Institutional Playthrough of Bee, Part Two
We’re back! As I mentioned yesterday, this has turned out be a spelling and religion playthrough, as there really isn’t a lot of content related to home-schooling. We’re more than halfway through my playthrough, so this should be a shorter post.
This is school-related: Alex overhears a conversation among persons outside of her community.
At the Bookstore
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It’s a quiet afternoon and you have a rare and precious sort of privacy. You are at Rainbow Books. Alone. No one to supervise you; no one to tell you which books you ought to prefer. You’re browsing half-guiltily through a selection of science fiction young adult books: ones with alien romance and secular interplanetary governance and all kinds of things of which your father would not approve. On the cover of this book is an attractive young man with black hair and unnatural lavender skin.
“You can always tell,” says a customer voice from the front of the store.
“What’s that?” asks the clerk.
“Those home-schooled kids,” says the customer voice. “Social rejects. You can always tell when you meet them.”
- Show them. Win your Bee and prove the value of your kind of upbringing.
- Then again maybe you are obvious…?
- Keep listening.
> Keep listening.
“I haven’t noticed that,” says the clerk tactfully.
“My sister-in-law is home-schooling her son and let me tell you, whoa is that one little weirdo,” the customer goes on. “He never looks you in the face when he talks to you. He keeps a big tank of tropical fish and he likes them more than people.”
- There’s a kid at Co-op like that.
> There’s a kid at Co-op like that.
There’s a kid at Co-op like that. His mother took him out of school because he got scared in the classroom and would scream at the other kids. He’s doing better now. But it’s not like being at home made him that way. And he’s a good guy, really, if you can take him at his own rate.
The bell rings at the front of the store and the customer is gone.
Alex’s choice of book is significant, isn’t it? She is drawn to science fiction, though part of her resists it. This is a brief-yet-tantalizing insight into her interests beyond church and spelling, and it draws out multiple threads of interpretive interest: attraction, parental disapproval, secularism. In other playthroughs, we see more responses to media and art, but our current story is rather constrained in this regard.
Presumably, Alex is practicing plain dress, since that is discussed elsewhere in the text, which might draw attention and/or comments from impolite “outsiders”. Despite the 500+ subscribers to father’s newsletter, it seems a small world; Alex knows the boy with the aquarium. Alex responds to the comments about the specific boy, but that’s all we get. It’s hardly a full-throated defense of home schooling "He’s doing better. But it’s not like being at home made him that way. Made him what way? Which way would that be? There is an implication of neurodivergence, but it isn’t enough to engage with meaningfully. It may not be a reality that Alex is prepared to discuss or understand.
In any case, Alex’s ambivalence implies–what?–weary acceptance? Indifference? She is likely embarrassed and/or marginalized by outsider responses to her educational life. Because the situation is so obviously uncomfortable, the absence of editorializing is effectively sufficient.
A school vignette!
Choosing the Year’s Curriculum
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At the end of summer every year, Mother gets out a big block of graph paper and plans what you and Lettice are going to study for the year to come. You are allowed to make suggestions.
- Consider possible textbooks.
- Schedule more drill time.
> Consider possible textbooks.
Sometimes Mother will bring home some used textbooks from the Co-op to see if they’re any good. She and Father will pick out the ones that are too extremely religious – the science books where Noah is shown feeding a dinosaur. The social studies books with maps of where the heathens live. One of the history books so upsets Mother that she “accidentally” spills a whole carafe of coffee on the Civil War, and ruins it.
“I won’t burn a book,” she says to Father. “But there are some ideas I don’t plan to encourage either.”
“No,” Father agrees.
“And that’s just the sort of thing people stereotype us for,” she goes on. “They think we’re all reactionaries! Because of a few hardcore parents who just happen to be the ones that stand out the most.”
Father leans back in his chair. It’s what he does when he knows Mother is going to be talking on for a while.
This is productive reading because it helps delineate the edges of the family’s theology. However, it leaves out more than it says. Where are the heathens? Is this the global south generally? Arkansas, which is overrun with Southern Baptists? What is the issue with the characterization of the Civil War? My guess is that it is insufficiently critical of the southern states, but there’s nothing here to bear that out.
More provocative (and humorous) is the family’s rejection the text featuring Noah with a dinosaur. This is not far-fetched. Religious persons who object to the theory of evolution sometimes fictionalize encounters between biblical figures and extinct reptiles:
You may recall the “A Call to Arms” anecdote that involved writing letters to a lawmaker. It contains a comment about Mrs. Perry’s pedagogical stance regarding evolution:
She reviews textbook materials. She has her children give ratings to everything they read or study, to identify for other home-schoolers how thorough, correct, and Godly those materials are.
Mrs. Perry’s children gave a 3.5 out of 10 possible points to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, entirely for thoroughness. The definition of evolution did not meet with their approval.
It is productive to put these passages in conversation with one another. Perhaps Alex’s parents are more open to scientific content than they are to more socially-concerned texts. We also see that, whatever a textbook might contain, burning it is a bridge too far. Alex’s mother clearly sees this as a bright line between her ideology and that of more “extreme” conservatives. This is an interesting follow-up to the bookstore vignette, since concern over outside perspective is once again discussed. “They think we’re all reactionaries!” One must ask: at what point does a reaction become “reactionary?” I feel invited to think about it for myself, as the text has no easy answers.
Advent again. We have not yet looked at the option involving an Advent calendar.
> Open a door of the Advent calendar.
The Advent calendar is not one of those childish sorts with candies inside, but a beautiful painted scene of Nazareth. There is silver glitter on the night sky, and the angels are made of gold foil.
Each day you open another door and read another verse about the coming of the Christ child, and admire the snow, and the sheep.
A very short passage this time, focus on specific, descriptive details. The calendar is “beautiful” rather than “childish”. For reasons hard to articulate, this reminded me of something from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (happy Bloomsday!).
Ash Wednesday and Lent are largely unchanged, though Alex has the added option of fasting on Fridays.
> The discipline of fasting on Fridays.
On days of fasting, you eat no solid food. Mother and Father have only water, but you are allowed juice or milk. Orange juice makes your stomach hurt if you drink too much by itself, though, so you stick to apple.
The effect is floaty and dreamy. You don’t concentrate well. You spend the day lying on your bed, reading a book for English, and having fantastical reveries about scrambled eggs. With mushrooms. Sliced mushrooms sauteed in olive oil.
Until now, Alex has not been old enough to practice fasting, so this is a new option. Like the others, it doesn’t necessarily feature the interiority one often associates with (or perhaps hopes for) with regard to religious self-denial. I’ll reserve further thoughts for now.
The rest of Lent repeats previous options.
Easter Vigil is different. There are four available choices (and a fifth one for year three) for Easter, even if we only have three years to work with.
- Drill yourself on spelling to keep focused.
- Be still.
- Keep an envious eye on the acolytes.
- Be a bad influence on Lettice, and vice versa.
- Tactically indulge your pyromania.
Obviously, I chose the spelling bee option on my first playthrough, and Lettice will be featured in later run. For this text, I chose “Be Still” (already discussed here), “Keep an envious eye on the acolytes,” and “Tactically indulge your pyromania.” Let’s have a look at those last two choices.
> Keep an envious eye on the acolytes.
The altar boys for the service are allowed to tend the candles, lighting them at the beginning and snuffing them at the end. This is by far the most interesting thing to do in the service, but you are not allowed to do what they do. Father and Mother feel that it is not appropriate; even though there are female acolytes sometimes, some places, they prefer to keep their daughters sitting quietly in their places.
- It would be nice to have everyone at church respect you, if you were an acolyte.
- But it is wrong to think of service in terms of how it would make others look up to you.
But it is wrong to think of service in terms of how it would make others look up to you.
When you look sideways at Mother, her face is turned downwards and looks as serene as the Virgin Mary’s.
I think that Alex’s parents refusal to allow her to be an acolyte is especially noteworthy. Despite the frequent discussions surrounding clothing, there hasn’t really been an exploration of what “modesty” might mean in terms of gender. It isn’t yet time, but at the end of this series we can discuss the various schisms and divisions that have occurred in the Episcopal church, all of which seem to involve the dignity of women and LGTBQ+ persons.
Meanwhile: Alex’s aspiration is contrasted with the serene acceptance of place indicated by her mother’s demure and downward gaze.
Why did I choose pyromania? I just didn’t want to repeat a choice, and I didn’t want to do Lettice early. Religious playthrough be damned, I chose pyromania.
The service begins with the lighting of the New Fire: a pagan-seeming ritual, though it wouldn’t do to comment about this to Mother and Father. The New Fire is made with twigs and scented sticks out in the courtyard before the rest of the service begins. Then everyone lights their candles and processes into the church proper, where there are no lights but the lights held by parishioners and a handful of candles on the altar.
The candles drip. There is a guard made of cardboard that is supposed to protect your hand, but it is never entirely effective and sooner or later some of the wax always dribbles through onto the sensitive webbing between forefinger and thumb.
To prevent this as much as possible requires careful and prolonged tending of the candle. You turn it this way and that way so that the wax drips down different sides, forming gnarly protrusions that look like a knobby tree or an old man’s face, rather than streaming straight down onto your hand.
Ahead in the darkness, the lector reads of God’s promise to Israel, of the dry bones raised to life, of Noah’s rainbow.
It’s not about pyromania at all! This is one of the few times Alex editorializes regarding Episcopal ritual: the New Fire is a bit pagan! The vivid detail of the candewax carried me back to my own Easter Vigil experiences. Of course, I wanted to play with the wax, and I often did until my father stopped me. But enough about me! This passage is a great characterization of religious practice, and the plan list of Biblical stories invests the scene with a significance that is largely off-screen.
Our last pentecost. While we are allowed the choice of a word, every year ends with “it makes a fire of God.” I can’t help but feel it’s a diminishment, repeating one of the best lines in the game three times.
…and that is the religious episode in this playthrough of Bee! What would I say about it? I’d like to wait until the end (and until the podcast, which Callie and I have been planning) to make any broad critical assessment. I do find that the way religion is portrayed in Bee seems very much a “thing of the world” with its emphasis on appearance, possessions, and social hierarchy. Of structures and rules. There simply isn’t enough theology to assess here, so we must talk about its absence instead. I suspect we’ll see that borne out in subsequent dives into the text.
What is next, anyway? Let’s do the Lettice playthrough, aka “arts and crafts.” We’ll spend every possible moment with Lettice, and we’ll try to exercise Alex’s creativity as well. I’m sure I can dig up some great passages to discuss.
As always, chime in! Let’s discuss Bee.
