Christy, Then and Now

Written by Elena Sorensen

Re-Reading Christy as an adult makes me feel as though I’ve known two Christys, or two versions of the same story.

As a teen, my reading of Christy was inflected by my love for the television adaptation from the 90s. I watched the show for the romance, and I read the book over and over for the same reason. Revisiting it this year was like putting on a once-beloved but largely forgotten junior bridesmaid’s dress. Like something laid away in a cedar chest, remembered fondly but only half-remembered.

As a teen I was discomfited, reading Miss Alice’s disclosure of her violation at the hands of a traveling “friend”, and of Lundy Taylor’s treachery. But it was not nearly as poignant a story line for me as Christy and David’s will-they-or-won’t-they courtship, or Christy’s frustration with the cheerfully cynical doctor, also a will-they-or-won’t-they bit of side tension.

What’s clear now is that after twenty-five years I’m reading less a chaste romance than a theodicy. From the first, we are flung into the world of the indigent. This is no story about the temporary reversals of fortune so beloved of Bronte and Gaskell fans. There is no respite or alleviation of sufferings for the mountain folk. Things just get harder and selfish actions beget more and more suffering until the Cove is blown apart by typhoid. All along, we follow Christy’s alternating dismay and determination. Dismay that there seems no good answer to the question of how a good God can allow so much suffering, and determination to fix the Cutter Gap community on her own. Christy’s Pollyanna-like reforms are not received well and that’s no surprise. 

As a young reader, I was impressed by her zeal, her desire to install folk schools, to reform and educate the society. But it doesn’t work. Nothing really “works.” Families don’t simply stop feuding. The economic reality of rum-running doesn’t melt away after a pastor’s pulpit tantrum.

I didn’t understand as a young reader just how much the suffering depicted in this book was how the world has always suffered. The shouted question in Christy, is how could a good God allow so much suffering? Such a question has been shouted by the hurting for millennia.

Miss Alice answers the question: Our participation in God’s work on earth helps us to know Him and his goodness. Our fight against evil is part of the journey to heaven. But like so many with youthful energy and a heart for justice, Christy is determined to set all to right by her own cognizance of what’s going on.

Finally, when typhoid strikes, she is pushed almost past endurance caring for the Cove’s sick and dying and comes to a realization of what participation in God’s plan means:

“I knew that I belonged here, helping the mountain people. There was nothing I wanted for myself. I just wanted to give. All these new feelings washed over me in a matter of seconds.”

The key of course is wanting nothing for herself. The answer to Christy’s theodicy brings her joyful recognition of God’s goodness. Evil and injustice persist in reality, but with less care for herself and her ideas than for saving others, Christy is free from wondering about it any more. The answer is to participate wholly in doing the good work she can do in the moment, with no worrisome theorizing and reforming.

The romantic resolution of the novel is still up in the air for me, but I believe, as I did when I was fifteen, that she chose the doctor, stayed in the Cove, and raised a mountain family of her own, loving and helping to mend and bring peace, not as an outsider but as a wise and loved member of the community.

Elena Sorensen

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