Patriot's Dream (1976)

Listening: Show Me the Way

Disillusioned by the struggle of teaching uninterested high-school students, twenty-three year old Jan Wilde takes the bicentennial summer off to recover and redirect, spending it with her elderly aunt and uncle in their historic Williamsburg home. While a number of men around her seem interested in providing the new path she's looking for, the real hero of her dreams turns out to be just that...a figment of her dreams. Or are they? As her nightly dreams of Revolutionary era Williamsburg and the former inhabitants of the family home grow more compelling and vivid, Jan begins to lose interest in the modern day. Will she lose herself in past and the mystery of the young Revolutionary hero whose history she can't pin down, or will someone find a way to save her from the history she's beginning to drown in?




Oh dear. Where to start.

Well, I give MPM points for trying. She wants to write a story about Revolution-era American history that includes African-American narrative, and condemns slavery. That's not a bad effort for a forty-eight year old white woman in the 1970s.

Unfortunately, her good intentions are not quite enough. The romance between the handsome son of a Southern slave-owning family and their beautiful, white-passing slave doesn't read as the desperate star-crossed love she intends. Not when I've read Kindred by Octavia E. Butler so recently, not when the practice of rape by slaver-owners is so well known. A love affair demands equal consent from both parties. That equal consent is automatically undermined when one of the parties is the other's slave, however 'good and noble' his intentions might be.  This feels, quite literally, like a whitewashed look at one of the ugliest moments in American history.

Also, really, why must the woman be practically white? I know it sheds further light on the nauseating reoccurring rape of slaves, but that's not really the emphasized angle here, and ultimately it feels like an unpleasant attempt to 'whiten' the love interest, because only a white woman could be considered beautiful to her audience. In an honest book, Leah would be Charles's half-sister, from her description and the family dynamics written here. And that's where the real horror and punch of the story would lie.

It's a bad enough plotline that it overshadows the main hero Jonathon's attempts to rescue slaves and end the practice of slavery throughout the Revolutionary war,  struggling with the conflict between the colonial dream of independence and its reliance on slavery. Possibly because it's a story about slavery...about a white man. Which is just odd. And finally, the confusing switch in identities between Jonathon and Charles at the end is purely impossible. It doesn't really work. Whatever moral tale MPM was trying to tell about the impossibilities of making perfect decisions in morally complex times is utterly lost, because she picked the wrong time and the wrong subject to paint as morally gray.

Sorry, MPM--this was an effort at writing something serious and socially relevant, but her other 1976 work, Legend, ends up being much better despite being much sillier.

Rating: **

Favorite Line: "The trouble with your generation is that you expect instant nirvana. When you find the world isn't to your taste, you start to kick and scream and throw bombs. The perfect world won't come in your lifetime; maybe it will never come. But that's no excuse to give up. The only defeat is to stop fighting."
     "Charles said something like that. The fight is the victory."
     "Then he must have been a pompous, pontifical idiot like me," Alan said. "If he was my ancestor, that probably accounts for it."

Notes:
*It might interest readers to notice the second reference to to the Vietnam War in MPM's work. The first was in The Crying Child. 
*MPM returns to the topic of reincarnation she brought up in SK's Daughter, only to back away again, leaving the suggestion unresolved.