![]() ![]() But, as Moriarty shows, the foster and adoptive parents chose children as one would select a pet at an animal shelter, or a calf at a cattle auction. Wikipedia informs us, under “orphan trains”, that, between 18, an estimated 250,000 orphaned, abandoned and homeless children were relocated, a solution to the problem of thousands of vagrant children on the New York city streets. At six, she was sent on a Children’s Aid Society orphan train to be adopted in the American mid-west. ![]() From about eighteen months to six years of age, Cora was raised by nuns at the New York Home for Friendless Girls. Handsome, successful Alan rescued sixteen year old Cora from an uncertain future after her parents’ deaths, but he has stayed away from her bed since the conception of the twins. It may be perfectly clean, but if it’s unwrapped they don’t know where it’s been.”Įventually, Cora feels that if she’d been experienced before marriage she might have chosen more wisely. Maybe for a lark, but not when it comes to marriage. Men don’t want candy that’s been unwrapped. “You’d like to be a bride… Louise, I’ll put it to you plainly. “You’ve told me you’d like to marry someday,” she tells Louise. On the train to New York City, imprisoned in the corset that was mandatory in the more fitted pre-1920s fashions, Cora envies Louise her short, unbelted garments, and worries that Louise is too free and easy with strangers: The last quarter of the novel concerns Cora’s post-New-York life.Īlthough Cora supported the enfranchisement of women, she hasn’t applied feminist principles to her own situation. Throughout the New York section, Moriarty provides flashbacks to Cora’s early life, and “flashes forward” to show how Cora’s changed outlook will affect others in the future. Will Cora narrow into conservative extremism, or will she embrace change and and live a fuller life?Īlthough the story encompasses Cora’s lifetime, her summer in New York with Louise takes up three quarters of the action of the novel, because that is where her transformation occurs. The murderous racism of the Klan throughout the twentieth century has been well documented. When Viola says she’s thinking of joining the Ku Klux Klan in the interests of improving morality, most readers will pause and cringe. Now that women have the vote, however, some of these matrons believe that the modern girl is going too far in her apparel, hairstyles and behaviour. They, with Louise Brooks’s mother, and other middle class matrons, campaigned for women’s suffrage. Moriarty presents Cora and her friend Viola chatting outside the Wichita Public Library in a Model T during a cloudburst. Setting up the story, Moriarty cleverly inserts a jarring reference which captures Cora’s options. Thanks to Louise’s example, Cora finds a bold, unexpected way route to fulfilment, and in the process, helps three other people live richer, fuller lives. During her six week stay, she not only learns about her birth parents, but also faces up to dissatisfactions in her current life. She has a secret reason for going with Louise – she wants to find herself, literally. ![]() Cora and Alan’s eighteen year old twin sons are away working on a farm before leaving for college, so Cora is free to travel. Thirty-six year old Cora surprises herself and her husband, Alan, a busy lawyer twelve years her senior, by volunteering to accompany Louise to New York. ![]() Author Laura Moriarty took this unknown woman, named her “Cora Carlisle”, and made her the central character of The Chaperone. In her autobiography she mentions leaving Wichita with her chaperone, a woman with whom she had nothing in common but a love of theatre. In her senior years, documentary makers and film historians were eager to interview her.īrooks’s show business career began the summer she was fifteen, when she went to New York to attend the Denishawn school of dance. Then she moved to New York City, where, according to her 1982 autobiography, Lulu in Hollywood, she worked first at Saks Fifth Avenue store and then as a courtesan with a select clientele. She made 24 movies, went through several fortunes and marriages, and in 1938, when her film career took a downturn, returned briefly to her Wichita, Kansas home. Silent film star Louise Brooks, 1906-1985, was famous for her short, black helmet of hair. ![]()
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