by M. O. Grenby
‘I’m George’,said the girl. ‘I shall only answer if you call me George. I hate being a girl. I won’t be. I don’t like doing the things that girls do. I like doing the things that boys do. I can climb better than any boy, and swim faster too. I can sail a boat as well as any fisher-boy on the coast. You’re to call me George. Then I’ll speak to you. But I shan’t if you don’t.’1
George epitomises both the sharp division between the social construction of girls and boys and the longing to cross the divide. Wearing shorts, with cropped curly hair and refusing to answer to her given name, this dogged eleven-year-old is determined to dodge the female role in which biology has cast her. She is also by far the most popular of the Famous Five, becoming, by the end of the twentieth century, an iconic figure. In frequent newspaper articles written to welcome the reissue of the books, or a new television adaptation, it is always George who is remembered most fondly. Her tomboyishness is the object of sometimes lurid speculation, her resistance to the stereotype of docile girlhood the subject of often hilarious parody. Blyton’s George is a compelling portrayal of liminality, embodying the differences between gender conventions at the same time as defying those traditional boundaries. She may be ‘awfully funny’ in the eyes of her conservative cousins, but by the same token she is awfully ‘exciting’.2
However, the kind of liminality, or ‘queerness’, that George embodies must be seen in the context of the orthodox gender conventions that the characterisation of boys and girls has reflected ever since child, rather than adult, characters became the norm in children’s literature. Writing in 1886, the literary critic Edward Salmon pronounced that ‘Boys’ literature of a sound kind ought to help build up men’ and ‘Girls’ literature ought to help to build up women.’3 This was a summary of how things had always been, he thought, and how things should continue to be. Salmon would probably have been surprised to learn that some of the very first recognisably modern children’s books had been addressed to boys and girls. John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), for instance, included ‘A Letter From Jack the Giant-Killer, to Little Master Tommy’ and another, ‘To Pretty Miss Polly’, that were identical save for the pronouns and words of address.4 By the end of the eighteenth century, though, there was increased stratification of texts along gender lines that Salmon largely took for granted at the end of the nineteenth. The publisher William Darton produced companion volumes, A Present for a Little Girl (1797) and A Present for a Little Boy (1798). Some of the lessons these two books taught were similar; others were, as Salmon would have hoped, distinctly gendered. A Present for a Little Girl includes a story pertinent to the situation of young well-bred ladies about two tame geese who wander away from their farm to live with the wild fowl. When a fox approaches, the wild birds fly off but the tame geese, unfamiliar with the threat and hardly able to fly, are soon caught and devoured. ‘From this short tale we may learn’, the narrator tells the intended female reader, ‘that those who forsake the state for which they are fitted by nature, will be in danger of sharing a like fate to that of the poor tame geese’. Indeed, the narrator continues, the two geese ‘remind me of two little girls which I once heard of, who, walking by a canal, saw a boat being rowed by men’. Thinking they ‘could do so too’, the girls attempt to man a craft themselves. Naturally, they lose control and have to be rescued by the gardener, learning ‘that it was not proper for little girls to row in a boat’.5
By the mid to late nineteenth century, the separate fictional worlds of boys and girls were being demarcated with great clarity, each with its own internal laws and its own territory, from which the other sex was outlawed. This development was perhaps especially noticeable in the lucrative market in children’s periodicals between 1850 and 1900, probably the most widespread and accessible form of reading for boys and girls. The Boy’s Own Paper (1855–1967) encouraged the development of specifically ‘manly’ attributes, for instance. The articles, editorials, stories and advertisements all laid a heavy emphasis on adventure, service to empire, science and sport, and also endorsed the gender-specific ideas of useful recreation, such as stamp collecting or taxidermy. The fiction encouraged a pursuit of an emphatic masculinity, whether in stories about the daredevil pranks of mischievous schoolboys or ones about acts of crime, violence or unruly individualism committed by near-mythic characters on the very margins of society, such as pirates, highwaymen, bandits and smugglers.
Jack Harkaway, the invention of the prolific nineteenth-century writer Bracebridge Hemyng, was the archetypal boy hero. He made his first appearance in Boys of England in 1871, pushing the paper’s circulation figures to 250,000 copies a week. Courageous, daring, athletic, strong, yet also moral despite his tendency to challenge authority, Jack combined a number of classic traits. As a schoolboy he was a wayward scamp, who played tricks on masters and was always in trouble. Incidents like this foreshadowed his future as the fierce advocate of British racial supremacy: ‘“You’re not a true Englishman”’, says Jack as justification for fighting a schoolboy comrade; ‘“There’s a touch of the tar-brush about you which shows you are not a white man.”’6 As his adventures became more extravagant, he ran away to sea and travelled around the world, facing danger in increasingly exotic locations. The Harkaway formula, once implanted, remained predictable: travel, fighting, torture, danger, escape and victory. As has often been noted, not the hero but the scenery changes. His bravery and ingenuity when threatened or trapped in apparently inescapable situations merely served to underline his independence and honour. Harkaway marketed a powerful nationalist ethic at a time when young men were encouraged to take pride in, expand and protect the empire, ‘sustaining and sustained by a dream of a fertile wilderness’ as Claudia Marquis observes.7 His stories gripped the attention of young readers, even if it was much to the disapproval of their parents. ‘My mother forbade me to read these things’, recalled Havelock Ellis in his autobiography; ‘Though I usually obeyed her, in this matter I was disobedient without compunction . . . If this is the literature a boy needs, nothing will keep him away from it.’8
During the same period, the Girl’s Own Paper (from 1880) was instrumental in establishing the girls’ story, celebrating family and home as a genre in its own right when it featured domestic fiction by L. T. Meade and Evelyn Everett-Green, among others. The girls’ stories show a greater respect for authority and conformity – however reluctant – to adult control than those for boys; young women must learn to do as they are told and the naughtiness, whilst endearing, is represented as a phase they must outgrow. Yet Edward Salmon criticised the dreariness of this exemplary fare for girls, contrasting it unfavourably with the literary diet served up for boys:
Girls’ literature would be much more successful than it is . . . if it were less good-goody. Girls will tolerate preaching just as little as boys . . . Girls’ literature, properly so called, contains much really good writing, much that is beautiful and ennobling. It appeals in the main to the highest instincts of honour and truth of which humanity is capable. But with all its merits, it frequently lacks the peculiar qualities which can alone make girls’ books as palatable to girls as boys’ books are to boys.9
Salmon laid the blame for the insipidity of girls’ literature on its subject matter: the domestic tedium of the adult lives for which its readership was destined. Girls might yearn for excitement as much as boys, he noted sympathetically. But real-life heroines like Grace Darling, who, in an open rowing-boat with her father, rescued nine people when the steamship Forfarshire broke up off the Northumberland coast in 1838, were few and far between compared with all the male heroes whom boys might be inspired to emulate. While writers for children after 1850 may have moved away from the overt didacticism characteristic of previous decades, many were nevertheless highly conscious of their obligations to edify the audience, whether composed of solitary child readers or family groups. Children’s fiction was supposed to prepare youthful readers to enter a society where strict, even unforgi
ving, codes governed male and female conduct, and to influence their outlooks in ways that would be conducive to a better society in the future.
But Salmon’s assertion that Victorian children’s literature persistently failed to satisfy both sides of the gender divide equally well should be qualified. In fact, many works, including domestic fiction for girls, when read closely, reveal that it was not uncommon for authors to set up tensions between prescribed and desired gender roles as a means of engaging readers’ interest in the narrative. The construction (or rather reconstruction) of masculinity is one of the concerns driving the plot of Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous (1897). Will the arrogant but effeminate Harold Cheyne Jr, the son of an American railroad tycoon who has been coddled by his mother, grow up to be a man capable of competing in his father’s world? The opportunity to prove himself one way or the other presents itself when, en route to Europe, he is washed overboard and rescued by the captain of a fishing boat for whom he must work until the end of the season. The conflict over ‘proper’ masculinity not only drives the plot here, but is instrumental in setting the moral compass for the story.
While late Victorian and Edwardian juvenile audiences may have absorbed conformist messages reaffirming orthodox gender distinctions from some works, they were also exposed to memorable characters who chafed against authority and deviated from the prescribed path for their gender. What is remarkable is that the characters who abided by, and helped to enforce, traditional gender roles – the boys’ own heroes and girls’ own heroines – coexisted in children’s books with other characters who sought to overturn these same proprieties. Most noticeably, this period saw the rise of the literary tomboy, who, like Enid Blyton’s George, fought against the confines of her feminine role, whose clothes got torn and dirty, and who wanted nothing more than to share her brothers’ adventures. Perhaps the most celebrated of all is the passionate Jo March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868). Struggling against her fate as one of her mother’s four little women, Jo became an emblem of independent girlhood for generations of readers, to whom it hardly seems to matter that Alcott ‘cheats’ in the novel’s second volume (added in response to her publisher’s demands) by making Jo relinquish her career as an author in favour of a spectacularly dull husband. Rather, the lasting image in the collective audience memory is the figure of the defiant tomboy chopping off her ‘abundant hair’ to sell in a magnificent gesture to help pay her father’s medical expenses. What we should also note from Little Women is that dissatisfaction with assigned gender roles is not restricted to the female characters. Laurie, the Marches’ neighbour, envies the harmonious, all-female world, which Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March inhabit and from which he is excluded. As he gazes wistfully at the March sisters from the window of his house opposite, Laurie yearns to share their camaraderie, suffused with fun, laughter and intimacy.
The tomboy archetype whom Jo personifies can be interpreted in different ways, among them as a girl’s aversion towards her own body, an example of what some psychoanalysts call ‘abjection’. Viewed in this light, Jo March rejects her femininity when bridling at female ways of dressing, or acting in non-feminine ways. At fifteen, Jo is at that transitional moment when childhood and adolescence collide. Her gangling body and flyaway hair refuse to remain under control. Impatient with her sex, she longs to be a boy. Frustrated in her desire to fight in the American Civil War, she resolves to take over the role of breadwinner for the household. It is her aching need to prove herself and to realise her own identity as an independent being that has made her such a mesmerising figure. Her recognition of self, which is primarily constructed in terms of gender, has been interpreted ever since the novel’s publication as a thinly disguised portrait of the author. Entries in Alcott’s journals contain much to confirm this autobiographical reading. She thought that she had been ‘born with a boys spirit under my “bib and tucker”’, and that ‘people think I’m wild and queer’.10 ‘Louisa’s was an isolated struggle’, one biographer has written, ‘and the only terms in which she could understand herself were that she was a freak, a girl-boy’.11 Yet in Little Women, as in so many other tomboy stories, the reader is not left with an impression of freakishness, or abjection, or even very severe gender confusion.
It is no coincidence that one of Jo March’s favourite authors was Charlotte Yonge. Little Women owes a considerable debt to Yonge’s most celebrated novel, The Daisy Chain (1856), ‘an overgrown book of a nondescript class, neither the “tale” for the young, nor the novel for their elders, but a mixture of both’,12 which was an enormous success, appealing to both male and female readers, children and adults, from its first appearance. The Daisy Chain provides another good example, in the character of Ethel, of the way in which conflict between the gender role yearned for and that assigned to a character powers a text. But here these tensions simultaneously retail a conformist view of the probity of strictly demarcated roles for men and women. Yonge’s was an extremely conservative voice in the later nineteenth-century debate on the place of women in society. Her Womankind (1874–7) endorsed the status quo of separate cultures for boys and girls, bluntly asserting that women were inferior to men and that, whatever their intellectual capacity, the exemplary woman is one ‘whose affections have been a law to her, and have trained her in self-denial, patience, meekness, pity, and modesty’.13 The Daisy Chain nevertheless explores the appropriateness of discrete behavioural models for boys and for girls, whether consciously or unconsciously on Yonge’s part.
Yonge’s family chronicle tracks the fortunes of the eleven May children, who span the age range from babyhood to late adolescence, after the sudden death of their mother in a carriage accident. That same accident results in the spinal injury of the eldest daughter, Margaret, who is subsequently confined first to bed and then to a sofa, where she takes her mother’s place as the household’s spiritual guide until her premature death seven years later. Like other models of female saintliness in Victorian literature, such as Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, Margaret’s fate also reflects key elements of the ideology of female self-sacrifice in an uncertain world. It is also worth comparing Margaret’s position with that of Katy Carr, the eponymous heroine of Susan Coolidge’s somewhat cruder American version of this formula in What Katy Did (1872). Katy’s injury can be interpreted as punishment for her hoydenish antic of flying too high on a home-made swing when expressly forbidden to do so. Her ultimate recovery shows her reverting to a placid femininity, patient, compassionate and nurturing.
Much of The Daisy Chain’s appeal, however, lies in its depiction of growing up as a natural and often imperfect process, with youthful high-spiritedness the norm rather than the exception. It is likewise remarkable for its fraught portrayal of another gender misfit, the third daughter of the family, Ethel. Her very name, a diminutive of Etheldred, a name more usually given to boys, hints at her ambivalent status. Exuberant and lively, Ethel is heavily criticised for being ‘just like one of the boys’. She is physically gawky, and has inherited her father’s academic bent in an age when to be ‘a regular learned lady’ is to ‘be good for nothing’. The family governess echoes the mantra of mid-nineteenth-century views of female education when she bluntly asserts that she considers ‘good needlework far more important than accomplishments’. Whereas in her favourite brother, Norman, intellectual brilliance, ambition and love of action are all traits to be admired, in Ethel they are shortcomings, because they deflect from her cultivating womanliness. Ethel’s obsession with books is rapidly ruining her eyesight and even though she is allowed only occasionally to use spectacles, wearing them at all makes her a freak in a society that values unspoiled feminine beauty. Yet she is sensitive and compassionate, always conscious of the fact that her energy and ardour are somehow letting down the side. As she incurs her father’s rebuke yet again when she returns from a brisk country walk with the hem of her dress encrusted with mud, she explodes with the typical anguish of the misunderstood teenager. ‘I am good for
nothing!’ she wails to Margaret, ‘Oh! If mamma was but here!’14
While Yonge’s portrait of the tomboy Ethel’s frustration in mid-nineteenth-century society is authentic, it is also resolutely pragmatic. The siblings who love and support her also voice the limits she should abide by. Yonge gives her young heroine the brainpower to keep pace with her brother’s lessons, but she sets out clearly through Margaret’s voice the social inequalities that make Ethel’s aspirations unattainable. Often compared with George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver, Ethel’s determination to keep up with Norman as he advances academically en route to Oxford University is depicted as comically heart-rending but unbecoming. Advised to renounce her classical studies, she breaks down.
‘Oh Margaret! Margaret!’ and her eyes filled with tears. ‘We have hardly missed doing the same every day since the first Latin grammar was put into his hands! . . . From hic haec hoc up to Alcaics and beta Thukididou we have gone on together, and I can’t bear to give it up.’
Just as The Mill on the Floss depicts a heroine’s struggle with prevailing concepts of female intellectual frailty, so Ethel has to be reminded by Margaret that: ‘we all know that men have more power than women, and I suppose the time has come for Norman to pass beyond you’. As Margaret says, ‘if you could get all the honours in the University – what would it come to? You can’t take a first class.’ In a society where women were barred from graduation, Ethel must buckle down and accept that her prime responsibilities should be domestic and that to be ‘a useful, steady daughter at home . . . and a comfort to papa’ should be the pinnacle of her ambition.15 By the novel’s end, Ethel has succeeded to Margaret’s place as her father’s most trusted daughter and has learned how to administer effectively a school for local poor children. And she has the satisfaction of having found that service to others is a more than adequate compensation for the sacrifice of her intellectual ambitions. Ultimately, the kind of challenge to orthodox gender roles that Ethel represents may be defeated in The Daisy Chain, but her resistance wins her the respect and affections of readers, regardless of Yonge’s personal views on feminine behaviour.