I first read Robert F. Young’s “The Dandelion Girl” a few years ago, when I had just finished watching the anime series RahXephon. Young’s story was cited as an unconscious influence on the anime, and I was intrigued enough to track down a copy of the story. I was pleasantly suprised to find it was one of the “classic sci-fi” stories featured on the Sci-Fi channel during the brief period it was engaged in rebranding itself to establish closer ties with science fiction literature. You can still read the story here, in fact, and if you like “soft” science fiction–the kind that emphasizes human reactions to the speculative elements rather than the details of the elements themselves–it’s not a bad read.
The gist of the story is this: A middle-aged man goes on vacation with his wife and meets a woman half his age while walking alone in the forest. She claims to be from the future, and, since he’s smitten by her, decides to humor her. After a days she stops showing up and he starts to feel guilty, so he goes up to the attic of his cabin to find something to do. He finds his wife’s old suitcase, and in it he finds an old, worn out dress just like the (unique) one the young woman wore. The woman, it turns out, had fled from persecution in her time to marry the younger version of him. He goes into town to meet his wife, she sees that he finally understands, and the two live happily and even more in love than they had before.
It’s a pleasant enough story, and it stands out in my mind as one of the few speculative fiction stories to be about romance rather than merely including it. It’s also a rare example of a romance purely from a male perspective, a rare bird in any genre. And a romance it is: we are told that
Unfortunately, it shows its age, and it shows it not in its technology but in its attitude. Julie, the young woman, is studying to be a secretary–not a bad thing in itself, but here is how she thinks of it:
"I'm studying to be a secretary," she said. She took a half step and made a pretty pirouette and clasped her hands before her. "I shall just love to be a
secretary," she went on. "It must be simply marvelous working in a big important office and taking down what important people say."
The story says “people,” but it might as well have said “men.” This is a good example of what critic Katha Pollit calls the Smurfette Principle: although ostensibly a story about a man and a woman, the female half of the story is peripheral at best. Anne/older Julie, the narrator’s wife, is described as graceful and ageless, with “warm and compassionate eyes with that odd hint of fear in them that he had never been able to analyze.” We learn, too, that she has always been afraid of being photographed. Once we learn of her status as fugitive from the future, the source of these fears is plain, and we are clearly meant to be moved by the idea of a terrified young woman heading into the past in order to try to make a life with the younger version of a middle-aged man she met one careless day in the woods. It’s a powerful idea, to be sure, and there is material there for a charming love story, but only if you ignore one half of the marriage.
I’ve read this story a few times now, and I can’t help but think that the story we don’t is the more interesting one. What was Julie/Anne’s experience of those two decades of hiding? How content was she living in the past? It’s asking a lot of the story to address this while retaining the air of wistful sweetness Young was clearly going for, I know; nevertheless, wouldn’t this have been a masterpiece if he had pulled it off?
In Young’s defense, I should mention that a reading of “The Dandelion Girl” that only examines its sexism is too simple. Young does make an effort to write Julie as an intellectual equal to Mark:
The conversation that ensued proved conclusively that they did have [mutual interests]—though the transcendental esthetic, Berkeleianism and relativity
were rather incongruous subjects for a man and a girl to be discussing on a September hilltop, he reflected presently, even when the man was forty-four
and the girl was twenty-one. But happily there were compensations—their animated discussion of the transcendental esthetic did more than elicit a priori
and a posteriori conclusions, it also elicited microcosmic stars in her eyes; their breakdown of Berkeley did more than point up the inherent weaknesses
in the good bishop's theory, it also pointed up the pinkness of her cheeks; and their review of relativity did more than demonstrate that E invariably
equals mc2; it also demonstrated that far from being an impediment, knowledge is an asset to feminine charm.
Of course, it doesn’t entirely work. Young protests too much: it’s not enough for Julie to be intelligent, she has to be shown discussing arcane scientific and philosophical topics. This is clumsy writing, for we are told, not shown, of Julie’s intelligence. And, complimentary though this may be, it doesn’t quite square with the flighty portrayal of Julie in the earlier passage. It is problematic that we are shown Julie being silly and childish but merely told that she is more intelligent than that. The impression I get is that Young likes the idea of intelligent women, but he hasn’t gotten to know any well enough to write about them. He seems to realize that the stereotypical female ideal doesn’t go far enough, but he has not realized the degree to which it informs his own, “corrected” ideal.
But it’s unfair for me to examine this story solely in terms of what I wish it had been. I find “The Dandelion Girl” plenty interesting in its actual form, for it seems to be an updated–and happier–retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, (1) where a marriage with a supernatural or otherwise non-human being relies upon a man or woman being unaware of or not explicitly acknowledging their spouse’s supernatural nature. This myth or variants of it crop up in quite a few human cultures; for example, the yuki-onna of Japan has a similar story. (3) I wonder whether this might reflect a tacit but universal fear among humans that romantic love is, on some level, always too good to be true, always one lit candle or one unasked question away from disappearing forever. From what I can tell, “The Dandelion Girl” is practically unique in following up its crisis of discovery not with the couple’s downfall, but with the simple revelation that Mark and Anne/Julie’s marriage is exactly what they hoped, and perhaps a bit more. (3)
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(1) Technically I think these myths are assigned the 400-450 range of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folklore classification system.
(2) Though in all honesty, this may not be the best example: it’s a retelling by Lafcadio Hearn, a Westerner who lived in Japan and recorded a few local legends while he was there. He was likely aware of the Cupid and Psyche myth and could have been influenced by it. See here for his version.
(3) Well, with so little work, anyway. In many tellings Cupid and Psyche get their happy ending, but it requires jumping through a lot of hoops and more than a little divine intervention.
