(here’s part 1, here’s part 2, here’s part 3)
"We want you to be happy
Don't live inside the gloom
We want you to be happy
Come step outside your room
We want you to be happy
'Cause this is your song too."
-from "Joy" by Phish, a stupid song about having a daughter that definitely doesn't make you sob when you're a dad
The final chapter of Wrinkle is titled “The Foolish and the Weak”, so named for a passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Mrs. Who, the master of quotations and citations, shares it with Meg before the final battle against IT:
“‘What I have to give you this time you must try to understand not word for word, but in a flash, as you understand the tesseract. Listen, Meg. Listen well. The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called, but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘May the right prevail.’”
Sometimes my four-year-old daughter gets extremely toddlery and starts having multiple meltdowns for no reason right before bed. Any disruption to her normal evening routine, no matter how minor, results in screaming and running and crying. And when these nights come around, I try to ask my daughter what’s wrong, and she says, through tears, “nothing’s wrong, it’s just been a long day is all”. This is, of course, not how four-year-olds talk, but she talks like this sometimes. Because I talk like this all the time.
Sometimes I react very poorly to things not going as expected. I sigh and shut down and snap very quickly and have to step away and take deep breaths and am generally a very cold and condescending and unpleasant person to be around. This is a big personal flaw of mine. It frustrates the people around me. I do not do enough to better regulate my responses to the world, especially when the world is showing me something unexpected. My wife does not have this problem, and remains the person who keeps me grounded and brings me back when I get like this, but she has to put up with me, and I am ashamed that she has to put up with me. But when I get like this, my daughter notices every time, and she asks me “why did you sigh?” or “what’s wrong?” And I always say to her - and it’s actually true, even though I act like it - “nothing’s wrong, sweetie, it’s just been a long day is all.” And she is learning that from me, and now she is doing it herself.
This is what I’m most scared of. My four-year-old is brilliant and funny and sweet and unpredictable in many ways. But every day, in her, I see my faults.
Meg Murry was a very unusual protagonist in children's literature of the era. L'Engle has speculated before that part of the reason it took Wrinkle so long to get published was that most science fiction novels for this audience didn't have female protagonists. And L'Engle was probably right about that, but there's something else that I think makes Meg Murry even more unique: this is a protagonist, in a novel for children, who hates herself. And L'Engle makes that very clear beginning on page 1 of the novel:
"It's not just the weather, she thought. It's the weather on top of everything else. On top of me. On top of Meg Murry, doing everything wrong."
Meg does do everything wrong: she’s a terrible student in a family of brilliant scientists, she constantly gets into fistfights at school and lands herself in the principal’s office, and she hasn’t made any friends her own age or seems to have any idea how to hold her life together, especially as she stews in her fear over her missing father. This is page 3, the first physical description we get of Meg, and the main takeaway is that Meg is unhappy with it:
"'Go back to sleep,' Meg said. 'Just be glad you’re a kitten and not a monster like me.’ She looked at herself in the wardrobe mirror and made a horrible face, baring a mouthful of teeth covered with braces. Automatically she pushed her glasses into position, ran her fingers through her mouse-brown hair, so that it stood wildly on end, and let out a sigh almost as noisy as the wind.”
She doesn’t like how she looks, she doesn’t like how she acts, she doesn’t like how she thinks. But Meg Murry is going to end up saving the lives of her father and her brother, and also possibly saving all of creation as well. And she will not do that, as it turns out, by overcoming those faults of hers. There is no training montage, Meg does not actually fix any of these problems, she still has all of them in her next novel. Nor does Meg really come to feel all that much better about herself by the end of the novel. Wrinkle is not a story of self-improvement, or even a story of self-reconciliation. It is, ultimately, a story about something that was always far more powerful than Meg’s faults.
I have a mental illness; actually, I have a couple. I have been receiving treatment for these illnesses for ten years. What they are is not particularly important, because these illnesses do not make me unique or even interesting. I do not like having them. They do not make me a better person. They do not make me a better writer. I am not proud to have them. I do not talk about them with other people. I don’t make jokes about them. I don’t take comfort in knowing that they are part of what makes me who I am. I would rather they not be part of what makes me who I am. I would be better at functioning if they had nothing to do with what makes me who I am. If I could not have them, I would choose to do that. They make me a challenging person to be around, they make me a person who does not respond well to the unexpected or to things going wrong. They have made earlier periods of my life very difficult, in ways that I won’t share with strangers in a newsletter. And when I see my daughter also having trouble responding to the unexpected or to things going wrong - even though she’s four and having a perfectly normal response for a four-year-old - I worry that she is going to inherit these illnesses from me, that she is going to suffer in the same way that I suffer, that her brain is going to be broken in the same way that my brain is broken. That’s my biggest fear.
As Meg Murry heads to her final showdown with IT, the giant evil brain who has enslaved and essentially possessed her younger brother, she is armed with very little. Mrs. Who gave her the quotation about the foolish and the weak. And Mrs. Whatsit, in an earlier chapter, armed Meg with her faults. “Meg, I give you your faults,” which falls very flat for Meg, but Mrs. Whatsit assures her that her faults will come in handy soon. But in the final chapter, all Mrs. Whatsit offers to Meg is her love. She tells Meg that she loves her. So Meg goes in to a battle to determine the fate of all of creation, armed with a Bible quote and the knowledge that Mrs. Whatsit loves her. That’s not really a lot with which to fight a giant evil brain that has enslaved your little brother. Meg is, understandably, afraid. She starts talking to herself as she makes her way to Charles Wallace and IT:
“Father said it was all right for me to be afraid. He said to go ahead and be afraid. And Mrs. Who said - I don’t understand what she said but I think it was meant to make me not hate being only me, and me being the way I am. And Mrs. Whatsit said to remember that she loves me. That’s what I have to think about. Not about being afraid. Or not as smart as IT. Mrs. Whatsit loves me. That’s quite something, to be loved by someone like Mrs. Whatsit.”
Meg’s prickliness and hair-trigger temper are, of course, faults that cause her problems in her day to day life, but Mrs. Whatsit is right that they do come in handy. She’s able to resist the suffocating rhythm of IT and keep her wits about her precisely because she’s so averse to fitting in, precisely because she’s a natural at sticking out and being a pain. As Constance Grady wrote a few years ago for Vox:
“…when she lands on Camazotz, Meg’s practice at fighting against conformity turns out to be exactly what she needs. Because the insidious thing about Camazotz is that it forces everyone to be exactly like everyone else, so that everyone thinks and acts and behaves just as the evil giant brain IT wants them to. But Meg, who never behaves the way anyone wants her to, certainly isn’t about to start now. It is all the things about Meg that are most unlikable, that our culture teaches girls to reject — her anger, her prickliness, her inability to perform social pleasantness — that make her a formidable opponent to IT, ultimately able to defeat IT where her beloved father failed. It’s astonishing to read about Meg as a small girl, to slowly come to the conclusion that perhaps it is possible, and even valuable, to be something other than nice and accommodating.”
But that’s enough just to keep Meg alive when she faces down IT; it’s not enough to overpower IT and free Charles Wallace. Charles Wallace, under IT’s sway, is spewing hatred to try and trip up Meg and crush her under the weight of her own flaws, but IT screws up when Charles Wallace finally spits out “Mrs. Whatsit hates you.”
“And that was where IT made ITs fatal mistake, for as Meg said automatically, ‘Mrs. Whatsit loves me; that’s what she told me, that she loves me,’ suddenly she knew.
She knew!
Love.
That was what she had that IT did not have. She had Mrs. Whatsit’s love, and her father’s and her mother’s, and the real Charles Wallace’s love, and the twins’, and Aunt Beast’s.
And she had her love for them.
But how could she use it? What was she meant to do?
If she could give love to IT perhaps it would shrivel up and die, for she was sure that IT could not withstand love. But she, in all her weakness and foolishness and baseness and nothingness, was incapable of loving IT. Perhaps it was not too much to ask of her, but she could not do it.
But she could love Charles Wallace.”
That’s the most moving line in the book. Not the light shining in the darkness, not Meg finding her father for the first time, but the automatic, almost-shrugged-off, “Mrs. Whatsit loves me; that’s what she told me, that she loves me.” Of course she does. She said it, out loud, to Meg. Meg’s faults will never be enough to crush her, because she is loved. And she knows she is loved because someone told her that she was, someone said the words out loud. Just like my family did, and does, for me. And even though Meg isn’t strong enough to be without faults, and even though Meg isn’t strong enough to fight IT the way that IT probably should have been fought, she had love for her brother. And she could tell him she loved him. And he could know he was loved. And that could be enough to overpower the darkness.
We are all part of the Light fighting The Black Thing, fighting evil, and while that can mean different things to each of us, we are each part of the same Light. And the world is big and scary and unknowable and indescribable, but we are still part of the Light, and it is okay for us to be here. And it matters that we are here, no matter how big we are in the scheme of the universe, we are here, and our existence matters, it is a ‘yes’ against nothingness. And flawed though we are, we love each other, and that love is enough to overcome evil and nothingness at every turn.
A Wrinkle In Time is the kind of book that follows people around for their entire lives after they read it, that pops up in your life when you least expect it. And I think part of the reason for that is that those lessons above are the kind of things you have to remind yourself of, all the time. And they are the kind of things that you have to teach your children, the exact people that make you need to re-learn those lessons in the first place.
I received, as gifts from my wife, a “Letters To You” book for each of our daughters. The idea is that you open up the book on your kid’s birthday and you have some writing prompts about them, and then you write a letter to them about the past year, and then you give them the book when they’re 18 or when they move out or when they get married or whatever. So I write down my favorite memories for each of my daughters and things that she’s learned or things she’s done that have made me crack up. I don’t tell her that I’m scared about what she’ll inherit from me, from foolish and weak me, from me doing everything wrong as I try to raise her. I just tell her, at the end of each letter each year, that if there’s anything I can possibly communicate to you at all, it’s that I want you to know that - and I put this part in all caps every time, so she will see it right away - YOU ARE LOVED.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. This is the fourth of four installments on Madeleine L’Engle's 1963 medalist, A Wrinkle In Time. Newburied will return in mid-September.