct a number of data, including the author's date of birth.

Some comments on the reception of the narrative outside of the USA, especially in Czechoslovakia, can be found in a master's thesis by Samantha Hoekstra at Florida University (2008). Research by the Czech literary scholar Jiří Trávníček provides figures on the popularity of the work in the Czech Republic. A research project by Trávníček at the Institute for Czech Literature at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (running until 2019) aims to determine reasons for the popularity of the author among the Czech readership.

Expenses (selection)

In English

• The Egg and I . Abridged preprint in The Atlantic Monthly , June 1945, pp. 97-108, July 1945, pp. 91-100, August 1945, pp. 97-106
• The Egg and I . Lippincott, Philadelphia 1945
• The Egg and I . Rockefeller Center, NY Pocket Books, New York 1945
• The Egg and I. Life on a wilderness chicken ranch. Edition for the Armed Services (No. 1100), New York 1945
• The Egg and I. Penguin Books, London 1956

Translations

• The egg and me . Translation into German: Renate Hertenstein. Alpha-Verlag, Bern 1947
  • The egg and me . Paperback edition with linen spine. Rowohlt, rororo No. 25, Reinbek 1951
• Aegget och hunt . Translation into Swedish: Sten Söderberg. Ljus, Stockholm 1946
• Ægget og Any . Translation into Danish: Christen Fribert. Erichsen, Copenhagen 1946
• El huevo y yo . Translation into Spanish: Lidia Yadilli. Peuser, Buenos Aires 1946
• Egget og any . Translation into Norwegian ( Bokmål ): Lill Herlofson Bauer. Ekko, Oslo 1947
• Het ei en ik . Translation into Dutch: EH van Meeteren-Verhagen. Amsterdam 1947
• L'œuf et moi . Translation into French: George Belmont. Laffont, Paris 1947
• Muna yes minä . Translation into Finnish: Eeva-Liisa Manner. Gummerus, Jyväskylä 1947
• Vejce a yes . Translation into Czech: Leopold Havlik. Žikeš, Prague 1947
• Io e l'uovo . Translation into Italian: Ada Salvatore. Bompiani, Milano 1948
• Yes, yes . Translation into Polish: Marta Wańkowicz-Erdmanowa. Kuthan, Warsaw 1949
• Vajce a yes . Translation into Slovak: Bohuslav Kompiš. Mladé letá, Bratislava 1971

literature

• Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald. The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I . University of Washington Press, Seattle and London 2016
• Zita Z. Dresner: Domestic Comic Writers . In: June Sochen (Ed.): Women's Comic Visions. Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1991, pp. 93-114. On The Egg and I : pp. 99-104
• Hamlin Hill: Modern American Humor: The Janus Laugh . In: College English , Vol. 25 (1963), pp. 170-176
• Beth Kraig: It's About Time Somebody Out Here Wrote the Truth: Betty Bard MacDonald and North / Western Regionalism . In: Western American Literature , Vol. 40 (2005), No. 3, pp. 237-271
• Jane F. Levey: Imagining the Family in US Postwar Popular Culture: The Case of The Egg and I and Cheaper by the Dozen . In: Journal of Women's History , Vol. 13 (2001), No. 3, pp. 125-150
• Patricia Meyer Spacks: The Female Imagination. A literary and psychological investigation of writing by women - novels, autobiographies, letters, journals - that reveals how the fact of womanhood shapes the operations of the imagination . Knopf, New York 1975, especially the chapter Finger Posts (pp. 190–226) on female autobiographies and there pp. 218–223 on The Egg and I
• Susan M. Squier: Poultry Science, Chicken Culture. A partial alphabet . Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick 2011, especially pp. 128-129 on The Egg and I
• Nancy Walker: Humor and Gender Roles: The "Funny" Feminism of the Post-World War II Suburbs . In: American Quarterly , Vol. 37 (1985), No. 1, Special Issue: American Humor, pp. 98-113

Web links

• Life Goes Calling on the Author of “the Egg and I” - Best-seller Betty MacDonald lives a very happy life without chickens. Homestory in Life , March 18, 1946, pp. 134-137, online
• Beth Kraig: Betty and the Bishops: Was The Egg and I libelous? Originally published in Columbia Magazine , Vol. 12 (1998), No. 1, available online from the Washington State Historical Society website
• Paula Becker: Betty MacDonald's The Egg and I is published on October 3, 1945 . HistoryLink essay # 8261, August 14, 2007, last revised October 17, 2014. Online
• Paula Becker: Washington Governor Mon C. Wallgren presents Betty MacDonald with the one millionth copy of The Egg and I on September 12, 1946. HistoryLink Essay No. 8263, August 18, 2007, last revised October 17, 2014. Online
• Paula Becker: Libel trial against Betty MacDonald of Egg and I fame opens in Seattle on February 5, 1951. HistoryLink Essay No. 8270, August 31, 2007, last revision on October 17, 2014. Online
• Paula Becker: Seattle jury finds for the defendants in libel suit against Egg and I author Betty MacDonald on February 20, 1951. HistoryLink essay No. 8271, September 5, 2007, last revision on October 17, 2014. Online
• Paula Becker: Jefferson County resolution officially establishes Egg and I Road in Center on February 3, 1981. HistoryLink Essay No. 8273, September 12, 2007, last revised October 17, 2014. Online

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The full poem can be found on Wikisource .
2. ↑ There was a Hicks family in the Chimacum Valley, but they were probably not the model of the Hicks, cf. The libel suits . The noun hick = provincial person, hillbilly could also have played a role in the naming .
3. ↑ Here, too, there are meaningful names : crowbar = crowbar, clamface = shell face , geoduck = elephant trunk clam .
4. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 44.
5. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , pp. 68f. and 191.
6. ↑ Baumgarten headed the book department of Brandt & Brandt from 1925 to 1957 and during this time represented the interests of John Dos Passos , EE Cummings and Mary McCarthy, among others . See the New York Times obituary dated February 1, 1978, online.
7. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 70.
8. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , pp. 171 and 187.
9. ^ “I have tried writing in the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, our bedroom, the guesthouse, the porch, the patio — it is always the same. I am first last and always a wife and mother and must stop whatever I am doing to — 'try and remember where you left the big screwdriver'… ”Betty MacDonald: Onions in the Stew , Lippincott, Philadelphia 1955, chapter 11.
10. ↑ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , pp. 76 and 192. Bennett's cover picture can be seen online on Mildred Andrews: MacDonald, Betty (1907-1958) , HistoryLink essay No. 156 , Fink's photo on Paula Becker, among others: Betty MacDonald's The Egg and I is published on October 3, 1945 . HistoryLink Essay # 8261, online .
11. ↑ Keith L. Justice: Bestseller index. All books, by author, on the lists of Publishers Weekly and the New York Times through 1990 . McFarland, Jefferson and London 1998, p. 202; Daniel Immerwahr: 1940–1949. In: The Books of the Century.
12. ^ Paula Becker: Washington Governor Mon C. Wallgren presents Betty MacDonald with the one millionth copy of The Egg and I on September 12, 1946 . August 18, 2007, online at Historylink.
13. ^ Paula Becker: Betty MacDonald's The Egg and I is published on October 3, 1945 . August 14, 2007, online at HistoryLink.
14. ^ The Author and his Audience. With a chronology of major events in the publishing history of JB Lippincott Company. Published by JB Lippincott Company on the occasion of its 175th anniversary . Lippincott, Philadelphia 1967, pp. 18 and 78. The statement is surprising insofar as Harper Lee's novel Who disturbs the nightingale ( To Kill a Mockingbird ) was also published by Lippincott, but not until 1960.
15. ↑ Beth Kraig: It's about time somebody out here wrote the truth , p. 237.
16. ↑ Matrix no. HCO2187, catalog no. 37278. The recording can be heard on Archive.org , see also the entry on discogs .
17. ↑ Matrix no. 20-2209A 2S, catalog no. 20-2209-A. The recording can be heard on Archive.org , see also the entry on discogs .
18. ↑ See for example Lum Edwards (Uploader, Old Time Radio Researchers Group): Lux Radio Theater - Single Episodes. In: Internet Archive , August 6, 2015.
19. ↑ Wesley Hyatt: Short-Lived Television Series, 1948-1978. MacFarland, Jefferson 2003, p. 32.
20. ↑ Susan M. Squier: Poultry Science, Chicken Culture. A Partial Alphabet , p. 103.
21. ↑ Susan M. Squier: Poultry Science, Chicken Culture. A Partial Alphabet , p. 104.
22. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 42; see also Marie Little, Kevin K. Stadler, Alderwood Manor Heritage Association: Images of America - Alderwood Manor . Arcadia Publishing, Charleston, Chicago, Portsmouth, San Francisco 2006, p. 26.
23. ↑ Susan M. Squier: Poultry Science, Chicken Culture. A Partial Alphabet , p. 26.
24. ↑ Janet Lembke: Chickens: Their Natural and Unnatural Histories . Skyhorse, New York 2012.
25. ↑ Susan M. Squier: Poultry Science, Chicken Culture. A Partial Alphabet , p. 129.
26. ↑ The Egg and I , Chapter 9.
27. ↑ Susan M. Squier: Poultry Science, Chicken Culture. A Partial Alphabet , p. 129.
28. ↑ The Egg and I , Chapter 9.
29. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 37.
30. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 36 f.
31. ↑ The Egg and I , Chapter 6: "I found it impossible that almost everybody was part Indian."
32. ↑ See Russell Barsh: Bishop, William Sr. (1833-1906) and Sally Bishop Williams (1840-1916): Re-peopling the Chimacum Valley . Historylink.org Essay No. 20249. Online .
33. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 126.
34. ↑ See the entry at the German National Library , online .
35. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 43.
36. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 44.
37. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 112.
38. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 115.
39. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , pp. 115 and 119.
40. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 120; Paula Becker: Libel trial against Betty MacDonald of Egg and I fame opens , online ; Beth Kraig: Betty and the Bishops , online .
41. ↑ Beth Kraig: Betty and the Bishops , online .
42. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 121ff.
43. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , pp. 121f.
44. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald . P. 112; the letter is undated, but presumably dates from early 1945.
45. ↑ "Perhaps the book would have a better flavor if I were to forget the truth and make the people less like the ignorant, immoral, amoral, immoral, foul mouthed group they were, and more folksy and quaint. If depicting the people as they were is libelous, then by all means let's show them as they weren't. ”Letter to Bernice Baumgarten from March 12, 1945, quoted from Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 113.
46. ↑ Ruth Miller Elson: Myths and Mores in American Best Sellers 1865-1965 . Garland Publishing, New York and London 1985, p. 24.
47. ↑ James Hart: The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste , Oxford University Press, New York 1950, p. 267.
48. ↑ See Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 68; also Betty MacDonald: Anybody can do anything , Chapter 17.
49. ↑ Betty MacDonald: Anybody can do anything , Chapter 17. In the original: “We are living in the last frontier in the United States. The land of the great salmon runs, giant firs, uncharted waters and unscaled mountains and almost nothing has been written about it. If you told the people in New York that salmon leaped in our front door and snapped at our ankles they'd believe it. Most of the people in the United States either think we're frozen over all the time like the Antarctic, or that we're still wearing buckskin and fighting Indians. Now personally I think it's about time that somebody out here wrote the truth. "
50. ↑ Betty MacDonald: Anybody can do anything , Chapter 17. In the original: “I was going to write a sort of rebuttal to all the recent successful I-love-life books by female good sports whose husbands had forced them to live in the country without lights and running water. I would give the other side of it. I would give a bad sport's account of life in the wilderness without lights, water or friends and with chickens, Indians and moonshine. "
51. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 73.
52. ↑ James Hart: The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste , Oxford University Press, New York 1950, pp. 267 f.
53. ↑ The Egg and I , Chapter 1.
54. ↑ Beth Kraig: It's About Time Somebody Out Here Wrote the Truth: Betty Bard MacDonald and North / Western Regionalism , pp. 243-246.
55. ↑ The Egg and I , Chapter 2; see. Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 73 f.
56. ↑ The Egg and I, Chapter 2; see. Beth Kraig: It's About Time Somebody Out Here Wrote the Truth: Betty Bard MacDonald and North / Western Regionalism , p. 250 ff.
57. ↑ The Egg and I , Chapter 2.
58. ↑ See Beth Kraig, It's About Time Somebody Out Here Wrote the Truth: Betty Bard MacDonald and North / Western Regionalism , p. 239.
59. ↑ The Egg and I , Chapter 2; see. Beth Kraig: It's About Time Somebody Out Here Wrote the Truth: Betty Bard MacDonald and North / Western Regionalism , p. 251.
60. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. XIV.
61. ↑ Jerry Wayne Williamson: Hillbillyland. What the movies did to the mountains & what the mountains did to the movies . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London 1995, p. 55.
62. ↑ Jerry Wayne Williamson: Hillbillyland. What the movies did to the mountains & what the mountains did to the movies . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London 1995, p. 55.
63. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 114.
64. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 116.
65. ↑ Tim Hollis: Ain't that a knee-slapper. Rural comedy in the 20th century . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2008, pp. 131 ff.
66. ^ Letter to Bernice Baumgarten dated March 12, 1945, quoted from Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 113.
67. ↑ The Egg and I , Chapter 17.
68. ↑ See Zita Z. Dresner: Women's Comic Visions , p. 101.
69. ↑ The Egg and I , Chapter 1.
70. ↑ The Egg and I , Chapter 16.
71. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 75.
72. ↑ Ruth Miller Elson: Myths and Mores in American Best Sellers 1865-1965 . Garland Publishing, New York and London 1985, p. 115; Quote: The Egg and I , Chapter 16.
73. ↑ Jerry Wayne Williamson: Hillbillyland. What the movies did to the mountains & what the mountains did to the movies . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London 1995, p. 55.
74. ↑ Jerry Wayne Williamson: Hillbillyland. What the movies did to the mountains & what the mountains did to the movies . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London 1995, p. 55.
75. ^ Introduction by Anne MacDonald Evans and Joan MacDonald Keil to Betty MacDonald: The Egg and I , Harper & Row, New York 1987, here quoted from Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 192.
76. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , S. XIII.
77. ↑ The blurb of the 1951 rororo edition. The entry MacDonald, Betty in the Munzinger archive , Munzinger Online / Personen - Internationales Biographisches Archiv , from 1958, almost literally adopted this characterization.
78. ↑ Hamlin Hill: Modern American Humor: The Janus Laugh .
79. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , S. XV.
80. ^ William Cumming: Sketchbook: A Memoir of the 1930s and the Northwest School . University of Washington Press, Seattle and London 1984, p. 183 f. In the original: “Betty's humor wasn't kindly, nor homey, nor gentle, nor friendly. It had the malicious edge of a scalpel, and it could cut. Betty saw the flaws of the race as vicious. The fact that these flaws generally ended in hilarious pratfalls didn't make them any less lethal in her eyes. She turned her acid humor against the stupidities of mankind because they enraged her. ... Like Billie Holiday she laughed to keep from throwing up. "
81. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 74 (quote) and p. 125.
82. ↑ Quoted here from Anna Rothe (ed.): Current Biography. Who's news and why 1946. HW Wilson, New York 1947, p. 363.
83. ^ Nancy Walker, Zita Z. Dresner (Ed.): Redressing the Balance. American Women's Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson and London 1988, p. 279.
84. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 73.
85. ↑ Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique (German: The womanhood madness ). Norton, New York 1963. Quoted here from the 2001 edition, p. 108 f.
86. ↑ The Egg and I , Chapter 2.
87. ↑ Both quotations: Patricia Meyer Spacks: The Female Imagination , p. 221.
88. ^ Nancy Walker: Humor and Gender Roles: The "Funny" Feminism of the Post-World War II Suburbs , here pp. 103-106.
89. ^ Zita Z. Dresner: Domestic Comic Writers , especially pp. 101 and 103.
90. ↑ Jane F. Levey: Imagining the Family in US Postwar Popular Culture: The Case of The Egg and I and Cheaper by the Dozen , p. 132; see. The Egg and I , chapter 9.
91. ↑ Jane F. Levey: Imagining the Family in US Postwar Popular Culture: The Case of The Egg and I and Cheaper by the Dozen , p. 132, cf. The Egg and I , chapter 4.
92. ↑ Beth Kraig: It's About Time Somebody Out Here Wrote the Truth: Betty Bard MacDonald and North / Western Regionalism , p. 266 f.
93. ↑ Jane F. Levey: Imagining the Family in US Postwar Popular Culture: The Case of The Egg and I and Cheaper by the Dozen , p. 134.
94. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 72.
95. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald , p. 77.
96. ↑ Life Goes Calling on the Author of “the Egg and I” - Best-seller Betty MacDonald lives a very happy life without chickens. Homestory in Life , March 18, 1946, pp. 134-137, online .
97. ↑ Quoted from James Hart: The Popular Book . Oxford University Press, New York 1950, p. 268.
98. ^ Bosley Crowther, The Screen in Review: "The Egg and I," Film Version of Betty MacDonald Novel Starring Claudette Colbert, Is New Bill at Radio City . In: The New York Times , April 25, 1947, p. 29.
99. ^ Paula Becker: Jefferson County resolution officially establishes Egg and I Road in Center on February 3, 1981 . Online .
100. ↑ Georges Charensol: Quels enseignements peut-on tirer des chiffres de tirage de la production littérarie actuelle? In: Informations sociales , No. 1, January 1957, online , pp. 36–45, here: p. 45.
101. ↑ The Egg and Claudette. A roll with an apron. In: Der Spiegel , July 5, 1947, p. 12. Online .
102. ↑ The time 18/1951, May 3
103. ↑ Samantha Hoekstra: The Egg and Us: Contextualization and Historicization of Betty MacDonald's Works . Master's thesis at Florida State University, 2008, online , pp. 44 and 46.
104. ↑ Jiří Trávníček: Čtenáři a čtení v České republice (2007, 2010, 2013). Ostrava, March 6, 2015. Set of slides online .
105. ↑ Ruth Franka: Czechs cling to literary traditions in spite of new technologies . Radio Praha, March 7, 2015. Online ; see also Luděk Navara: Co Čech, to knihomil: podle průzkumu jsou Češi jedni z největších čtenářů . Idnes.cz, December 23, 2008, online .
106. ^ Andrew Roberts: From Good King Wenceslas to the Good Soldier Švejk. A Dictionary of Czech Popular Culture . Central European University Press, Budapest / New York 2005, p. 41 ff.
107. ↑ Číst znamená žít, být a vědět ("Reading means life, being and knowledge"). Interview by Daniel David with Jiří Trávníček on January 4, 2018. Online .
108. ↑ Here quoted from the English original: Philip Roth: The Prague Orgy . Vintage, London 1995, p. 76.
109. ↑ Philip Roth: The Prague Orgy. An epilogue . Rowohlt, Hamburg 2004 (new edition), pp. 95-104.
110. ^ Stanislav Kolář: Philip Roth and Czechoslovakia . In: Litteraria Pragensia , vol. 25 (2015), No. 49, pp. 6–21, here: p. 14.
111. ↑ James Hart: The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste . Oxford University Press, New York 1950. Ruth Miller Elson: Myths and Mores in American Best Sellers 1865-1965 . Garland Publishing, New York and London 1985. Hamlin Hill: Modern American Humor: The Janus Laugh . In: College English , Vol. 25 (1963), pp. 170-176. Walter Blair: Native American Humor. 1800-1900. American Book Co., New York 1937.
112. ↑ Patricia Meyer Spacks: The Female Imagination. A literary and psychological investigation of writing by women - novels, autobiographies, letters, journals - that reveals how the fact of womanhood shapes the operations of the imagination . Knopf, New York 1975. Nancy Walker: Humor and Gender Roles: The "Funny" Feminism of the Post-World War II Suburbs . In: American Quarterly , Vol. 37 (1985), No. 1, Special Issue: American Humor, pp. 98-113. Nancy Walker: A very serious thing. Women's humor and American culture . University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1987. Zita Z. Dresner, Nancy Walker: Redressing the Balance. American Women's Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson and London 1988. Zita Z. Dresner: Domestic Comic Writers . In: June Sochen (Ed.): Women's Comic Visions . Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1991, pp. 93-114. Kathy D. Hadley: MacDonald, Betty. In: The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States . Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford 1995, p. 535. Barbara Levy: Ladies Laughing: Wit as Control in Contemporary American Women Writers . Gordon & Breach, Langhorne 1997. Kristi Siegel: Women's Autobiographies, Culture, Feminism . Peter Lang, New York 1999. Penelope Fritzer, Bartholomew Bland: Merry Wives and Others. A History of Domestic Humor Writing . McField, Jefferson and London 2002.
113. ↑ Jerry Wayne Williamson: Hillbillyland. What the movies did to the mountains & what the mountains did to the movies . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London 1995. Tim Hollis: Ain't that a knee-slapper. Rural comedy in the 20th century . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2008.
114. ↑ Beth Kraig: It's About Time Somebody Out Here Wrote the Truth: Betty Bard MacDonald and North / Western Regionalism . In: Western American Literature , Vol. 40 (2005), No. 3, pp. 237-271. Mildred Andrews: MacDonald, Betty (1907-1958) , HistoryLink Essay # 156, online . Furthermore the publications mentioned under web links.
115. ↑ Susan M. Squier: Poultry Science, Chicken Culture. A partial alphabet . Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick 2011.
116. ^ Paula Becker: Looking for Betty MacDonald. The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I . University of Washington Press, Seattle and London 2016
117. ↑ Samantha Hoekstra: The Egg and Us: Contextualization and Historicization of Betty MacDonald's Works . Master's thesis at Florida State University, 2008, online . Jiří Trávníček: Čteme? Obyvatelé České republiky a jejich vztah ke knize (2007) . Host, Brno 2008.
118. ↑ Betty MacDonaldová jako český čtenářský fenomén ("Betty MacDonald as a Czech reader phenomenon"), project no . GA17-06666S, online .
119. ↑ See photo and description at http://www.detlef-heinsohn.de/rororo.htm .

This article was added to the list of excellent articles on June 5, 2018 in this version .