Deep Rereads: A Wrinkle in Time chapter 1: Mrs. Whatsit

It was a dark and stormy night.

I think it’s always a dark and stormy night at the Murry’s. L’Engle seems to delight in dramatic weather, and I can’t really imagine their old house on a bright and sunny day. I’m not sure what Meg’s attic would be like, with sun seeping through and nothing to scare her. I don’t think it ever happens; the Murrys live in a universe where, if you live in a creaky attic, there will always be a thunderstorm to drive you downstairs and into the arms of adventure.

Or at least Charles Wallace making you cocoa, which is pretty much the same thing.

But before that, we get Meg falling behind in school, Charles Wallace being teased, and Sandy and Dennys being painfully gender-normative. From the very first moment they appear, in an exposition flashback, they’re dislikable. Their older sister shouldn’t fight the people looking down on Charles Wallace, they should, presumably because they’re boys. This isn’t going to change, and it’s an interesting choice, to set up the main characters’ siblings not as helpers, not as villains, but as nominal allies who don’t really have a clue. How to write a happy family without having it be too perfect.

Then there’s quite a bit of Meg being scared and put upon - by hurricanes, tramps, her perception of her own ugliness, and walking into things scattered around the attic. This feels too much, to me. I’ve been thinking, coming into this reread, about why, though I enjoy Meg as a character, I don’t think I’d like her very much as an actual person. And I think the first impressions from this chapter may have a lot to do with that. She’s set up as a huge underdog in the way she thinks of herself, and yet she’s immediately capable and practical, she’s from a smart and influential family, and while her perception is that everyone in town is always thinking negatively about her, or Charles Wallace, or her father in one way or another, that’s unlikely to be true. Her sad-sack attitude at the beginning is just too over the top.

But then we get to the cocoa, and the character who makes these books for me, Charles Wallace. Of all the strong images in the books, this is the one that strikes me as the most fundamental: Charles Wallace sitting in the kitchen in the middle of the night, in the dregs of a hurricane, making cocoa for his sister and his mother before they even think to come downstairs, and sandwiches after they do. This is where the three of them are most themselves. Meg opens up her insecurities and Mrs. Murry lets them roll off her like water, when confronting them would not be believed. Charles Wallace perceives things in ways that no one else does, and his mother is unflappable. Mrs. Murry is something of the ultimate Zen parent, a role model in dealing with younger people.

And then Mrs. Whatsit arrives, bundled to the teeth, with water in her boots. Meg makes her a tuna salad sandwich, and put celery in it, which is probably another reason I can’t like her as much as I feel like I should. She never thanked Charles Wallace for the cocoa, and she puts celery in the tuna salad. Well.

Anyway, those boots are a wonderfully temporal detail to introduce a character who will turn out to be almost wholly spiritual. We’ll see Mrs. Who’s glasses in the next chapter, which serve the same purpose, to anchor these alien, powerful beings to the mundane world the Murrys all were somewhat disappointed to be living in.

There is such a thing as a tesseract.