Deep Rereads: A Wrinkle in Time chapter 2: Mrs Who

It’s interesting how little happens in this chapter, for how much happens in this chapter. We’re about to meet a bunch of significant characters for the first time, within the space of thirteen pages, and yet it feels like it’s just passing through, waiting for things to get started.

It starts with Meg hoping the previous chapter was a dream, and I don’t know, maybe other people have dreams with liverwurst sandwiches in them, but that seems awfully mundane to me. Mrs. Whatsit, the boots, the hurricane, Charles Wallace and the cocoa, I could buy all of that as a dream. But the sandwiches are a problem.

Anyway, then Sandy and Dennys show up and are jerks again. Well, that’s not really fair - Sandy is a jerk, and Dennys kind of goes along with it. In any case I can’t help feeling glad that we’re not going to see very much more of them.

Nor are they the only jerks. Meg’s teacher apparently thinks she’s intolerably rude for asking the perfectly legitimate question of why they should care about the imports and exports of Nicaragua. For what it’s worth, exports are coffee, gold, beef, sugar, and (which ought to be important to Meg) knit sweaters. Imports are oil, medicines, rubberized fabric, and delivery trucks. Now you know enough not to get sent to Mr. Jenkins.

Meg doesn’t, though, and I’m quite pleased to meet the series’ wonderful quiet, tiny, well-intentioned-but-cluess villain. He thinks he knows more about everything than everybody, and yet manages to accomplish absolutely nothing, and at the end of the scene has to give up and send Meg back to her study hall because he can’t figure out what else to do. He even has no concept of how lucky he is to be the principal where Meg Murry is the “most belligerent, uncooperative child in school.” Many teachers and administrators justifiably feel threatened by students who are capable of asking intelligent questions, but that seems a bit much.

And then she goes home and Charles Wallace hauls her out to the haunted house where Mrs. Whatsit and her friends are staying, and they meet Calvin O’Keefe, who is a sport, and not the baseball kind. Calvin’s smart - he’s two years ahead in school - and smart enough to figure out that Charles Wallace isn’t as stupid as his reputation suggests. But even so he’s afflicted with Talking to Charles Wallace Disease. Nobody ever says “I must remember I’m preconditioned in my concept of your mentality” unless they’ve been convinced that talking in big words is the thing to do. This seems to happen to a lot of people in the presence of Charles Wallace.

Calvin was compelled to come, and Meg’s not really one thing or the other, and everything seems to be a mystery to everyone except Charles Wallace, which is really the way it should be.

And then, Mrs. Who, and her glasses. As a kid, I had an idea what enormous spectacles must be like, but now as a grownup who looks at a lot of old photos I’m pretty sure that idea was more or less what normal glasses were like in 1962. Even now it’s hard to get into that perspective enough to figure out just how enormous we’re talking about. Like the over-the-top Edith Head only more so style that’s caught on in cartoons since Edna in The Incredibles? Mrs. Who will soon be all glasses, but it sounds like she more or less started that way.

The popping along in multiple languages thing is cute, and L’Engle handles it reasonably well in not excluding the audience who would have no idea what she’s talking about otherwise. But what strikes me this time is Mrs. Who’s need to turn everyone’s names into simple diminutives. It’s Charlsie and Megsie, and I’m pretty sure Mrs. Who could make it as a hockey coach.

So we know some people, and they’ll be very important people, but I’m left with the feeling that we know even less about what’s going on now than we did at the start of the chapter.

And we still don’t know what a tesseract is.

Previous entries in this series:
Chapter 1