by M. O. Grenby
Both fifteen years old, Ethel and Alcott’s Jo clearly share many characteristics, but the differences between Little Women and The Daisy Chain are critical. Part of the originality of Alcott’s narrative is that it was aimed quite specifically at a young female readership rather than at the whole family, unlike The Daisy Chain. Overcoming her initial reluctance to undertake the task of writing ‘a girls’ story’, Alcott created a fictional world that celebrates female culture and values. With all the able-bodied adult males away at war, the women are left to cope on their own, and in the liberated society of New England, in striking contrast to the hidebound English class system, they are furthermore allowed to earn their own living without shame. As Little Women takes the four sisters and their flawless mother, Marmee, through a calendar year, the story becomes a battle against the odds, with each of the four girls having to wrestle with her own personal demons in order to achieve a standard of behaviour that might meet with their absent father’s approval. Above all, as each of the March sisters tries to improve herself, together Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy form a group that validates girlhood. The values of their domestic world are markedly differentiated from those of their neighbours, the wealthy Lawrences. In that all-male household, the crotchety grandfather, the lonely boy and the reserved tutor, John Brooke, live in a world of material affluence but spiritual deprivation. The March sisters may be poor but their lives have an emotional richness that is transformative. Their artistic talents provide them with an inner sustenance that Laurie can only envy. In Little Women, femininity performs the traditional civilising function assigned to it in a number of nineteenth-century mainstream fictions.
What Alcott conveyed most emphatically is that girlhood creativity could serve as the basis of a new role model for fictional female characters. The act of creation – whether by sewing, writing, acting or dancing – would continue to feature prominently as a means of agency in late Victorian and Edwardian girls’ stories. In novels by Frances Hodgson Burnett, innate artistry helps to carry isolated girls beyond the mundane lives they actually inhabit. In A Little Princess (1887), for instance, Sara blocks out the harsh realities of having lost her favoured status within Miss Minchin’s seminary through clandestine storytelling to her fellow schoolgirls, and in the process carries them with her. Likewise, Mary Lennox in Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) rescues the sickly, self-absorbed Colin Craven through Scheherazade-like tales that soothe his pain and restore his self-confidence and health. It is not difficult to see the creativity of characters like Sara or Mary as a means of coping with the constraints imposed by gender, especially given their status as orphaned girls dependent upon the charity of others. It is just as easy to read this female creativity as Burnett’s attempt to reconcile two conflicting impulses, the desire to remain a ‘proper’ girl who accepts her place, and the desire to be free from all such restraints that place imposes. Creativity gives Sara and Mary an alternative means of self-actualisation through the exercise of their gifts, but without disrupting ideological and social orthodoxies. Thus, even if these characters seemingly learn to accept the limitations their gender imposes, just like the girls in A Present for a Little Girl who learned why it was not suitable for them to mess about in boats, their stories are not invariably accounts of abjection, nor even of subjection. Whatever moulds the heroines are eventually forced into, they still are represented as having triumphed against the odds.
After the First World War, the rigidity of gender roles became more relaxed in children’s fiction, at least for girls. Authors writing girls’ stories in the interwar years continued to rely on the tension between societal expectations of proper female behaviour and their characters’ creative aspirations to drive their novels. One striking change is the portrayal of a network of women who support the girls in their dreams. Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (1936), for example, features three orphan children, Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil, who are adopted by an eccentric palaeontologist, ‘Uncle Matthew’, from whose occupation they derive their surname. With Uncle Matthew absent for the bulk of the narrative, the three Fossils grow up, not unlike the March sisters, in an almost entirely female household, and Ballet Shoes shows the survival strategies women adopt in a male-oriented society. In order to pay the household expenses, the children’s guardian Sylvia takes in lodgers, and sends the three little girls to stage school, where even as children they can earn a living and learn how to be self-sufficient. Vowing to make names for themselves, the Fossil girls explicitly discard any debt to the past and carve out lives as independent modern individuals. Pauline and Posy prove to be naturally gifted at acting and dancing respectively, while Petrova turns to the profession of an aviator, one that perhaps most dramatically defines the new age. Another of those misfits so beloved by authors of girls’ stories, Petrova is never happier than when she is donning overalls at an airfield, where she can follow her bent for engineering and indulge her passion for flight, both metaphorical and literal.
A cast of unmarried women provide them with strong role models. Two of the lodgers are retired teachers, spinsters, who tutor the young Fossils in mathematics and English. Sylvia herself is resourceful in finding ways to meet the rising household costs and she is supported by Nana, her old nanny, who becomes the girls’ moral protector. The Principal of the ballet school, Madame, is a refugee from Imperial Russia who exploits the commercial opportunities of her émigré status and her talents. Just as with Alcott’s March sisters, the heart of the novel’s appeal rests in its celebration of the imaginative expression of female creativity. Alternatively, the tradition of books featuring precocious girls who take starring roles on stage can be regarded as fantasies of female autonomy, most popular in an age when traditional models of femininity were being re-imposed. The Second World War, and the return of men from the armed services at its conclusion, led to a re-validation of traditional familial roles. Novels such as Pamela Brown’s The Swish of the Curtain (1941) and Lorna Hill’s 1950s series of fourteen books about Sadler’s Wells ballet school provided an escape. On stage, whether acting, dancing or painting scenery, children are allowed a platform (literally) for self-expression. They can legitimately be the centre of attention and display their hitherto unnoticed talents as they hold audiences enraptured with skilled performances, astonishing parents and friends. These theatrical narratives were followed by Streatfeild’s bestselling tales of sporting celebrity, such as Tennis Shoes (1937) and White Boots (1951). More recent children’s novels have heroines who share these kinds of artistic aspirations but do not encounter similar obstacles to satisfying their drive for self-expression, as in Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964) for instance. But the fact that Streatfeild’s artistic tomboy stories, like those by Alcott, Ingalls Wilder and Montgomery, are still in print alongside their descendants both confirms the enduring appeal of the literary tomboy and suggests that there remains a need for stories which posit creativity as an alternative means of fulfilment for girls denied, by the limitations of gender propriety, full freedom to express themselves in society at large.
There is no direct equivalent of the word ‘tomboy’ for boys who behave like girls, or at least no equivalent that is not much more pejorative. This may be taken as an indication that the proprieties of gender roles have been even more rigidly enforced for boys than for girls (certainly it has taken longer for non-boyish boy readers to find sympathetic portraits of themselves in children’s books). Perhaps the archetypal retailer of the quick-thinking, noble masculinity so vigorously advanced in the later nineteenth century was G. A. Henty, author of almost 100 classic historical novels for boys. Whether set in Roman or Saxon times or in the more recent conflicts of the American Civil War, Henty’s fictions engaged their audience with accounts of action in the wider world rather than interior worlds. They were also acclaimed for both their accuracy and their educational content, providing detailed, compelling accounts of battles, weaponry and events. Featuring boys or young men living in turbulent times who
are determined to take full advantage of the excitement the age had to offer, boredom is an anathema and war exhilarating. ‘Well, I would give anything to be a soldier, instead of having to settle down and be a banker – it’s disgusting!’, declares the young Etonian, Tom Scudamore, ‘for the twentieth time’, in the opening chapter of The Young Buglers (1881), one of Henty’s most popular works.16 Naturally his wish is soon to be granted. Henty takes the orphaned Scudamore brothers, aged fourteen and fifteen, off to the 1808 Peninsular War. They are ‘regular young pickles’, ‘up to all kinds of mischief’ and ‘the pluckiest and most straightforward youngsters imaginable’. They run away from their guardian, a maiden aunt whose sensibilities are particularly ill adapted to cope with boyish exuberance, defeat a highwayman, rescue a black sailor from drowning (who becomes their devoted servant), survive three days on an open raft, successfully spy for the British by attaching themselves to the Spanish guerrilla forces and, after a year of continual adventure, are restored to their lost fortunes and ultimately settle down to lives as conventional English country gentlemen. As cool as they are plucky, resourceful as they are courageous, the Scudamores win the admiration of their commanding officer, not coincidentally named Captain Manley, who, like the author, adopts a language of paternal affection in describing the exploits of these quintessential young English heroes.
The Scudamores’ combination of virtues was to live on in the heroes of the continuous, complicated tales of action and audacity featured in comic books, which, in the years just before and after the Second World War, began competing with the periodicals as the dominant mode of cheap reading for children from all classes and age groups. The quality of publications like Marvel (launched in 1893), the Rover and Wizard (both first published in 1922) and the Eagle (which first appeared in 1950) was widely disparaged, but the comic book had a profound effect on the development of mainstream children’s literature by popularising enduring juvenile literary typologies including the adventure story, the school story, the science-fiction narrative and the historical novel, all of which had already proved their appeal to boy readers in books by Captain Marryat, R. M. Ballantyne and the mass-market periodicals in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Whilst books often appealed to both sexes, periodicals generally remained firmly separatist in the gendered behavioural models they advanced and the discrete genres they offered their readers.
Anthony Horowitz’ series about Alex Rider, a fourteen-year-old recruited as a spy, continues this tradition. Starting with Stormbreaker (2000), these books send Alex on a series of dangerous missions. A James Bond in miniature, he has had a special-forces training, carries lethal weapons and all sorts of high-tech gadgetry, but his chief characteristics are still the pluck and intrepidity of Jack Harkaway or the Scudamores. He has even inherited their derision for foreigners. The climax of Stormbreaker, for example, shows Alex saving the life of the British Prime Minister. ‘How did you do it?’, howls his Russian opponent; ‘How did you trick me? I’d have beaten you if you’d been a man! But they had to send a boy! A bliddy schoolboy! Well it isn’t over yet!’17 The appearance of the Alex Rider books is regarded by some contemporary commentators as particularly timely. In a 2007 speech to the Fabian Society, Alan Johnson, the then British Secretary of State for Education, commended the series and upheld the view that ‘Boys like books which depict them in a powerful role, often as sporting, spying or fighting heroes.’18 Charlotte Yonge had said much the same thing in 1888: ‘boys especially should not have childish tales with weak morality or “washy” piety, but should have heroism and nobleness kept before their eyes’.19 The views of Johnson and Yonge may well reflect political circumstances of their times, but they both implicitly harken back to an earlier age when, supposedly, boys’ books had had a more straightforwardly masculine agenda, with the implication that this agenda has somehow become compromised.
But, in fact, neither Johnson nor Yonge took into account the sophistication and complexity of representations of masculinity in children’s literature. Certainly many interesting and enduring children’s books since the late nineteenth century have not represented any one simple model of masculinity. Neither the hero of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) nor Jim Hawkins in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) can be described as ‘sporting, spying or fighting heroes’, even though they may sport, spy or fight during the course of their adventures. In Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie did not represent physical ability, pluck, self-assurance as the major constituents of boyish heroism. Male protagonists, even of the muscular Christian persuasion, have not suppressed their feminine side. Thomas Hughes’ campaigning Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) attacked the raw brutality of the masculine ethic endemic in the English boys’ public school, for instance. Tom notably resists the temptation of indulging in the aggressive violence of the schoolboy bullies and instead protects the weak and innocent young Arthur, whom he has taken under his wing. And when Arthur dies, Tom, the model of a young Christian gentleman, is allowed to shed copious tears. Cedric Erroll, Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), offers another compelling illustration of a popular boy hero who displays the traditionally feminine qualities of compassion and emotional generosity. Intriguingly, theatrical and screen adaptations of the novel tended to cast actresses in the title role, most famously the golden-ringleted Mary Pickford, who played both Fauntleroy and his mother in the 1921 film version. Cedric also plays the role more usually ascribed to women in mainstream nineteenth-century fictions, that of softening a male heart, in this case Cedric’s grandfather’s, and reintroducing the crusty male to a value system governed by feeling rather than by dogma.
Even twentieth-century authors of epic fantasy have played with readers’ expectations of masculinity in their choice of protagonists. In The Hobbit (1937), Tolkien (himself a veteran of the First World War’s disastrously bloody Battle of the Somme) casts an unlikely character as the unwitting hero of this quest: the hobbit Bilbo – portly, timorous, diffident and wedded to the comforts of home – but who goes adventuring with Thorin and Company anyhow. While readers may suspect that Bilbo will prove to have the pluck and cunning to prevail, no matter what tight corner he finds himself in, just like a more conventional hero, it is in fact his inherent domesticity that triumphs. If Henty’s Tom Scudamore would have given anything to be a soldier, instead of settling down to be a banker, Bilbo is happier sitting at home in front of the fire. After having been tested to the full extent of his resources, ‘the sound of the kettle on the hearth was ever after more musical than it had been even in the quiet days before the Unexpected Party’. His sword and armour are given to a museum, his magic ring of invisibility is used chiefly ‘when unpleasant callers came’. When told by Gandalf that he is ‘only quite a little fellow in a wide world’, he responds ‘“Thank goodness!” . . . and handed him the tobacco-jar’ – an emphatic renunciation of the heroic impulse.20 Indeed, Tolkien makes it plain that Bilbo would have become enthralled to the ring if he had been possessed of a more fiery, restless and ‘masculine’ temperament.
Bilbo is not unique among heroes of twentieth-century fantasy. When Ursula Le Guin decided to add the fourth volume, Tehanu (1990), to her Earthsea trilogy (1967–72), she consciously tried to show her hero, Ged, recognising the institutional sexism of his world, and determining to embrace the feminine side of his nature.21 But it might be said that, while many other boy heroes in twentieth-century children’s literature had already exhibited this kind of cross-gender identity, it was not until quite late in the century that this blurring of gender roles became the focus of whole novels, rather than being immersed more deeply in the text. In Anne Fine’s Flour Babies (1992), to take another example, the ursine Simon Martin discovers through participation in a psychology experiment his capacity for caring and nurturing, and, even more importantly, the necessity for accepting the drudgery of responsibility.
After the Second World War (and especially in the United States), young adult novels ha
ve also presented boys who are tested in circumstances where acting like a man in the mould of a Jack Harkaway or Tom Scudamore does not guarantee their triumph over genuinely evil antagonists. In Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974), for instance, Jerry Renault is caught up in the competitive, aggressive and conventionally masculine world of a Catholic all-boys school, where its code is rigidly enforced by the Vigils, a not-so-secret society of boys headed up by the Machiavellian Archie Costello. The boys usually capitulate to the Vigils’ demands because resistance seems calculated only to invite more trouble for anyone reckless enough to refuse to co-operate. During the school-wide sale of chocolates, Jerry defies the Vigils, and indirectly the administration, in whose interests it is to raise as much money as possible. The enemies he makes realise that the best way to provoke Jerry is to question his masculinity: ‘you’re a fairy. A queer. Living in the closet, hiding away.’ It seems to Jerry that the only proper response is to play the lone hero standing tall and participate in a fight that will be staged so that he cannot possibly win, in a way that makes a mockery of his principled refusal to play along. Only after he has thrown his punches does he realise that, by having done so, he has submitted to the very system of aggression and competition that he hates: ‘A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.’22 Dramatising Jerry’s persecution, capitulation and defeat, Cormier ‘successfully demonstrates the violent and dark side of masculinity and provides readers with a powerful indictment of conventional manhood’, as one critic has put it.23